In an interview with The Babylon Bee, Elon Musk He has discussed censorship in private companies, mainly large corporations like Google, and whether laws should be passed to protect the freedom of expression of users before private companies.
On the possibility of creating laws that protect the freedom of expression of users before private companies, which some compare or say is inspired by the first amendment of the United States Constitution, the one aimed at protecting the freedom of expression of citizens in the face of government censorship, Musk has responded that there is a lot of censorship that people are not aware of and that most of it comes from Google, Instagram and Facebook.
Being more specific, Musk has said in relation to Google, Instagram and Facebook that “there is a lot of suppression of secrets on Facebook, Instagram and Google. It’s a non-stop secret suppression.”. Regarding the methods used, he highlighted the shadow banning or expulsion in the shadows, which in the context at hand and according to the billionaire consists of carrying out practices such as put a link on the fifth page of a search to remove visibility of a page or a website. Whether or not that statement is true, it is a plausible scenario considering the strong dominant position that Google has in the search engine sector.
In addition, Elon Musk has also commented that it would be good if the companies behind social networks published their algorithm, thus following the example of Twitter itself. Continuing on from the company that he still runs (and will most likely continue to run from the shadows), he said that developers they found a hidden layer of censorship that was written in 2012. While he acknowledges that “censorship is perhaps the wrong word,” it was basically an algorithm that removed every tweet that contained any of the thousand words that were present on his list.
The developers of Twitter, according to Musk’s version, They found not only an algorithm with a list of words that removed tweets, but also another with a list of URLs that were removed.. If all the data exposed by the tycoon is true, it would be clear that the platforms censor according to their interests, something to which the opaque way in which they usually work obviously does not contribute. In fact, Google itself has come to receive government pressure to show its algorithms.
Little trust can be placed in many of the large Internet services, especially if their main source of income is advertising, which has to be targeted to be truly effective.
