This past weekend brought another round of massive "No Kings" protests across the country and in some places abroad. The latest was part of a "get out the (early) vote" campaign ahead of the upcoming midterm elections. In the middle of it, the No Kings Instagram account was suspended for about an hour, with admin access locked for a few more hours.
Many supporters immediately suspected foul play, pointing to Mark Zuckerberg's public support for Trump over the past couple of years. The implication was that Zuckerberg was manipulating the platform to help the president. The author argues this is unlikely to be true, but says it doesn't matter whether the takedown was deliberate. The real problem is that such a takedown was possible at all, and the response should be the same either way.
Will Robinson and Tim Chambers offer practical advice for digital organizers: keep communication channels that a third party can't easily switch off, set up accounts on open platforms, and have a playbook for getting the word out if an account is shut down.
The broader point concerns decentralization and user control. Centralized systems create a natural pull toward control over speech. Danny O'Brien has argued that decentralization is part of the means to guarantee "cognitive liberty," since handing speech to a third party without the ability to exit gives up a fundamental liberty.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing