(2023-06-06) Newton The Platforms Give Up On 2020 Lies

Casey Newton: The platforms give up on 2020 lies (disinformation). On tech platforms these days you can get away with just about anything, as long as you’re running for president.

Take Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. A leading anti-vax conspiracy theorist, Kennedy lost his Instagram account in January 2021 when he tried to scare people away from getting the COVID-19 vaccine.

But now he’s launched a bid for the presidency that looks to have about as much chance as Connor Roy did in Succession. And presto: he has his Instagram account back.

Needless to say, Kennedy is also welcome on Twitter, where Elon Musk hosted him in a Spaces event on Monday

Kennedy suggested that anti-depressants cause school shootings and that COVID was a bioweapon.

I’d be surprised if even Kennedy thinks he can win the nomination. The real point of running for office is to draw more attention to his harmful views — and platforms have now agreed to help with his project.

One function Musk now serves in the tech ecosystem is to give cover to other companies seeking to make unpalatable decisions

Twitter’s decaying policy and enforcement systems have proven to be enticing for other social platforms.

Twitter’s peers took notice of its reversal and chose to follow suit. In February, Meta restored Donald Trump’s accounts, and upon reinstating him said it would no longer prevent users from lying about the 2020 election. And on Friday, YouTube announced that it wouldn’t, either.

CNN hosted a town hall with the president in which the accompanying corrections for his ravings ran into the thousands of words

it’s one thing to host a single ill-considered town hall in the name of ratings, and another to volunteer to serve in perpetuity as a digital library for all the election lies that candidates and their surrogates see fit to upload.

I find it more than a little grim that, little by little, Big Tech has opted out of the fight. Two years after the Capitol attacks, it’s easy to forget how close we came to losing our democracy

magical thinking of its own — that offering the most powerful communications tools ever devised to the enemies of democracy, allowing them to nibble away at the fabric of reality without consequence, will somehow fail to affect the society that they seek to unmake.