As the election approaches, allegations are circulating that social media platforms have “shadow banned” or otherwise filtered political content from celebrities. After several Latin the stars have spoken Against the racism and misogyny displayed at the Madison Square Garden rally last week, Ricky Martin posted an Instagram story claims that the platform blocked a post he had published on the subject. Users also speculated that their access to other public figures who posted about the rally, including Bad Bunny, was restricted in some way. Add these musicians to a long list of users who say they’ve been shadowbanned. These include Bella Hadidwho claimed in 2022 that the platform had penalized her for her publications on Palestine, and the sources of a recent Washington Post investigation that claimed Instagram limited its political content.

Allegations of political post suppression have been made for years, but the idea that a platform would censor this content right before an election with serious consequences is alarming. Is this true?

Well, yes and no. Instagram and its text platform, Threads, have claimed in the past and continue to claim that they don’t ban specific people. “Our policies are designed to give everyone a voice while keeping our platforms secure,” Dani Lever, Meta’s director of public affairs, told Vox in an email. “We are currently implementing these policies during an intense, highly polarized election and we readily acknowledge that mistakes can be made, but any implication that we are deliberately and systematically suppressing any particular voice is false.”

Last year, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram detailed the many moving parts that determine how a post is categorized, organized and served to users on a platform, including, he said, “thousands” of user preference “signals,” including what users likes, information about the post and who posted it and how interested you are in the person who made it. This criterion varies from one user to another and is constantly evolving.

Instagram’s complex content ranking system also involves another content filtering operation. Previous reports reported that Instagram and Threads remove and filter content, including covertly restricting individual accounts and their content from search results – the oldest commonly understood meaning of a shadow ban – as well as displaying posts unless of users. This apparent contradiction may be why the talk of the shadow ban has picked up again this past week.

In addition, the political context – just days away from anxiety-inducing elections – adds another level of concern. Platform news official policy regarding the policy is to not recommend any political content to users. “Our goal is to preserve the ability for people to choose to interact with political content, while respecting each individual’s appetite,” Mosseri. said earlier this year when the policy was announced.

“People told us they wanted to see less political content on Facebook,” Lever told Vox, “so we spent the last few years refining our approach to reducing the amount of political content seen in Feed and other surfaces.

Users can opt-in to receive political content if they want – which is a good thing – but users who don’t know they have to opt-in first may search for political content and then get the wrong idea. idea when they can’t find it.

Not only that, but in March, Instagram deployed a little-noticed but massive change in the way it displays hashtags on the site: it essentially erased real-time feeds. Now, no matter what tag you search for, you can no longer see posts made in real time on a universal feed. While you can still see posts recommended to you on the mobile app, you can’t see everything. This, again, is another problem that could make people believe they are being targeted or that their posts are hidden, when they are more likely to get lost in Meta’s ineffable algorithmic approach to searching for content .

Given the polarized era we find ourselves in, all of these factors can create confusion. After all, Meta has previously limited political content across all of its platforms. In 2022 he published a advertising restriction in the week before the election to prevent any political advertising from getting through, and it is implementing a similar restriction this week. (A recent Forbes survey found that before the current one-week ban on election advertising, the company had been enjoy easily political advertising on Facebook – even ads that spread widespread disinformation about elections.)

Lever pointed out to Vox that the company actually had announcement his approach to the elections a year ago. “We very clearly stated that we would show people links to official information about how, when and where to vote when they search for election-related terms on Facebook and Instagram,” Lever told Vox. Still, the average Instagram user likely won’t see the missing content as part of a site-wide design; rather, they may see it as an unfair ban on a specific piece of content or theme.

Users’ perception that their freedom of speech is restricted has become a recurring theme for Meta, as well as other platforms like Twitter, now known as X. Owner Elon Musk has frequently been criticized for having authorized censorship and artificial amplification content on this platform, often at the request of right-wing authoritarian governments. (Vox has contacted X for comment.) Under Musk, X is also known for ban left-wing usersincluding journalists, of the platform while the users have not violated any site policy. All of this prior activity tends to fuel the rumor mill during times of high anxiety and tension – like, for example, a few days before an election. Even if X does not filter content, the perception that it must do so may contribute to user reactions.

The problem of users believing they have been banned reflects larger tensions between technology and politics.

This brings us to another, perhaps more worrying, problem. Increasingly, the prominent moguls at the helm of these platforms appear willing to kneel to Donald Trump. Some tech entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong might be. hedge their bets in anticipation of a Trump election victory. Musk has made it clear that he is a fan of Trump, but that is not necessarily the case for Mark Zuckerberg, with whom Trump has had a notoriously tense relationship over the years.

After the January 6 insurrection, Facebook and Twitter both banned Trump from their platforms, which deeply displeased the former president, including Zuckerberg. That month, on TruthSocial, he noted his intention to protect TikTok in the face of attempts by US politicians to ban the platform – only because TikTok is Facebook’s biggest competitor. Trump followed this by threatening put Zuckerberg in jail if he filtered Trump-related content on Facebook.

Trump’s statements are part of a long litany of threats he has made against his enemies around the world. policy, the mediaAnd Silicon Valley if he won office. Additionally, Congress has shown a willingness to investigate social media platforms when they are unhappy with alleged content restrictions.

Tensions between Trump and Meta appear to be easing, however, as Meta gradually gives more face to Trump. Zuckerberg restored Trump’s access to Facebook and Instagram in 2023 after a two-year ban. He also praised Trump for his courage following an assassination attempt in July, and called him after the incident. While Trump had previously mentioned Zuckerberg as “enemy of the people” this atmosphere has changed; During a recent podcast interview, Trump claimed that he likes Zuckerberg “much better now”. Facebook has denied Trump’s claim that Zuckerberg went further and implied that he would vote for Trump in the election.

It’s not hard to see this in a scenario where tech CEOs are fall in line to pay Trump his dues in case he wins the election, the end user is the one who loses.