Too much or not enough

But increasingly, their moderation has been debated. One such example is the decision by Facebook and Twitter in 2020 to block access to a news article about then presidential candidate (and current President) Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden. Critics condemned the companies for blocking a report that a news organisation deemed fit to publish, while the companies cited rules against carrying material obtained through hacking or illegal sourcing.

At the same time, the platforms – particularly Facebook – have been criticised for not doing enough in some other circumstances: They were criticised for not curtailing conspiracy theory groups such as Qanon and hate collectives such as the Proud Boys, which were among those that laid siege to the US Capitol on January 6.

In a 2017 paper published in First Monday, a peer-reviewed open access journal for research on the Internet, public and tech policy experts Philip Napoli and Robyn Caplan write that treating social media companies as tech firms ignores the social aspects and influence of their reach, as also the fact that their main revenue source is content, the same as media companies.

“The framing of social media platforms and digital content curators purely as technology companies marginalises the increasingly prominent political and cultural dimensions of their operation, which grow more pronounced as these platforms become central gatekeepers of news and informa