I'm starting to think that the degeneration of society into a 1984-style dystopia may now be unavoidable. We need to take power back from big tech and we need to do it now.
By banning certain politicians, it now has to maintain consistency... which means banning thousands more globally.... which means making itself irrelevant to huge swaths of the global population.
It's no longer a ubiquitous utility. ... but that's what people want. they don't want their toaster to judge what food they make.
They've doomed themselves.
It’s not what I want. I don’t want my social network promoting violence anymore than I want my toast poisoning my family.
If you don't think you, as an adult, are capable of seeing hate-speech without disregarding it, then you should use a child-friendly platform.
I think Twitter is even firewalled from the PRC, so why they let PRC propaganda propagate on their servers is beyond me.
Look, lying is bad, and there is no nobility in defending lies. It's pretty clear that something's broken with how people think about free speech when they make hysterical 1984 comparisons when someone makes it slightly less easy for a massively powerful authoritarian country to spread its lies. It's not just you, I see this all over.
I mean, 1984 was all about a massively powerful authoritarian government making it impossible for the little guy to spread truth. Comparing this to that literally turns the novel on its head.
Doesn't big tech have power because so many people depend on this small set of platforms?
It seems there are perhaps three(?) options that come up:
1) Constrain big tech via regulation (thereby in some sense transferring the power to regulators/government, with the hope that it would in turn be influenced by democratic processes)
2) Or, directly influence big tech behaviour through boycotts and other consumer action.
3) Or, break up big tech forcibly or again through consumer action to switch to alternatives, thereby diffusing this power.
And you prefer 3. I think I do too.
The problem is that when the market is already consolidated, you need one to get the other.
Suppose you want to compete with the major phone platforms. Your biggest problem is apps. No apps, no users; no users, no app developers.
A way to fix this is to create a cross-platform app development framework. Developers would love that -- write your app once and it runs on both the existing major platforms and any new ones? Great!
Except that the incumbents block it. You can't create a competing app store for the existing platforms, which means you can't leverage that into a competing platform.
But without competition there, they can also do this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304275
So there goes your competition for Twitter and Facebook.
Constrain them from limiting competing app stores. Works a lot better than doing nothing.
No.
Besides inauguration day, do you remember reading official documents on the whitehouse.gov website? I never have. Nor have I ever gone to AOC's official house.gov site to read her messages. But I do know what she's saying on Twitter.
Not to belabor the point but where the message is delivered is a huge factor in whether or not the message will even be noticed.
Yes. Traditional media is struggling greatly because of tech in general and big tech in particular. The profitability has been squeezed out and what remains of media is less trustworthy because of that.
Craigslist and the New York Times website probably did more to harm the profitability of newspapers around the country than any FAANG company, and there’s no shortage of new websites claiming to report the news.
Tech is the media’s biggest supporter, but maybe not the media that you grew up with. What’s driving down the price of news isn’t tech, but the new forms of competition tech—big, small, medium, XL, etc.— enables.