In 2020 a number of platforms even began regulating material from President Donald Trump, with Twitter placing fact-checks and warnings on some of his tweets and the platform Twitch temporarily suspending his account (Copland and Davis, 2020).Īs one of the largest digital platforms in the world, Reddit has not been immune from this pressure. In 2018 for example, a number of large social media companies banned the high-profile conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his platform InfoWars from their platforms (Hern, 2018), while in 2019 the web infrastructure company Cloudflare deplatformed the controversial site 8chan (Prince, 2019). This has occurred in particular through banning and restricting users and channels (Marantz, 2019). In recent years, in response to increasing pressure from the public, lawmakers and advertisers, many large social media companies have given up much of their free speech rhetoric and have become more active in regulating abusive, misogynistic, racist and homophobic language on their platforms.
While social media companies position themselves as platforms which offer unlimited potential of free expression (Gillespie, 2010), these same sites have always engaged in some form of content moderation (Marantz, 2019).
This paper is part of Trust in the system, a special issue of Internet Policy Review guest-edited by Péter Mezei and Andreea Verteş-Olteanu.Ĭontent moderation is an integral part of the political economy of large social media platforms (Gillespie, 2018).
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