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Sure, they can. Should they? And should they be allowed to looking forward, or are they now an active threat to democracy? By the way, I say this speaking as a

Sure, they can. Should they? And should they be allowed to looking forward, or are they now an active threat to democracy? By the way, I say this speaking as a conservative who opposes basically everything the Socialist Workers Party stands for, but who is more threatened by autocratic tech censorship than by opposing ideas.

SllX 6y ago
There isn’t a shortage of means to socialize and communicate digitally. Facebook rises and falls on its own merits and if your speech depends on Facebook, that’s a personal problem, and reflects your own personal choices. 20 years ago Facebook didn’t exist. Now we have Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Tumblr, WordPress (both the service and the software), YouTube, SoundCloud, the Fediverse, Twitch, Slack, Discord, iMessage groups, whatever the 3 Google messengers of the day are, XMPP clients and servers, IRC (which is admittedly more than 20 years old), countless dating sites, Reddit, and countless other “social networks”. When the bars re-open, we’ll have those too, and that is an ancient institution. And for what it’s worth, there’s also the comments section of NRO and The Dispatch. Oh, and the forum we’re talking on.
- throwaway45349 6y ago
  I mean, that's fine, but I take issue with one party having this massive megaphone to the world, with the other side having theirs completely snuffed. Either ban them all, or ban none of them.
- bostonsre 6y ago
  Sure, there isn't a shortage of digital communication, but they are responsible for a large proportion of that communication and they hold the power of tilting democracies by choice of those in charge of the company or by seemingly random bearucratic decisions made by their employees. They are a medium of information distribution. If certain phone companies decide to not put through calls years ago in an effort to sway democracies, would that have been acceptable? They are a for profit business ruled by one individual that has extraordinary power. As a society, are we really supposed to just let them do whatever they want just because there are less popular alternatives?
  - SllX 6y ago
    There was an argument to be made to treat phone companies like common carriers, I’m not entirely sure that was the best way to handle them, but it happened, and it was a good argument nonetheless, or at least well argued. Social media isn’t like that at all. Social media proliferates and in different forms and it does so internationally with popular and unpopular opinions easily spreading like wildfire. I have no problem with the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world running their servers with the carte blanche of the private property owners that they are because what you and others perceive as a lack of options and alternatives looks more to me like there’s not a lot of options today compared to how many there will be 20 years from now. Go look back at the history of the web, here’s an incomplete and not comprehensive list of sites and internet services which have existed, do exist, ceased to exist, got gobbled up by bigger fish and spawned smaller networks of their own and probably in some small way contributed to the political conscience of most Americans alive today and definitely not concerning ourselves with all of the countless web forums, Usenet groups, and mailing lists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_serv... Classmates.com: 1995 GameFAQs: 1995 Newgrounds: 1995 ICQ: 1996 AIM: 1997 CaringBridge: 1997 Slashdot: 1997 Penny Arcade: 1998 Yahoo Messenger: 1998 BlackPlanet: 1999 Blogger: 1999 Fark: 1999 Kiwibox: 1999 LiveJournal: 1999 Metafilter: 1999 Neopets: 1999 Something Awful: 1999 Xanga: 1999 CrossFit: 2000 DeviantArt: 2000 Radio UserLand: 2000 Wikipedia: 2001 YTMND: 2001 Yahoo Groups: 2001 last.fm: 2002 Meetup: 2002 4chan: 2003 Gaia Online: 2003 LinkedIn: 2003 MEETin: 2003 MySpace: 2003 Second Life: 2003 Steam: 2003 WordPress: 2003 Digg: 2004 Facebook: 2004 Flickr: 2004 hi5: 2004 IMVU: 2004 PatientsLikeMe: 2004 RoosterTeeth Forums: 2004 TV Tropes: 2004 World of Warcraft: 2004 Yelp: 2004 Vimeo: 2004 Dailymotion: 2005 Google Talk: 2005 LibraryThing: 2005 Ning: 2005 Reddit: 2005 YouTube: 2005 CafeMom: 2006 Flixster: 2006 Goodreads: 2006 iLike: 2006 ReverbNation: 2006 Twitter: 2006 Chess.com: 2007 Italki: 2007 SoundCloud: 2007 Tumblr: 2007 Hacker News: 2007 Justin.tv: 2007 Academia.edu: 2008 GovLoop: 2008 identi.ca: 2008 Nextdoor: 2008 Formspring: 2009 Foursquare: 2009 Grindr: 2009 Pinterest: 2009 Quora: 2009 WhatsApp: 2009 Friendica: 2010 Instagram: 2010 Untappd: 2010 Duolingo: 2011 Fishbrain: 2011 I Had Cancer: 2011 Letterboxd: 2011 Twitch: 2011 Whisper: 2012 Google Hangouts: 2013 Slack: 2013 Vine: 2013 Voat: 2014 Yo: 2014 Discord: 2015 Periscope: 2015 Gab: 2016 Houseparty: 2016 Mastodon: 2016 Peach: 2016 micro.blog: 2017 Parler: 2018 So let’s break this down. > Sure, there isn't a shortage of digital communication, but they are responsible for a large proportion of that communication and they hold the power of tilting democracies by choice of those in charge of the company or by seemingly random bearucratic decisions made by their employees. No. We are responsible for our own communications and when we don’t trust the messenger, we encode our messages or we use a different messenger. We are also the ones responsible for the upkeep of our own democracy and the upkeep of the institutions which maintain it because it’s ours and our responsibility. Corporations, as it turns out, as organizations which represent the aggregate interests of their owners and employees, are also actors in aggregate within the framework of our democracy, much like name a group of three or more people. How ten thousand people voted in one place or fifty-thousand voted in another isn’t Facebook’s responsibility, or Twitter’s, or Reddit’s, or Slack’s. It’s the responsibility of every single person who cast their own vote, which should be all of the people who cast votes in every election. > They are a medium of information distribution. They are a handful out of the millions of ways that exist to distribute information. > They are a for profit business ruled by one individual that has extraordinary power. As a society, are we really supposed to just let them do whatever they want just because there are less popular alternatives? They are dust. If our free speech depended on the whims of one Mark Zuckerberg and one Jack Dorsey, then we didn’t have free speech to begin with. Facebook and Twitter are critters of the last 20 years, there have been others, and there will be more like them, but also entirely unlike them. The way people talk about social media companies today they make it sound like we need some sort of Social Media Public Commission to control the moderation policies and enforce the publication of government speech. We don’t, because we have what we need: competition and the many many technologies that enable it and a free flow of cash and labor and capital. It’s disgusting to me how freely conspiracy theorists, socialists, PRC apologists and neo-Nazis can easily congregate and talk themselves up into a furor about seizing the means of killing the Jews before Bill Gates takes over the world and prevents Chairman Winnie the Pooh from leading us into glorious revolution, but that’s the mark of a free society that they can find a way and will always find a way. So is being able to tell the President and anyone else to get off your lawn and/or servers.

SllX 6y ago

There isn’t a shortage of means to socialize and communicate digitally. Facebook rises and falls on its own merits and if your speech depends on Facebook, that’s a personal problem, and reflects your own personal choices. 20 years ago Facebook didn’t exist. Now we have Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Tumblr, WordPress (both the service and the software), YouTube, SoundCloud, the Fediverse, Twitch, Slack, Discord, iMessage groups, whatever the 3 Google messengers of the day are, XMPP clients and servers, IRC (which is admittedly more than 20 years old), countless dating sites, Reddit, and countless other “social networks”. When the bars re-open, we’ll have those too, and that is an ancient institution. And for what it’s worth, there’s also the comments section of NRO and The Dispatch. Oh, and the forum we’re talking on.

throwaway45349 6y ago
I mean, that's fine, but I take issue with one party having this massive megaphone to the world, with the other side having theirs completely snuffed. Either ban them all, or ban none of them.
bostonsre 6y ago
Sure, there isn't a shortage of digital communication, but they are responsible for a large proportion of that communication and they hold the power of tilting democracies by choice of those in charge of the company or by seemingly random bearucratic decisions made by their employees. They are a medium of information distribution. If certain phone companies decide to not put through calls years ago in an effort to sway democracies, would that have been acceptable? They are a for profit business ruled by one individual that has extraordinary power. As a society, are we really supposed to just let them do whatever they want just because there are less popular alternatives?
- SllX 6y ago
  There was an argument to be made to treat phone companies like common carriers, I’m not entirely sure that was the best way to handle them, but it happened, and it was a good argument nonetheless, or at least well argued. Social media isn’t like that at all. Social media proliferates and in different forms and it does so internationally with popular and unpopular opinions easily spreading like wildfire. I have no problem with the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world running their servers with the carte blanche of the private property owners that they are because what you and others perceive as a lack of options and alternatives looks more to me like there’s not a lot of options today compared to how many there will be 20 years from now. Go look back at the history of the web, here’s an incomplete and not comprehensive list of sites and internet services which have existed, do exist, ceased to exist, got gobbled up by bigger fish and spawned smaller networks of their own and probably in some small way contributed to the political conscience of most Americans alive today and definitely not concerning ourselves with all of the countless web forums, Usenet groups, and mailing lists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_serv... Classmates.com: 1995 GameFAQs: 1995 Newgrounds: 1995 ICQ: 1996 AIM: 1997 CaringBridge: 1997 Slashdot: 1997 Penny Arcade: 1998 Yahoo Messenger: 1998 BlackPlanet: 1999 Blogger: 1999 Fark: 1999 Kiwibox: 1999 LiveJournal: 1999 Metafilter: 1999 Neopets: 1999 Something Awful: 1999 Xanga: 1999 CrossFit: 2000 DeviantArt: 2000 Radio UserLand: 2000 Wikipedia: 2001 YTMND: 2001 Yahoo Groups: 2001 last.fm: 2002 Meetup: 2002 4chan: 2003 Gaia Online: 2003 LinkedIn: 2003 MEETin: 2003 MySpace: 2003 Second Life: 2003 Steam: 2003 WordPress: 2003 Digg: 2004 Facebook: 2004 Flickr: 2004 hi5: 2004 IMVU: 2004 PatientsLikeMe: 2004 RoosterTeeth Forums: 2004 TV Tropes: 2004 World of Warcraft: 2004 Yelp: 2004 Vimeo: 2004 Dailymotion: 2005 Google Talk: 2005 LibraryThing: 2005 Ning: 2005 Reddit: 2005 YouTube: 2005 CafeMom: 2006 Flixster: 2006 Goodreads: 2006 iLike: 2006 ReverbNation: 2006 Twitter: 2006 Chess.com: 2007 Italki: 2007 SoundCloud: 2007 Tumblr: 2007 Hacker News: 2007 Justin.tv: 2007 Academia.edu: 2008 GovLoop: 2008 identi.ca: 2008 Nextdoor: 2008 Formspring: 2009 Foursquare: 2009 Grindr: 2009 Pinterest: 2009 Quora: 2009 WhatsApp: 2009 Friendica: 2010 Instagram: 2010 Untappd: 2010 Duolingo: 2011 Fishbrain: 2011 I Had Cancer: 2011 Letterboxd: 2011 Twitch: 2011 Whisper: 2012 Google Hangouts: 2013 Slack: 2013 Vine: 2013 Voat: 2014 Yo: 2014 Discord: 2015 Periscope: 2015 Gab: 2016 Houseparty: 2016 Mastodon: 2016 Peach: 2016 micro.blog: 2017 Parler: 2018 So let’s break this down. > Sure, there isn't a shortage of digital communication, but they are responsible for a large proportion of that communication and they hold the power of tilting democracies by choice of those in charge of the company or by seemingly random bearucratic decisions made by their employees. No. We are responsible for our own communications and when we don’t trust the messenger, we encode our messages or we use a different messenger. We are also the ones responsible for the upkeep of our own democracy and the upkeep of the institutions which maintain it because it’s ours and our responsibility. Corporations, as it turns out, as organizations which represent the aggregate interests of their owners and employees, are also actors in aggregate within the framework of our democracy, much like name a group of three or more people. How ten thousand people voted in one place or fifty-thousand voted in another isn’t Facebook’s responsibility, or Twitter’s, or Reddit’s, or Slack’s. It’s the responsibility of every single person who cast their own vote, which should be all of the people who cast votes in every election. > They are a medium of information distribution. They are a handful out of the millions of ways that exist to distribute information. > They are a for profit business ruled by one individual that has extraordinary power. As a society, are we really supposed to just let them do whatever they want just because there are less popular alternatives? They are dust. If our free speech depended on the whims of one Mark Zuckerberg and one Jack Dorsey, then we didn’t have free speech to begin with. Facebook and Twitter are critters of the last 20 years, there have been others, and there will be more like them, but also entirely unlike them. The way people talk about social media companies today they make it sound like we need some sort of Social Media Public Commission to control the moderation policies and enforce the publication of government speech. We don’t, because we have what we need: competition and the many many technologies that enable it and a free flow of cash and labor and capital. It’s disgusting to me how freely conspiracy theorists, socialists, PRC apologists and neo-Nazis can easily congregate and talk themselves up into a furor about seizing the means of killing the Jews before Bill Gates takes over the world and prevents Chairman Winnie the Pooh from leading us into glorious revolution, but that’s the mark of a free society that they can find a way and will always find a way. So is being able to tell the President and anyone else to get off your lawn and/or servers.