How Social Platforms Became Political Power Brokers (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: I think this story is about the power that the social media companies have and it's about the way that geopolitics and politics and social media and everything else have all kind of fused together and distrust in politicians and distrust in the companies and have created this environment where you know a combination of events which could have kind of happened slightly at random but also kind of appeared to be connected which is how often conspiracy content does spread but sometimes often these are legitimate things people are raising. How that can kind of create this environment where people don't know what to trust and people are looking for clues constantly themselves and the relationship these companies have with the administration in the US kind of affects not just US users but actually everyone all over the world. The attitude that for example Donald Trump has towards the way that content is moderated appears to have impacted and influenced some of the decision making that's been made at X or at Meta which owns Facebook and Instagram even though they would say they're making these decisions independently. It's actually in my view about how social media platforms have become to some extent political weapons but that's not to say that that's in a conspiracy theory way e.g. people are deliberately you know controlling and misusing what they say it's just that they are hugely influential and they are very not transparent about why they promote certain things and why they block certain things and why they don't and sometimes the explanations are innocent and sometimes they're not.