I highly doubt that. How did social media increase self censorship in the media?
In 1920, a newspaper publication or a public speech needed to be really outrageously beyond the frames of the Overton window to end up in mass protests, boycotts, etc. It took a serious effort to coordinate the outrage, so it only happened when people felt really deeply about it.
In 2020, with social media, the cost of spreading the outrage is nearly zero: a retweet or a repost, maybe with some a few words of an inflammatory comment added on the top. But with social graphs being what they are (highly connected via a number of popular "influencer" accounts), any bit of outrage has a good chance to spread quickly and widely.
The outrage can defend itself by directing the outrage at detractors and doubters, so attempts to actively stop it can make one a victim of it; the cost of spreading outrage, and the cost of ignoring outrage, is much lower that the cost of trying to calm it down, and / or to call to reason over emotions.
It does not help that any moderately public figure, especially a journalist, has to have social media presence, because it's such a powerful tool to spread their own publicity, influence, and agenda.
Freer information flows usually change societies. Invention of writing changed ancient societies profoundly. Invention of the printing press and movable type in Europe changed Europe drastically. The internet and social media are changing our societies seriously, as we speak. There's no way back to the pre-Internet state of society.
Uhm, are you familiar with the material Henry Ford was publishing in 1920? Specifically to increase sales?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_International_Jew
Perhaps this wasn't "beyond the frames of the Overton window" at the time, I don't know. But cancel culture ain't all bad!
The only real solution for this is education, teaching people to think, to listen, to evaluate the quality of their sources of information, to draw their own conclusions, and so on. It's not perfect but the alternatives are closer to simple AI trained on a very limited and one sided dataset.
> This is a very astute observation. It’s also only really possible with centralized social media, not decentralized/federated.
I'm not so sure. Can you explain why you think that? The GP describe a social problem, while the difference between "centralized" and "federated" is a technical implementation difference. If you can "retweet" a post from a federated instance, then I don't see any barriers to this kind of emergent social behavior.
Federation is a solution to a set of very specific problems, it's not a panacea.
The chilling effect is that the "traditional" media see something on social media, say a "racist" post (something they deem to be racist anyway) of some normal person, then amplifies triggering wide scale harassment, and "canceling" of the person.
These laws could help though if it's just your boss who wants to fire you, but most of your colleagues would like to support you, even if silently.
Chances are the boss is just doing what's political correct too due the pressure put by various groups not what he/she badly wants.
Most (all?) of continental Europe actually has such laws, which is why you don't hear about american style firings here. So, your logic has been tested in practice and found out to be wrong.
This can give the victim some valuable paid time though.
I thought this was a foregone conclusion.