There IS a determination on the part of the people who lost the last election to prevent a repeat of that in 2020--by making sure that Facebook et al are not going to be used by opponents of their party and/or candidate. You are aware, I assume, that it has been argued that social media made possible Trumps surprise victory by allowing opinion that was not supported by CNN, NBC, etc. to get around
Yes I think that is true.
as one might expect, Antifa and all manner of terrorist websites are still going on as usual...Alex Jones was simply a very easy target, allowing a very easy defense of the decision to remove him, as though the censorship of many other websites that are not at all in the Alex Jones mold is not underway at the same time.
I’m not sure if FB et al are really comfortable censoring their users, and they don’t really have a framework for it either. I don’t think it was ever part of their game plan, at the end of the day, popular social media is a huge cash cow for it’s creators and, despite the posturing, that’s ultimately what it’s about. With Alex Jones as you say they are responding to a political/social, in some cases legal environment. I think any censorship is likely to be reactive rather than proactive in the first instance, only gaining momentum once whoever decides has decided to apply censorship to particular types of sites. I do think however that, regardless of where the pressure to do so is coming from, censoring some sites is an important public service. I’ll take your word for it that there are serious sites with a genuine message to share that are being censored, I just don’t know of any personally, because I haven’t looked for them. I know there are serious conservative news outlets- although I’m not that familiar with it I read The Atlantic sometimes and that seems to be conservative leaning and a serious publication - but my experience of the kind of sites popular at the time of the last US election is through a friend who loves all that stuff - his FB Page was full of click bait links, usually headed with shock horror headlines about the Clintons or the Obamas, which are linked to ‘news’ sites filled basically with gibberish broken up by pictures of semi naked women holding assault rifles. I can’t remember exactly where it was published but I read a long article containing notes from interviews with some teenagers in Macedonia who made a small fortune creating and promoting those kind of sites back in 2016.
What’s my point? My point is as far as it goes, i.e from what I’ve seen and in my view FB pages etc that promote slander, malicious gossip, bizarre conspiracy theories etc should be censored. They are irresponsible, and dangerous. If that extends to serious news coverage, delivered with integrity and attempting to be as accurate as possible, redgardless of which way the publication leans politically, then I’ll agree with you that there’s something fishy going on in Denmark. I pick the papers I read according to the quality of the reporting - the UK papers I read, The Times and the Telegraph, are conservative papers, for the US I read the NYT and WAPO - two papers which quite obviously and openly carry a liberal bias. But, the reporting is of a high quality and, despite the odd error and the views I may disagree with, the standard of integrity is high, particularly in comparison with some of the further right leaning ‘News’ sites I’ve come across, which only publish the information that supports their POV.
Nb the LGBT bit was just to give an example, I’m aware there is a genuine struggle for free speech in the face of socio-political ideas being promoted as scientifically rooted fact. There’s a broad range of issues I’m not that familiar with that come under that overall heading. I just don’t think the kind of social media sites being censored are necessarily reliable guides, not from what I’ve seen anyway.
