When former president Jacob Zuma’s daughter, the odious Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, was allegedly inciting violence on X (then named Twitter) during the July 2021 riots in KwaZulu-Natal, the US-based social media company — then led by Jack Dorsey — did nothing to rein her in.
As rioters torched and looted shopping centres, burned cars and created mayhem and death, Zuma-Sambudla used her Twitter account to applaud them.
“We see you! Amandla!” she kept posting in response to images and videos of the violence as KZN and parts of Gauteng burned. She revelled in the anarchy.
Despite pleas by many South Africans to Twitter’s moderation teams, including direct appeals to Dorsey, to do something about Zuma-Sambudla’s account, and others, the company — now owned by Elon Musk — did nothing.
South Africa was burning and Twitter turned a blind eye to it. Riots in a small economy at the tip of Africa — a country that also happens to be 10 time zones away from HQ and rarely ever makes headlines in the US — didn’t merit intervention.
I bring up the 2021 riots because they were a clear demonstration of the real-world life-and-death consequences of not dealing with incitement on social media platforms.
Twitter determined there were grounds to suspend Donald Trump’s account over the 2021 attack on the US Capitol, so why wasn’t the same treatment meted out to Zuma-Sambudla? It reeked of double standards.
A lot has changed since 2021. Musk bought Twitter, renamed it X and fired the platform’s content moderation teams in favour of a system of “community notes”, where ordinary users are now expected to correct the batshittery that has flooded the platform.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is keenly aware of shifting political winds and last week announced that Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Twitter clone Threads, would do away with (read: buckle to Trump on) content moderation in the US, opting instead for an X-style community notes feature.
This was not a principled decision by Zuckerberg: it was a commercial calculation aimed at currying favour with Trump and the incoming administration, just as an antitrust probe against Meta looms. Bending the knee to Trump also makes business sense as Meta limbers up for battle with the EU, which is turning the screws on US big tech firms, including social media platforms such as Facebook and X. Zuckerberg probably figures it’s better to have a political bruiser such as Trump on his side in this fight.
But scrapping content moderation, as flawed as it is, is risky. Free speech absolutism of the kind espoused by Musk is attractive on paper. In practice, it can and does lead to real-world harm. Legal systems in the world’s democracies have set reasonable limits on speech where it conflicts with other rights and protections. This is not censorship. An example often used is shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre when no fire exists, leading to the risk of a stampede and injury.
It’s now as clear as daylight that the EU and the US under Trump will take radically divergent paths when it comes to regulating social media. Trump, Musk and Zuckerberg will hold up the US as a bastion of free speech, while the EU will emphasise the need to regulate the platforms to prevent social and other harms.
Where this ends is anyone’s guess. Where will people get reliable information in a world where social media is awash with fake news, where the “algorithm” deliberately polarises them by feeding them information that reinforces their world view, while profiting from cultural and political division?
Bending the knee to Trump also makes business sense as Meta limbers up for battle with the EU, which is turning the screws on US big tech firms
Musk loves to ridicule what he calls the “legacy media”. Like Trump, he regularly pours scorn on platforms used by real journalists — you know, the ones who uncover corruption and shine a light on corporate and political abuses. He does this to promote X as the real/only bastion of truth.
Yet in a world flooded with misinformation and disinformation on social media platforms such as X, the real news media — and, to be clear, I’m not talking about the biased US television news networks — have arguably never been as important as they are today.
Sadly, the best content — the stuff people really should be reading for context and insight — is increasingly behind paywalls, and many people remain reluctant to pay for what was once free. That means they’re getting their “news” fed to them by an algorithm designed not so much to inform them, but to profit from their outrage.
* McLeod is editor of TechCentral
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