Late in Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) dodged a question about whether he and running mate Donald Trump would accept the 2024 election results by pivoting to a favorite topic: what he called the “censorship” of Americans by social media companies, terming it “a much bigger threat to democracy.”
His statement drew on a years-long Republican contention that Silicon Valley tech giants have suppressed conservative views on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. That narrative has underpinned congressional hearings, Republican fundraising campaigns, the dismantling of academic research centers, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, state laws seeking to restrict online content moderation, and multiple lawsuits that reached the Supreme Court this year.
But is it true? Well, yes and no, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Conservatives and Trump supporters are indeed more likely to have their posts on major social media platforms taken down or their accounts suspended than are liberals and Joe Biden supporters, researchers from Oxford University, MIT and other institutions found. But that doesn’t necessarily mean content moderation is biased.
There is a consensus that emotions are bad and should be ignored but if you ask people what they want out of life it’s all emotions: love, happiness, excitement, fullfillment. We denigrate feelings all the time but we didn’t go to the moon for science, it was curiosity and wonder and joy.
Your comment just reminded me that I’m very tired of emotions being dismissed as useless or harmful.