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Excellent post, one nitpick:

>Wikipedia is another example [of the public square]

Quite the opposite; Wikipedia is explicitly based on published reliable sources. They have a specific rule[1] excluding information that was not published in such way.

There are certain advantages to this rule, and its utility has been validated through Wikipedia's long, and ongoing, run. Nonetheless this cathedral mindset cannot be compared to a public square in any way other than being a very opposite.

In particular the published reliable sources rule excludes general blogs and public forums and the likes, thus excluding the majority of discourse & voices on the internet. Even expert sources, if self-published, can only be used in limited way and with caution.

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[1] "If no reliable sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources

You're not wrong, but I think you're missing his key point, which is that a forum for free thought simply isn't if it's policed by content moderators around a set of culture rules, no matter how high-minded the intentions. Now for sure, WP has moderators, and they are human, but they're pretty tightly bound to enforce only the rules of admission. They're not vested with the power and mission to censor opinions deemed odious or disharmonious. I'm sure abuses happen and the slope is slippery, but moderators tend to respond to conflict there. Not predefine and block it's alleged precursors.

The key point was wrong wrt Wikipedia :-)

>a forum for free thought >if it [isn't] policed by content moderators around a set of culture rules

The rules are mostly invisible to us because we are surrounded with, and submersed in, this very culture 24/7.

To get written up in Wikipedia one must first get published in a reliable source. This mostly means a journal or "books published by respected publishing houses" (full list: [1]). The publishing is the gatekeeper here; the wikipedia moderators are a secondary consideration.

This does indeed silence out a priori (i.e., censors) ideas that are culturally unpopular or frowned upon or just held by small number of individuals. To avoid muddling the argument with hot button issues, here's a very mild and barely objectionable example: picoLisp, a modern interpreted programming language with dynamic scoping. Having it written up, and then kept, in Wikipedia is an uphill struggle spanning years, and with sad reversals & losses. And that's with ideas that are only mildly unpopular.

Again, Wikipedia's utility is clear and recognized. Let's just not mix it up with a public square.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#What_c...

https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

This is wikipedia co-founder writing this.

It's true. Sadly it takes strong familiarity with wide range of subjects to be able to point out the biases of omission, and a big name to point it out without attracting too much of dismissive shrugs.

In my opinion, the bias is primarily derived from the bias of the sources Wikipedia uses, with influence by the WP editors being only a secondary influence.

Larry Sanger is an idiot. There's a reason he was kicked out early in Wikipedia's history.

Wikipedia is certainly biased, but in what topics are covered, not the content itself. I think they had an example that the article for the Falklands war was longer than the Congo civil war, the deadliest conflict since WW2.

I'm not saying that wikipedia is equivalent in every way to twitter, vis-a-vis the public square concept. It is a very important media though, and faces a lot of the same issues.

Whatever issues social media has encountered around politics, covid, etc. are arguably more acute for wikipedia... because of its authority and role as a source of objective information. Meanwhile, it has handled everything much better by default. That's why we don't think of it as part of the social media problem.

Naturally, there's a relevant XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/978/

Does Wikipedia not have rules against using sources that were published later than the 'fact' on Wikipedia was asserted?

If only the stakes were as low as the scroll lock key...

The citogenesis xkcd is right, but could & should take one more step and say openly:

Wikipedia has became part of the media ecosystem, not much different from any other part of the media ecosystem.

Journalists at typical outlets are also engaged in re-publishing -edited or verbatim- content from other outlets. Among those practices, churnalism [1].

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churnalism

Why do you say that? Wikipedia is vastly different from anything I’d normally recognise as news media(I guess that’s what you mean?). It puts content up front (except when asking for donations). It shows how the sausage is made (you can look at talk pages if you really want to). It sources claims. I guess at some point it’ll take a turn for the worse, but it’s nowhere close to there yet from what I can see. Am I missing something? I guess you could say that it’s part of the ecosystem in that it trusts it and news sources are an integral part of its fact-checking process, but I don’t see that that makes it resemble too closely the sources it uses for fact-checking. And companies use it for PR\allow-washing, which isn’t great. And subject-experts express frustration in getting their edits reverted by idiots. But, it’s still recognisably wikipedia from the old days. I don’t see how you get to “not much different from any other part of the media ecosystem”.

>Wikipedia is vastly different from anything I’d normally recognise as news media

Agreed - Wikipedia is not news media.

Instead it's media fact & opinion aggregator and editor. It does function as media platform, with content provided by the media and only by the media. The editors' opinions are a secondary consideration; they are obliged by the rules to only ever derive content from the published reliable sources.

My "not much different from any other part of the media ecosystem" statement is connected with how the ideas & opinions flowing back and forth between Wikipedia and other medias (as shown in the citogenesis xkcd) - a process that's typical, even characteristic, of media.

I don't get why people are so quick to replace private authoritarianism with government authoritarianism. At least with the first version you have the theoretical option of escaping.

> I don't get why people are so quick to replace private authoritarianism with government authoritarianism. At least with the first version you have the theoretical option of escaping.

I’d like to run the numbers on how long fugitives escape justice when they’re targeted by bounty hunters, placed on most wanted lists or other red notices, or both. It’s not always good innocent guys getting caught by good innocent law enforcement, either. Entrapment and parallel construction exist. Ideally the crimes or criminal intent to justify all this apparatus actually exist too, right? Some people may not care about justifications; feels over reals, basically.

The people involved may believe they are correct to work for private authoritarian companies, or public ones; I guess that’s hypercapitalism for you.

Twitter and FB could be replaced quickly, because their technology is not their primary asset. Their primary asset is their hundreds of millions of users who are there mainly because of the other hundreds of millions of users.

Not surprisingly, network effects are pervasive on the network, and with everything moving to the network, network effects will dominate almost everything unless something is done to deal explicitly with network-effect-based monopolies. Just imagine email if you couldn't email anyone who didn't have an email address at the same company you have yours. Almost all email would begin to consolidate in the winning company, which would then begin telling people what could and couldn't be said in email. They could cut you off from email and destroy businesses for violating whatever "terms of service" they felt like imposing or even accidentally. Too bad for you.

I think the answer to network-effects monopolies is to force them to switch to an open protocol once they crossed a threshold of a certain number of users. They could then continue to offer services, but other companies and agencies could also put you on "the network". Companies could stay small and retain full control or grow and be forced to open so their competitors and users couldn't be locked out (or in).

It is not easy to run the infrastructure for a Facebook clone, even with 10M users. Technology is absolutely part of their entrenchment.

> Twitter is a private public square

So ABC, NBC, CBS are all private companies and they are much older than Twitter. How is it that they can be regulated by the FCC?

FCC only regulates broadcasts that go over the public airways; cable TV isn't regulated by the FCC.

is LTE not public airwaves?

Your cell company that directly controls the LTE transmission is regulated by the FCC, not every small website you may interact with on TCP/IP on your smartphone over LTE.

I don't fully understand what you're trying to argue here.

> Meanwhile, we really need to consider the economics of companies like twitter & facebook. Does FB really need 50k employees and a $70bn budget to provide the world with facebook?

Are you saying that if FB had a smaller headcount or budget, they'd be less influential? A company's headcount and budget are largely a function of the market, and the market highly values FB. If you have a problem with the economics of FB, you have a problem with the market forces that created it. But you end with:

> I hope we're not heading for a regulatory shitshow

If you're not happy that the market created conditions for companies like FB to grow to the size that they are, and you're also not happy that regulation is possibly in the future of these companies, then how would you like to see this scenario play out?

Imo the party which makes the values of FB high is the problem. It isn't just some companies that want to put advertisements for their products. The companies want to dominate the market and shut down their competitions, even to the point that our privacy start to be intrused.

The best scenario is for FB to stay at early 2000 version, where our feeds full of friend's stories, games and some ads. Now it's full of media, arguably some pushes political agenda, intrusive advertising (tracking ads), and a few of friend's feed.

Then imo, not all regulations are good. Because fb is a political platform, the regulation for sosmed is more likely full with political agenda too.

To the first part, I meant that the range of possible worlds is very broad. Resources aren't a limiting factor. Facebook could continue to do facebook regardless of financial burdens placed on them. If not, someone else can. This wasn't the case for most monopolies of the past. In the past, there was a real concern of "oops. We killed smelting. No more steel."

To the second part... I don't have full answers. I would like this scenario play out to a free media outcome. Decentralisation, and ideally, a lot of commercialisation too. More wikipedias, WWWs. Fewer FBs. Disintermediation. Commodification of bottlenecks like youtube has... owning the relationship between video maker and video watcher. The ideals that made the internet work in the first place.

That's not something a politician can give us though. No one decided that wikipedia or WWW would win. It happened. What I want from politicians is a laundry list:

(1) Trustbusting. The Facebook's acquisitions of whatsapp & IG should never have happened, for example. Youtube should be split from Google (and adwords from search... off topic).

Also, modern antitrust needs to recognize the economic realities of these businesses. This isn't a railroad monopoly or Bell. There are no capital costs and there is no major danger of harming the public interest by sinking the industry. Social media will exist whether or not FB is worth $1trn. That money does not represent "capital" in the productive capacity sense, it just represents earning potential.

(2) Different rules for giant companies. Rules should apply only to designated giant companies. The biggest problems are size related. Be explicitly skeptical of size. Data laws. Copyright enforcement. User content liability. Fairness requirements. etc. A normal regulator will enforce the monopolies which create the underlying problems. We need an explicitly "large company" set of rules, including tax rules.

(3) Much stronger fair use and public domain rules. A complete rethinking. Eg, if a politician gives an interview... this should be public domain or under extremely strong fair use protection.

This is another area where we need to consider modern economic realities. For said political interview, you could preserve most of the financial value (and incentive) with a copyright limited to one week.

(4) Non-consumer rights in regards to monopolies. If facebook, youtube or amazon ban you, this is a public matter. It's more akin to blackballing than "please leave this bar." Everyone needs protections from monopolies, especially non consumers. Once companies are in that size range, they need to

(5) Data use transparency laws. FB political advertising is an extreme example. Half the shit they do wouldn't stand the light of day. Some of it is borderline treason. Shine that light. Full data dumps of ads, targeting criteria, etc. Publish ad matching algorithms. Give the public access to everything the advertiser has access to...

... the list gets long.

If someone else is always confused by the use of acronyms, "JD" here is for "Jack Dorsey" (twitter co-founder and CEO).

> The problem is that Twitter is a private public square.

What were the public public squares and the private public squares before Twitter was developed?

Understanding the historic context of these forums is pretty important.

I would argue there have only been remarkably few public public squares since property became privatized.

so... jericho?

Does this point to a social media platform which is publicly funded, publicly funded internet infrastructure, and publicly funded web access?

Do we not want a public square?

I don't trust governments not to coopt such a system and make it political in one way or another.

I'd prefer we go a federated route, like Mastodon. That way the servers are private, but the system as a whole is not controlled by a central authority. Can't find a server that will let you express what you want to express? Roll your own. Don't want to hear about Emacs ever again, join a vi-only server, or a never-emacs server.

> fell off the edge of the disc

What in the flat world... ? /s