Notebook: Immoderate

Social media is either suppressing politics or running wild with it; academic study of misinformation is shut down; election interference is rising. Is moderation possible in the internet we have?

Our institutions of communications and information seem more confused than ever about what is the right amount of talking about politics. Major newspapers and other outlets cannot decide if covering extremism and public lying and conspiracies helps to promote them or to discredit them. To reproduce is to amplify; to remain silent to acquiesce. Younger staff at book publishers and bookstores revolt against publishing and distributing the work of figures they consider malevolent, as the market for nonfiction declines and the field of book-length commentary is ceded to the loudest talking heads with the biggest followings, and those who are condemned by the activist wing cry censorship and consolidate their gains in their own publishing redoubts in the opposite encampments of the culture wars.

As has been widely reported, after the convulsions of Cambridge Analytica and the January 6 uprising and dueling covid realities, most of the major social media companies have stepped back from the content moderation that seemed urgently demanded by those events. After a muscular effort by Facebook in 2020 to monitor for election information manipulation, Facebook parent company Meta demoted all political content in the years following in favor of “friends and family,” recoiling from charges of political favoritism in its moderation decisions. When it announced its Twitter competitor Threads in 2023, Meta’s Instagram head Adam Mosseri openly proclaimed the platform would disfavor political speech; Facebook not only no longer sponsors a journalism-promoting news tab, it deprioritizes outgoing links to news outlets in personal posts, although reportedly half of US adults say they get their news from social media, predominantly Facebook. The New York Times recently described a chastened Mark Zuckerberg who, personally affronted by government challenges to his business, even pulled his private philanthropies back from projects that might be interpreted as political and muted employee activism. Meanwhile the Biden Administration’s efforts to curtail the spread covid disinformation contributed to a partisan political backlash leading to judicial decisions and bureaucratic guidance that can curtail the government’s ability to distribute public information at all. According to The Washington Post, for example, officials at the National Institutes of Health sent a memo last year warning employees “not to flag misleading social media posts to tech companies and to limit their communication with the public to answering medical questions.”