X Suppressing ‘Freedom of Reach’

Three years ago, a revolution swept through Big Tech demanding an end to censorship and a commitment to freedom of speech in the name of the ability to exchange information and ideas online. Elon Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it as X to be a bastion of the First Amendment. Meta announced it was overhauling its Covid-era censorship rules on Facebook and Instagram.  

Today, that revolution is dying out. Censorship is creeping back in. Yes, the politicized era of doctors being banned for spreading supposed “misinformation,” conservatives being deplatformed for sharing their opinions, or dubious “fact checks” being smacked over content may be over. Instead, a more subtle type of censorship – censorship of reach – is taking its place.

What does that mean? Simply put, Big Tech companies like X or Meta are putting their thumbs on the scale to control which kinds of posts actually reach users’ feeds. This isn’t being done in the name of partisanship and politics but in advertiser appeal and profit. They may not outright censor posts like they used to, but they still control who sees them to determine what kind of “experience” you have on their platforms. Even if you opt to follow someone, there’s no guarantee that the Big Tech algorithms will ever allow their content to reach your feed. Influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers can struggle to get their content in front of their audiences if it doesn’t conform to what the corporate algorithms want you to see. 

This new regime isn’t censorship of speech. It’s censorship of reach, and it’s the newest red line emerging in the fight for a truly free and open exchange of ideas and information online. 

Take, for example, the fact that X’s algorithm punishes posts that include links to external websites. That means that if an influencer posts a link to an article they wrote on Substack or a video they produced on YouTube, only a fraction of their hard-earned audiences are likely to see it. That may make sense for X from a business standpoint – they want users to stay on their platform – but it doesn’t serve the interest of exchanging ideas, content, and information. Nor does it give creators much room to earn revenue off of their content outside of X. 

More recently, X just announced last week that it will be pressing its thumb on the scale even further by “tweaking” its newsfeed algorithm to promote more “informational/entertaining” content and downplaying “negativity.” Of course, it will be up to X to decide the parameters for what content does or doesn’t make the cut. 

This puts creators in a trap. If their content is flagged and pushed out of X’s algorithm, they can’t earn money on X … and they can’t use X to send people to other platforms. It’s a rigged game that pressures influencers into self-censorship just to survive.

Alarmingly, there are signs it could get worse. Just this month, X outright blocked users from sharing an article from the Spectator World involving Elon Musk, sending a notification that the content was “potentially harmful.” Critics pointed out that the inability to post the article was uncomfortably similar to how Twitter censored the New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the closing weeks of the 2020 presidential election. 

Did the revolution secure freedom of speech online? Or did we free ourselves from the frying pan only to land in the fire?

As both an advocate for free speech and a content creator, I am alarmed by these emerging trends that hurt both creators as well as users who choose to follow them. That’s why I launched Pickax, a social media platform designed to protect freedom of speech and freedom of reach. Pickax doesn’t have any nefarious algorithms or content moderation rules based on viewpoints, nor does it punish creators for posting external content. If leaders in Big Tech are truly committed to free speech and the unbridled exchange of information and ideas, they can lead by taking their own social media platforms down a similar path. 

The revolution for free speech online is far from over. Conservatives were right the last few years to demand Big Tech stop censoring particular viewpoints and blocking articles. The goal has always been to create open and free online spaces for true civic discourse. But while we’ve moved on from the dark days of censorship of the past, a new type suppression has emerged. Throttling newsfeeds with corporate-driven algorithms doesn’t allow for a truly free social media space where users can freely access information and creators can be guaranteed their voices will be heard by those who want to hear them. 

As we’ve learned the past few years, the only way for social media users to change the system is to demand it or create it ourselves.