Pokes, likes and dislikes: Political satirist and influencer Akash Banerjee on Big Tech and censorship
Banerjee ranks YouTube the highest and X the lowest on weeding out hurtful content, but adds that news happens a lot on the microblogging site.
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Akash Banerjee, social and political satirist and founder of the YouTube channel TheDeshBhakt, spoke to Storyboard18 about how Big Tech censors news. “It's platform-dependent, " says Banerjee. In his experience, YouTube does the best job, followed by Instagram. Facebook and X are the pits when it comes to weeding out posts that violate societal norms, but for news, X tops.
“One can't say this with empirical evidence. However, one is aware of certain reports that came out about Facebook, for example, and how their head of policy had to leave under very suspicious circumstances. They refused to take down a very vitriolic MP's account after even their internal teams flagged it because they wanted to maintain friendly relations with the (Indian) government,” he pointed out.
Speaking on the sidelines of the Storyboard18 DNPA Conclave, Banerjee said, “There are many creators who would tell you that on Facebook, if you have something which is antithetical, which is a little bit anti -establishment, those posts seem to not do well, they seem to be suppressed. So that is definitely a problem with Facebook,” he said, adding that the social media giant also makes it very clear that if you have any sort of political content, they are free to not monetise. Given that Facebook itself determines what is political and what isn’t and can take a call on monetising it or not, “what is the incentive for me to be on that platform?”
According to Banerjee, YouTube scores a lot higher. The video site offers an environment where all sorts of opinions are respected, as long as you are not inciting violence or indulging in hate speech, for example.
“I think any platform has a basic responsibility, if it is not vitriolic content, but death threats, violent threats, or inciting people for violence, they should control that,” said Banerjee.
According to him, X is the worst of the lot.
“I think they want more violence, they want more aggression, they want more abuse. On Twitter (as it was known earlier), what we see is that the most abusive or anonymous content bubbles up right to the top, because they seem to want that,” he said.
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Ironically, despite being part of Facebook parent Meta, Instagram does very well on this count. “You can't do any sort of violent or even semi-violent content, even somebody marching or somebody screaming, shouting, they will say it is sensitive content. Which is, I would say, better compared to allowing any sort of hate content to float online. You can pin up to three comments, you can report, and I have seen that accounts that have been reported actually get taken care of much more on Instagram,” Banerjee pointed out.
On the flip side, since X is unregulated and uncensored, it also allows for a lot of information, for instance, on the Israel-Palestine conflict. “If I put images of the bombings on any other platform, my account will get deleted. But because they have allowed this sort of content, we are witnessing the war, thanks to Twitter. Not because of Facebook or Instagram or YouTube, because of Twitter,” Banerjee noted.
Addressing the relationship between social media and anonymous sites, Banerjee said that he is yet to leverage social media platform Reddit, which gives users the option to remain anonymous. He pointed out that Reddit is not controlled by someone and so it’s all about peer-to-peer trust that is reflected in the most upvoted comments.
