Platform moderation is driven by surplus volume and velocity, not public welfare.

Evidence

There is nothing neutral about the surveillance intermediary now, as the extraction imperative and its demand for economies of scale in surplus supply mean that the surveillance capitalists must use every means to attract a never-ending tide of content to their shores. They no longer merely host content but aggressively, secretly, and unilaterally extract value from that content. As we shall see in Chapter 18, economic imperatives require them to forgo as few of these raw materials as possible. That means moderating only those extremes that threaten the volume and velocity of surplus by repelling users or attracting regulatory scrutiny. This is the reason that firms such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter have been reluctant to remove even the most egregious content from their landscapes, and it helps to explain why “lawyers for tech companies litigate ferociously to prevent even a sliver of erosion” in Section 230. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 360

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Extends the platform-incentive logic (moderation reluctance as a function of extraction imperatives) relevant to the trees-infrastructure piece’s argument about unexamined technological infrastructure costs.