I personally have a very tough time fitting your interpretation into my model of the world. To me the popularity and actions of Facebook et al. are mostly disconnected from our ability to communicate with family and close friends.
In my opinion the timeline seems to be a little more as follows:
People are on Facebook and Twitter and other social media platforms both to stay in touch with friends and to complain about the outgroup.
COVID-19 hit, significantly reducing quality of life everywhere. People realign their political discussions and notions of outgroup along COVID-lines—are you a believer in lockdowns and masks and science or the opposite? This temporarily supersedes other political discussions, not because people have wonderfully unique and insightful opinions on COVID countermeasures but because this is the biggest event happening and as such is necessarily political.
After approximately one year of lockdowns and countermeasures people have sunk significant parts of their public profile into their thoughts regarding COVID. A large portion of the public, as well as officials, will support silencing opposition if only to retain a coherent public image (after all, if communication on COVID is not more important than free speech, what have you been doing all these months?).
Facebook rises to the occasion and offers to selflessly censor people according to criteria set by the WHO.
I’d like to couple this with a prediction that Facebook will not start censoring older messaged by the WHO and other Respected Officials. I see Facebook’s cooperation more as a power grab with plausible deniability than a desire for certain messages (officially endorsed) over others (crackpot/other). It only exists through the support of the very serious people, so it is counterproductive to start challenging them on their own history.
Lastly I think that if you genuinely want to have a heart-to-heart with your friends and family it is silly to restrict yourself to communicating via Facebook. Call them, start a blog, meet somewhere outside for a walk if you want. This has the twin benefit of you not having to worry about issues being ‘controversial’ as defined by Facebook, and them not having to publicly change their thoughts over your message. Also it is much less embarrassing if it turns out you were unbelievably overconfident all along.
I personally have a very tough time fitting your interpretation into my model of the world. To me the popularity and actions of Facebook et al. are mostly disconnected from our ability to communicate with family and close friends.
In my opinion the timeline seems to be a little more as follows:
People are on Facebook and Twitter and other social media platforms both to stay in touch with friends and to complain about the outgroup.
COVID-19 hit, significantly reducing quality of life everywhere. People realign their political discussions and notions of outgroup along COVID-lines—are you a believer in lockdowns and masks and science or the opposite? This temporarily supersedes other political discussions, not because people have wonderfully unique and insightful opinions on COVID countermeasures but because this is the biggest event happening and as such is necessarily political.
After approximately one year of lockdowns and countermeasures people have sunk significant parts of their public profile into their thoughts regarding COVID. A large portion of the public, as well as officials, will support silencing opposition if only to retain a coherent public image (after all, if communication on COVID is not more important than free speech, what have you been doing all these months?).
Facebook rises to the occasion and offers to selflessly censor people according to criteria set by the WHO.
I’d like to couple this with a prediction that Facebook will not start censoring older messaged by the WHO and other Respected Officials. I see Facebook’s cooperation more as a power grab with plausible deniability than a desire for certain messages (officially endorsed) over others (crackpot/other). It only exists through the support of the very serious people, so it is counterproductive to start challenging them on their own history.
Lastly I think that if you genuinely want to have a heart-to-heart with your friends and family it is silly to restrict yourself to communicating via Facebook. Call them, start a blog, meet somewhere outside for a walk if you want. This has the twin benefit of you not having to worry about issues being ‘controversial’ as defined by Facebook, and them not having to publicly change their thoughts over your message. Also it is much less embarrassing if it turns out you were unbelievably overconfident all along.