Yeah that’s what it appears like if you just gloss over it for 5 minutes
Most recent 5-4 is excellent.
And putting profit-centric tech executives in charge of what political speech is forbidden and what speech is allowed seems not great.
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And how it has always been, so…
Liberals begging their tech overlords to regulate political speech is not how it’s always been. Liberals used to be in favor of free speech, now there’s a vocal segment of the left that is ardently in favor of that sort of censorship.
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The wealthy owners of media companies have decided what gets a platform and what doesn’t since Gutenberg. I’m not saying it isn’t a problem, I’m saying it isn’t a new one.
I think FB does a shitty job, but there is something of a coherent ideology at work (more communication/“community”=good) that should be steel-manned and argued against. My policy for FB would be different, but I’m not sure of the exact contours, especially internationally.
The difference is you actually can buy your own printing press and print your own pamphlet or start your own publishing house or newspaper. You can’t start your own google or twitter or facebook because of the network effect and other barriers. These are effectively unregulated monopolies and giving them control over political speech is terrible.
I think you overestimate the difference in barriers to entry between eg. CBS CA. 1950 and Facebook today, but yeah, I agree with your broader point I guess. the best solution is probably regulating them as utilities, not sure to what extent it’s feasible to break them up.
In the meantime, fetishizing free speech to the point that hate and psyops dominate everybody’s information diet is way worse and an actual problem right now so the hypothetical risk associated with limiting that information is a risk we would be stupid not to take.
OK, and then if they’re regulated as utilities, then the big social media platforms become state-sanctioned monopolies. If they’re state-sanctioned monopolies, then it seems like their speech regulation would have to fall into the framework of the first amendment. So you could sue Alex Jones for libel (and compel him to remove libelous material) but you couldn’t remove him from Facebook or Youtube.
So what do you suggest?
Exactly that – recognize that the tech companies are natural monopolies, regulate them as such, and treat stuff like Facebook and Twitter as public squares and give all Americans the freedom to say there whatever they could publish in their own newspapers or pamphlets or say in the entrance to city hall or wherever.
And then the tech geniuses can work on ignore functions so if you never want to see Alex Jones in your twitter feed you never have to.
what do you mean you can’t start your own facebook/twitter? I could see replicating google being a problem but social media has been and is being recreated by people that want unregulated platforms.
IIRC the Nazis have already set up their own mirror social media sites like gab and whatnot.
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yea this is what i was referring to, and if he meant that well they dont gain any traction, maybe freedom to spout nazi nonsense isn’t a big a factor in peoples social media choices?
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Fb outright lying about views and metrics to everyone else, making hundreds of companies pivot their business models to video platforms then going bankrupt when they discovered fb lied and basically got no punishment should be mentioned.
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Rabbit Hole is a really good podcast. It’s about a guy who got sucked deep into the alt-right and how he got out of it. Kinda crazy that guys like Stefan Molyneux who I consider far-right are really just the gateway to the actual far-right.
TIL that a thing called BreadTube exists.
You can obviously try to start a twitter or facebook (facebook did!). But my point is that each social media space is a natural monopoly because of the network effect.
It’s kinda that you can’t start a twitter competitor that offers a similar product (which is the ability to vomit out your ads to huge amounts of people).
Both were posted about on here
Also don’t know if you saw but the police arrested one of the activists who went looking for the kids in the house for trespassing lol fucking pigs
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