Social Media Double Feature

Moderation of social media posts had been designed to keep users safe, but, as of the 2020s, this really depends on what that content is. There is a glaring free speech issue when social media companies moderate civil, but somehow "bad" content. This content often gets blocked, banned, or otherwise censored on the major platforms because it allegedly goes against Community Guidelines. 

Actually, the creators of that content are simply trying to provide another side to help us understand current world events more completely. If every social media post stuck to one dominant perspective, then speech would not be truly free, and we would not really know true history. We would not find much information for anything besides what the Powers That Be portray the world as.

What the Community Guidelines in social media websites need to follow is the U.S. Constitution, which says freedom of speech is an unalienable First Amendment right. Blocking or banning peaceful, nonviolent content simply because of its worldview is a violation of First Amendment rights.

There are other platforms besides the major ones, and there seems to be an alternative website to every major one when censorship becomes all too common on established platforms, due to concerns about shadowbanning or "Facebook Jail," accounts being terminated for unfair reasons, information being lost to censorship, and privacy. For YouTube, its conservative-leaning counterpart is Rumble. For X (formerly Twitter), its equivalent is Truth Social. Both Rumble and Truth Social found their footing in the early 2020s. 

Rumble has restored channels and videos that YouTube had deleted. These videos contained alternative arguments about certain issues. Different perspectives are important for each citizen, including those with limited social media participation. Similarly, President Donald Trump created Truth Social to substitute for Twitter in 2022, as pre-Musk management locked down his account earlier in that year. 

Twitter tweet limit 

Former X (then Twitter) CEO Elon Musk limited how many tweets or posts users were able to read per day as of July 1, 2023. Verified accounts can view 10,000 tweets in one day. Unverified accounts can only read 1,000 tweets per day, and new unverified accounts can read just 500. Musk set the limits in response to AI companies using “data scraping and system manipulation” to train language models to support chatbots. The limit is still in effect as of May 2026. 

Is the X post limit important? It depends on one’s point of view. The X post view limit might help people stop mindlessly scrolling on social media and spend more time interacting with reality. This will leave a strong impact for the better, all around the world. After all, unhealthy social media usage can hurt people’s mental health. Some people were happy that the X post view limit existed, and thought it would help them reduce their screen time. Jack Dorsey, the original founder of Twitter, joked about that reaction by posting a picture of grass, a reaction image symbolic of the "touch grass" idiom. Elon Musk himself stated “Touch grass again” to a similar post from another user.

Some thought Elon’s decision was ridiculous, because purposeless scrolling generates ad revenue for social media companies. 

Recall that the fewer X posts one scrolls to read, the less ad revenue and possible data mining for the corporations. 

The view limit, according to Musk, would additionally protect users’ data from artificial intelligence companies stealing their data in their efforts to train bots. Language models and “data scraping” social media outlets, such as X, training the AI bots is an endless source of conversation, not to mention a free treasure trove of human language. AI companies stand to make a fortune off of chatbot communications, but should scraping be free? The companies have a moral quandary staring them in the face, as the users never gave permission for their data to be stolen. 

It is also possible that Musk was setting the limits to encourage people to pay for X Premium, the $8/month subscription service for verified accounts. 

In the grand scheme of things, the X post limit has a role akin to a safety measure to protect users from data mining. It provides more fitting environment for those who do not intensively use this social media format, but merely check it for a few minutes and move on. A few users supposedly needed to access weather information through National Weather Service posts when Musk first put limits on posts one could read per day; they may have possibly ended up using information found on a local weather app.