And violent videos and propaganda have been spreading beyond major platforms, on Hamas-linked Telegram channels, which are private groups that are effectively unmoderated. This is happening at the same time as these same platforms have deprioritized the surfacing of legitimate news by reputable sources via their algorithms (see also: Musk’s decision to strip out the headlines that were previously displayed on X if a user shared a link to another website).Ĭontent moderation is not a panacea. After making widely publicized investments in content moderation under intense public pressure after the 2016 presidential election, platforms have quietly dialed back their capacities. The reduction in moderators on social-media sites, she said, leaves the platforms with “fewer employees who have the language, cultural, and geopolitical understanding to make the tough calls in a crisis.” Even before the layoffs, she added, technology platforms struggled to moderate content that was not in English. Caitlin Chin-Rothmann, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me in an email that Meta and YouTube have also made cuts to their trust-and-safety teams as part of broader layoffs in the past year. Musk slashed the company’s trust-and-safety team, which handled content moderation, soon after he took over last year. If some of the changes making social-media platforms less hospitable to accurate information are obvious to users, others are happening more quietly inside companies. The accounts of those Twitter Blue subscribers now display a blue check mark-once an authenticator of a person’s real identity, now a symbol of fealty to Musk. Musk has also introduced financial incentives for posting content that provokes massive engagement: Users who pay for a Twitter Blue subscription (in the U.S., it costs $8 a month) can in turn get paid for posting content that generates a lot of views from other subscribers, be it outrageous lies, old clips repackaged as wartime footage, or something else that might grab eyeballs. Now a toxic brew of bad actors and users merely trying to juice engagement have seeded social media with dubious, and at times dangerous, material that’s designed to go viral. “In recent years, all the major social-media platforms have evolved further into algorithmically driven TikTok-style recommendation engines,” John Herrman wrote last week in New York Magazine. But the design and structure of the platforms are starting to weaken even those capabilities. Where social media shines, Charlie said, is in showing users firsthand perspectives and real-time updates. But, my colleague Charlie Warzel told me, the Israel-Hamas war is also “an awful conflict that has deep roots … I am not sure that anything that’s happened in the last two weeks requires an algorithm to boost outrage.” He reminded me that social-media platforms have never been the best places to look if one’s goal is genuine understanding: “Over the past 15 years, certain people (myself included) have grown addicted to getting news live from the feed, but it’s a remarkably inefficient process if your end goal is to make sure you have a balanced and comprehensive understanding of a specific event.” Posts that stoke strong reactions are rewarded with reach and amplification. Social media has long encouraged the sharing of outrageous content. Misinformation and violent rhetoric run rampant on X, but other platforms have also quietly rolled back their already lacking attempts at content moderation and leaned into virality, in many cases at the cost of reliability. Musk, in his capacity as the owner of X, has personally sped up the deterioration of social media as a place to get credible information. Three hours later, he deleted the post both accounts were known spreaders of disinformation, including the claim this spring that there was an explosion near the Pentagon. He tagged them in his post, which racked up some 11 million views. “For following the war in real-time,” Elon Musk declared to his 150 million followers on X (formerly Twitter) the day after Israel declared war on Hamas, two accounts were worth checking out.
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