this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
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I mean in principle this is just a matter of moderation being different from censorship.
But really, an "algorithm tweak"? I am still wondering when or why who decided that we needed to have "algorithms" that someone could "tweak" on the Internet at all. The first kind of "social media" I ever used was web forums where the entire "algorithm" was thread bumping, and even if you insist that we need to have the structure of a microblog: Mastodon does fine without an "algorithm" beyond reverse-chronological sorting.
I think Mastodon does fine, too, but I've often heard people complain about the lack of an algorithm. Like, they don't know how to find things if they aren't being shoveled into their feed
Personally I follow slightly more than 100 accounts plus less than 10 hashtags and feel I'm already getting plenty of things into my feed, nowadays I tend to unfollow things that post too many irrelevant things more than I follow new ones.
But you had all these rightwing weirdos complaining they were being censored because "the algorithm" didn't promote their weird little ideas enough!
Back when.
So tweaking the algorithm is quite literally censorship!
Not that this "free-speech absolutist" has proven particularly true to his word.
I strongly agree with the point made in the linked article that censorship is when a sender wants to send something, the receiver wants to receive it, but a third party (government, social media platform, whoever) keeps them from doing so.
If I want to see "weird little ideas of rightwing weirdos" (or of leftwing weirdos or any others), I should be allowed to. If I don't, I shouldn't have to.