Post No.: 0865
Fluffystealthkitten says:
All sides of a conflict will spread its own propaganda to one degree or another because wars aren’t just kinetic wars but information wars. The originators and disseminators of propaganda nowadays aren’t just governments either but any individual/group, due to how online social media has democratised mass-reach communication.
It’s not just in war but any competition. Corporations will fund propaganda campaigns to try to undermine their rivals or to fight against legislation that affects them. For instance, Meta hired a consulting firm called Targeted Victory to allegedly smear TikTok in 2022. In a free press environment, many private media corporations express their own political and national biases. Even the BBC, despite being a public service broadcaster with political impartiality rules, appeared to express inconsistent standards after suspending presenter Gary Lineker over a personal tweet that criticised the government in 2023.
So free speech with a wide audience has been democratised due to social media. Yet ‘cancel culture’ means that one must be careful in case one says – not necessarily a falsehood – but a controversial opinion. Some argue that cancellation is just ‘consequences’ for (what they deem are) punishable behaviours. On the bumpy road towards tolerance and inclusivity, even those who espouse those values can be highly intolerant of and will suppress and intimidate, and thus coerce, those who just wish to express their authentic views. Since these are often voices in a democracy and free market – free social media users who seek to curb free speech are akin to free voters who wish to vote for authoritarianism. Should their unfettered desire be honoured? Well is it democratic to try to silence or threateningly convert those who freely question or voluntarily oppose democracy?
A related dilemma is trying to simultaneously uphold the right for the self-determination of religion with the right for free speech or expression, when a religious group may wish to stop those who attempt to depict their prophet. Who should get their way? Some religious followers may consider this disrespect for their faith as inflammatory hate speech, and we shouldn’t be ‘victim-blaming those who are overly sensitive to non-physical insults’. Killing those who attempt such depictions isn’t a proportional reaction though.
Is it wrong to criticise criticism, moan about moaners, be negative about negativity, judge the judgers, be intolerant to intolerance, or gag those who oppose free speech?!
Upholding ‘political correctness’ is often petty, yet it’s someone’s own liberty to grumble if they wish! Who are we to (hypocritically) tell them to not be PC? Yet we do tend to have a habit of only wanting people to be free if they do what we think is right!
‘Free speech absolutists’… or I guess we can call them ‘terror-plotting, ****-juggling, baby-rapist corpse-****ers’ – hoisted by their own petard(!) – are naïve to hold such an extreme stance because sometimes people falsely smear the good names of, or incite real violence against, others for instance. Telling those who tell you to shut up to shut up would be clearly hypocritical too! The most sensible position for democracy I think is moderate moderation in order to tackle lies that subvert a well-functioning democracy. But of course the difficult conundrum is what ‘moderate’ means in practice?
Elon Musk, a self-proclaimed ‘free speech absolutist’, revealed what he meant by ‘free speech’ when he opposed the words from those he felt were personally against him or his own interests, like when he muzzled any journalists who mentioned anything critical about Twitter. He also blocked some links to competing social media platforms, like Mastodon – calling them malware, without basis. He revealed what he meant by ‘democracy’ or ‘vox populi, vox dei’ too when he asked his followers whether he should step down as head of Twitter. The result was ‘yes’ – yet he stayed on for a while longer. For not liking the verdict, he then decided that only certain subscribers could vote in future policy-related polls on the platform!
The popular social media platforms can end up becoming de facto gatekeepers of information when they themselves decide what and how to moderate what appears on their services. Who made Facebook, for instance, the ‘thought police’ to regulate what’s allowed to be shared? It’s a difficult position however because they’ll get criticised for allowing any hate speech, offensive and disturbing material, etc. to spread if they take a hands-off approach.
There’s a conflict of interest between profit maximisation and serving social responsibilities too. It’s usually extreme (e.g. disturbing, offensive) and negative content that generates the most views, reactions, comments and therefore engagement, hence such content makes social media platforms the most revenue via eyeball-time for advertisers.
The attitude to tackling political adverts is mixed because of arguments of ‘free speech and not policing the truth’ versus ‘protecting the integrity of democracy’ – which highlights clearly that free speech and democracy are not really one and the same. These platforms cannot simultaneously be bastions of absolute free speech and protectors of the integrity of democracy.
It’s however unconvincing to claim that not banning political adverts will favour the quietest voices because it’s those with the most resources, who are usually the loudest, who are the most able to pay for the most political adverts to drown out the quieter voices. Maybe it’s not a problem with political adverts per se but the nature of the types generally found on social media platforms compared to those on television (in the UK at least) – political adverts on social media tend to be far more dubious in content and emotionally divisive, even if we can (be bothered to) check who paid for them. (We’ll more likely check a source if we disagree with it but more likely just accept a claim at face value if we agree with it.)
Popular accounts, even if they spread extreme material, often receive more protection because they bring so much business to a platform. A ‘verified’ status, like on YouTube, signifies that an account has been ID-verified. In the past, it only signified that an account was popular rather than official. Regardless – viewers, readers or followers often take such badges as an endorsement of the content posted rather than merely as verification of the identities of the account holders. There are ways to fake the verifications anyway.
The Twitter ‘pay for a blue tick’ fiasco openly invited this because the only thing the company cared about at the time was making money. Plus it was basically saying that only the wealthy enough to regularly pay for ‘verification’ could be ‘trusted’ as ‘official’. It was so ill-thought-out that masses of fake ‘verified’ accounts immediately sprouted, and some damage was done to some genuine businesses!
The seeking and closing of the accounts of underage users also isn’t proactively performed since they still count as users, and young minds are the most impressionable for the advertisers too. So it’s a conflict of interest to stop underage users from using their platforms whilst simultaneously wanting to serve as many eyeballs to advertisers as possible; and the younger they come, the higher their customer lifetime value too. On some social media platforms, they might be paying subscribers to a service like ad-free viewing, hence banning them would mean surrendering their direct custom. What serves their bottom line best is to block as few users as possible. But 1% of users can equate to millions of individual problems like bullying or abuse on platforms that have large user bases.
Platforms like Facebook do utilise algorithms to try to uncover and block fake news and fake accounts, but a complication isn’t just blocking the true positives but not blocking the innocent false positives. Some fake news about an issue doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all fake news about that issue either. Another example of blocking false positives is blocking art that includes nudity when trying to only block pornography.
The company has set up an internal oversight board – but only after external pressure was heaped upon them. Companies/industries tend to only finally attempt the implementation of self-regulatory measures after there are external pressures to regulate them. (It’s the classic strategy, after being found to be wrong or failing at something but one is rich and powerful, to suggest ‘no need for you to call the police – we’ll sort this out ourselves’. Harvey Weinstein tried it by saying he’ll check himself into rehab in an attempt to get others off his back about his sexual crimes!) Even then, conflicts of interest can persist because the Oversight Board isn’t totally independent since its paymasters are Facebook. Do we dare bite the hand that feeds us? It’s an odd dynamic trying to force your boss to do things. Facebook also chose who the board members are, and the board’s mandate is limited. (Note that even when a conflict of interest is declared, it’s a quandary if no one else can realistically do anything about it.)
Trolling is a popular form of engagement on social media platforms, hence again they present a conflict of interest concerning moderating what could be deemed as free speech; unless the reduction in social media engagement as a result of the trolling is overall greater than the engagement generated by the trolling and other divisive and inflammatory comments.
This highlights that users do collectively hold some power over these tech giants – they can ultimately choose to boycott a service. Most businesses will prioritise whatever maximises their profits, and this’ll depend on what their customers or users ultimately do – which might be a mass exodus of users who leave a platform in solidarity with a group whom they feel has been mistreated by the company. However, these mass exoduses, or cancellations, seldom happen in sufficient numbers to make the company sweat. Meow.
We actually vote with our actions or wallets, not really our words. Yet for too many users, they face a conflict of interest too, between standing by their alleged principles and sticking with a service that gives them what they want. Therefore too many people will complain about something… yet nonetheless continue to help line the pockets of whom they’re complaining about! Consequently, what’s incentivising that business to change its ways?! One needs to hit them where it hurts i.e. their bottom line. One may call for others to also put pressure on the business, but the business will feel zero pressure from empty words. For ‘cancel culture’ to work, enough users must actually boycott or otherwise reduce their demand for the service. Mere talks about cancellation might even give more publicity to a service than it otherwise would have, which might overall boost its demand!
If one doesn’t wish to stop using their products because one doesn’t wish to sacrifice what one gets from them then it might have to remain an uneasy bargain. One may instead call for external regulatory pressures to the applied – but if one wants to do it the free market way, one needs to personally take one’s business elsewhere. Words are relatively empty when money talks in a free market.
We likewise complain about idiotic content creators, but watch their content and tell others about their channels anyway, thus making them wealthier(!) This is reinforcement theory in action – rewarding a behaviour and thus perpetuating it. It can be a bit of fun, yet it’s not free to consume because it takes our time away from less brain-rotting content or activities. ‘Hate-watching’ may give us a sense of self-superiority as we denigrate others to make ourselves feel better. If whom we find deplorable has a personality disorder though then shouldn’t we feel sympathy for them instead? I guess instead of just analysing the psychology of those content creators – we also need to place under the microscope the minds of those who feel they can’t stop watching them!
Meow. In conclusion, platform moderation can be complex because the risk is censoring worthy free speech. And who shall decide what is ‘worthy’?
Comment on this post by replying to this tweet:
