Beckman, Ludvig | 2025
Constellations
Initial hopes of the democratizing potential of the internet are increasingly replaced by fear that a fragmented and unedited public sphere unleashes the destructive forces of populism, hate speech, and demagoguery (Tucker et al. 2017). In social media, these forces are amplified by algorithms used to feed designed to create “audience engagement.” Thus, toxic communication in social media is no accident as postings that provoke and elicit emotional responses are consistent with the business model (Saurwein and Spencer-Smith 2021; Maréchal 2021). At the same time, operators of social media supervise and regulate postings on their platforms.Content violating “community standards” risk being demoted, flagged, or deleted,while users that do not comply with these standards are potentially excluded or “deplatformed” in the new vocabulary.[...]
