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Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

I know plenty of people who don’t have Twitter accounts and live extremely normal lives. Can you say the same thing about electricity?

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Google, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter are all private entities. Let's say they don't like the Democratic party. They can single handedly cause a media block out and be able to unfairly influence the elections, view of the world etc. You won't be able to find a single search result or a speech or tweet.

In this context we can't afford to treat these companies as private entities. They should not be able to block/ban whoever they want just because they feel threatened and challenged by their views.

You say “single handedly”, but you just named five different services by three different companies. Do you see the problem here?

Are all the radios broken? Do newspapers not exist? Has TV vanished? Fox News alone has millions of viewers every week. There are hundreds of other outlets from which people get their news.

You really think Twitter can unilaterally erase something from public consciousness?

This is taking away the very obvious point: at some point, lack of participation alone is seen as a sign of nonconformity. Which itself has caused enough issues for individuals while at least "making it seem" as if the majority are okay with the status quo.

It's one thing to be denied access to these platforms. It's another thing entirely to see a specific opinion pushed on the young and the less critical, trickling down to actual demands, rules and restrictions. These platforms are powerful enough to do so. You can find many examples of misinformation translating to demands in CS and IT alone, and these are still relatively harmless.

"single-handedly" is a red herring. None of the listed entities needs to band up with another to have a great effect on political or social outcomes.

You’re moving the goalposts. There are plenty of entities that can unilaterally have that great effect. That doesn’t mean they’re so vital to public wellbeing that the government needs to take them over or whatever it is we’re talking about.

I didn't set the goalposts :) I just noticed that there is a miscommunication.

The miscommunication is that you presume "That doesn’t mean", whereas the whole discussion is about whether that's desired or not.

I actually don’t think giant corporations are desirable. But that’s not the discussion people are having here. They’re claiming that Twitter is so indispensable, so woven into the fabric of everyday life that it’s tantamount to a public utility, like electricity or sewage.

Which is a perfectly reasonable claim. Rejecting it out of hand doesn't make anyone wiser.

Okay, but you’re acting as though it’s the same claim as “Twitter has a lot of power”.

I’ve explained my reasoning against the utility claim. If you want to defend it, do so. It might be reasonable, but you haven’t offered anything other than substituting it with a different argument.

It's not the same claim as being indispensible, but it's the same claim as being extremely vowen into everyday life. I think that claim reflects what is actually being discussed better. What I offer is not a defense of the claim, but a request to consider the claim seriously.

In the public utility metaphor, utilities were not defined until they became defined. There's no reason to discount a possible category of "utilithing" that shares some properties with the existing one but not others.

It might be that I missed your explanation (was it in a sibling thread?), but in this thread I don't see a consideration for that idea. "They are not so vital" is not an argument against it, but your personal value judgement.

It’s in my root comment in this thread. I’m not giving my personal value judgment — it’s the value judgment of the ~75% of adults in the US who don’t use Twitter. It’s a real stretch to say that something less than a quarter of the population uses is “vital” for everyday life. How many Americans do you think go a month without electricity or sewage?

> it’s the value judgment of the ~75% of adults in the US who don’t use Twitter.

So 5% of all adults? Yes, I just made up that number, just like you did.

Why would I make up a number that’s easily verifiable? https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media...

You served the wrong number: this is the share of population on Twitter. I asked about the share of non-Twitterers sharing your values.

If you don’t use Twitter at all, like over three quarters of adults in the US, you de facto don’t think it’s vital for every day life.

You seem to think about "vital for every individual" when no one said that but you. There were various weaker versions of "powerful" considered.

This discussion isn’t going anywhere; you just keep reusing the same old motte and bailey. Have a nice day!

Well, I tried to save you from fighting a view that no one represents. That only brings further misunderstanding. Good luck.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the majority of those companies already did that with the Hunter Biden laptop story.

If only Fox News is covering something and you’re not allowed to talk about it on Twitter, Facebook, etc. then there’s no effective way for it to reach everyone who doesn’t watch Fox.

Right, which is fine. I don’t watch Fox because I don’t like the content Fox produces. You seem to be interested in turning Twitter into some sort of firehose wherein I’m forced to consume Fox content anyway.

I would say we need less echo chambers, not more. You probably don't think the people that only watch Fox are well informed, and you'd be right.

It’s their prerogative to not be well informed. I certainly don’t think it’s right to force them to watch CNN.

Where does this end, anyway? Should we also force people to consume OAN or InfoWars? Can I get my blog on this required reading list?

And there's already clear evidence of collusion to censor certain entities between those companies. It's hardly a "what if?" scenario.

Me too. But they have FB accounts, IG accounts, TikTok accounts and so on. The share of people without any kind of social media presence or consumption is shrinking everyday.

Sure. So do we make all of those “public squares”? How many “public squares” can we have before it becomes clear that they’re not?

Really? That question is presuming the outcome and has no place in a good faith discussion.

Does HN count as social media? If not, I haven't used social media in some years. And to see me on the street, you wouldn't even know I'm a weirdo.

Not long ago twitter, telephony/mobiles and electricity didn't exist, and people lived normal lives - but over time "normal" is redefined.

The issue isn't twitter, but online discourse in general, and what happens when it becomes "normal". There is also an issue of choice - it is normal not to read books, as many people do not; yet I wouldn't accept this means you can deprive people who want to read of a library.

Right, and not long before that didn’t have electricity before too. In 2022 in the US, living without electricity is very abnormal. Living without Twitter is… not.

If your issue is online discourse in general, then we’re in a good place: it’s very easy to set up your own website and distribute whatever content you want without needing permission from corporations.

The post you are responding to was talking about today, now, not "not long ago". Today, now, not having twitter is totally normal.

If you think it might be a necessity in the future, then we can talk about it then, if you're right.

By "then" it might be too late - lots of discussions leverage "too late to change now". This is how climate change is in such a horrible state.

Also, who says when we "are there"? Maybe we are already?

I don't think it's worth entertaining every prognostication on the off chance that it may eventually one day be true.

As you mentioned, some of them have a convincing case behind them, though, like climate change. Those are worth entertaining, IMO

The implication here is that this doesn't have a convincing case behind it? Then when would you act? There are already plenty of monopolies and "lobbies" in America on the basis of the same efficiency (not acting until it's a "problem") - maybe proactive caution around big business should be the norm given all the historical abuses, from beef to chemicals to medicine to tobacco?

  > The implication here is that this doesn't have a convincing case behind it?

The explication, I guess, yeah. I was and am explicitly saying that, yes.

  > Then when would you act?

When the prediction that this may become a issue becomes more convincing, somewhere between where it's at now, and climate change, which already has a convincing case that it WILL become a issue (nay, IS one!)

  > maybe proactive caution around big business should be the norm given all the historical abuses

Agreed, proactive caution towards things for which there is a convincing case that it is or may become an issue

> I know plenty of people who don’t have Twitter accounts and live extremely normal lives.

Even this I'd say is a stretch. If they're consuming any kind of news or contemporary entertainment, Twitter is absolutely impacting their lives. The degree to which it quickly propagates groupthink and shared narratives is difficult to overstate.

Do you think pre-Internet mass media — one-way communication from corporation to consumer — does not propagate groupthink and shared narratives?

We live in a society, so of course popular things will have nth-order effects on everyone’s lives. TikTok, Facebook, Fox News, the New York Times, Disney, Nintendo, Steam, Itch, Bandcamp, your friend’s podcast. It’s extremely unclear to me why Twitter should be singled out here.

> Do you think pre-Internet mass media — one-way communication from corporation to consumer — does not propagate groupthink and shared narratives?

It certainly did, but not as quickly, and not in a separate channel from the media itself.

Put bluntly: today's journalists, entertainers, and influencers can very quickly arrive at the same (sometimes factually incorrect) narrative through following the same in-group of people on Twitter, which then results in "real" news, entertainment, and other media being produced that share the same groupthink and narrative. This can happen in hours, even minutes.

But it's not clear to your average consumer that what's dictating the stories on nightly news, Saturday Night Live, or the late night shows is actually Twitter, and the ease with which the same people can create the same bubbles without explicitly coordinating.

Size. Market penetration of Twitter is orders of magnitude above that of Nintendo or your friend. You should rather ask: how does influence scale relative to size?

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