Interesting they use the example of covid - to me that's a far less offensive application of censorship than what my research on social media platforms during the last year seems to be indicating - it became very apparent that Meta has/was taking various censorship methods against pro-palestine content - whereas tiktok largely was not (at least from what I could tell, I don't research tiktok as much as I do meta platforms). I suspect (conspiracy theory a bit but not entirely farfetched) that the sudden, completely bi-partisan effort to force tiktok to divest was influenced in no small part by the government's lack of ability to censor that platform compared to ones like meta's.

Was the palestinian stuff directed by the government? I don't know, but it sure seemed to me like the israel/palestine war posts that were allowed through sounded awfully similar to what the white house/IDF was saying about it. When stuff like this comes out, regardless of whether my theory is true or not, it adds fuel to that fire in a way I don't feel is very good for democracy or social media in general, particularly when zuck/meta will gaslight their users and claim state censorship isn't happening when it very, very obviously is. What was stopping them from coming out and saying "hey we're censoring this type of content?" Their entire approach to moderation is like this, it's a completely automated black box that leaves a user with very little clue as to how they're even supposed to interact with the platform without being punished in strange and obtuse ways.