Information and censorship on social media
Information and censorship on social media
A research conducted by the BBC News (1), which included a comprehensive analysis of Facebook data, revealed that the social network has "severely restricted the ability of Palestinian news outlets to reach an audience during the Israel-Gaza war." The BBC also obtained leaked documents showing that Instagram increased its moderation of Palestinian user comments after October 2023.
The control of news and information on social media is primarily managed by algorithms. These algorithms often limit the diffusion and visibility of certain content and profiles through "shadow banning," a subtle form of censorship. Algorithms are "black boxes"—they are not open or transparent, so we can only observe their effects, as shown by the BBC research.
In other cases, content is completely censored, removed, or even results in the suspension or termination of related profiles, often following a manual review by humans. Apart from overt cases of fake news and hoaxes, censorship mainly affects those who engage in counter-information and that are not aligned with mainstream thinking.
The Digital Services Act (DSA)(2), the new European regulation on digital services, aims to combat disinformation. However, it could paradoxically become a tool for large platforms to censor divergent opinions, offering them a legal base to limit freedom of speech.
Zuckerberg's recent announcement that Meta will no longer use fact-checkers to counter misinformation and fake news seems to be more of a political move towards the new Trump's administration. Some speculate that, besides paying less taxes, (one of) Meta's goal is to get the new president to press the EU to soften possible sanctions resulting from the DSA (and maybe also from the GDPR).
Regarding X, there seem to be no similar studies that show evident manipulations of its algorithm for censorship purposes. But it is factual that its owner intervenes, even intrusively, on domestic political issues of various countries, openly supporting alt-right and extreme right-wing parties and harshly criticising governments( for example Venezuela, Brazil and, lately, even United Kingdom!!) or even oppositions (for example in Italy) he does not like. This is not certainly a guarantee of impartiality of his platform, to be as free and democratic as he claims.
-Incidentally, in December 2024 the presidential elections in Romania were cancelled due to an alleged campaign on TikTok orchestrated to influence the vote in favour of the winning candidate.
If the February elections in Germany were won by the far-right AFD party, openly supported by Musk, would the elections have been cancelled in the same way? Honestly one has to doubt it-
Another aspect that is commonly accepted as completely normal is the fact that social networks are controlled by a few private companies and individuals such as Meta (Zuckerberg), X (Elon Musk), Bytedance-TikTok and Google-YouTube who, in addition to holding control over the data of billions of people, also manage a very significant part of information at a global level, which nowadays mainly (if not exclusively) passeson social media, for the majority of people.
If we consider that the large traditional media (TV, newspapers...) are also in the hands of a small circle of private groups, then information is anything but free and this represents a serious obstacle to achieving a truly mature and complete democracy.
There are also more democratic and independent alternatives to the dominant social networks, albeit with some limitations in terms of maturity and functionality. Some are based on a decentralized model, through servers managed not by a single company but by various user communities around the world and use algorithms whose source code is open, such as Mastodon or Minds, the latter (on which you are reading this post) based on the Blockchain.