Censorship is what you see in China, not what they say was on Facebook and Twitter

In the plutocracy that is emerging, and whose consequences we can only guess at, the big business magnates do not want to put a stop to hoaxes and hatred, because that would be censorship, but they do want to combat serious journalism, relegated to social networks with this slogan from Elon Musk to X users: “You are the media now.” As firm as they are against alleged woke censorship, in places where there is real censorship, namely in dictatorships, the tech companies do not raise their voices when it does not suit their business.

Mark Zuckerberg’s case is more cynical: only after Donald Trump won the election did he dismantle the moderation and verification policies that Meta (Facebook, Instagram and Threads, as well as WhatsApp) introduced in 2016 under pressure and after a series of scandals. In 2020, with Biden’s victory, he rushed to suspend Trump’s account, as did Twitter, because he was mounting an insurrection, a good reason. But that was before Musk bought Twitter, now X, to save us from the progressives and turn it into a loudspeaker for himself and the alt-right.

The truth is that moderation and verification never really worked on any of the networks. Zuckerberg in 2016 was in the midst of a huge reputational crisis: he had been singled out for Cambridge Analytica’s massive manipulations in Brexit and Trump’s first victory, for the massacre of the Rohingya in Myanmar encouraged on his networks, for his techniques on Instagram to generate addiction in teenagers at the expense of their mental health. Meta was and still is diligent in repressing the sight of a nipple even in the most artistic context possible. And when Twitter was supposedly woke, it was not effective in suppressing death threats or racist, sexist or homophobic insults either, but at least it showed some intent to do so. There are more platforms for disinformation: YouTube has recommended anti-scientific, anti-vaccine and flat-earther delusions to its users, if not outright jihadist or supremacist ones. In all three cases, the problem at this point is no longer deleting toxic content: it would be a step forward if they simply stopped promoting it. At the same time, links from respectable media have been punished in their algorithms.

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