Comment by Adutude | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Adutude | Hacker News Reader

Oh noes, my beloved hacker news has sunk down into the political morass.

I think the bigger picture, and meta topic here is that private companies have become the arbiters of what is and what is not appropriate social discourse.

We as a society have chosen to let the Marks and Jacks of the world decide what is appropriate to publish.

I think the bigger part of the problem is that while we sit and argue about whether the policy was fair or not or was biased or not, we are not asking the question of are the right people setting those policies?

Should private companies with no accountability to the public they serve/sell to the highest bidder, be the ones to decide what constitutes valid social discourse?

We all thought social media was a good idea, when we were young up and coming geeks. We thought it would be a force for good and allow people to connect and talk.

What we as geeks actually invented were a bunch of brain washing machines that profit by selling the minds of their "users".

I have an opinion about whether or not there was bias, but I don't think it's as important as the bigger question this story brings up.

We now, in this thread are fighting about how the brain washing machines are being used, instead of the IMHO, the more important topic of, how can we turn off the brain washing machines and put the genie back in the bottle?

This is a rare case where the political class actually has a better grasp of the root cause of a social problem, and is further along in solving it, than the people at large.

In the past year, we've seen both sides of the aisle clamoring to repeal CDA 230, while the public is split between either not caring or recoiling in horror at the thought.

I don't believe for a second that the repeal of the CDA is really on the table in Washington. If they wanted to do it, they would have done it. But that would nuke Google, Facebook, and Twitter, all at once. (I personally don't think that would be all that bad for the internet or society in general, but I digress.) But they (meaning the swamp creatures, Trump included) realize now how much power they hold over Big Tech via this law, and how much influence they can exert over the world with this power. And they realize how bad it would be for the US stock market (which all of Washington worships as their god) if the tech giants failed all at once.

I believe Techlash will either kill these companies or transform them, and I think that much is inevitable. That is why Zuckerberg straight up asked for regulation. He wants the government to save his company. We will probably see a series of regulations that places these giants under the control of Washington. Maybe it's time to put forward some kind of tech Bill of Rights now to limit what the government can do with our data beyond what's already prohibited in the actual Bill of Rights. Things like "No about queries." "No recording conversations in the home." etc.

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