A fun thing about content moderation—the practice of social-media platforms deciding what we can and cannot say in some of the world’s most important online spaces—is that almost everyone thinks that it’s broken, albeit in different ways. Almost everyone also thinks that if you just put them in charge, they would fix things. When you’re the world’s richest man, you can actually give it a shot.
Many people think of TikTok as a dance app. And although it is an app full of dancing, it’s also a juggernaut experiencing astronomical growth. In July, TikTok—a short-form video-sharing app powered by an uncannily good recommendation algorithm and owned by the Chinese company ByteDance—became the only social-media mobile app other than those from Facebook to ever pass 3 billion downloads. At the end of last month, TikTok announced it had more than 1 billion monthly users.
No one has set any clear standard about how badly a politician can break Facebook’s rules before getting kicked off the platform, and yesterday the company’s wannabe court missed a chance to fill the void.
It happened slowly, and then all at once. After years of sparring, the internet’s most powerful moderators deplatformed their most famous troll: the president of the United States. Facebook has blocked Donald Trump’s account indefinitely. So have Snapchat, Twitch, Shopify; even one of the Trump campaign’s email providers has cut it off. At the time of writing, Trump still has his YouTube channel, but the company says it is accelerating its enforcement action.
For years, social-media platforms had held firm: Just because a post was false didn’t mean it was their place to do anything about it. But 2020 changed their minds.At the end of May, Twitter for the first time labeled a tweet from the president of the United States as potentially misleading. After Donald Trump falsely insisted that mail-in voting would rig the November election, the platform added a message telling users to “get the facts.