Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, testifies during the US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing “Big Tech … [+]
What happens when someone famous tries to hide something? In 2003, singer Barbra Streisand attempted to sue a photographer for uploading an aerial photograph of her Malibu home to a website. The lawsuit was thrown out, but the publicity generated by the case caused the photo to be downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. The Streisand Effect has since become shorthand for situations where an attempt to draw attention away from something ends up attracting massively more attention to it.
Social media giant Meta appears to have just experienced its own Streisand Effect moment. The company that owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Whatsapp last week blocked all links on its platforms to the Kansas Reflector, a non-profit news outlet that had published a piece criticizing the firm’s alleged suppression of content about climate change. When journalist Marisa Kabas wrote about the event, all Meta links to her site, The Handbasket, were blocked too. Kabas was even momentarily blocked from posting anything at all on Threads, Meta’s microblogging site.
Then, CNN got hold of the story. Meta was forced to deploy its public relations people, who claimed that the sites had been blocked due to a “security error.” The links to the Reflector and The Handbasket were restored. Instagram head Adam Mosseri even posted about the event on Threads’ rival platform Bluesky, saying that the domains had been “mistakenly classified as a phishing site.” Nevertheless, the damage had been done. CNN followed up its reporting with an article titled, “Big Tech’s grip on social media is a growing problem.”
When I contacted Meta about the incident, a spokesperson referred me to previous comments from Andy Stone, the company’s head of communications, about the security error. But Kabas, for one, is not convinced by Meta’s response. “They’re saying a lot of words, but the words don’t really mean anything,” she tells me. “It really just felt like a big brush off. Our trust has been undermined at a time when people need little more reason to distrust the news.”
A notification from the Facebook account of journalist Marisa Kabas, showing that links to her … [+]
Was Meta’s action a technical glitch, or was it part of an effort by the corporation to suppress criticism of it? The question is now largely irrelevant. The event reinforced the belief among many journalists and researchers that the corporation is in the business of suppressing content it doesn’t like. It wouldn’t be the first time such accusations have been levelled at the firm: a 2023 report from Human Rights Watch, for instance, found that Meta’s policies had silenced voices in support of Palestinian causes.
The latest furore, however, concerns allegations that Meta suppresses posts about climate change. Prominent U.S. climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe has told Scientific American that her own content on Facebook has faced systematic suppression as part of the firm’s official policy of limiting “political” content—a policy that itself has no shortage of critics. Meta, for its part, denies that it limits climate content, with a spokesperson telling me the firm “does not seek to ‘squelch’ posts related to climate change.”
It’s a mess that speaks to the multiple harms that one firm’s monopolization of so much media can have on journalism, and consequently on democratic processes. As film producer Dave Kendall wrote in the article that caused Meta to block Kansas Reflector: “The implications of such policies for our democracy are alarming. Why should corporate entities be able to dictate what type of speech or content is acceptable?”
Meta’s decision to limit political content goes back to the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, when it was revealed that personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users had been collected by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, and used for political advertising. So damaging was that scandal that the firm changed the name of its holding company from Facebook to Meta.
James Dennis, a senior lecturer in political communication and journalism at the University of Portsmouth, says Meta’s limiting of political content is particularly harmful because many people—especially young people—rely on platforms like Instagram for their news and political information. “I’m deeply concerned that younger audiences, and audiences experiencing inequality, are going to lose access to important political stories,” Dennis tells me. “They don’t consume a lot of news from what we would describe as legacy news media. Using lived experience as a way to explore political stories is something that’s really valuable on Instagram.”
Meta is also winding down CrowdTangle, a tool aimed at helping people—such as journalists—to track misinformation across social media. “This is a massively important decision in 2024, when we have at least 64 elections worldwide,” Dennis says. “Losing a tool that helps us track misinformation and disinformation I think is really bad for democracy.”
But perhaps even more significantly, social media has become a crucial tool for facilitating political connections with others. “Whether it’s Black Lives Matter, or MeToo, or Extinction Rebellion,” says Dennis, “social media is integral to allowing people to connect and organize when it comes to a whole host of different online and offline forms of activism.” Dennis’s 2018 book, Beyond Slacktivism: Political Participation on Social Media, focuses on this phenomenon. It attempts to show that, far from being a mundane waste of time, social media use could be beneficial to democracy, enabling regular people to more easily consume news and participate in politics. In this context, the deliberate limiting of political content by the world’s preeminent social media player appears all the more harmful.
What is certainly true is that, in the 21st century, campaigns of all types live or die by social media. An effective campaign likely won’t be successful in the real world if it doesn’t take off in the digital one. And that has implications for democracy.
If journalists, activists and democratic institutions stand to lose from Meta’s policy to limit political content, who stands to gain?
“I think ultimately it benefits the fossil fuel industry, for one,” says climate justice campaigner Wawa Gatheru, founder of the non-profit Black Girl Environmentalist. “For example, if more people don’t know about the fact that the build-out of LNG exports [in the US] is currently the single largest [fossil fuel] expansion in the world, that benefits the industry and the corporations that are attempting to build them.”
Social media is Gatheru’s domain, and where she advocates for Black women, girls and non-binary people to join the climate movement. “One of the reasons why I started making content online was because every time I was seeing climate content, a lot of it was misinformation,” she tells me.
But beyond its communication function, Gatheru sees social media as a force that can help bind communities together in the real world. She says this was shown most vividly earlier this year on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, where a campaign action, led mainly by Black women leaders, attempted to block the development of new liquified natural gas (LNG) facilities in that state. The action was successful, and caused the Biden Administration to pause all LNG permit applications.
Climate justice activist Wawa Gatheru speaks on the opening night of Climate Week NYC, 2023.
“That push obviously had a lot to do with on-the-ground organizing,” Gatheru says, “but also the ways in which that campaign was able to spread within the climate movement and beyond using Instagram Reels, using Meta’s tools to communicate.”
Now, there are concerns that Meta’s apparent suppression of climate content could stymie future efforts to organize effectively.
“It’s very frustrating to think about how there is no future for that [the pause in LNG exports] if the Biden Administration does not win the election in November,” Gatheru says. “It is very scary to think that audiences who might be swayed may not be able to access [relevant content] because of the ways Meta is suppressing information around climate that could be seen as contentious and political. I think that could definitely hamper the future of climate campaigning.”
The ultimate and perhaps most ambitious promise of social media was that it would strengthen democratic processes—not weaken them. So, to campaigners like Gatheru, Meta’s policy of limiting political stories and voices puts it on the side not of David, but of Goliath. And that’s a choice.
If Meta’s current path is so harmful, what route could it take if it wanted to be part of the solution?
“Not getting rid of political content or suppressing it on their platforms would be a good start,” says Dennis. Acknowledging that disinformation is a major challenge for social media platforms, the researcher suggests a renewed focus on developing tools for fact-checking, perhaps in collaboration with existing fact-checking organizations, such as the U.K.’s Full Fact. “I would like to see social media companies reaching out to those charities to integrate fact checking into their platforms,” he says.
With regard to climate change content, one option could be to classify climate change not as political, but as science-based. Dennis notes a 2017 controversy in which Facebook banned breastfeeding images under its nudity policy. “Campaign groups mobilised against that and said Meta’s labelling policy was not fit for purpose,” he recalls. “As posts about climate change are legitimately scientific in their nature, I think campaign groups will have a solid case to make when it comes to that.”
Gatheru, however, isn’t so sure about relabelling climate content. “If you come from a sociological perspective, everything is political, right?” she says. “And whatever Meta is parsing out as political or not has a bias, and choosing to limit political content is inherently political in and of itself.”
On the other hand, there are serious doubts over whether the corporation and its platforms are able to discern the difference between valuable climate information, and misinformation. “Do I believe that Meta would be able to parse climate content that is misinformation?” she asks. “Do I trust Meta as an institution to do that now? No.”
But Gatheru remains optimistic about the power of regular people to bring change to such corporate titans, and says she’s noted widespread dissatisfaction on Meta’s microblogging site, Threads, with the direction of the platform. “The most common narrative I see is people being frustrated at the ways in which their information is being suppressed,” she says. “So I think what Meta is doing right now also does not work in their own best interest. There is a rightful argument that the users, the people who use Meta, should push back. Let them know that this is unacceptable.”
Kabas agrees. “I think Facebook and Meta and all their properties have a political agenda of their own, because it’s impossible for them not to,” she tells me. “Even if they say they have no political agenda, that in itself is an agenda. For them to now claim ‘we’re just not going to be involved with politics and we’re limiting what people can say about it’, that does ultimately end up being suppression.”
Kabas has since summarized the Meta affair with a fiery call to action on her own newsletter. Titled “We can slay giants,” the piece defiantly states: “Tech companies and thin-skinned billionaires won’t get the final word.”
And yet, the Kansas Reflector debacle had already had its own chilling effect: in the aftermath, the editorial board of a much larger, much older newspaper, The Kansas City Star, published an editorial about the affair, stating that “it’s hard to trust social media.”
Notably, the article ends with a caveat: “We won’t be sharing this editorial on our own Facebook page,” it reads. “Just to be safe.”