Censorship in Social Media

What responsibility should social media companies (Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, etc.) take on inequality created on their platforms? In what ways do the platforms listed determine how much censorship to use? These are two questions that have formed in my mind during this week’s class. It’s important to remember that these platforms act as full-fledged businesses. As with most American businesses, these platforms prioritize economic gain over social and political responsibility.

From my current understanding, censorship is authorized by government bodies and those people decide what we can see. Some examples that I think of right away are cinema ratings: restricting access to certain content that you can see (PG, PG-13, R).

Also, censorship has/is present on Instagram regarding vaccine information. When people posted anything with any rhetoric referring to those two topics Instagram would ‘flag the post’ and provide a link to ‘find out more information about the election’ or ‘find more information about the vaccine.’ This same type of thing also happens on TikTok. When particular videos are speaking or including text that speaks of the election or vaccine, that flag pops up linking valid, factual information about that topic. TikTok is also interesting because the app itself has its own censorship guidelines. If certain profanities are being used in a video, they will remove that video from the ‘for you page.’

Moreover, the intersections between censorship and political viewpoints in social media are interesting. In order to better understand this, I decided to look at some research. Pew Research Center tells us that, “Most Americans think Social media sites censor political viewpoints,” but they also found that “Democrats are more likely than Republicans to approve of social media companies labeling posts from elected officials or ordinary users as inaccurate, misleading.” The debates about censorship really started to come alive, politically, when former president donald trump had his tweets labeled as misleading on Twitter. This prompted some of the president's conservative followers to attack these platforms that were “censoring conservative voices.”

Altogether, we see that the debate on censorship is complicated socially, politically, and economically.