I don't rule it out entirely. In 2021 we saw a coordinated deplatforming of a sitting president across practically every social media platform. But this seems too low stakes
The big tech companies are on the side of power and money.
Are you, by chance, of the left?
All research I’ve seen on this shows the right significantly outbotting the left.
EDIT: I’m mistaken, this is a US senate candidate. I was confused by the ambiguous wording in the article.
They've been doing this for a decade, no reckoning yet in sight.
> Mark opens the meeting by talking admiringly about what he calls “street fighter tactics” that Uber is employing against politicians around the world and how successful they’ve been.
> He launches into a spiel about Empereror Augustus, his favorite emperor, who led the transformation of Rome from a republic to an empire.
> He wants to establish a team within Facebook to figure out how to build the tools that will use the algorithm and platform to pressure adversaries, including politicians who oppose us, to bolster the policy team.
>Nixon reported that the account was back up an hour later.
Now I think, "how can there be a star trek future while we have social media and the Internet?"
Honestly, it's probably what started the eugenics war.
But as a pass time, I’m fair certain Holodecks buried pretty much everything else for good. Movies, songs, books, and as hard as it may be for tech people to believe..
Even social media.
At least to me, this is a good working explanation - the conspiracy angles prove things that don't need to be proven to effect sustainable solutions. The real issue, as it has always been, is that we need to move away from these centralized communications technologies controlled by corpos. Their concentrated power is what makes their censorship inevitable.
So pragmatically as things stand - while it's completely understandable that political campaigns (and everyone else) need to engage with where people are, they should also be making it a point to nudge followers to distributed forums. Use censorship-eager popular forums to recruit new followers, but maintain your base of members with censorship-resistant communication methods.
Or politically, assuming a critical mass of people frustrated at this problem that we can effect change, what we need is anti-trust enforcement that breaks up these companies into smaller entities, chiefly by un-bundling apps (client software) from hosting services and mandating published APIs for the two markets to interact.
I guess the best approach is to look at a string of such events, and see if they add up to a consistent pattern of behaviour. The longer the string, the less likely it is to be accidental. (But this assumes the bad actor isn't trying to cover their tracks in active ways. Ho hum).
The change I would like to see: feeds must be in date order, most recent first. Posts should only appear in feeds if you have actively chosen to "follow" the originating account in some way.
I honestly think these two simple changes would solve many of the problems we have today, as a society.
The account was created only 1 week earlier and was flagged as a campaign impersonation account.
Whether that's honest and truthful, we can only know if Meta is transparent. But, not including that information shows what the article's intent is.
> "During campaign season, we pay particular attention to accounts that could be impersonating candidates or campaigns and misleading voters. The account in question was created only a week and a half ago, so our systems automatically and mistakenly assessed it to be impersonating the Nixon for Senate campaign. The account was restored on Tuesday evening after three hours."
EDIT: I’m mistaken, this is a US senate candidate. I was confused by the ambiguous wording in the article.
> In 2021 we saw a coordinated deplatforming of a sitting president across practically every social media platform.
It wasn’t coordinated, it was a bunch of social media companies responding to the same event, notably the president in question using his social media accounts to try to overthrow the US government.
cyanydeez•1h ago