Platform rejection is starting to look a lot like choosing a side

The playbook for digital boycotts and disharmonious crowds show that online spaces are maturing in ways the so-called legacy media can recognise.

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 18:05, 23 January 2025

Last updated: 18:26, 23 January 2025

By way of an exquisite piece of 1980s comedy writing, it's quite possible to illustrate the road we appear to be heading down in our apparent New Platform Reality.

In 1987, the BBC's legendary British political satire Yes, Prime Minister featured a scene where the country's fictional leader Jim Hacker is woefully perusing the morning's newspapers whilst lamenting their withering coverage of his administration. 

When his most senior aid Sir Humphrey suggests that the print media simply "pander to their readers' prejudices", Hacker surmises his view: "The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country, the Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country, the Times is read by the people who actually do run the country, the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country, the Financial Times is read by people who own the country, the Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country and the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is." 

And so it is that this week we see a resurgence of public conversation by "the community", aka those online masses who take the time to think about such things, around claims and counter claims of censorship, enforced or suggested follows, unacceptable brand alignments and so on, spurred on by perceived or actual events and opinions.

For example, plenty of users reported that Facebook and Instagram appeared to be ham-handedly curating their feeds around politics and follow lists. Meanwhile another surge in abandonment of X appears to be incoming after US Inauguration Day, including Reddit forums floating the idea of banning all links from X and Meta.

This is not official Reddit policy of course, yet such action seems to be in the air and we'd be fools not to expect more of the same from any and all actors in the online space.

Old habits in new channels

There's nothing new in any of this though. As the comedy excerpt above implies, factional, slanted or partial media, or whatever description you prefer, has been the case since the advent of the popular press, and the platforms are just a different way of packaging or transmitting the same. Shared platform usage does not instantly breed shared beliefs among the crowd, any more than having the same electricity supplier or postal service.

Recall if you will, that it was Reddit who shut down the Donald Trump forum r/The_Donald all the way back in 2020. Shout about "free speech" all you will, they were perfectly entitled to do what they wished in this case, and doubtless the active posters from The_Donald found somewhere else to post.

We've heard a lot about echo chambers in the past few years, and I offer the possibility that rather than the discordant closed feedback loop which is assumed to result from such a scenario, nowadays users increasingly feel more like they are in a choir, or chorus, where singing from the same hymn sheet is regarded as a strength. 

While it was Reddit which banned r/The-Donald, it was only after it became apparent that it was singing out of tune with much of the rest of the Reddit choir.

We are seeing some indications of the rise of once-impartial platforms becoming a bit partial and choosing to identify with one political standpoint or another, however loosely that is.

Also at play in our comedy excerpt above is a reflection on "the tail wagging the dog" mindset that seems even more apposite now when discussing platforms and their power.

It's important to note one difference, and perhaps why the audiences concerned are starting to make their opinions clearer: while the politically divided UK press of the 1980s operated on a national scale, the platforms operate on a near-global one. The British Prime Minister could quickly get an editor on the line to explain the perceived consequences of coverage, while maybe only the US President could do that with Zuckerberg.  

It's a fair question: if you were an editor, and you had your nation's political leader on one line, and Mark Zuckerberg on the other, who would you make wait? The biggest platforms are now international instruments, and as others have asked, why else would President Trump have stayed TikTok's execution if it wasn't to gain more power over it by doing so? If he is now "owed", plenty will tell you it's a pretty decent bargaining chip in international discussions.

Know thy friend

Note that Sir Humphrey says that the press "pander to their readers' prejudices", placing the ideological excess squarely on the audience and at least suggesting there is a marketplace reality at work. 

It's the same with platforms, yet in this case the audiences are still massively intermingled and only just starting to come to terms with the reality that - just like when people would not be seen dead buying "the wrong paper" - they might be on the wrong platform. Wrong for them, that is.

How much longer the concerned masses stay on the platforms they dislike is to be seen, given that an increasing number believe that platforms might be a cause rather than a carrier. 

Ultimately, I think it can be good news for those of us who value the content produced by the formal process of publishing and media, with all its limitations and well-known alliances.

Whether you agree with them or not, their audiences do implicitly know the predispositions of the brands they are consuming, and that those predispositions exist.

I'd argue that that is less insidious than an audience that does not know they are being preached to, by entities which are assumed not to be preaching.