It’s ironic isn’t it? As soon as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announces he will introduce moderation changes to “dramatically reduce censorship” across Facebook, Instagram and Threads, a wave of new political content control is crashing through the social web.
Zuckerberg and his fellow tech billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos may be the three richest people on Earth, but they appear worn down by accusations (and evidence) that their digital platforms may not have humanity’s best interests at heart.
Luckily for them, the new US president is happy to let them off the hook as long as they sing from his political playbook. Likewise TikTok, which Trump has gone from hating to saving.
Is Elon Musk’s X now brimming with far right hate speech? For sure. Are Instagram and TikTok supressing left-wing political commentary? Probably. Even a “lifestyle” magazine like Cosmopolitan magazine has noticed. Welcome to the era of gangster tech regulation.
The new algospeak
One problem with this censorship, aside from the obvious political ramifications to democracy, trust and freedom of expression, is that it encourages the proliferation of “algospeak” – coded messages or double / multiple meanings designed to avoid detection by social media algorithms.
But coded messages and multiple meanings add another layer of complexity on top of the existing misinformation, disinformation and AI slop. People worry that online culture causes brain rot. Big tech platforms are already suffering from what tech commentator Cory Doctorow has called enshittification. This feels like another step in the process.
Social media ends up becoming even more useless and nonsensical. And therefore potentially more dangerous. Yes it can be fun to be part of the group that gets the language and references. But it can also another factor draining our attention which maybe should be elsewhere.
Some recent examples
- TikTok: After Trump returned to office in the US on 20 January, coded messages started appearing (using pop culture “cloaks” – popular hashtags to attract attention – and containing images of handwritten notes) to share news of anti-immigration ICE raids across the US. Many aligned under the innocuous topic of cute winter boots. The avalanche of double-themed content makes it hard to separate irony and piss-takes from the serious stuff. This problem is clear in the very different meanings of the “cute winter boots” screen shots illustrating this article from India.
- Instagram: it’s been standard moderation practice to suppress terms associated with suicide or eating disorders for many years now. But recently it’s been reported that certain search terms related to democratic politics are being suppressed: Meta faces backlash as democrat-related terms vanish from Instagram
- ChatGPT: people were alarmed that DeepSeek, the Chinese-owned AI app avoided questions on Tiananmen Square. But on the day that story broke, I asked ChatGPT to summarise an article on Trump and TikTok. It responded with the summary for a completely different article. When I asked it why, ChatGPT gave me a fawning apology. I went back to grab the screenshots but they had mysteriously disappeared from my chat history. Being gaslit by technology is a very 2025 vibe.
Land of the free?
In January, TikTok users flooded to Red Note (another Chinese-owned app) in anticipation of a US ban. A friend of a friend on Facebook (yes I’m still on Facebook!) described an interesting cultural exchange on Red Note concerning the political differences between East and West.
“A lot of the US creators posted videos with ‘ask me anything?’ and the Chinese creators went ‘Why? We are human too you know? We’re not super different’. So then the US creators ask them things like ‘Is it true every child works in a sweatshop, you all earn £3 a week and 98% of the population work for SHEIN?’ And the Chinese go ‘No, we like children. We earn up to about £100 a day. Life is a LOT cheaper here and what the hell is SHEIN? Also do you guys in the US really have to work two or three jobs to just pay rent?’ As of this morning, I was seeing US creators on TikTok going ‘I asked them what the biggest assumption was they had about US citizens and they told me that US citizens mistakenly believe they are free, but they are anything but – their whole social structure means they belong to a corporation. And they are all fat.’”
A few days ago, an old colleague of mine shared this cartoon by Zez Vaz. A lone figure with two white flags stands in front of a row of Tesla cars. It’s a direct echo of the famous image captured in Tiananmen Square before anti-government protests ended in massacre in 1989.
It sums up the new US administration in a nutshell: we are seeing West meet East, but not in a way that bodes well.
Image: Zez Vaz
Jemima Gibbons
Ethnography, user research and digital strategy for purpose-led organisations. Author of Monkeys with Typewriters, featured by BBC Radio 5 and the London Evening Standard.
