> Social media is trending towards regional balkanisation.
By choosing to frame things like that, it almost sounds like multinational monopolies on social media controlled by murderous fascist regimes and used to push industrial loads of machine-generated propaganda is something that's somehow preferable.
Your new digital town square brought to you in part by the House of Saud, where there's free speech for everyone but some accounts are more equal than others and cisgender is a slur.
We're talking about Elon Musk's Twitter, who around the time of Russia's invasion of Ukraine was found to have hardcoded censorship of pro-ukraine content as well as users who posted pro-Ukraine content on Twitter.
This is just speculation. I see videos from Ukraine sticking it to the Russians like every other day from Twitter, shared with the news. Also from Telegram channels. The most recent one was with a downed Su-25. Here:
This is not speculation. When Elon Musk did that stunt on open-sourcing Twitter's source code right after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the source code explicitly included references to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in hardcoded rules to downrank discussions on the topic.
The majority of pro-Ukraine content used by journalists are on Twitter. Has always been the case since the very beginning of the war. Take a look at any article on TWZ, like the most recent one:
By choosing to frame things like that, it almost sounds like multinational monopolies on social media controlled by murderous fascist regimes and used to push industrial loads of machine-generated propaganda is something that's somehow preferable.