Facebook, Twitter & Instagram can be banned in India tomorrow for non-compliance
businesstoday.in
businesstoday.in
IMO, This is more like a signal to threaten foreign companies (who anyways die to capture Indian market due to its startphone penetration and population) to comply with Government.
But FB has a huge presence in India and they can't just piss off that government without putting their employees at risk, as well as the sunk cost of their existing business. They'll actually have to block things on their end. You'll wind up with the same censorship-due-to-business-interests controversy that the NBA and other business operating in China have experienced over the past year.
>requiring them to remove any content flagged by authorities within 36 hours
Does this apply to content posted from an IP address located in India? Does it apply to content posted by a profile whose info states that they live in India regardless of where they connect from? If you don't want to be censored can you simply make a profile that lives elsewhere or connect via a vpn but friend all the same people?
Is content expected to actually removed or is it merely not shown to users who either live in or appear to connect from a location where it has been "removed".
Eg Bob in foo who doesn't believe in censoring sees a feed like
1. My friend had a great dinner out what a nice time
2. government of foo stinks they ought to take a long walk off a short pier
3. bar sucks too
James in bar sees
1. My friend had a great dinner out what a nice time
2. government of foo stinks they ought to take a long walk off a short pier
Sam in baz which wants to maintain a favorable relationship with foo and bar sees
1. My friend had a great dinner out what a nice time
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/24/22400976/twitter-removed-...
Is this an autotranslated article? What is a lakh or crore as a unit?
The only tragedy here is going to be the rights of the Indian citizen. I can't even begin to fathom how radical of a shift this would be for the global market, and I also don't really understand how the worlds most populated country will be okay with being cut off from uncensored information...
Twitter does censorship and has accepted its left leaning.
On the contrary, these platforms are masssive cesspools of censored content.
I'm not aware of any major news outlet - liberal or otherwise - "finally admitting now that the lab leak hypothesis is probably right" at this point. The WSJ story the other day doesn't come close to that assertion yet.
So people or stories get banned even if they are true for some other reasons. You don't know what those reasons are, and they may change going forward.
https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/privacy_violatio...
> We remove content that shares, offers or solicits personally identifiable information or other private information that could lead to physical or financial harm, including financial, residential and medical information, as well as private information obtained from illegal sources.
Pretending they’re being fair, when you know they’re not is gaslighting.
You may think it’s ok for them to apply their policies unequally, and dishonestly; that’s another discussion, but please don’t act like what they’re doing is fair or honest.
The biggest example of them not blocking doxxing was the implicit help in spreading the Parlar hacked data. I know of fb devs who participated in spreading it.
It can also be very easily argued that the leader of the BLM movement is a public figure and sharing her home address is not doxxing. And I’m sure that argument has been used to allow sharing private info of similar public figures who Facebook’s progressive devs didn’t care for.
This is such a false spin on what was actually happening. It was only a year ago. It isn't hard to remember. People were banned/downvoted to oblivion for merely suggesting the lab leak was a credible theory, not for claiming it was definitely the 100% truth. Stop gaslighting.
I'm not qualified to say if the lab leak has any credence, but it wouldn't be the first time the powers at be have been wrong. Just look at the classic "WMDs in the Middle East" rhetoric that lead us to war.
But agreed in general; I think there's a lot of political opposition on the left to the lab-leak theory, in no small part because Trump pushed so hard to blame the Chinese for the virus while in office. Even if unlikely, a lab leak is far from impossible as a cause, and we should talk about it and explore it until evidence conclusively rules it out.
Are they? It's easy to walk down the slippery road that leads to authoritarian behaviors.
So I would disagree that "conspiracy theories are problematic." Some are problematic, but there are also some that turn out to be extremely important. No progress is made without questioning authority and the status quo.
Investigating wrongdoing and backing up findings with evidence is extremely important. Spouting unfounded lies is not.
I have less of a problem with marking things as unfounded if they are actually unfounded. I wouldn't use the term misleading because not all unfounded claims are false. There's still a lot of gray area here. Maybe the person in charge of making those judgements is not a subject matter expert. Or maybe the person making the claim has some additional information that cannot be revealed. (Perhaps they are inside the organization and cannot leak too much or they will be caught.)
I would set the bar for marking things as misleading as requiring evidence to the contrary. I think it is fine to mark things as lacking evidence, as long as that can be established fairly and reliably. I have my doubts that this can be done reliably, but as long as there is no blocking occurring, I think the harm of a mistake is minimized. Anyone claiming to be an impartial subject matter expert capable of making these judgements should provide evidence of that claim.
To me, the latter is too big a price to pay for the former.
If so, where do you propose the line exists?
If not, I would suggest you're advocating that the "loudest" voice (where volume is measured by firepower) always gets their way.
Sure, believing any conspiracy theory is not a justification for breaking the law.
> If so, where do you propose the line exists?
The line is already clearly defined by the law. Ranting on Facebook about conspiracies (true or not) is legal. Nonviolent protests are legal. Storming the Capitol obviously isn't.
The line is drawn where an actual crime is committed.
I'm not really a fan of pre-crime control measures, but that's a personal opinion.
This isn't even a "both sides" thing, because I'm pretty sure there isn't any actual equivalent of the attack on Scalise but on the other side. It stands almost entirely alone in recent US political history, a uniquely awful example of America's political polarisation turning into a justification for violence and attempted assassination that came incredibly close to succeeding. (Also, I would be shocked if one of the things that radicalized the attacker wasn't false claims of presidential election rigging, just because they were so utterly pervasive on social media amongst people with his political affiliation back then.)
All the mainstream American media narratives about the dangers of political violence have nothing to do with actual political violence. It's a weapon they use against the political side they oppose and stop caring about or even become apologists for when the side they support is carrying out the violence.
Not that I believe the election was stolen, but I think the lab leak is the most credible, to a great degree because it was censored so badly earlier.
Clearly not - we know that it is possible for elections to be fraudulent and people can talk about it. We don't yet live in a post-truth society. Evidence counts.
There is obviously no clear delineation between these two categories and the censors (ie government or big tech) would be incentivized to bill some instances of the latter category as the former.
Is it misleading to say that a group of doctors conspired to ensure that black Americans died of a disease they could have cured, just so that they could study their effects?
Because those are conspiracy theories, and they are both true.
If you ban a massive centralized network, another one will take its place. It will certainly be smaller than Facebook, but no less centralized. And in this particular case, I would imagine that based on the Indian government's grievances with these American networks, information will almost certainly be less free on the replacement.
One of the elements missing in the intra-US debate is that a lot of the hostility that much of the country feels toward Silicon Valley is generated from a very similar feeling. To many, how culturally distant elites on the coasts are from those in "middle America" coupled with how much power the former has over the later ... it can, at times, make it feel like there's an element of foreign rule. Technology has made it a lot easier to project cultural power - once you have it. Once you lose it, it seems it's almost impossible to get it back.
(Plus of course what will actually happen is that Facebook and Twitter will comply, and Indian users of those platforms will be subject to both the whims of California-based moderators and the Indian government's current penchant for objecting to pictures of funerals and suggestions they might not be doing a wonderful job. The potency of control of information and ideas in action; nobody in the upper echelons of the Indian government cares about Zuckerberg's policy on the lab-leak theory...)
If your country is consuming information through the filter of the American coastal elite, then they are likely to come to believe in the things that the American elite believes, to despise the things that the American elite despises. We can meaningfully speak of individuals having a choice to believe this or that, but as a society, that kind of domination of information will predictably drive people to believe what they are told to believe.
It cares not in the slightest whether Indians get access to things Facebook cares to censor (which they can anyway, through the large majority of Indian media Facebook does not influence or seek to influence) but is determined to browbeat Facebook into removing evidence that the Indian government's handling of COVID might be suboptimal. This is the purpose of the policy. Reinstating posts on lab leak theories is not the purpose of the policy, and the American coastal elite (or Bangalore tech elite) will continue to censor stuff they want to on their platforms in addition to the more pervasive and more universal Indian-government censorship.
Takes a remarkable degree of dishonesty to make freedom of thought arguments in favour of the Indian government being able to prevent any material it does not agree with from reaching Indian eyeballs.
The reason for the ban is obvious. Twitter tagged propaganda by the government as fake news.
Email, Facebook, SMS, Twitter, and Discord are all massive networks that all can also facilitate small group conversations.
Bigger companies have much bigger kitty and clout and they can fight back when something unreasonable is being pushed down the throat.
Smaller companies will be completely at the mercy of the governments.
I am guessing that these companies are deliberately waiting for a court case.
2. The total number of people talking on all networks will probably go down.
The decrease in 2 is probably orders of magnitude larger than the increase in 1. I don't think that it's necessarily a positive change.
Not from India but personally I'd much rather my government not set such precedents and not have such power to block websites. Next thing you know they'll be blocking credible sites to spread their own misinformation agenda.
So yes, I have independent media, because I can access the entire world's media and choose what I look at.
> Next thing you know they'll be blocking credible sites to spread their own misinformation agenda.
I assume courts will act against it, So that is not really a complaint.
This is not a good assumption. I've seen lots of cases in the developed world where the courts do nothing.
The American media is NOT independent.
But because at least the American government doesn't ban and censor websites, I effectively have independent media because I can look at any non-American media that I wish.
That's why I cautioned to not wish banning or censorship upon your own local law, wherever you are. If they are allowed the precedent of banning Facebook, they can also ban Al-Jazeera or BBC or DW or Wikipedia or whatever you wish to actually look at.
Hence, the anger in the comments and downvoting by upper caste folks of Indian origin.
Different localities have different dominant networks. E.g. Instagram Stories and Viber in Europe, vs Snapchat and WhatsApp in the US, vs VKontakte in Russia. Clearly, banning a global dominant network will only spur the creation and migration to a more local, but likely still centralized, network. (It might still be equally, or differently but to the same degree, censorious.)
> With these platforms banned, it will be more easy for Indians to encounter information that challenges the dominant narrative of the elites.
You assume the "free range" information flowing around is free from the influence of 'the elites'. It might not be by the elites you particularly resent, but rest assured it is still going to be a strata of elites, who have the massive resources to organize, build, publish, market, brand, filter, "fact check" etc what information is allowed to flow around with what credibility.
Nobody is asserting that, or even hinting at it. You have to have the most sensitive, assumptive and skeptical, upside reading of that to suggest that 'Having Facebook Available' as some kind of statement in support of 'One Truth'.
Modi's government is one of the most corrupt and dysfunctional in thew world and becoming excessively authoritarian.
Facebook, with it's obvious shortcomings, is one reasonably managed voice among many.
On the whole, having a fairly open Facebook is considerably better than having a Completely Corrupt Modi Facebook.
Facebook is not a tool or organ of the US and is not an organ of US state propaganda.
While some of the 'New Rules' seem reasonable, others definitely do not, and have authoritarian implications [1] including direct government oversight over some forms of content.
" I am quite sure the local people there are not wishing for someone from outside to come and save them."
I'm pretty sure that people would like access to critical information wherever they are.
I don't use FB, I don't care about it, but I would go to my first protest ever if my government tried to politicize it.
[1] https://theprint.in/india/governance/modi-govt-announces-tou...
India has its own social order. Why should it let its online discourse be controlled by the American social order?
The other side of the debate use the same American tools.
This is more a civil war in American discourse between the liberals and conservatives than anything else.
If tomorrow, I say something religious in nature, would such a thing be banned by some person in California who decides it is not rational thought?
The three links you posted don't require me to take up arms :)
1) It is a regrettable event in which courts have did the right thing.
2) Sorry, I cannot read it.
3) It is an opinion column in an online publication.
- https://www.ft.com/content/de6c9ce7-35d9-489b-be59-02f7dbfb1...
- https://jacobinmag.com/2020/10/india-narendra-modi-criminali...
- https://www.newframe.com/extreme-hindu-nationalists-smother-...
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/01/uttar-pradesh-...
- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/14/indias-political-pr...
- https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/bloody-mary/have-a...
Anyway, if you wanted to, you'll find hundreds of links on Google. Have a nice evening.
I have seen this in my country in the past fifteen years.
I always thought entertainment and audience to promote your personal brand is what you get in return.
If Facebook doesn't do what those groups demand, they will be smeared in the media, suffer internal strife, and face punitive antitrust probes.
And of course, many tech executive are true believers in left-wing politics and like that they can use their positions to advance those ideas.
Now, it's an excuse to take the air out of conservative political sentiment.
Totally independent of that, the general scientific community seemed to be much more opposed to the lab theory early on than they are now. It still doesn't appear to be much evidence for it beyond circumstantial stuff, but it is a possibility that more people are engaging with.
Combine these two and it isn't surprising that these platforms cracked down on this type of talk early and are slow to allowing it to start happening again.
With Trump gone and even more time elapsing with no reasonable natural origin of COVID found, a lab leak is back in the mainstream, even though we should’ve been discussing it from the beginning based on circumstantial evidence. It’s plainly evident that allowing these platforms to regulate our speech in this manner is poisonous. But whatever it takes to silence Trump and his ilk, I guess.
Edit: I see I’ve been downvoted for this. I suggest people look at the facts themselves and decide whether a lab leak should’ve ever been dismissed as a crockpot theory.
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
I don't think it is unreasonable to wait for direct evidence of guilt before signing off on blaming someone for millions of deaths. That is a heavy accusation that needs to come with a degree of confidence that goes beyond the normal conspiracy theory approach of "just asking questions".
Direct evidence of guilt is going to be hard considering the CPC’s reticence to allow an independent investigation, which honestly is another point in my opinion towards a lab leak. But regardless, regardless! When you combine the following facts:
1. There was a lab in Wuhan studying bat-related coronaviruses in gain of function research.
2. The virus was well adapted to humans at the beginning of the pandemic, very uncharacteristic of a zoonotic spillover.
3. The virus had no evidence of a natural origin then and it still doesn’t despite ones being found for MERS and SARS-1 within a few months.
4. Of the first 40 or so cases, not all could be definitively linked to the wet market that the CPC said the virus originated in.
How could we not take a lab leak seriously? All 4 of those facts were true even last year, though 3 was a bit weaker since we’d only had a few months since case 0 and not the year and a half we do now. Our social media platforms should NEVER have been silencing this debate, and it’s absolutely ridiculous that its still even remotely controversial to bring it up. Calling it a conspiracy theory, when the questions I’m asking are profound and grounded in science that’s well agreed upon, does nobody any favors.
Edit:
For those who don’t read my original source, Daszak is the head of an organization EcoHealth Alliance that directly partnered with the WIV to study gain of function using bat-originated coronaviruses.
No, because your accusation wasn't that they simply impacted global discourse. Your accusation was that they maliciously silenced discourse as an effort to avoid their own personal culpability. Where is the evidence for that?
All four facts you list are circumstantial and you even admit that one of them wasn't truly known at the time this theory was first being popularized. To repeat myself, I don't think it is unreasonable to want more than that before leveling these accusations, especially when it is known ahead of time that some people will use your "questions" to support their own political and anti-scientific motives.
The evidence I listed is so strong that it’s now being seriously considered by many scientists, including Fauci who originally said it was far fetched. Saying its circumstantial to deride its importance is anti-scientific. And I’d clarify that even last year it was remarkable that the incredibly effective Chinese govt couldn’t produce evidence of a biological spillover 4 to 5 months after the first reported cases.
I’m not saying any of these scientists were directly responsible. Was gain of function research irresponsible? Probably, yes. Should these scientists go to prison? Of course not, not without evidence of bad intent. But should we at least have been these discussions last year? Yes! That’s all I’m saying.
Edit: I will point out that there is some serious evidence against Daszak for authoring that Lancet letter and declaring no conflict of interest when his org was partnering with WIV, which was the lab coming under scrutiny. That alone does deserve some serious investigation into why he’d lie about that. Him and any scientists who signed the letter who were also involved with Daszak or WIV.
It is perfectly reasonable for the media to put more trust in the word of scientists in comparison to the words of the last President due to the literally thousands of times he has publicly lied for a variety of motives.
>I’m not saying any of these scientists were directly responsible. Was gain of function research irresponsible? Probably, yes. Should these scientists go to prison? Of course not, not without evidence of bad intent. But should we at least have been these discussions last year? Yes! That’s all I’m saying.
You certainly seemed to imply "bad intent" in your original comment when you said the following:
>Members of the scientific community with a potential culpability in a lab leak helped silence discourse by framing it as a political issue as opposed to a scientific one
We have a complete aberration in viral behavior that defines all known facts of how viruses jump from species to species. It's an extraordinary exception that we haven't seen in any other similar virus.
We have no known a natural origin, went over that already.
The strongest fact may actually be the last one. A majority 40 victims could not be in any way linked to the place that the CPC claims the virus had started. That's actually really, really extraordinary. Think about what this means - there's either missing viral victims in the early outbreak (a whole lot of them) or there's transmission vectors we missed. So why should we default to the natural origin as the default explanation and call everything else a conspiracy theory, which you're continuing to do?
So yeah, when you take all 4 of those facts together and try to explain them with a natural origin hypothesis, it just falls apart. If you frame them from the perspective of a lab leak, it's far easier to link them together and explain them.
The mainstream media shouldn't have taken the scientists at face value when their conclusions were baseless! There was even less evidence for a natural origin than a lab leak, but we accepted it as common fact! It's not as if a natural origin is the default explanation we should fall back on when we have no other explanation - we need to have probable cause to declare that and establish anything else as a conspiracy theory that early on. It was irresponsible on the scientists involved and it was irresponsible of the media. And it was even worse for the tech platforms to silence people for daring to talk about this just because Trump said it, and everything Trump says is bad.
Yeah, that statement is still true, by the way. Peter Daszak had a conflict of interest, lied about it, and now it looks like his conclusions were wrong. So, yeah. That's at least one actor with some "bad intent".
>The strongest fact may actually be the last one. A majority 40 victims could not be in any way linked to the place that the CPC claims the virus had started. That's actually really, really extraordinary. Think about what this means - there's either missing viral victims in the early outbreak (a whole lot of them) or there's transmission vectors we missed. So why should we default to the natural origin as the default explanation and call everything else a conspiracy theory, which you're continuing to do?
You are mixing different theories together and the evidence for and against them. You need to keep the specific evidence matched with the specific theory. The lab theory is not "the virus didn't originate in the market". The lab theory is the virus originated in the lab. Therefore victims not being linked to the market is not evidence of the lab theory. How many of the victims are linked to the lab? That would be evidence in support of the lab theory?
>Yeah, that statement is still true, by the way. Peter Daszak had a conflict of interest, lied about it, and now it looks like his conclusions were wrong. So, yeah. That's at least one actor with some "bad intent".
And yet again you are assuming intent not proving intent. Someone being wrong doesn't guarantee that were intentionally wrong. Someone not disclosing a potential conflict doesn't guarantee that a conflict exists and is impacting their behavior.
To your second point, if there are things that cant be explained about the theory using available evidence we need to conduct an independent investigation. The CPC is not allowing us to do this. It raises questions as to why.
And to your last point, Daszak directly lied about having no conflict with the research in question, it wasn’t a failure to disclose without prior prerogative. It was a direct lie.
I understand your skepticism and I’m not even saying that WIV was the source. I’m trying to present you an argument that shows it’s just not that outrageous of a thing to raise questions about. We need to be able to have these discussions. The original linked article was about censorship, and I hope you’ll agree that we need to be able to talk about these things without being accused of racism or having an agenda.
If there are other writings or speeches from these 2 people that were talking about the lab leak theory where they were being racist, I would love to see it, but I don't think it exists (I'm happy to be corrected).
[0] https://www.cotton.senate.gov/news/press-releases/-cotton-op...
Pompeo also got into multiple spats with other diplomats for specifically pushing people to call it the "Wuhan virus" in order to deflect blame towards China. Promotion of terms such as that likely resulted in more racial tension in the US.
I didn't say the theory was only pushed by racists and I'm not going to call someone like Pompeo a racist just for supporting this theory, but he certainly fits in the opportunists category I mentioned in my previous comment. He clearly pushed the theory for political gain not some allegiance to finding the truth.
The fairest characterization would be to say both share some weight. We would expect China to have contained the outbreak to minimize the impact to itself and other nations, but we also expect the US to protect us from foreign viral/bacterial agents as a matter of national security.
I've seen no evidence of increased asian-related racial tensions aside from black people cold-cocking more Asians than usual. I don't think black street criminals are taking their cues from Trump or Mike Pompeo.
For people talking about th lab leak theory, I found another piece I remember from the time from April 3 (18 days prior to Cotton's piece): https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-china-tra...
If it later turns out that aliens HAVE landed but on a diplomatic mission not an invasion force you are still a crackpot who was partially right not by dint of sagacity but more or less by accident.
The lab story was usually promoted as part of a wider narrative where covid was either portrayed as a deliberate attack by the Chinese or the accidental release of a bioweapon a narrative designed not to explicate but to distract one from laying blame on the Trump administration for its incompetent response. It frequently mixed hypothesis, conjecture, and outright lies.
You can probably be forgiven for having not known there might be a useful hypothesis when it was largely being promoted by liars with corrupt motivation mixed with lies.
Their argument doesn't seem relevant to the policy discussed in the article at all.
Besides, free expression is protected by the Indian constitution, so it's hardly for the government to decide whether Indians buy into "the Californian Elite's warped ideas."
But while Facebook does not constitute “true” free expression, it does allow a very large number of people to voice their opinions that will lose their voice in its absence.
This ban isn’t because of some noble notions of protecting the public discourse. To the contrary, it seems the intention is to suppress it. It’s no secret that the Modi government is irked by criticisms of it on Twitter; it attempted to censor hundreds of tweets critical of its handling of the pandemic. Whatever the government may claim as its reasons for the (currently hypothetical) ban, it seems awfully convenient that it gets to remove the platforms which so many use to voice dissent.
One of the benefits of social media platforms is that they insulate dissenters through anonymity, and the law precipitating this ban also threatens to undermine this power by making these platforms responsible for tracing the originators of information it deems unacceptable. This is not a country where you want the government to have this power. To give you an example of what could go wrong, people in Uttar Pradesh (an Indian state) have been harassed by cops just for asking for oxygen on Twitter and Instagram for their relatives dying of COVID-19. This was because the state government wanted to cover up oxygen shortages. You can just about expect that through this law, the government will be able to find and punish those spreading what it considers wrongthink.
To your point, Indian public discourse is hardly "controlled by the moral pieties of the American elite class." Although there are in absolute numbers millions of Indians on these platforms, they are hardly a blip in the Indian population. Further, millions of Indians including myself also espouse Western values and subscribe to the “American social order” that comments in this thread implicitly refer to. Given that India is a free country, it isn’t for the government to decide whether this is good or bad, any more than the government should be able to decide which god I should worship or which school my kids should go to. India is already a massively heterogeneous country; no Indian is being forced to buy into “the moral pieties of the American elite class,” since these social media networks are strictly optional. But banning them will force people who believe similar things to find alternate places to express them, likely local alternatives where their views will be penalized. Personally, I use Twitter and Instagram to engage with people from around the world, and this will effectively restrict my ability to communicate with many of them.
You can read more about the chilling effects of these laws in this post [1] by the Internet Freedom Foundation, an Indian nonprofit. (One interesting byproduct of the fact that these laws require originators of information to be traceable is that they effectively constitute a ban on encryption, which I’m sure HN can appreciate is Not Good And Also Very Bad.) I don't expect that these laws will stand, since the reasoning behind them seems blatantly unconstitutional and contrary to the Indian constitution's protections for privacy and free expression.
[1] https://internetfreedom.in/pound-the-alarm-the-clock-strikes...
https://twitter.com/internetfreedom/status/13967435539050864...
I don't agree with some points mentioned by the IFF org, Couple listed as example, I still think banning them would be a bad step.
> Significant SMIs must enable automated tools (basically AI tech) to identify + take down child sexual abuse material. This can lead to function creep - extreme tech measures contemplated for a limited and serious use will start being utilized for other issues.
How else would you take it down. Hire people to sift through messages? Don't companies already do this using? Are these companies limited now by anything from using these measures given their finances and scale?
> SM platforms don't generate content - you do. They are simply intermediaries who host it. This distinction helps them avoid liability for your content.
True, then why would SM butt in as arbitrator of truth.
The irony.
This is because fake news being published by the ruling government is being tagged as manipulated media. Calls to violence by the ruling government is also being removed. Pseudoscience covid19 cires by folks from and associated with the ruling party are also being tagged.
I disagree because
1) in this specific case, it seems to be part of India suppressing information, and IMO India's suppression is a much larger issue than Facebook/Twitter/Instagram propagating controlled information (their suppression is different because there are other sites, vs. India cracks down on those other sites).
2) in the more general case, banning Facebook/Twitter/Instagram is controversial and there are more moderate approaches which are at least more practical. For example, you can better educate the public, or convince them to join your own site. It would be hard, sure, but forcing the public to quit Facebook/Twitter/Instagram without full-out rioting would be harder. Heck, you can "teach" children in schools that those sites are bad and the information there is wrong - I'm not arguing you should actually do that, but it would seriously threaten them while technically preserving free speech.
If you aren't actually arguing for a full-scale ban (it was implied), then I 100% agree with what you said.
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Anyways, the main point of the above comment is to show that I'm glad such a great opinion is not only posted but it was top comment (unfortunately not anymore). It took me a long time to actually find a good argument against it even though it intuitively seemed so "wrong". I really wish this was more common on forums.
Of course government censorship is bad. I just have no sympathy to big techs who censor others.
As for examples of how social media companies in particular shape public opinion, consider how Twitter banned Zero Hedge for many months for alleging the virus may have leaked from a lab. Now this hypothesis is mainstream, potentially only because it no longer a political tool in an intense election year. A more recent example of opinion shaping/propaganda is Facebook classifying and limiting visibility of comments that express hesitancy about vaccines (https://www.projectveritas.com/news/breaking-facebook-whistl...). The plain reality is that these companies have government-like power in censoring and shaping public opinion, but are only accountable to themselves. That should be unacceptable to Americans, and doubly so to other nations.