RRU in the Media: Jaigris Hodson on social media censorship

The rapid shift from TikTok to a new social media platform UpScrolled underscores deepening fears over censorship and growing political polarization online.

After American investors acquired a majority stake in Tiktok's US operations, users reported that posts about ICE raids and topics like Palestine weren't uploading or receiving visibility-problems many suspected were tied to new moderation controls rather than technical glitches.

In a recent article for The Conversation Canada, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies Jaigris Hodson explains what drives users to switch platforms and why this can in fact create further divisions and polarization.

Here's some of what she wrote:

"Because each social network engages in or facilitates different types of content filtering, each provides a different kind of echo chamber that people self-select into or out of.

These echo chambers are a problem because they reinforce beliefs, even ones grounded in mis- and disinformation, and in turn create deeper more polarized divisions between people that are hard to escape from. Since young people report getting most of their news from social media sites, people concerned about algorithms have more than just government censorship to worry about."

Read the full article in The Conversation Canada.

Image by Larisa from Adobe Stock.