Let’s talk about this “demonstrated ability to steer public opinion and unilaterally steer elections”. I believe you have fallen into an intentional conflation

Let’s talk about this “demonstrated ability to steer public opinion and unilaterally steer elections”. I believe you have fallen into an intentional conflation of ideas here. Social media as private platform with terms of use that other people promote on, versus the social media company acting with their own political agenda. Those thongs are not the same. We’ve seen many disinformation campaigns proliferate on FB, Reddit, 4chan, Twitter, et al, but with the notable exception of 4chan, these campaigns are promoted the company’s executives, but rather amplified through algorithms developed to promote time on site. Zuck only cares about money. He doesn’t care if it’s coming from cooking tips, flat earth memes, or a 6 hour expose videos about how satanic pedophile aliens are eating children in the basement of the Alamo. It is the users posting the misinformation that are attempting to manipulate elections by utilizing a third party’s engagement promoting algorithms and platform. This distinction is very important, but gets intentionally muddied. FB isn’t manipulating the election, as much as Simone trying to manipulate an election are being stymied. Furthermore, when we actually examine the claims of “censorship” they end up falling apart pretty quickly. It will be a clear cut TOS violation, by a person that unfailingly has had a long history of getting passes for TOS violations. Which makes me wonder, why were they getting so many extra chances. (Case in point: Alex Jones and YouTube.) You also have the same people screaming about how they’re being censored, regularly appearing as the most shared pages on FB.[0] When you dig into even more, there’s nothing there.[1] So what is going on here? It’s a replay of the 70s and 80s. Newspapers are dead, and so the “liberal media elite” canard (and we know it is a canard, because Bill Kristol and Rich Bond have admitted it.[3]) needs a new target. And just like then, if it doesn’t have a particular political bent, its “unfair”. And you know what? The whining is working again.[2] 0: https://mobile.twitter.com/facebookstop10 https://mobile.twitter.com/facebookstop10 1: https://www.npr.org/2020/10/05/918520692/facebook-keeps-data-secret-letting-conservative-bias-claims-persist https://www.npr.org/2020/10/05/918520692/facebook-keeps-data... 2: https://mashable.com/article/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-conservative-pages/ https://mashable.com/article/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-conser... 3: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/general/news/2005/05/26/1476/think-again-working-the-refs/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/general/news/2005/05...