Concerning the Way to Govern Social Media Platforms

CURRENT RANK: LOWLY SERF

To the Magnificent Social Machiavellian:

CHAPTER 5: CONCERNING THE WAY TO GOVERN SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS OR COMMUNITIES WHICH EXISTED UNDER THEIR OWN CONTENT POLICIES BEFORE THEY WERE ACQUIRED BY ANOTHER PLATFORM

Whenever those social media platforms which have been acquired have been accustomed to operate under their own community guidelines and with freedom of expression, there are three courses for those platform administrators who wish to hold them: The first is to shut them down, the next is to tightly control them directly, the third is to permit them to operate under their own policies, extracting regular profits from the platform, and establishing within it a content moderation team which will keep it friendly to you. Because such a social media platform, being acquired by the tech giant, knows that it cannot stand without its content moderation policies and advertising revenue, it does its utmost to support its business interests. Therefore, he who would keep a social media platform accustomed to freedom of expression will hold it more easily by the means of its own influencers and community guidelines than in any other way.

There are, for example, Twitter and Mastodon. Twitter held Vine and Periscope, establishing there content moderation policies, nevertheless they lost them. Mastodon, in order to hold Gab, Truth Social, and Parler, largely ignored them, and did not lose them. They wished to hold Twitter as Elon Musk held it, making it a free speech platform and permitting its community guidelines, and did not succeed. So to hold it they were forced to decentralize many communities on the platform. There was, in truth, no safe way to retain them otherwise than by fragmenting them. And he who becomes master of a social media platform accustomed to free speech and does not change it, may expect to be changed by it, for in rebellion it always has the watch word of zero-content moderation and its old policies. Neither time nor benefits will ever cause users to forget these. Whatever you may do to protect against rebellion, the influencers never forget free speech or their old content unless they are deplatformed.

But when social media platforms are accustomed to living under content moderation policies and that original moderation team is destroyed, they, being on the one hand accustomed to obey and on the other hand not having the old moderators, cannot agree in making new policies from amongst themselves, and they do not know how to govern their content. For this reason, they are very slow to rebel against censorship. A new content moderation team can become accepted as their moderator and secure the platform much more easily. But in platforms with a strong tradition of free speech there is more energy, greater hatred of censorship, and more desire for revenge against moderators, which will never permit them to allow the memory of their former liberty to rest. So the safest way is to shut them down or to establish a strong presence there.

NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI II