Social media moderation has happened all along

Social media platforms are finally coming to the conclusion that people who spread inflammatory falsehoods on their sites should be banned, even if they are powerful individuals. We’ll see how long that lasts.

But there has been “content moderation” of social media all along, including some that resemble fact checking. This had already caused the right to cry foul and claim bias.

There is no mystery as to how this would come about. If you’re a progressive, what might you post about? Let’s say climate change, police violence against nonwhites, income inequality, vote suppression, a tax code that takes proportionately more from the working poor than from the rich, or the Democratic Party’s chumminess with Wall Street.

Now, a person could certainly post about these issues by making stuff up, but there wouldn’t be any particular need to. They’re all real. You may not agree that they are problems, but they’re real.

If you’re a Trump-Fox News adherent, what might you want to post about? These days, the big one is the idea that Trump actually won the 2020 election.

Before that, perhaps you echoed his claim that global warming is a Chinese hoax. Maybe your scoop is that Fauci is mistaken and COVID is just a flu. That immigrants commit more violent crimes per capita than locals. That Joe Biden is a Marxist, or that Obama is Kenyan and/or Muslim.

Maybe it’s simply that all Democrats are socialists. Then there’s the ever-popular QAnon.

Each of those items is false and inflammatory, and that’s why a content moderator might want to flag or even disallow them. Not because they’re all right-leaning, which indeed they are, but because they’re all toxic garbage.

Not to worry: There will always be a falsehood-friendly platform somewhere on the internet.

Eric Kuhn, Middletown