Censorship on the platforms changed from moderation to a kind of gaslighting (as per the twitter files), cloud services consolidated their control over email as a medium, the web is almost fully intermediated by google, akamai, and cloudflare.
There is no "internet," it's just some propaganda outlets attached to the surveillance devices you have to keep in your home to participate in the economy. It is no longer a popular elsewhere, 2018 marked the inflection point or epoch of the internet becoming just another homogenized organ of the leviathan, not to connect people, but to atomize them, imo. It is a walled garden that is completely surveiled.
I'd speculate that the majority of people who use the internet now are young enough to have almost never lived without it, and it forms the substrate of their ontology, instead of being just a thing that is separate from real life.
They have no sense of it being an objective fantasy realm.
I honestly can’t tell whether you think Twitter now, under Elon, is now less or more moderated than before, whether you are on the left or right of current political thought (or somewhere else entirely), or whether you consider unmoderated communication to be a good or bad thing (but I’m pretty sure it’s one of those).
I honestly can’t tell you why almost any of that is pertinent to the conversation at hand.
Why does it matter whether he has shackled himself to one side of a political binary, or cares for the happenings of a singular website and its owner?
As for moderation, I believe they were lamenting the corporatization of the Internet and how it has become a hotbed for controlling the populace, rather than connecting the populace. Which would presumably fall under a preference for unmoderated communication.
The US left took those Trump-Russia files as gospel, even though it turned out that the whole thing was most probably a set-up.
As such, the same US left now saying that one shouldn't take those Twitter files seriously is quite disingenuous, if anything, the Twitter files seem more real than any of that Trump-Russia fiasco.
The Trump Russia files were exposed as a 'work in progress' investigation from a former spy that wasn't supposed to be leaked yet. Stuff he was still researching. If you think the "US left" took them as "gospel", you may be consuming too much propaganda. Nobody thinks the Twitter files were fake, they just didn't reveal anything as damning as claimed. Is it surprising that the president's team asked them to remove (illegal) stolen pictures of his son's dick? Seems expected and reasonable.
There should be some kind of Litmus test to see how a platform is moderated. You could use it to find where in the political spectrum the moderation team is to see if the platform suits you.
I propose, for example, "equating abortion to murder", "misgendering someone", "calling someone the f-word", "saying that f-words are molesters", etc.
Most of the big platforms (such as Twitter or Meta) are just in the middle. Twitter before Musk moved one point to the left, making misgenderisation a bannable offence, but I think Musk undid that. As a data point I have had comments flagged for doing the first one here, so you can tell where this community stands.
I have absolutely no faith in changes made by Musk, but I have to say I still remember the days when the platforms, instead of silencing everybody by default, trusted you to make a judicious use of the block button, like a grown-up would.
It all started back in late 2016 (guess why), I'd say that by 2018-2019 the momentum was already strong enough for the general population to also get hold of it.
It all culminated in the summer or 2020 (for the Anglo- and Anglo-influenced world, at least), but, hopefully, I'd say that right now we're in the middle of a vibe shift. Evidence number one is the launch of Threads itself, which feels like the launch of a dead carcass out in the sea.
All this to say that the OP is correct, social media is dead.
