Just to remind us why everyone hates Big Tech’s content practices, we do a quick review of the week’s news in content suppression.
- A couple of conservative provocateurs prepared a video consisting of Democrats embracing “election denial.” The purpose was to highlight the hypocrisy of those who criticize the GOP for a trope that belonged mainly to Dems until two years ago. And it worked all too well: YouTube did a manual review of the video before it was even released and demonetized it because, well, who knows? An outcry led to reinstatement, but too late for YouTube’s reputation. Jane has the story.
- YouTube also steps in the same mess by first suppressing then restoring a video by Giorgia Meloni, the big winner of Italy’s recent election. She’s on the right, but you already knew that from how YouTube dealt with her.
- Mark covers an even more troubling story, in which government officials flag online posts about election security that they don’t like for NGOs that the government will soon be funding, the NGOs take those complaints to the platforms, and the platforms take a lot of the posts down. Really, what could possibly go wrong?
- Jane asks why Facebook is “moderating” private messages sent by the wife of an FBI whistleblower. I suspect that this is not so much content moderation as part of the government and big tech’s hyperaggressive joint pursuit of anything related to January 6. But it definitely deserves investigation.
- Across the Atlantic, Jane notes, the Brits are hating Facebook for the content it let 14-year-old Molly Russell read before her suicide. Exactly what was wrong with the content is a little obscure, but we agree that material served to minors is ripe for more regulation, especially outside the US.
For a change of pace, Mark has some largely unalloyed good news. The ITU will not be run by a Russian; instead it has elected an American, Doreen Bodan-Martin to lead it.