In the throws of the 2024 presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, social media giant – last year it was revealed that officials from the Biden administration pressured Meta to redirect traffic away from right-leaning outlets, and specifically singled out The Daily Wire as a site they wanted to censor.
The policy has been criticized as overly broad – the filter is applied to all accounts by default and has to manually be disabled. Meta has also been criticized for limiting voter access to information about candidates and causes during an election year.
X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, has taken a strong anti-censorship stance since it was purchased by Elon Musk in 2022, and it is the fifth most popular platform for consuming news among the social media giants, after Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and controversial Chinese-owned TikTok, which is set to be banned in the United States early next year if parent company ByteDance doesn’t sell it.
