Great Social Media Decentralization

Description

Renee DiResta:

"She asks, “What happens when sprawling online communities fracture into politically homogenous, self-governing communities?”

For DiResta “what ultimately splintered social media wasn’t a killer app or the Federal Trade Commission — it was content moderation. Partisan users clashed with ‘referees’ tasked with defining and enforcing rules like no hate speech, or making calls about how to handle Covid-19 content. Principles like “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” — which proposed that ‘borderline’ content (posts that fell into grey areas around hate speech, for example) remain visible but unamplified — attempted to articulate a middle ground. However, even nuanced efforts were reframed as unreasonable suppression by ideologues who recognized the power of dominating online discourse. Efforts to moderate became flashpoints, fueling a feedback loop where online norms fed offline polarization — and vice versa.

And so, in successive waves, users departed for alternatives: platforms where the referees were lax (Truth Social), nearly nonexistent (Telegram) or self-appointed (Mastodon). Much of this fracturing occurred along political lines.”

This “Great Decentralization,” as DiResta calls it, is accelerating. Just last week Meta, too, announced it was ending its content moderation and turning to “community” self-policing."

(https://www.noemamag.com/how-disinformation-deforms-democracy/)