Honestly I’m just excited that you guys have taken up the right wing libertarian mantle of defending tech companies’ right to do whatever the hell they want without oversight from anyone. Google and Facebook are private companies bro, if you don’t like it start your own predatory monopolistic enterprise!
Seems like you’re conflating normative vs. positive to score cheap points, or at least painting with too broad a brush in doing so. Big tech is doing whatever they want, and we currently have little power to stop or change that, and laughing at when someone deserving gets got is at least cathartic. Meanwhile, there is no obvious solution to speech on social media. Prohibiting social media companies from any sort of moderation turns them into hotbeds of radicalization and violence. Government regulation of social media speech is fraught with first amendment issues. Letting the companies regulate themselves gives a few unchecked billionaires an outlandish amount of power over what speech and news is seen daily by billions of people. There’s not really a clear fourth way: as some sort of non-governmental regulator or entity would be either completely toothless or indistinguishable from a government regulation. About the best fourth way I could come up with would be to decouple the right to free speech from the right to a platform, or perhaps more aptly, the right to freedom of the press from the right to print using someone else’s press, but this would be a massive change that would require a complete overhaul of public perception as well as likely a constitutional amendment. So, it seems hardly fair to generalize people who look at option C as the best of bad ones as now staunch defenders of big business able to do whatever they want in general when the government clearly has greater regulatory authority in areas of e.g. environmental impact or intellectual property than it does in free speech.
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You can certainly make this observation, but Trolley Trollson can’t with the absurd broad brush attack that he’s trying to pin to Bob here.
For your other points, I won’t reply here in detail, if you want we can talk in the appropriate thread. But many here (not you) and on the left in general have gone far beyond laughing when an Alex Jones or someone gets deplatformed, they actively complain that this person or that view hasn’t yet been silenced by big tech. And indeed do make the libertarian argument about Google or Facebook being private companies.
It’s usually a positive argument, not a normative one. In the context of 2021 USA#1, it’s not silencing him (obviously he can just go somewhere else, albeit likely with a much, much smaller platform), and the big tech companies most definitely have the right to kick him off. That’s the shortest distance from point A to the desired outcome: Alex Jones losing a massive audience. When things work out well, people will highlight why they worked out well. If you want normative arguments, then you’ll probably have to put up questions divorced from particulars or examples where the desired outcome didn’t happen.
If you believe in the idea of a Living Constitution, maybe an amendment isn’t necessary.
There are those who say that even if the Founding Fathers intended for the Second Amendment to protect an individual right to gun ownership, they did not foresee the existence of killing devices as efficient as semiautomatic weapons and might not have extended the right to keep and bear arms to those sorts of guns. In the same way, the Founding Fathers could never anticipate the internet and social media and perhaps online speech should not be treated identically to speech in other spaces.
Maybe we need modernization of freedom of speech and freedom of the press to be on the table in a way that would shock and horrify absolutists.
Not really following you. Trump or Alex Jones get booted off Facebook or iTunes or whatever and then Glenn Greenwald says hey, do we really want Zuckerberg or Tim Apple in charge of what views are permitted to be broadcast to huge numbers of people? Then you’ll get takes in response saying, hey, Facebook and Apple and Google are private companies, if you don’t like it, start blah blah blah. It’s both positive and normative, right? They’re both stating and defending the status quo.
I want the possibility of someone like Trump getting booted off of a platform like Facebook or Twitter to exist. To accomplish this, there needs to be a person or body capable of making this decision or of implementing an algorithm that makes this decision. This decision-maker should be vulnerable to pressure from the public and government so that decisions can’t be completely arbitrary as a form of checks and balances.
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OK, what’s the non-problematic, obvious liberal position that every liberal would support if they weren’t a bunch of hypocritical apologists for big business?
They wouldn’t beg tech billionaires to censor certain people and would wouldn’t celebrate when those sorts of campaigns succeed. They would acknowledge that it’s a problem: no one should have that much power over speech.
As far as a specific program? You’re not going to get everyone to agree on that sort of thing but I’d suggest breaking Facebook and Google apart as much as possible and prevent them from buying more companies. Ban targeted ads and impose restrictions and transparency on their suggestion algorithms (the former would reduce incentives for the latter in any case). Then maybe adopt Clarence Thomas’ suggestions on common carriage applying to social media. Which wouldn’t make it impossible to kick off people from social media, you’d just have to have transparent, viewpoint neutral criteria for doing so.
I don’t really believe that someone should have an unlimited platform to spread lies and hate, so, no, I don’t really want to decline this celebration.
This isn’t just regulation. This nuking them from orbit. Their entire value to their customers is in, one, network effects, and two, targeting.
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Separating Facebook from Instagram doesn’t impact network effects. Separating Youtube from Google doesn’t impact network effects. Keeping Google and Facebook from buying such companies in the future doesn’t impact network effects.
How in the world do targeted ads benefit the users of Facebook and Google? The value of Facebook is you get to communicate with your friends and acquaintances. The value of google isn’t the targeted ads Google slips into results, it is the search results. The value of youtube is the videos you watch, not the targeted ad you’re shown in the middle of that video.
I said customers, not users. The users are the product. Advertisers are the customers.
I was hoping that’s what you were saying. Who gives a fuck about advertisers? Google and Facebook shouldn’t exist as they do now. Facebook shouldn’t be worth a trillion dollars. They’re a fucking advertising firm!
Google and Facebook? Like, advertisers are their customers. They literally cease to exist without customers.
I guess I don’t see the problem. Certainly Facebook and Google would have to make some changes to their horrible business models. That’s the point.
Does this ban on targeted advertising extend to CBS showing different ads during football games compared to NCIS?
No, I’m talking about banning the use of individual data for targeting of advertisements.
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But even putting aside nuking the entire social media business model entirely for a moment, I still don’t see why I should be upset about Donald Trump or Alex Jones getting kicked when
any such criteria I would support would indeed kick them off.
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I never said you should get upset that they are kicked off social media. I said that you should be alarmed that the mechanism by which they are isn’t transparent and is just people begging tech billionaires to censor people. It’s fine that the transparent, viewpoint neutral criteria you might support would result in Trump or Jones being kicked off social media. The point is that no such process or criteria exist.
Yea I mean it’s a weird concern to have because I’m not really aware of someone being kicked off these platforms that didn’t massively deserve to be - maybe drdisrespect on twitch, lol.