Back in the day of forums personal banning wasn't a thing, we had to see everything until someone did something bad enough to be deplatformed from the forum. In the current social media, you can just block people you don't like, you don't have to endure their "content".
The censorship is built-in in modern platforms. I prefer the old ways personally but in the old days the profile of the people was different.
in the old days there were actual people, today most “social” media is not people
Do you have any evidence to support that?
People frequently claim the majority of social media is "bots", but I highly doubt that.
People are not having concerned citizen ideas 24 hours a day everyday, those are obviously professionals who are having concerns about the society, race, jews etc in order to fulfill some goals. Those are not real people, you won't be able to change their minds with argumentation because they don't speak their mind in first place. That's for Twitter of course, in other places they have other productions like "tradwifes" on Instagram or reviewers on Youtube. They are all businesses or indies trying to become businesses. They all use analytics and do A/B testing to acquire and steer their content ideas to the platforms liking. Platforms decide what will be shown to the users, they of course need to run their own business and they also pursue their own KPIs but as cost of doing business they allow other businesses to insert their KPI into the algorithm in exchange of money or favors. For example when there's a new movie release upcoming they can pay the platform to boost engagement on content about their movie, platforms also incentivize the creation of such content by paying certain influencers if they create a content that feeds into the campaign(i.e. if they do a dance from a movie that is being promoted they get paid if their dance video meets the quota). They can do all this for consumer products but they can do it for political stuff too.
Almost no genuine content, its all one big reality show all orchestrated by the big tech. I mean sure, there is genuine content but they are all fillers or trying to win against the flow.
I don’t think this is really an issue of censorship to a lot of people (though that may be how it shakes out in the government) but rather of control over their digital environment and sanity.
EDIT: I don’t think this is what I’m remembering, but it has concrete numbers somewhat lower than I thought (48% of teens think social media harms people their age, but only 14% think it harms them personally) https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/22/teens-social...
They'll be weighing constituents by their ability and willingness to give campaign donations and other favors.
That would be a matter of linguistics, and I can't say which of both definitions is true.