The basics of any social psychology should remind us all of the dangers of a group feeling stifled and oppressed, and the last thing we should do is trivialise them, lest we deepen the wedge driven between common sense and politically manipulated fiction. Right-wing republicans in the USA, also increasingly believe that there is a liberal bias on social media platforms and, inversely proportional to this, they decreasingly support suing or regulating these platforms. The whole “liberal snowflake” narrative, accusing the left of taking offence disproportionately, is exhibited clearly in the data. The privatisation of exacerbating bias is exactly why free speech and capitalism were incompatible to begin with.Ĭonsider the Right/Left split in American attitudes towards offensive content online: There’s a definitive tendency within the conservative realms to value freedom (to hate) over the creation of a positive digital community. There is no real incentive for the illustrious “algorithm” to do the right thing. More likely, however, is a continuation of right now: Surveillance and targeting of the most extreme biases, reinforcing them with increasingly polarised content, because all a platform wants is to be used. The Trump Presidency began an era of post-truth, with paradigmatic changes in what counted as objectively believable and the attitudes toward social media fact-checking and content moderation exhibit this clearly.Īfter the January 6 insurrection and COVID-19, while the world watched the allegorical Lighthouse of Alexandria crumble at the hands of vaccine scepticism and hate speech, the Ptolemic sanctum of the American Government acted in the interests of its people: Shying away from reform and regulation in favour of turning a blind eye to this tool of sedition and falsehood.Īcademia finds itself resorting to utopian views of the future, like the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University, where there is a vision sculpted of an eventual equilibrium between regulation and the freedom to innovate and speak freely. Parler and Telegram: Alternative Facts, Alternative Platformsīoth platforms emerged as big hitters as right-wing users and public figures looked to express, communicate and share independent of those pesky moderators that regulate mainstream platforms. This corner was catered toward by the likes of Parler and Rumble. Facebook promptly followed suit, driving away the same users, creating a corner that the right wing was backed into. This was arguably an inflexion point in the usage of “Alternative Social Platforms”, a term coined by Pew Research. Hillary Clinton’s inability to keep track of her emails on her Blackberry resulting in one of the most contentious criminal investigations in living memory, then, shows that being With Her(in 2008 or 2016) was little more than aligning oneself with…Neanderthal in a fight with a cyborg.Ī pivotal moment in the global discussion about free speech was when President Trump had a Tweet flagged for being potentially false in 2020. The Obama 2012 campaign arguably acted as a proof of concept for the platform’s efficacy in shaping a political conversation on social media that led to favouring one presidential candidate over another. Little, now, is left to the imagination when we see a vastly reduced urge from the American Right Wing to regulate or take punitive action against Facebook’s parent company, Meta.ĭemocrats find their hands far from clean, though. During the Trump presidency, the alleged land of the free made a lot of noise with allegations of bias and illegal data sharing resulting in tense moments when Mark Zuckerberg deigned to come before lawmakers.Ĭonsider that the Trump campaign in 20 had Facebook employees embedded within it, helping sculpt a microtargeted and robust narrative on the platform.
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