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A public option for social media is exactly what I want. Townsquare.us, run by the government, where all speech except that which is literally illegal is allowed. Supreme Court for challenges. No ads or tracking allowed. Post illegal content? Feds come knocking.

Then, let FB/Twitter etc do whatever they want

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What's the point? We have plenty of options like that, but no one wants them. People want to go where other people are.

The point is that it settles, once and for all, the role of government in policing social media. If social media really is the replication of the public town square, then one that has the same operating model is called for.

Doesn't matter if people want to go there. The point is that it exists, and the model is governed by the taxpayers.

How would the existence of a crappy government run social media site that nobody uses have any impact on the issue at stake here?

The issue at stake: governments telling private businesses what they can and can't host on their servers.

Impact of a government social media: If you get banned from Facebook, you have the option to post your non-illegal content on townsquare.us. Therefore, your free speech rights are not being impacted. The right to speak is not the right to be heard by the audience of your choice.

There are already tons of sites you can move to if you get banned from a platform, so there is no functional difference.

I get that you don't share concerns about deplatforming, but presenting this as a solution to those concerns is not accurate.

> There are already tons of sites you can move to if you get banned from a platform, so there is no functional difference.

But none of those platforms draw a direct line between the constitutional guarantee of free speech and implementation of that speech. That’s the idea behind the public option: it’s the constitution with teeth, freedom in its purest form, while leaving corporations open to experiment with restrictions as the market demands.

If social media is the public square then the government would just seize the servers just liked they seized all the public squares/roads/areas from private people.

It would be unusable. Porn is legal, gore is legal, hate speech is legal, as is any threat that’s not likely to cause “specific and imminent lawlessness”.

The bar for the government being able to legally suppress speech is purposefully very, very high. This is good when it comes to keeping the power of the state out of matters it shouldn’t be involved in, but this is bad when you’re trying to make a social media platform usable by anyone but the absolute dregs of society.

Content moderation is very, very hard, but people actually want it. There’s a reason why people stay on Twitter while whining on Twitter rather than going to 4chan or 8kun

>It would be unusable. Porn is legal, gore is legal, hate speech is legal, as is any threat that’s not likely to cause “specific and imminent lawlessness”.

Such is the nature of living in a free society. Certainly there are ways, in even the most basic social media platforms, of un-following / blocking certain posters. And if the content isn't targeted by algorithm, should be fairly easy to avoid content you don't want to see.

Any if not, well, there's always Facebook and Twitter.

I don't think Hacker News allows you to block people. Or follow them.

The only useful purpose of Facebook for me is using it as a somewhat modern phone book. It’s a great tool for tracking down old or new acquaintances and establishing a line of communication. It’s kind of what Facebook used to be before the newsfeed and like button. I wish there was an alternative to Facebook without the tracking and advertising, run by something not profit seeking. Maybe an organization like NPR or PBS?

>where all speech except that which is literally illegal is allowed

So I can post all the ads I want for my revolutionary penis enlargement pills?

Sure! Your account is going to be linked your driver's license. It's your space. Go nuts!

I wouldn’t be surprised if people got paid to spam ads on the website. People who don’t have any money (or care what Google indexes on them) would gladly send spam on behalf of their drivers license.

> where all speech except that which is literally illegal is allowed... No ads .. allowed.

Another free speech utopia imploded within two sentences.

To be clear, in my vision of this, people would be allowed to advertise however they want. Businesses could have accounts. But having a space for ads and then using behavioral ad targeting would be out.

In your vision of it, perhaps. Citizen's United, however, has already decreed that corporations have free speech rights like everybody else. By creating a distinction between commercial and personal speech, the government would be interfering in the 1st amendement rights of personal and commercial entities.

My vision doesn’t create a distinction between commercial and personal speech. In fact, it does the opposite, by not privileging commercial speech and giving it a special space on the page. If you want to advertise you wares, do so, but you don’t get to pay to get attention. Get people to follow you because they like what you have to say.

When you wrote "having a space for ads and then using behavioral ad targeting would be out", I understood it to mean that you did not want any space at all for ads and not just a lack of designated space for ads.

With that being said, the only way I see this happening is if the government builds its own ISP and /or IXP, secures its own peering agreements (with the understanding that another ISP can refuse), hosts the website on its own servers, and accepts all potential spam that comes from all of its users.

In addition, none of this will stop tracking by ads using tricks like the Facebook Pixel, obfuscated analytics, or fingerprinting scripts as code is also free speech. In fact, none of stops any tracking on server-side by government agents either. Any IP logs or information that's gleaned from user access of government services is understood to be self-incriminating and will be treated as such as in the case of a drug dealer in Massachusetts.[1]

All in all, who is expected to pay for all this (and on what grounds) and how do you intend to stop ads or any tracking at all with these factors involved?

[1]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/how-the-usps-tar...

Oh the users would most certainly be tracked by the government. In fact, that's part of the point. One of the unfortunate byproducts of Parler getting shut down was the loss of visibility of right-wing terrorists.

I'm not sure I follow the code-as-free-speech argument, or how it would apply to a government website. The government banned the use of cookies in 2000. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/10/24/r...

It certainly could again.

Of course it would be taxpayer funded.

A more generous interpretation is "no ads allowed" means the platform is not funded by advertising, but by public dollars. That way the system design does not become so maliciously driven by engagement/addiction metrics

Then it gets taken over by spammers.

Advertising is literally spam:

>Spam: irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the internet to a large number of recipients.

Social media and the internet is already overrun with spam anyway so its a null point

The roads used to be full of spammers, but governments started banning stuff like prostitution and street peddling to reduce it. And the difference between government and a social media platform is that the government will go to your home and fine you dollars or put you behind bars if you run a professional spamming agency. So I think a government run option would have way less spam in the long run, but almost surely less freedom as well which might not be what people want either. We already see people getting arrested for relatively minor comments they post on social media in UK.

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