With more and more pressure building on social media sites to be more proactive in the “woke” movement it makes it harder and harder to allow free speech. Over the last 8 years I have slowly watched more and more right leaning social media influencers get banned for posting their political opinions. With the “cancel culture” movement beginning to get more and more power they have become hard to stop when they put a target on your back.
Conservative influencer Alex Jones was one of the first ones to be banned. With little resistance from the right leaning groups Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube all realized that they can continue to do these things to help silence the opinions they don’t like.
Now not all influencers are getting permanent bans. Youtube has demonetized videos so influencers can’t make money from the ads they post in the videos and how many people watch the video. Instagram and facebook will shadow ban people as well. A shadow ban stops the user’s post from popping up on people’s feeds so less people see the post. The only way to get around these Shadow bans is for your followers to look up your profile directly.
Then conservatives tried to start their own social media platform and once it started to gain traction the app was shut down on every platform. I believe there’s one last attempt being made by former President Trump for a conservative social media platform, so stay tuned to see how that comes along.
Hopefully large companies will stop falling for the pressure of cancel culture and allow free speech on their platforms.
Sources
https://nypost.com/article/social-media-censorship-conservatives/
https://knewz.com/conservative-beauty-youtuber-influencer/
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/aug/6/conservative-majority-silenced-by-the-left/
Journalism 2.0 