Tools of the state. Last week, Facebook and Instagram (parent company Meta) partially lifted a ban on death threats in Ukraine, making room for citizens of the besieged nation to call for the death of their invaders, as well as the death of Russian President Vladimir Putin — provided the threats aren’t credible. This followed a similar decision by Twitter, drafted after U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham shared his earnest hope that someone in the Kremlin would assassinate Russia’s leader. Most recent in a string of surprising tech decisions, it was inadvertently a flex of power by U.S. social media’s global hegemony that ironically indicated the hegemony’s fate, which relies on some illusion of neutrality, in the ash heap of history. Ten years from now, provided America doesn’t descend into real, political authoritarianism, social media as we know it — a few enormous companies, moderating “truth” as defined by the beliefs of Washington Post columnists only, used by everyone — will no longer exist. It has in some important dimensions already stopped existing.

On announcing the decision, Meta’s carefully-crafted language made clear the purpose of lifting the ban on death threats was only to allow sharing at a time of heightened emotion, and not to facilitate real-world harm. Rules navigating “hate speech,” by nature ambiguous, are an especially bizarre imposition when the neighborhood kids were just gunned down attempting to escape the country. But the call nonetheless evoked a sense that Mark Zuckerberg personally greenlit the world’s very first Russian hunting season. What followed was a cornucopia of useless tech press takes, from smug eye rolls, and the implication Facebook just worked murder into its terms of service, to convoluted think pieces arguing Meta’s decision signaled Silicon Valley’s acquiescence to status as weapon of the state, which was actually a good thing (???). But in terms of this particular decision, the boring truth is just we’ve never had a digital hive mind at global scale before, and there’s no rule book for moderating conversation this loud while cities are being bombed. Facebook is navigating, best it can, a difficult situation with no right (which is to say “not horrifying”) answer. This is war, after all. If it feels good, consider for a moment you might be evil.

The New York Times’ Mike Isaac hinted at the complexity of the situation when he took apart a reductive Reuters headline that triggered the earliest bad takes: