One of the big, usually misleading, complaints about content moderation is that it’s done out of personal animus or whims, rather than a focus on actually making it so people stop being jackasses on platforms. Indeed over and over again you hear stories about some content moderation decision that people assert way too much thought into why it happened, when the answer is often some overworked content moderator (possibly halfway around the world) with a giant stack of posts to review made a decision in five seconds and moved onto the next one.
This was some of the impetus behind Elon Musk purchasing Twitter — that false belief that Twitter moderation had been “infected by the woke mind virus” or some stupid nonsense like that. The reality was that Musk has never understood content moderation or how it works. And, yet, since taking over Twitter, which is now ExTwitter, he’s regularly done exactly what he claimed he was taking over the company to stop.
This isn’t quite the same thing, as it’s not ExTwitter we’re talking about, but earlier this week reports came out that Disney+ had magically disappeared from Tesla’s screen UI.
Electrek heard from a source that Tesla informed Disney+ last week that it would remove its native app from the Tesla Theatre in its vehicles without giving a reason as to why.
A few days later, Tesla told Disney that it would only remove the app for Tesla owners who never used the app before.
The automaker now appears to have acted on the threat, as many Tesla owners are reporting not seeing the Disney+ app in Tesla Theatre anymore. Others, presumably those who have used the app before, are still seeing the app available in their cars.
Even sites that are strongly pro-Tesla seem to think this pettiness is stupid, explaining to people how to get Disney+ back.
This whole thing seems to stem from Elon being ridiculously thin-skinned and immature. He remains mad that Disney stopped advertising on ExTwitter, and famously told Disney’s Bob Iger to go fuck himself, before insisting that Disney’s board should fire Iger (and I thought Elon was against cancel culture? tsk tsk)
Anyway, this is the kind of childish behavior that too many people think is behind content moderation decisions, but almost never is. Except when Elon’s in charge. Which is only slightly ironic, given that he keeps insisting that he’s trying to stop that kind of moderation as being “anti-free speech” or whatever excuse he’s come up with today.
