One of the things I despise the most - and I don't mean to be political here, take this post as a general critique to humanity and our deviant ways, not a specific political party - is censorship masked as protection and cancel culture disguised as oppression.
Today, I woke up and a friend had shared with me an Instagram image that turned out to be censored by the platform in order to protect the viewers and I was like "what? why? and also, who does Instagram think they are to decide what is harmful for me or anyone else for that matter?".
See, the problem of giving this kind of power to tech giants like Instagram/Facebook/Whatsapp to do things like this that little by little, tech giants continue to get a hold of every single piece of controllable entity. And yeah, that power is handed to them by us, if we didn't comply with their crap and just stopped using it once a crazy measure such as this one was taken, they would stop, they would know their limits, but they keep pushing those limits and people keep taking it in their rear, no questions asked.
Instagram and Fact checkers get to decide what gets posted or not, just like an publisher and like a social media platform.
Since Donald Trump won the US elections in 2016, tech giants realized the power that social media actually has besides the well known data control that makes them incredibly powerful. Social media has been used for a decade to shape society towards a reality that the powers high above want, that is well known, but in 2016 social media proved there is another use case for these platforms, and that is actually to change reality, not just shape it in a subtle way by using subconscious strategies; social media can not only shape society, but it can also change the reality. Trump won thanks to meme magic in social media, and sure as hell they won't let that happen again, at least not when the outcome is not the one they want.
And that is when it get really scary. Most people I know - and I'm not surrounded by idiots. Granted, my inner circle is not made off MENSA members, or Quantum mechanics experts, or anything like that, but I wouldn't be exaggerating when I say most of them are a step or two below that level - browse Facebook and get their news from it, not from Papers or Websites (which are also following the same narrative as social media and tech giants, so it doesn't matter in the end, but it matters by principle). This means that anything they read, has already been curated - and censors if needed, or even nuked - by Facebook.
The information way is already here and it's not only affecting society in a subconscious way, it is now actively messing up with it in a deeper level.
I would like to go on a much deeper level here, but this is my first freewrite in about a year and I'm getting dry, not of ideas, but of ways to express myself and to be able to keep writing about this topic. I promise I will make another post about this once I'm back on track.