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Comment by amanaplanacanal | Hacker News Reader

Media owners have always used their ownership to push their own version of reality. I guess the difference now is that we have allowed so much concentration of media ownership in so few hands. Antitrust is pretty much dead from what I can tell.

Or is this just the current story? Maybe media has always been as concentrated as it is now, we just didn’t notice.

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Public social media is really fundamentally different from traditional media because it functions as the public square in a way that traditional media never did.

As such, it needs to be evaluated and regulated as the novel thing that it is. It's not a newspaper and it's not a telephone company, and it's time to stop trying to apply old regulatory arguments and mindsets to the new situation.

So far, attempts to regulate social media show barely an understanding of the problem at hand, but I hope we can recognize that there needs to be defined a novel regulatory framework to prevent tragedy of the commons or heavy handed ideological censorship on public social media networks

In the meantime, the value of privately owned and operated, and invite-only social networks (like setting up your own Mattermost or IRC servers) will continue to go up in relation to public networks, because only in tight knit private communities can anyone actually speak their mind.

I’m curious as to why this was downvoted.

Is it because they disagreed with some of the opinions? I was under the impression that’s not what down voting was for here.

Personally I think it is worth considering a social media platform, once it reaches a certain scale and depending on how content is distributed, as a “public square” or at least more towards a “public square” on the continuum between a private community and a large scale public one.

Your Undivided Attention has an episode which touches on this: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/27-wont-you-be-my-neighbo.... The rest of their series has some interesting perspectives as well.

Could some one who down voted this elaborate on their reasoning?

I can no longer edit the above post but it looks like the parent post I was referring to is no longer down voted.

Compaining about downvotes or the reasons behind downvotes is a reliable way to attract downvotes. The is expressly mentioned in the site guidlines:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Understood, thanks

Social media also has tremendous potebtial for manipulation. If Fox News or New York Times prints false allegations, they and their brand are on the hook.

But Facebook can just boost someome who holds that opinion, you would have the inpression that millions of independant people are thinking that, and would never know who is pulling the strings.

Social media been doing that since nearly the start, though mostly for advertising purposes via "influencers." Read more about some of the early growth hacks (which have included lots of faked engagement) for most media companies to get a sense of this.

It's clear to people who were online since the early days how much things have been changed both artificially and naturally (Eternal September).

One of the problem of such networks is permanency of something that we still treat as spoken word. If posts were ephemeral, they would present much less of an attack surface for various digital mobs.

Maybe there should be an option for users to limit their comment lifetime to N minutes. With N starting somewhere around 5. Of course, you can do this manually, but a semiautomatic mechanism would work better.

Self-destructing messages only really work if you trust every person who reads them AND their devices. They can somewhat limit exposure (especially in obscurity) but also introduce the risk of establishing unwarranted perceptions of security.

People were always able to reproduce things you said—by repeating the words.

They can even claim you said something you didn't say!

That is true but I think it can be misleading to apply this kind of logic when technology has fundamentally changed the economics of this kind of recording. For example, it’s always been perfectly legal to station a police officer next to the road and have them write down the license plate numbers of cars on public roads. Does this mean we should allow law enforcement the unregulated ability to deploy automated license plate reader systems everywhere to track all of our movements in real time?

Your perspective is a cryptographic one, where most flaws are fatal. My proposal was a softer one: reduction of the "I met someone I hate, let me dig in his ancient comment history to get him fired" risk. Self-destructive messages are far from perfect in this regard, but still useful.

If self-destructing messages become the norm, you will see numerous efforts to log and cache those messages for journalistic, political, historic and economic reasons. This is why I made the second half of my comment. Self-destruction relies on obscurity of the practice to work and can create false feelings of security.

The current situation is technically better than it was 50 years ago. However, there is a big scale that goes from perfect totalitarianism to perfect freedom and it is pretty much always a good idea to be applying pressure in the freedom direction because big institutions (like governments) naturally attract people who want totalitarianism.

And the first amendment is a really good idea. It deserves a spirited defence no matter what the historical situation was. Media companies shouldn't be looking to or pressured governments to decide what is and isn't acceptable on their platform. If the ideal is impossible then the question of how close they can get must be asked.

In this case the answer is "much better than this". YouTube is setting up for more long term harm than good with its policies. Maybe even short term. I don't care if they like it or not, academics are exactly the sort of people who we should be allowing to voice "crazy" and "dangerous" ideas.

This has moved a long way on from when the coordinated takedown of Alex Jones was a controversy. Where is the line here?

> Antitrust is pretty much dead from what I can tell

It has just been defined to mean 'thing that harms consumer prices'.

The question is: who is the consumer? The idea that Facebook users == consumers might not be right. Perhaps the real consumers are the corporations that pay for ads. In that case, some price fixing might be out there. I doubt that Facebook does its best to keep the ad price on the level of a perfectly competitive market.

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