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Comment by somehnrdr14726 | Hacker News Reader

One difference is that Twitter, Facebook, Google, are not governments and have no real authority over you. They only have the power you give them by choosing to stay in their ecosystem. Therefore it's a strain to refer to them as officials.

If you're worried about them _becoming_ officials, then act now. Leave these platforms and convince others to do the same.

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Well, in a literal sense, no. But they certainly have the ability to:

- Exclude you from the largest (and nearly monopolizing) media channels. Good luck getting an online business off the ground when an AI filter bans you from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Google search results. And good luck contacting Google support to contest it, which is notoriously absent for virtually everyone.

- Have you socially ostracized by labelling you as X bad thing, all without you having any recourse or ability to contest the designation. The fact that stuff like this is legal blows my mind: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/yelp-racist-alert-added-busines...

- Collude to affect government policy and prevent competitors from gaining any footholds. Typical BigCo stuff.

Sticking to the consumer-side of the discussion, the BigCos aren't going to break the cycle. In fact, it's a capitalist crime to do so. Their flywheel requires a steady cattle population to surveil in the fields. When we choose as individuals to remain in their ecosystem, we choose the hidden fees of surveillance capitalism over more straightforward payment models. This is what gives BigCos the muscle to wield against smaller capitalists.

We in our consumer role, by not participating in these business models, are the only truly free actors in the system at this time. The only other way out is for government to get bigger and step in, as it's doing in Australia now.

The government could do plenty of things (using laws written a century ago in the Teddy Roosevelt era) to encourage competition and break up de facto monopolies. They've simply been asleep at the wheel.

> If you're worried about them _becoming_ officials, then act now. Leave these platforms and convince others to do the same.

the assumption that we do still have agency, and can exercise power as a collective "by voting with our feet/wallet" is wrong. we (some isolated heroes and activists who care) might be able to throw some spanner into the works or otherwise help things unravel at a slower speed. But things will still unravel in the same way as Jacques Ellul documented and predicted in "La Technique"[0].

To get rid of them is not possible because the only way out we can imagine is regulation which will further cement their position and status quo. There is no future in which these companies and power structures will not be around. I think it is more likely we see the end of the world than to envision a world where these platforms don't exist (maybe not among everyone my age but certainly among everyone 20 years younger than myself who has never experienced society without the Internet/Web)

[0] The Technological Society https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...

Yes - but until such a time as we have a healthy ecosystem and interoperability, they are a defacto monopoly and I would assume the "anti-monopoly" people would just do something about it, if only to promote an ecosystem. Instead we live in this weird limbo where we can't criticize these platforms because "it's a private company" whilst still using it as if it's a government/society-level ubiquitous platform.

> One difference is that ... Google ... are not governments and have no real authority over you.

Legally-required quarantine-checking apps or contact-tracing apps in some countries have only been made available through the Apple and Google Play stores. The Android apps often require Google Play Services, which require a Google account.

The same will likely be true of the vaccination-certificate apps that are being planned in some countries (countries intend to allow you to generate limited-time QR codes, not present a permanent paper certificate).

Consequently, staying on the good side of supposedly private platforms is increasingly necessary to be an ordinary, law-abiding citizen.

> If you're worried about them _becoming_ officials, then act now.

If you mean this figuratively, we already have many situations - going back at least to the Arab Spring - of government officials directing policy on social media sites. Secretary Clinton of the Obama Administration spoke about this many times.

If you mean this literally, check out how may high level policy types from social media companies came from and have returned to high ranking spokesman+policy roles in Biden Administration.

But fundamentally, it doesn't require being an official. Even filtering and shaping search results has an impact.. and this has been measured repeatedly. Here's a study from five years ago (aka pre-Trump) which demonstrated it:

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...

We don't live in isolation, and most of us couldn't. If we want to be part of the social fabric, we're often forced to use these services to some extent, so they have real authority over us.

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