These things are fine for the town square, since people have free speech, but nobody should be handing them a megaphone that reaches 7 billion people.
Free speech does not mean you are entitled to have your speech broadcast to a global audience.
These things are fine for the town square, since people have free speech, but nobody should be handing them a megaphone that reaches 7 billion people.
Free speech does not mean you are entitled to have your speech broadcast to a global audience.
All of these topics you've mentioned are and always have been far away from trending ('amplified', 'normalized') pages. You can't go anywhere on these sites and see these topics without searching for them, and when you do the hashtags are either immediately taken over by the rest of the users on the site or taken off of trending deliberately by administrators, often both. Can you provide one example of these topics consistently being 'amplified' or 'normalized' by one of the major tech platforms? I'm talking public content, not private groups. Posts that are 'amplified', not just present. You can find posts from anyone about anything online, so I don't really see what separates these private facebook groups from something like a mailing list. It doesn't seem "normalized" at all.
Facebook exercises editorial control (moderation) of what user-provided content is published on its site. Therefore if something is there, it’s because their moderation system allowed it to be there. I don’t use Facebook myself so I can’t provide a first-hand example, but it’s increasingly being reported that this content spreads virally through these platforms’ recommendation rabbit-holes and through promotion by end users.
If social networks were largely just content crafted by the people I follow, it would then be more representative towards a digital representation of the in-person social structures that would or do exist.
They make much less money that way though. Your average user would probably also use it less.
But those same folks will happily excuse the whole BLM/Antifa rioting during 2020 where billions of dollars in property damage was caused and dozens of people died.