the talk of legality is nonsense, because there are jurisdictions where anything can be made legal.
The vast majority of the world will be better off with a twitter/fb etc cut down to size, and the current massive power of social media networks being reduced.
That's exactly what state sponsored media, dictatorships and big media conglomerates want to promote. Having layman question if social media is really good or not is great for these people.
People forget so fast [0]
[0] https://www.npr.org/2021/05/04/993605477/as-arab-spring-unfo...
However, I am not sure the Arab Spring was a net positive. Tunisia turned out ok, but Libya is still a disaster. Egypt went from Dictator to Islamist Party to Military Dictatorship. Syria has seen massive death and destruction and Assad is still clinging to power. Yemen is involved in a nasty civil war.
I think many in the West take a too rosy view of the Arab Spring. For the average Middle Easterner in those countries, the Arab Spring has been a disaster.
and once the change is set in motion, no one is able to predict what the next actions would be.
There is no "cutting down to size", these sites are popular as the function of individual choices, short of authoritarianism you can't dictate which sites people decide to use.
I think by now one has to be extremely naive and uninformed to claim that only individual user choices are the factor in whether or not a social network can prosper.
People bring up Parler as if the political context of the very recent (at the time) attack on the U.S. capitol had no bearing on how things transpired.
> I think by now one has to be extremely naive and uninformed to claim that only individual user choices are the factor in whether or not a social network can prosper.
I'll have to replay that "naive and uninformed" label back at you if you seriously believe that sites like Parler are unpopular because of big tech collusion rather than the type of content cultivated by such sites.
BTW, another fact - most of the planning for US Capitol protest that is known about actually happened on Facebook, and livestreaming the even also happened on Facebook and Youtube. Of course, nobody shut them down for that.
Try reading my post again because I never made any such claim.
> most of the planning for US Capitol protest that is known about actually happened on Facebook
I never stated otherwise (besides calling it an attack, not a "protest"). It seems to me you have fixated on a certain perspective and are projecting that on to my comment.
These sites are popular as the function of individual choices, short of authoritarianism you can't dictate which sites people decide to use.
In fact, however, Big Tech oligopolists very much can dictate that people won't be able to use sites they want to use (despite the fact you personally don't like the content there). If I decide to use Parler but Parler is shut down by Amazon, then it's very much not a product of my individual choice.
> I never stated otherwise
And again, you said:
People bring up Parler as if the political context of the very recent (at the time) attack on the U.S. capitol had no bearing on how things transpired.
What transpired is that some people involved in Capitol protest on Jan 6 were using Parler, and many more were using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc. Parler was shut down - very much not a product of individual choice of anyone but Jeff Bezos maybe - and neither of other platforms, who played bigger role in the same event, didn't even bat an eye. So your mentioning the events at the US Capitol only goes to illustrate my point, not yours - the idea that we somehow have a free market here where people are free to choose whatever platform they like according to their individual choice is very much delusional. Some platforms have more freedoms than others, and some are subjected to strictest scrutiny - and sometimes shut down - despite the preferences of their users. That's my perspective, which aligns with known facts.
Try reading my post again because I never made any such claim.
You can invest in education and empower people to make informed choices about the source or value of the information. This is an investment governments go out of their way to avoid because it just so happens the same lack of education that gets people hooked up on low quality content is what makes them easily manipulated by the political class.
It is extremely hard to have a 2nd youtube, reddit or facebook... because of the network effects
This is a subjective distinction, but setting aside subjectivity for the sake of argument, it's a user-driven video sharing website, it's pretty similar to YouTube in many ways, but the fact that it is not synonymous is exactly my point - TikTok created something that differentiated itself from YouTube and so people flocked to it, and the fact that YouTube was already popular didn't diminish TikTok's accessibility nor did TikTok's explosion in popularity come at the cost of YouTube's popularity. TikTok created something attractive and people made individual choices to use it.
a better comparison is the conservative leaning 'rumble' - without google's massive support, it stands no chance of winning against youtube.
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parler was the alternative to twitter and fb, and see how it was cut down for no real reason, though at the time, the entire media made it seem as if it was the most logical thing to do.
later one finds that there is more extremist stuff in fb and twitter..
also, it was interesting how all the biggies - Amazon, Google, Apple, Visa all joined hands to squelch Parler an opponent of their enemy (for ad dollars) Twitter...
speaking loosely, this is quite an example of a cartel.
tiktok and youtube have essentially the same core functionality: sharing user generated video content. YouTube even has a "Shorts" section that is entirely composed of tiktok style videos wherein most of the videos are actually ripped from tiktok.
> parler was the alternative to twitter and fb, and see how it was cut down for no real reason
Parler is an alternative to twitter and fb, it exists today, it was not "cut down" https://apps.apple.com/us/app/parler/id1402727988.
The furor over Parler was manufactured outrage, Parler was suspended from the app stores because they didn't do what the app stores asked, a very common occurrence, we could all be so lucky as to have that much publicity surrounding the suspension of our apps from the notoriously capricious app stores.
> also, it was interesting how all the biggies - Amazon, Google, Apple, Visa all joined hands to squelch Parler an opponent of their enemy (for ad dollars) Twitter...
It's not that interesting, it was an obvious reaction to Parler openly courting extremism after there had just been an attack on the U.S. capitol. Parler made themselves toxic and nobody wanted to do business with them because they were extremely unpopular. Anyway, I suspect we probably won't agree on the details of Parler, but there's no disputing that Parler's temporary shutdown was under extremely unusual circumstances.
HTTP is a request-response rather than content broadcast or publish-subscribe protocol. Presumably you could develop a publish-subscribe protocol with low-latency encryption support embedded in protocol layer similar to QUIC.
> if fediverse style apps take off the problem would just move to the most popular nodes on that network.
So suppose the Department of Energy provides a public cloud which people can get a network address to hold files for them similar to how they can get a Post Office box number at the post office. Except when you put a file in your own PO box the PO will make free copies of the file for others on your behalf which are subscribed to your PO box without destroying the original copy.
This would really just create a lower-level protocol or new number system for publish-subscribe content. It would compete with the other ARPAnet protocols such as TCP.
Tim Berners-Lee might get it right this next time around?
How does that even work? Who gets to decide which topics or points of view are off-the-table for normal social-media moderation? I guess you’re saying government figures and major political parties could decide unilaterally. We’ll have to repeal the first amendment, anyway.
Billion dollar companies are not persons, they should not have the same rights at all. At that size they start to mingle heavily with politicians. They want politicians to enact the right policies, and in return those politicians wants the company to censor the right people or fund their campaigns. Just because there is no formal agreement here doesn't mean that the companies aren't just the extended arm of the government and vice versa.
Twitter is different: It is close to a common carrier, and you can't just shut down one side of the political discussion. If you do, you'll have the appearance of free discussion, when in reality you are exercising totalitarian control.
That is more harmful for democracy than occasional idiots dressing up in Viking costumes and entering the capitol (of course, riots of the opposing spectrum can be safely promoted on Twitter anyway).
It isn’t at all. Twitter’s business model is getting people to join and engage with the network, and to that end they broadcast, moderate, curate, promote, remove, suggest messages based on the content of the messages. If we pass some law that forces it to be a simple message or feed delivery platform, twitter as a business is done.
> totalitarian control
Twitter running its business the way it wants is normal western freedom. Forcing twitter to broadcast the messages of the leader of the government would be totalitarian control.
It goes back to the conversations expressed elsewhere in this post about twitter being an utility, de-facto.
If it is given that status, then there are some expectations that come with it.
Once a company takes a political position, then it cannot appeal on 'moral' or other subjective grounds.
> How does that even work?
I don't know... maybe an entity like the Swiss? Not sure if it is a good example, being a country itself? The reason people seem to be ok with the presence of the country is that it is strictly neutral, and both sides protected it.
> Who gets to decide which topics or points of view are off-the-table for normal social-media moderation?
How about no one?
> I guess you’re saying government figures and major political parties could decide unilaterally. We’ll have to repeal the first amendment, anyway.
The 1st amendment is for the US exclusively. This version of the Freedom of speech is a distinctively American concept, and for that reason, twitter actually finds some tepid support from conservatives.
Each country is sovereign in the laws that govern their land, unless they breach some major crimes, and thats when the UN steps in. Nothing new here.
Parties within a nation are all subject to the same laws with established responsibilities and rights with established procedures for settling differences.
The fact that some platforms choose to exclude a minority of players from using said platforms to spread ideas that the majority finds evil and harmful is a feature not a bug. There are established laws that protect actual rights and privileges. Just none that would privilege you to stand on others property and shout hateful offensive things.
Get your own bullhorn and stop trying to make laws demanding your neighbor lend you his.
What is being discussed here is Twitter, an American company in relation to countries like India, etc.
> to spread ideas that the majority finds evil and harmful
Who is the majority? And how did twitter find it? If twitter lets a ranking system similar to HN/reddit, and content below a particular ratio is hidden, that might be fine I guess. it would be a mob, I would'nt like it, but atleast, its uniform.
> Get your own bullhorn and stop trying to make laws demanding your neighbor lend you his.
What does that even mean? Is twitter my neighbour? Do I, a ordinary citizen have similar clout?
In a way, I see twitter as a bully (a loud bullhorn) who was terrorizing the neighborhood one after the other. He walks into this one, where there is a stronger bully (with laws that have teeth) and slaps him silly.
This bully now cries, and yeah, not getting much sympathy from the folks he bullied.
it is also coinciding with a period of extreme distrust of the media, wherein, if some thing is spreading outside of the media, the position being taken is that it must be true, whereas one would expect the opposite to happen.
The media and the government must introspect their roles in leading to this situation.
Many lump twitter as being part of the media itself, because of its proactive actions.
Because the media is presenting reality in a fashion vastly closer to objective truth the liars are obliged to explain why their positions and the medias differ and the most trivial response is to continue lying and call the media liars. The liars audience has chosen their own alternative facts over objective reality and there is absolutely nothing the media could have done to prevent it.
and the other half comes out smelling like roses?
Let me ask you this, as atleast you know there are 2 universes (which many do not ):
- Do you sample both of the universes and make up your mind?
- Do you know which direction the media thats most accessible (otherwise called as mainstream) leans politically?
- Do you lean that same direction yourself?
- if so, it is that side that needs to seek out the alternate universe and figure if there is any truth to it. ( theoretically, there can be right?)
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The people on the right are generally exposed to the mainstream media, and therefore, and also consume alternate media from the right, and at least, get to hear both sides.
The people on the left, on average, simply do not do this
I HAVE sampled both sides mostly because I had an interest in watching the crazy. The far side of the fence from the "liberal media" is sadly stunted men swimming in a cloud of misinformation so thick that escape appears difficult. Explaining one wrong thing nearly always involves dealing with not only present issues but prior preconceptions.
Although these men may possess in some areas of their life judgement, character, values but they are guided by not only fake information, but fake resources who will not only at need feed them more misinformation but has poisoned them against sources apt to contradict their line of bullshit.
Militarily, invading Switzerland would have been far more work than it was worth.
Well, it could work similar to the existing and uncontroversial laws, that are already widespread on certain communication companies.
Specifically, we could take common carrier laws, which already apply to certain communication companies, and extend them.
Those laws are uncontroversial, and established. So it is silly to claim that such a thing is unconventional.
> We’ll have to repeal the first amendment
No we won't. Common carrier laws already exist, and we didn't have to repeal the 1st amendment to have them.
The rest of your question I consider invalid. Companies do not have civil rights [1]. Hell, it's in the definition of the word:
"relating to ordinary citizens and their concerns, as distinct from military or ecclesiastical matters"
But clearly the existing common carrier regulations don't infringe on the "civil rights" of the companies they apply to, so even accepting your false premise, this is very straightforward.
[1] or at least, they didn't until extremely recently https://www.inquirer.com/business/hobby-lobby-citizens-unite...
In general, conservatives believe in markets, and if they happen to grow to a particular size with these constraints, so be it.
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> If you look at the actual speech that is being disincentivized this looks objectively terrible in our present context.
I'll give one example to see what the reaction ought to be.
A private citizen makes an otherwise legal speech at a political meeting - and youtube and all media wipe it out of the internet last week.
Regardless of the private citizen being Trump and the party being Republicans, a liberal ( as the word used to mean before) should have been up against such censorship.
'Moderation' does not come into play in this example, but there is nothing specific to moderate really in what is essentially a semi-private meeting of free people.
As an example, There are several newspapers in India, which still continue to post opinions critical of the government. There is a system of courts still, sort of working, and would step in if things got too bad.
I think a good parallel might be TikTok in the US, Trump was exploring banning the platform toward the end of his term without a particularly large pushback from the general populace (though a whole bunch of pushback from tech literate folks). You can use excuses like that a time or two without raising too many eyebrows, but once it becomes a pattern people get angry.
Having more smaller platforms makes it harder to effectively accomplish any censorship since your few shutdown freebies won't significantly impact the ability for political opponents to communicate with the public.