The black hole of online censorship

By Josephine Bartosch, The Critic:

There has never been a perfect public space; the agora of ancient Athens was only open to men, and those harvesting the coffee beans never had the chance to enter the coffee houses favoured by enlightenment thinkers. But at a time when we are barred from pontificating about politics over a pint or at a public meeting, social media platforms are a lifeline to the marketplace of ideas. This week, the banning of sitting President Trump from Twitter and the removal of social networking site Parler from Amazon, Apple and Google have made it clear that online opinions exist at the sufferance of those providing the soap box.

Inevitably, social media platforms come to mirror the values of their founders. Despite hang-wringing about diversity in their workforce, the monocultural background of the Silicon Valley based technocrats has led to stagnation of discourse on mainstream sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Those who ask awkward questions, people who for example might consider the mental health impact of lockdown as grave as the coronavirus, have been squeezed off YouTube and locked out of Facebook. Whether users are in Tunbridge Wells or Timbuktu, should they anger the gods of Twitter or Facebook by disobeying US-centric community guidelines users will risk being cast out onto the virtual heath.

The spaces that exist outside of the mainstream sites have a distinctly frontiers feel, sheltering everyone from dissident feminists and lockdown sceptics, to QAnon conspiracists. Parler is one such site, with community guidelinesdrawn from classic liberalism it is neither explicitly left nor right. The stated purpose of Parler is to create a “nonpartisan public square” to encourage “polite discourse among people with differing life experiences, and viewpoints.”

Read here

Please right-click links to open in a new window.