Concerning Moderated Social Media Platforms

CURRENT RANK: LOWLY SERF

To the Magnificent Social Machiavellian:

CHAPTER 2 - CONCERNING MODERATED SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

Unmoderated platforms on the other hand are either new communities founded on free speech principles, as are alternative sites such as Rumble, or they are established forums that resist the pressure to censor, as are web hosts that refuse to take down objectionable but legal content. I will leave out all further discussion of unmoderated platforms because in another blog I have written of them at length and will address myself only to moderated platforms. In doing so I will keep to the order indicated above and discuss how such social media platforms are to be moderated and their communities preserved.

I say at once there are fewer difficulties in moderating established moderated platforms, particularly those long accustomed to the content policies of their owners, than newly moderated ones. The reason is that in such platforms it is sufficient only for the moderators to maintain the policies of those who ruled before them, and to deal carefully with content as it arises. In this way, a social media platform can maintain its user base unless it faces extraordinary and excessive negative publicity. If the platform loses his follower base in this way, whenever any unfortunate viral meme happens to the competitor who took its followers away from it, the platform will get them back.

We have examples of social networks that lasted against major scandals like Facebook's data privacy scandal nor the moderation crises facing YouTube, only because their platforms had been cemented over decades with billions of habituated users. An incumbent legacy platform has less cause to make drastic changes that risk user backlash; hence they tend to retain more user loyalty. And unless extraordinary controversy causes the platform to irreparably violate public trust, it is reasonable to expect that existing users will naturally remain loyal to it, and the longer the duration of ingrained habits of the users, the more likely that the memories and motives that encourage unsubscribing are lost. In the end, each new algorithmic change increases the possibility of desensitizing people.

NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI II