Seriously, wtf is going on? All the big platforms are going ban happy on a lot of people as of late for no reason, no explanations, nothing, or for extremely vague bogus reasons if they even say anything at all, a lot of people are getting randomly screwed out of the blue on years long accounts, they literally didn’t do anything to warrant it at all, even I got randomly nuked and locked out of most of the internet without any warning, discord is the only one that hasn’t been going crazy lately.
When the heck did it get this bad? Why are they going after people doing literally nothing wrong but leaving porn/scam/AI bots and actual TOS violators be without an issue? How do they benefit from banning everyone with no reason? What’s the goal here? Because it sure isn’t for stopping bots or scammers, those are running rampant more then ever now, and I don’t see how they gain money by banning and discouraging people who create content for their platforms, isn’t that like, bad for them?
EDIT: right, forgot everyone here is super duper political. Fyi I’m not much of a political person (sorry y’all), and I don’t really understand how any of this benefits them politically in anyway to begin with, or what any of this has to do with shareholders? How does any of that benefit those guys in anyway? I’m talking about normal people getting randomly banned without any politics even involved, people just hanging out in normal spaces and suddenly getting the ban hammer out of nowhere with no explanation.
I can’t avoid politics and shareholders completely, but it really boils down to cutting costs.
They are companies supported by venture capital, basically risk-taking investors wanting a high pay-off. The problem with receiving this money is that the investors end up owning the company, and you have to answer to them. And once they are making money, why wouldn’t the owner feel entitled to their share?
The problem being, of course, that they never really had a strategy for monetizing the platform. So how can you turn a profit? Some try to sell premium features, but for a dominant social media company it always boils down to three things:
It used to be that point 3 required certain base levels of moderation, but with the current US government, this has changed. Point 3 has become unpredictable. Censorship of political content that can be deemed extremist, such as opposition to genocide in Gaza or sympathy for Luigi Mangione, might help social media companies that are eager to comply in advance.
So basically, platforms now need to maintain the cheapest possible moderation (1) that allows advertisers to stay on the platform (2) in order to maximise profits.
These platforms are huge enough that they do not need to care about individual users - especially sites where users tend to be anonymous. So you don’t really need to introduce expensive checks and balances; just ban users at any suspicion. There are plenty of fish in the sea.
Now, how do you get to a point of suspicion as cheap as possible? Machine learning models is probably your best bet. Reddit observing people’s voting history provides them with useful data to this end. Running some LLM on the user’s comments is good as well, which is how you end up being banned for quoting the Godfather, as I saw one newly recruited Lemmy user report. The more safeguards you introduce, the more expensive moderation becomes.
Advertisers don’t care much about over-moderation. Nobody has any incentive to care about individual users in a site that is as crowded as Reddit. What matters is that there are enough users left to generate content (until AI can take over that as well), and that passive (harmless) users are there to click on ads. This dynamic is the same across all mainstream social media - Instagram just wants to provide you with a sufficiently addictive and toothless feed to have you keep looking at ads.
Last, the question is what needs to be moderated. Is sympathy for Mangione the same as encouraging violence? The regulators/political elites would certainly think so. Is it extremist to support Palestine? Where is the line drawn between legitimate political opposition to a fascist coup d’etat and inciting political violence? These are sometimes hard decisions, but following the above logic of unmonitored over-moderation, you don’t even have to think about it. Just ban at first suspicion.
And then, suddenly, the social media platform is not only seeking profit, but it is also colluding with a fascist state takeover and suppressing the opposition. Which is why people give you political answers to this question even though the answer is really very simple: Bad moderation is cheaper.