Twitter et. al. have been a political force for most of their existence. The only thing that has changed is that while in their early years, their political effects were concentrated in the developing world in faraway lands, in recent years they have started affecting western politics as well. Many people who praised the earlier effects are condemning the latter. But the fundamental forces and processes are the same; it is the target that has changed. And Twitter has known it was political at least since 2009, when revolutions were named after it and multiple countries blocked it from their internet for the fear of the havoc it may cause.
Also, realistically no one's gonna care too much if you ban one of those millions of people without a voice, but good luck trying to censor the president.
I don't think Twitter revolutions were free of propaganda. I am sure all the superpowers and regional powers were fanning the flames of discontent and trying to steer the results in their favourite direction. The excuse many countries gave for blocking Twitter was that it was a foreign propaganda tool. I am not saying the entire thing was foreign agents and propaganda. I am saying that there was some of that then as it is now. We have just learned to see it, because now the propaganda is directed at us and we have a clearer view.
Entire networks of bots spreading misinformation get removed every once in a while, but you won't see the same happening with world leaders purposefully spreading lies.
Also, almost all of the people who have large followings in Twitter have large followings in real life. That is, they are people in power trying the use the platform to disseminate their propaganda.
In the case of the Twitter revolutions, they are revolutions in far away countries that align with American geopolitical interests, so an American would be inclined to agree with it (due to media, society, their own material interests) and consequently rationalize it.
Social Media literally turns every important, nuanced discussion into propaganda. Until we all realize that and decide to collectively reject it at an ideological level, it’s gonna be a rough road.
This is somewhat disingeneous. Twitters efforts in the developing world were only to make sure everyone had access, and nobodys voice was squashed. It didnt bow down to dictatorial takedown requests, and allowed dissenters voices to be heard, thus enabling the revolutions that followed.
The game they are playing now is arbitrating content, and putting labels on things to guide the narrative. Regardless if they are right or not, as they are in the case with Trump its a very, very different game.
1) That they are arbitrating content, like what you mentioned with Trump
2) That they are not arbitrating content enough, giving platform to climate change denialism, conspiracy theories, far right radicalization, and genocide [0].
So sure, they can return to their original stance and censor nobody. I don't think people would be too happy with them when the world gets more genocide-y and violent protests break out fuelled by conspiracy theories regarding the health of the elections.
So to recap: moderating and not moderating content on their platforms are both subject to serious criticisms. Right now, social media companies are trying to strike a balance, but the result is that they are angering both sides. If they choose a side (all content is allowed / we will moderate the content as closely as HN is moderated), they other side will be angrier at them. They were happy not doing moderation when the negative impacts were only affecting non-western countries, but now that it is also affecting western countries, they are more clearly seeing the negative sides and they have moved more to the middle.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
Maybe before Tahrir Square that was true, but they've been at this fulcrum for ~9 years now. They know what they're doing and what their part is in the play staging today.
The kinds of problems social media has exposed are problems that society isn't able to deal with and the people who were just looking for a quick buck, without needing to do much work, are caught in the middle of it. Corporate structures were never intended to regulate the speech of billions of people in thousands of legal jurisdictions, but that's exactly the situation Facebook is now in.
I don't know if there is a good solution to the problems of social media short of simply outlawing it.