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[Loud Whispers]

Being continuously fucked by powerful non-state actors is normal, that doesn't make it normal. The solutions are pretty simple
1. Break up the big internet monopolies so there can be actual competition.
2. Internet impartiality enforced by the state the same way impartiality is enforced for traditional media.
2.1 because this is America, probably start with impartiality in traditional media. Whilst rooting out partisan news is a bit utopian, you can at least settle for "no deliberate lying" and "no obvious bias." Whilst foreign media isn't without its own biases; Fox news doesn't survive in Eurocountries
3. Have ISPs enforce their TOS uniformly with objective violation criteria, i.e. all death threats are haram instead of just some.

Regarding speech always being censored on political grounds, yeah but that's a different discussion altogether. Pls pls pls read the articles, it's not a question of whether to censor; it's a question of who is allowed to censor. A private entity should not be allowed to abrogate the functions of state, the state should be the one defining what gets sinbinned to avoid abuse of power by completely unaccountable madlads

[MonkeyHead]

Social media is still media. As such, we should not be surprised that said media companies control the political message of content. Literally every newspaper\TV\radio outlet does so, rightly or wrongly. Even those who strive for balance (say, BBC) end up amplifying fringe stances by looking for two sides in stories with broad consenus.

That said, not sure I like the ideas of state owned or totally unrestricted social media. There really are few shades of grey here, all of which represent a number of undesirable outcomes. Society by way of media oligarchs? Niet. The state monopolising messaging? Nein danke.

Now, isn't it interesting that in general the social media message is a broadly left wing one (save for minority exceptions like Parler or the Chans) which is attacked for censoring the right, while the print and broadcast media leans majority right, and has been accused of deplatforming the left? Almost as if there is a generational divide being coloured in by market forces.

[MorleyDev]

Not only is it normal, I think it's a requirement for society to function. A state's job is to keep up with evolving societal norms, not enforce them to remain, and when you start mandating the allowance of certain speech and not others you can easily lock those norms into stasis as a result.

I'm fine with 1, 3 and 4 (but Twitter doesn't count for 1 really, they're a single service, whilst Amazon Store can be a customer of AWS rather than sharing ownership).

[MrRoboto75]

"I AM BEING SILENCED" the right shouts on national television

[McTraveller]

It's definitely an interesting conundrum. I think the arguments that "nobody holds CEOs accountable" argument is specious though - nobody really holds governments accountable either, at least not on a short enough timespan to be reasonable.  What is the difference between a company de-platforming an entity and a government de-platforming it by executive order?  The only difference I can see is who likes the decision.

I think what's really interesting is that, because of the power of these corporations, the US has something we really haven't seen before: competition between the government and other entities.  One could say this is the most "American" situation ever - even the government has to compete with the ability to control its population.

There are dangers to be sure - when companies can de-platform people "on a whim" this is power that is easily abused.  We will have to see how our court system holds up - I can easily see a lawsuit against the companies making it all the way up to the Supreme Court.

EDIT: (response to edits while I was typing) - this isn't really something that can be solved by monopoly busting; any time you have a worldwide forum for sharing ideas, there is nothing to "bust".  The only thing you can do is either put in place laws that define when you can and cannot prevent someone from sharing a particular idea.  This is the core difficulty - how do you have an infrastructure that "fairly" allows people to tell each other "no, that is a dumb idea. Please stop talking about it."

The reality is that there is always going to be a tension about the definition of unacceptable speech.  Can you come up with a "fair" system that will discourage unsavory or false views without oppressing speech?  I don't know that it's possible - that's why I don't tend to focus on the communications infrastructure, but on education and teaching people how to live peaceably with people that have different opinions.

[Loud Whispers]

Social media is still media. As such, we should not be surprised that said media companies control the political message of content. Literally every newspaper\TV\radio outlet does so, rightly or wrongly. Even those who strive for balance (say, BBC) end up amplifying fringe stances by looking for two sides in stories with broad consenus.

And as with any other media, media consolidation is an immense problem. When a few media companies dominate shallownet discourse, they begin to control oligopolistic levels of power which should not belong to unaccountable figures. Peoples like Murdorch exist when you allow stupid levels of media consolidation. Social media is no different; they should not be allowed to decide what is acceptable content. If the only kinds of political messaging which is allowed is that which is permitted by a handful of unaccountable men, this will completely fuck up any ability for normal people to engage in group mobilisation outside of a very narrow framework. Today that is a neoliberal one, but it doesn't even really matter whether the oligarchs of tomorrow swing away from it or not, it's too much unaccountable power in the hands of too few people. Its existence has a corrosive effect on public discourse (or lack thereof) even without flagrant abuse

That said, not sure I like the ideas of state owned or totally unrestricted social media.

BBC, Al Jazeera, RT, all pretty good. BBC also makes good shows (and some fucking god awful ones) from time to time. Certainly Beeb and Al Jaz score higher for impartiality than any American private media. Then you also have shit like Reuters that is private and impartial, so I don't think there's any correlation between funding source and impartiality - rather there is correlation between media competition, government impartiality regulation and impartiality in the media.

State funded social media would be a bloody datamining operation. I mean they all are but moreso

There really are few shades of grey here, all of which represent a number of undesirable outcomes. Society by way of media oligarchs? Niet.
Now, isn't it interesting that in general the social media message is a broadly left wing one (save for minority exceptions like Parler or the Chans) which is attacked for censoring the right, while the print and broadcast media leans majority right, and has been accused of deplatforming the left? Almost as if there is a generational divide being coloured in by market forces.

I don't see much left-right divide here. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, they employ left or right whenever it suits them

[MorleyDev]

Eh, not sure I buy 'social media is media' except in the loosest sense. It's a hole with millions of people screaming into it and occasionally someone else hears what they're screaming. If anything, the regulation I'd rather see is currently elected politicians just be banned from explicitly using it for political purposes. Social censorship of private individuals is a-okay by me, I think it's the reason most people in the west don't take slavery serious as an idea anymore. It was socially censored practically out of existence as a meme.

[Doomblade187]

I find it *hilarious* that everyone seems to think twitter is the government's only means of communication.

Look at it this way: companies can enforce their TOS basically however they want. When the US created an account on twitter for the president, they basically entered into a business relationship with the platform.

Now, a note: Donald trump almost never used it. He used his *personal* account for his bullshit. The US Account was muted (not banned) when he tried to ban-dodge in a violation of their terms of service, which the US gov would be subject to as contracting with twitter.

Yes, social media conglomeration is terrible, but it's not bad because the president was banned for inciting violence. It's bad because two-three companies control everything. Break the monopoly, don't nationalize it, and fix the damn web.

[MorleyDev]

The social media monopoly can't be broken without changing it's fundamental implementation. It's either global, in which case it's inevitably going to become a monopoly of a few services as everyone migrates to the same ones because everyone else is on it, or it's forcibly segregated (regionally, culturally or communities. Think Discord) in which case it's fundamentally not the current form of social media anymore.

So you either ban it in it's current form entirely, or play whack-the-monopoly every few years.

[Doomblade187]

The social media monopoly can't be broken without changing it's fundamental implementation. It's either global, in which case it's inevitably going to become a monopoly of a few services, or it's forcibly segregated (regionally, culturally or communities. Think Discord) in which case it's fundamentally not the current form of social media anymore.

So you either ban it in it's current form entirely, or play whack-the-monopoly every few years.

I'm perfectly happy to whack monopolies every few years until we realize capitalism is bad.

[MorleyDev]

Pretty sure the public would get tired of the state interfering with their crack addiction every few years and demand they stop first.

[McTraveller]

If the only kinds of political messaging which is allowed is that which is permitted by a handful of unaccountable men, this will completely fuck up any ability for normal people to engage in group mobilisation outside of a very narrow framework.

Right this is the challenge of our day - how do you enable people to engage in group mobilization while simultaneously avoiding mobilization of groups that arguably shouldn't be mobilized?  Or alternatively, if you do promote allowing all viewpoints to have their groups mobilize, how should we put in place the mechanisms to manage the inevitable conflicts between those mobilized groups?

I mean you can say "the government is supposed to do that" but that's part of the problem - that only works if you have an "unbiased" government.  I posit that there is actually no such thing as an unbiased government, because all governments are made of people which are all biased.  I don't know that having an equal mix of opposing views is equivalent to "unbiased", it's more "biases in balance."

[Loud Whispers]

Yes, social media conglomeration is terrible, but it's not bad because the president was banned for inciting violence. It's bad because two-three companies control everything. Break the monopoly, don't nationalize it, and fix the damn web.

That is what everyone is concurring, ye yey eyeye

[Starver]

Thierry Breton, one of key EU commissioners behind these reforms, wrote in an op-ed in POLITICO that “the fact that a CEO can pull the plug on POTUS’s loudspeaker without any checks and balances is perplexing. It is not only confirmation of the power of these platforms, but it also displays deep weaknesses in the way our society is organized in the digital space.”

wtf I love merkel now

This is something I disagree with. (Not the loving Merkel, though. So long as it's mutually consential, have at it, the both of yer!)

There were arguably insufficient checks and unequal balances. There is no God-Given right to be reported upon (if he believes that Twitter should be the same as a media organisation, with the accompanying trashing of the prior Fairness Doctrine) and social media is not a Utility Service (with whatever protections there might be against the privations of either general outages or specific disconnections - probably also lagging in the US market).


@Jack or Zuckerburg, et al, can decide (or have their subordinates decide) to chuck anyone they want off the platform, and have done with countless others for less. If Toady kicked me off Bay12Forums that would be his business. If I was Emperor of Earth and yet started just posting Free Slots! Free Slots! Free Slots! all the time then, one way or other, I probably should be deplatformed and if I'm not its a failing from Tarn or probable overreaching tyranny from me.


The timing was bad (better if it had been ages ago) but arguably better still than at the instant of the handover as previously threatened (because that would have cemented in a 'right' to be undeplatformed purely due to some exterior factor closer to notioriety than any subjective/objective worthiness). Any normal person would have been given marching orders long ago, yet they coddled Trump. Tolerated him beyond many a fault. Priviledged so many of his delete-worthy posts with Read-Only status, or even merely tagging and still allowing reply and retweet options.

He wasn't persecuted, he was ring-fenced. The zoo or safari park that has a lion/gorilla/marmoset that has a habit of breaking out of his enclosure, mauling keepers and visitors alike, gets the taste of human blood and yet feels it must just keep it in its own special (barely more secure) fenced-off sections to be specifically gawked at.


The rebound was much worse for this. I miss my (multi-times-)daily dose of @realDonaldTrump, browsed since before he was elected. I was always trying not to let it becoming my personal Two Minutes Hate session (I lurked to some extent to see the intermeshing of supporter and detractor comments and diving into supporting comments to get further opposing/supporting views as much as I dove into contrary views for the support/opposition that fanned off those POVs). But if he ever turns out to have something worth saying then one (or two, or even a handful) of the social media outlets nixing his various ramblings and rousings cannot be likened to being forced into a zippermouthed gimp helmet and chained in a fellar (edit: ...or even "cellar"...) against his will. There's enough other channels of communication, some of which don't even have pesky counterarguments and mocking memes immediately following whatever words he whips up. Loudspeakers are not even a human right. Many are denied them. Oh how the mighty fall, but yet the masses that they trampled remain trampled and the frequently overlooked remain underfoot.

i.e. If he can no longer be ReTweeted, I'm sure he can easily be RussiaTodayed. Or whoever does still want to touch his presence. I'm sure that there's still much such self-love in the OANN onanism.



(I agree that the digisphere is societally askew, outwith the left-right axis, but it's not more equittable with Trump's leaway stretched even further. My voice probably wouldn't rise any higher up the hierchy in the proper meritocracy we deserve, though, so I'm sure you don't need to listen to me and how I might even personally prefer the pre-Eternal September situation in many ways.)

[Loud Whispers]

Loudspeakers? I prefer loudwhispers