I feel like we’ve completely lost the plot when we’re starting to invite government partial Internet shutdowns as a good idea. This is a totalitarian government play.
Governments have been working on regulating platforms. Every time they get close, there’s outrage when people realize what it means for them.
Age regulations are the best example. Every time the topic comes up there is a lot of support for government regulation of social media by age.
Then every time there comes an actual attempt at government regulation or even self-regulation by the companies, everyone goes ballistic when they realize what that regulation means.
This topic is awash in ideas that regulation will come in like a scalpel that only touches something that won’t affect anything we like, only hurt some companies in some specific way that doesn’t take anything away from us. This notion doesn’t survive contact with reality.
That’s how we get these short sighted comments inviting the government to come shut down parts of the internet. I bet the person who asked for that assumed it would be perfectly targeted at sites they don’t need or use, leaving their version of the internet untouched. They never imagined the government might scope creep it to start shutting down communications they didn’t like.
Maybe the people of " Age regulations are the best example. Every time the topic comes up there is a lot of support for government regulation of social media by age." and " Then every time there comes an actual attempt at government regulation or even self-regulation by the companies, everyone goes ballistic when they realize what that regulation means." are different?
"This topic is awash in ideas that regulation will come in like a scalpel that only touches something that won’t affect anything we like, only hurt some companies in some specific way that doesn’t take anything away from us. This notion doesn’t survive contact with reality." Depends on the regulation. Also maybe the non intended effects are still worth to introduce the regulation?
Maybe they'll feel differently when they have to upload their ID and face scan (which later gets leaked) just to be able to read a recipe for beer or whatever.
People love to ask the big government daddy to step on them and when it actually happens they start wondering why would any sane person want that.
There's been criticism about the culture surrounding platforms like Mastodon/Bluesky that anticipated this.
Putting China aside, and regardless about one's opinion on the aformentionned measure, I think you need first to learn the concept about totalitarian governement and representative democracy before trying to use those words because you clearly don't know what these are.
There is potential harm in us doing regulation but there is also benefits thinking it's this binary option of free VS slavery is imo. Harmful.