The White House announced this week it was launching a sort of hotline for people to report their experiences of censorship on social media. Americans are invited to share their stories through an online questionnaire if they “suspect political bias” in enforcement actions taken against them by companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter.
Setting aside the enormous implications this has for the privacy of individual users (what better way for a government to identify all the people plotting its downfall than to get them to fill in a form revealing political leanings?), this intervention by Donald Trump demonstrates just how significant the actions of social media platforms are now considered in controlling the speech of users.
