Many Instagram users this week had their scrolling interrupted by the bearded appearance of our newly elected Vice President, JD Vance. Suddenly it seemed that in the week of their launch, everyone on the app was following or being advised to follow their official accounts. President Donald Trump and Vance (@POTUS and @VP respectively).
Chaos ensues. In group chats, on Instagram Stories, on X and Bluesky, people were frantically wondering what was going on. Some, like pop stars Gracie Abrams And Demi Lovatosaid that when they tried to unfollow the VP and POTUS accounts, the app wouldn’t allow them until they tried multiple times. Other hashtags are banned or hidden, such as #jan6 or #democrat.
Meta, meanwhile, was busy assuring users that there was nothing new or strange going on. The accounts of the POTUS and VP, along with their followers, were automatically transferred to the new administration as is customary during a presidential transition, while the accounts of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would previously be duplicated under these usernames. An archive account. They said it “may take some time for following and unfollowing” but did not provide details when asked. The New York Times Why that might be. Hashtags like #democrat were hidden, Meta said, because of “a bug” that affected many hashtags, not just left-leaning hashtags (those hashtags are now visible).
The episode came weeks after Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, announced sweeping changes to the platforms: CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he would ditch Meta’s fact-checkers and loosen standards for post moderation in an effort to curb “bias” and “censorship.” “—a move that was widely read as an attempt to curry favor with the Trump administration. As of 2018, Instagram and Facebook have Deprived political and news content; Now, it plans to bring these topics back to the front of users’ feeds
Meta’s assurances that they are not boosting certain accounts or censoring others, and that these issues are nothing more than errors may very well be. But due to the secretive, black box nature of algorithms like Meta, such claims are very difficult to verify.
Jillian York, author of Silicon values: The future of free speech under surveillance capitalism, said that meta-censorship has a long history. “We shouldn’t take their word for anything,” she says. “Meta has a history of saying, ‘It’s an error,’ and what they really mean is internal bias, human error, or AI error. At this point it’s unclear what we’re talking about.”
For years, Republicans believed That social media companies were inherently biased against conservative speech, notwithstanding Evidence to the contrary. (more Tends to influence news conservatives, and mostly men.) Now with the new Trump administration in power, liberals are the ones expressing concern — and their fears, watchdogs say, are more reasonable than they might initially seem.
People worried about how Silicon Valley tycoons are pandering to Trump need not look far for an example of what conservative control of a platform might look like. “We saw this happen with X after Musk took over. My feed was completely different, and I think it’s possible with Meta as well,” York said. Twitter was famous for its searchability, its transparency (you can see who follows who, who liked what, what tweets were posted and what was trending), and its allowance of free speech compared to other platforms.
“We shouldn’t take their word for anything.”
But who is under Kasturi? Describes himself as a free speech absolutistCensorship in X has gotten worse, not better. He banned links to competing websites like Instagram and Substack and admission X throttles posts that include links at all, preventing users from accessing substantial, quality information found in news articles. he Tweets about Ukraine are ranked down And Seen to limit vision Includes terms such as “transgender,” “gay,” and “bisexual” and allows slurs for gay people. he dissolve Company Trust and Security Council and Added his own tweet So that becomes unavoidable for any user regardless of whether they follow him or not.
Just as Musk pulled certain levers to make X a friendly place for hate speech, spam, and AI slop, so can any other platform. They can prioritize links to certain websites (or any website) so that posts containing them will get fewer views. They can expand Hate against minority groups While prohibiting discourse critical of the established order (for example, Under the new rules of Mt“White people have mental illness” is banned on Facebook, while “gay people have mental illness” is allowed). They can, in theory, throttle users they deem problematic so that their posts don’t spread while encouraging those sympathetic to their own interests.
Platforms can also limit transparency, as met Got rid of CrowdTangleTools that allow researchers and journalists to track what’s trending, how information spreads and which accounts are driving it tiktok too Silently killing his features which allows people to see how many views videos with certain hashtags have received The move follows allegations that TikTok is promoting pro-Palestinian content due to the popularity of pro-Palestinian hashtags, although there has been no evidence that this is true.
All major platforms already filter out “sensitive” topics (why would so many people using algospeak(eg “seggs” or “unalive”?) There is nothing to prevent them from continuing to bury however they see fit; Various rights monitoring organizations warned That Facebook and Instagram routinely censor pro-Palestinian content.
On TikTok, many users have complained that their algorithms seem to have become more conservative since the app arrived. Offline for a few hours in the US, then restoredPerhaps a reflection of a change in the user base that has occurred Been going on for months. The app greeted users with an announcement that expressly thanked Donald Trump, a rare move for a tech company. During the opening weekend event, TikTok Sponsored a party Celebrating the top 30 conservative influencers who helped secure Trump’s election. In the days that followed, TikTok users claimed they couldn’t search for terms like this “fascism” Or comment “Free Palestine”.
TikTok though denied As for whether it’s censoring this content, the problem is the same as Meta’s: no one can be sure the company isn’t lying, and it’s no wonder people are suspicious.
Internet users fear more than erosion of trust in their social platforms: AI has made Google search barely usablefull amazon, Etsy, and other storefronts With garbage, social media populated with bots, and misinformation regurgitated to millions of people using tools like ChatGPT or Google Gemini. People have never spent more time online, but the spaces we live in often interact with each of us and distrust what we are told.
Despite the reaction against the swing to the right on major platforms, it is curious that there is not a larger mass movement from them. Per Politico’s Derek Robertson wrote in Liberties JournalMany of us feel we are heading toward a dystopian technocracy in which human life and connection are constantly degraded and devalued, and yet, “Why a Popular Movement for Technological Self-Government Has Failed to Cohese — Some Like Political Movements by Urbanist Jane Jacobs Motivated? Why, to return to our original question, people do not care?”
It’s clear that people care, but perhaps they feel that their concerns won’t be heard unless they’re on the same platform as everyone else, or that the platform they’re on will turn into something unrecognizable. Perhaps we’re just too burned out by the thought of making an appearance on yet another new app—one that, like all apps before it, may ultimately disappoint us.
