Instagram is Censoring more Political Content (3/21/2024)
And I experienced it firsthand after posting moderate political speech.
There is a particularly nagging itch you get when a Trillion dollar company lies to your face.
I guess I’ve known for a while that Meta (nee Facebook), supresses content it deems undesirable, which includes censoring some political speech. Today I got to experience it firsthand, and I feel annoyed and a bit mad.
This evening, while squattin the john, I posted a short essay on my Instagram story about the war in Gaza. The text I wrote was:
Whatever numbers of deaths we see on the screen cannot represent the human suffering of people stripped of basic rights, forced into exile, starved, humiliated, slaughtered like animals, with their cities burned to the ground.
All Jews grew up hearing stories like this, and now Israel has completed its inversion wherein an abused nation becomes an abuser.
What a catastrophe.
I have not given up on Israel, though, which is also like saying, I have not given up on modernity, I have not given up on the future.
Like the US there is a large partisan divide there. I hope the Israelis come back into their hearts soon and commit to healing a broken world, which to me is the lifelong commitment of being a Jew.
Look, all good essays start on the shitter. (Not that this is a good essay, I’m just saying.)
A few seconds later, I am unceremoniously logged out of my account “for suspicious activity.” I try to log back in, to no avail. I click “forgot password” and type in my email address, and on the bottom of my screen, up pops a benign message we’ve all seen a million times:
We sent an email to [my g-mail address] with a link to get back into your account.
The thing is, they didn’t send me a link to get me back into my account. I checked and double-checked that I was using the right e-mail, and I was. No link. I tried it again (right now, as I was typing this!)—Nope, no link. Yes, I checked my spam folder. No link!
I don’t like being lied to! HMPRH!
We’ve lived with Facebook/Meta for so long, that its lies have become woven into the fabric of our global public square.
It’s a shrill irony that Ted Cruz and the Republicans, of all people, were crying bloody murder over Meta’s political suppressions years ago, and most liberals didn’t bat an eye. Now Meta’s censorial eye (it probably looks about like this)1 is apparently cudgeling people who post even modest anti-Israel content, at a time when the United Nations reports that “in the northern governorates [of Gaza], a majority of people went entire days and nights without eating at least 10 times in the last 30 days.”
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The famished cries rising out of Jewish ghettos in Nazi Germany echo loud and clear.
I don’t post much political content on Instagram, because I tend to think that it’s a bit like yelling into the void. But I have used the app consistently for over a decade, running pages for business ventures, art projects, and my own personal page. Who knows how much money my eyeballs have netted this company.
Most Americans, including me, grew up being told that in America, you can say whatever you want, because we have this thing called “free speech.” One has to understand that exceptions to the rule are stamped with regularity, as predictable and consistent as a Joshua Tree casting long purple sillhouettes on the desert hardpack at sundown. We don’t need to take a tour from lynch mobs, to Cold War anticommunist laws, to the FBI’s pressure on Martin Luther King Jr. and civil rights leaders, to today’s algorithmically enforced censor, to notice that the pattern holds—America’s got a history with political suppression, especially of the left.
Anyway, I’m going to get back to painting. But what are we going to do about all this? Meta’s problems go way deeper than political censorship. In no particular order, here is a sampling of the social liabilites of Meta’s products:
Enables pedophiles to target young children and profits from this activity; has resisted calls to take action (NYTimes)
People under the age of 18 who use Instagram (and probably many above 18 as well): significant increases in suicidal ideations, anxiety, and depression, according to Facebook’s own internal studies. (From Facebook whisteblower, WSJ and others)
Keeps up an “animal torture empire” (David Farrier)
Surely a bunch of other weird shit that we’ll learn about in the future.
The point is simple: Meta, one of the largest companies in the world, profits from products that are hazardous to users, catastrophic for children, and that restrict political speech in the public square. Although Congress has promised to deal with Meta, and every so often puts on a show trial of Zuckerberg (our Senators do love to get their sound bites in), the current government is dysfunctional, slow-moving and unlikely to agree on major reforms.
So we’ll have to live with an increasingly vigilant censor from within the world’s most popular social media site. I personally will shift my internet presence towards other platforms, so that I am not as beholden to a soulless conglomerate that can basically do whatever it wants, ethics be damned—and ever more frequently does.
Hilariously, Facebook employees refer to Zuckerberg as having “the eye of Sauron”, and even more hilariously, Zuck believes that they use this nickname “lovingly”. https://consequence.net/2022/04/mark-zuckerberg-eye-of-sauron/