alt Hacker NewsIt is interesting that attitudes, laws and initiatives that would be called "censorship" against traditional media are more and more accepted against social media platforms, all over the world in very democratic countries.
I am not against these attitudes. I just want to point to that.
A possible reason is that these platforms are seen as either monopolies or American imperialism agents. In both cases these are very damming perceptions. Both Musk and Zuckerberg have been disastrous in branding their platforms.
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There are various laws in many countries that ban traditional media from straight up recommending specific candidates.
This is not censorship, and traditional media have always been forbidden from picking a candidate and promoting them in Brazil.
It's still called censorship when it's against a social media company.
What interests me more is that Elon has completely reversed his anti-censorship stance. He was always censoring while opining against censorship and getting sued for millions of dollars for ignoring a Brazilian censorship law. Now he's just quietly complying with Brazilian censorship law.
The posts are not being forbidden or excluded. Candidates are still free to post. It just can't be recommended in algorithmic feeds.
And those platforms are absolutely agents of American imperialism. Latin American countries in particular should be very wary of these.
Anyone sensible doesn't call this censorship. It might sound complicated if you live in a country where elections are won by who spends most money for airtime, but granting candidates equal airtime on traditional media is how it works if you want to hold normal elections. Since that can't work on algorithmic platforms where everyone sees different content, you just block their reach to avoid anyone gaming it.
Normal countries also have media silence for the day or two before the votes.
Restricting the reach of politicians is an absolute good.
I think it's a fair limit. Preventing social media companies from invisibly favoring any candidate seems sensible to me.
Censorship is deletion of the candidate's social media presence.