Does censoring the radical right on social media work?

The 2020 US elections showed a shift in how platforms dealt with political content. Twitter did not allow for political advertisements at all, and Facebook restricted advertisement a few days before the election. During the election and vote count, Facebook and Instagram added real-time information from news sources directly to the posts sent out by both presidential candidates. Twitter used various notifications to inform users that content of tweets was disputed and made it harder to share such tweets.

Platform interference is not a new phenomenon. Behind the screens, thousands of content moderators are cleaning social media platforms of its most gruesome content. Child pornography or videos of beheadings are clear cases that need to be removed. Most cases of removal are not so obvious. When it comes to the moderation practices of removing hateful tweets or radical right pages, it is often more opaque why certain content is removed.

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