The second Trump administration may presage the significant retrenchment, if not collapse, of what critics call the censorship-industrial complex, a symbiotic and sometimes coercive relationship among the U.S. government, private researchers and Big Tech to suppress disfavored narratives and political movements such as populism.
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On Nov. 4, one day prior to the 2024 presidential election, a headline on the increasingly left-leaning news aggregating site The Drudge Report screamed: “Misleading claims have been viewed more than 2 billion times on X.”
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Republican lawmakers are raising concerns that Twitter’s new Chief Executive Parag Agrawal may threaten conservative political speech on the social media platform.
Agrawal, Twitter’s former chief technology officer who was announced as CEO following Jack Dorsey’s decision to step down early Monday, has previously highlighted the perceived threat of online “misinformation,” calling to depart from free speech considerations in favor of other concerns in an interview with MIT Technology Review in November 2020.
“Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation,” Agrawal said. “The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed.”
Agrawal previously oversaw development efforts on Bluesky, a decentralized social media platform intended to “better control abusive and misleading information.”
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