Thread by @arctotherium42

The most interesting thing in Facebook's evolution from mostly-free (albeit without pseudonymity) platform to aggressively controlled between 2015 and 2020 is how involved European governments were in the process (thread).

The most important thing about Facebook is that it can be used to reach the great mass of Gen X and Boomer adults who are not Internet natives and comprise most swing voters. Dark Facebook Manipulation from Russia and Vote Leave was blamed for both Trump 2016 and Brexit.

These two events provoked an avalanche of books, news articles, government reports, NGOs, and hearings (including in 2018 in the US Senate) about how Facebook microtargeting would end democracy. Example:

Facebook did not change their formal policies as much as Twitter/Reddit/YouTube, transformed how the platform surfaced and moderated political content. Facebook began reporting their "hate speech" moderation metrics in Q4 2017; in three years it was nearly erased from the site.

The amount of content actioned for hate speech steadily rose 2017-2020, exploding to more than 22 million posts in Q2 2020 when the lockdowns (which intensified Internet closure across all platforms) began.

Facebook hired an additional 3000 moderators in 2017.

In 2017, Facebook began flagging 'misinformation'; by 2019 this had been outsourced to third party fact-checkers (who, of course, were not ideologically neutral), who gained the ability to flag, deboost, and eventually remove posts at will.

The German government's German Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) imposed large fines for illegal (incl political) content. Since there were no fines for over-enforcement, this encouraged Facebook to aggressively censor. Officially-recognized journalists were exempt.

One of the privileges of the Fourth Estate of our present ancien regime is freedom of speech - the ability to avoid social media censorship.

As with YouTube, the British government was extremely important in the closure of Facebook. The Brexit referendum was blamed on a (hallucinated) microtargeting narrative (Cambridge Analytica), which was then used to justify a then-novel suite of legal speech controls.

Dominic Cummings, who ran Vote Leave and wrote down what he was doing and how he did it both before and after the referendum, pointed out that this "dark adverts" narrative is nonsense from journos who don't understand A/B testing or focus groups are.
dominiccummings.com/2018/05/18/on-…

annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/wp-content/upl…,
gov.uk/government/new…,
committees.parliament.uk/committee/378/…