In the 1880s and 1890s, a series of technological innovations—the invention of the linotype machine, the move from hand-cranked to steam-powered presses, the adoption of cheap pulp paper—made newspapers so cheap that millions of readers could afford to read one or more paper every day. New York City newspaper barons Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst engaged in a bare-knuckle battle for readers, capturing attention with increasingly sensational and lurid headlines.
Hearst saw international conflict as a surefire way to sell newspapers, and dispatched famed illustrator Frederic Remington to Cuba in 1897 to document the Cuban revolution against Spain. Remington cabled back that there was no revolution to illustrate, and Hearst is said to have responded: “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.”
Hearst’s quip was apocryphal, but he and Pulitzer did, in fact, furnish a war. In 1898, the American warship USS Maine, anchored off Cuba, exploded and sank, killing 266 crew members. Historians believe it may have been an accident, but Hearst and Pulitzer used their papers to advocate a narrative that a Spanish torpedo or mine had sunk the vessel. The papers tried to outdo each other in goading President McKinley to declare war on Spain, leading to wry commentary about the “prompt and able fashion in which Hearst and Pulitzer took charge of the Government at a critical period”.
When the Spanish-American war ended later that year, the US took ownership of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Hearst and Pulitzer were both fabulously wealthy and powerful. Other less successful newspaper owners warned of the dangers of using propaganda to mobilise public passions. Perhaps it’s worth considering that caution as we consider the alignments between a powerful new medium and a conservative populist movement.
Donald Trump, who owns a social network valued at $8.5bn, was elected president of the US with an assist from Elon Musk, who paid tens of billions to turn Twitter into X, a social network that has traded near-universal usage by journalists and politicians for centrality to the global far-right movement.
Perhaps feeling left out, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been finding ways before Trump’s inauguration to show his fealty to the administration. Meta donated $1m to the Trump inaugural fund. Zuckerberg appointed a close Trump ally to Meta’s board. And, sparking an outcry from journalists everywhere, Meta announced it is terminating support for fact-checking organisations around the world, shifting to a community-moderation model inspired by X’s “community notes” programme in the US.
In the wake of conservative electoral surprises in the US and UK in 2016, journalists and academics began to warn that mis- and disinformation online might affect elections and damage democracy. In December 2016, Facebook launched a third-party fact-checking programme, partnering with newsrooms and nonprofit organisations to identify and debunk misinformation. Such programmes rose to prominence in 2020 as fearmongering about Covid vaccines flooded social media platforms, and companies like Meta became increasingly willing to block misinformation for fear of danger to public health.
Efforts to limit the promotion of dangerous and untested Covid cures were characterised by some conservatives as “censorship”. Those cries rose to a howl when Meta and others took steps to limit conspiracy theories about a stolen US election in 2020, and deplatformed Trump for inciting his followers to violence. Trump’s banishment from Facebook and Twitter led to the creation of Truth Social, to Musk’s takeover of Twitter, and to a new model of social media moderation centred on “free speech”.
“Free speech” should be understood as a marketing term, not the actual practice of these platforms. X under Musk is infamous for suspending the accounts of critics and journalists who’ve angered him, as well as critics of the Indian government and other undemocratic regimes. What “free speech” means in this context is “little to no moderation”, a stance that conveniently cuts costs for companies, which can now employ fewer humans to review and remove content that violates community standards. (While Meta, X and Google have all invested in AI, the fact that it is not yet reliable enough to handle sensitive content-moderation tasks at scale should serve as an important warning for enthusiasts.)
Online spaces cannot exist without moderation: they inevitably attract illegal content such as child sexual abuse imagery, eventually leading to serious legal problems—as Pavel Durov, founder of the largely unmoderated Telegram network, found when he was arrested in France. Networks that remain relatively unmoderated can advertise their openness to a wide range of speech. But in fact they often lose valuable perspectives, as many users are unwilling to engage in spaces where they are harassed or denigrated. Truly unmoderated spaces, such as the notorious 8chan, rarely attract advertisers and are most popular with extremists who would be unable to post elsewhere.
Moderated networks tend to welcome broader audiences, but face ongoing debates about what content is OK and what should be removed. Not only is moderation controversial and expensive, it’s a perpetual reminder that a corporation is in charge of the community’s speech rules—it’s not a participatory, democratic process.
Community notes, launched as “Birdwatch” at Twitter in 2021, is an interesting experiment in making moderation more participatory and democratic. Volunteers review posts flagged as potentially misleading and add notes providing explanation or context. It would be easy for such a system to be gamed by groups of politically aligned participants, but there is an algorithmic twist. Community notes rely on “bridging” algorithms that promote notes upvoted by participants from across the political spectrum.
It’s hard to give Meta the benefit of the doubt and assume its shift is designed to boost healthy democratic debate
Community participation and other digital tools allowed Wikipedia to emerge as the curator of consensus reality in a conflicted world. Exploring ways for communities to govern speech is a path towards fixing social media. But the context around Meta’s decision to abandon journalistic fact-checking for community oversight is concerning.
Among the changes Meta is making is around what constitutes “hateful conduct”. While Meta prohibits users from posting insults about “character” or “mental capacity”, it now explicitly permits “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality”. In other words, it’s prohibited to accuse someone—say, Zuckerberg—of cowardice, but it’s fine to describe someone as mentally ill because they are transgender. Meta also now allows denigration of undocumented immigrants, explicitly permitting statements like “Immigrants are all thieves”.
It’s worth remembering how Facebook’s hateful conduct policy came about. Starting in 2016, the Myanmar military killed between 25,000 and 43,000 Rohingya Muslims and displaced a million more. The military used Facebook pages to encourage violence against the Rohingya, and scholars and human rights groups accused Facebook of being instrumental in genocide. Measures like the hateful conduct policy were meant to prevent it from being abused this way in the future. The loosening of these restrictions in the US at a moment when an anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT administration is taking power should be chilling.
So it’s hard to give Meta the benefit of the doubt and assume that its changes to content moderation are designed to encourage healthy democratic debate. Instead, they seem like a strategy to curry favour with Trump and his nativist supporters, a decision that is likely economically beneficial in the short term.
Neither Hearst nor Pulitzer’s papers survived the 20th century. A rival that did was the New York Times. Alarmed by the sensationalist propaganda Hearst and Pulitzer published leading up to the war in Cuba, the Times decided to distinguish its editorial policy with a catchy slogan: “All the News That’s Fit to Print”. In the long run, serving a public with fact-based news was more profitable than feeding populist passions.
We may want to keep that in mind, just in case Trump sends a battleship to float off Greenland’s shore, seeking war with Denmark.
