The tech executive known for her work to detoxify Reddit says
Social Media bosses know what’s right – they just need to act
The United States’s reckoning with
racism set off by the
police killing of George Floyd has been expressed by social media companies in Silicon Valley with a certain stiffening of the spine.
Twitter hid one of Donald Trump’s tweets behind a label;
YouTube banned some white nationalists; Twitch suspended Trump’s account for hate speech and Reddit got rid of the largest pro-Trump message board, which had long been a fount of harassment. As for Facebook, well,
Facebook maintained its practice of exempting Trump from many of its rules and was hit with an unprecedented advertiser boycott.
Finally, it seems, content moderation on social media is making some moves away from the free speech absolutism of the early internet and toward a more nuanced understanding of what kind of rules are necessary to enable free expression for the broadest possible range of people.