If you aren’t paying for it, you are not a customer.
Mo Brooks proves that you don’t need Twitter or any of the other social media products to release a rambling message directly to your constituents (link originally supplied by RickJay):
This exactly.
The entire snowflake national-socialist (in a Left Right weirdo merger) argument is they have a political right to get their ideas distributed by the most easy and convenient private distributor-publisher.
Well no.
Internet hasn’t changed a damn thing and stripping private owners of their rights for some bizarro world Left-Right extremists right to seize these private channels is deluded.
“I’m NOT a socialist, I’m a national socialist! Now hand over the Twitters and the FaceBooks!”
The head of the Republican Party of San Francisco was interviewed on a local news show. (Brief segment, not a long interview.) His position was that the insurrectionists (my term, not his) only went into a few empty rooms, and Trump being banned on Twitter and Facebook was a much more serious threat than the invasion of the Capitol. Even after the somewhat shocked reporter reminded him that people died there.
He also said that millions of people were blocked, which news to me. Maybe he meant millions of Trump lies were blocked,
Banning people (including world leaders) on Twitter is not the problem. The problem is that anyone ever imagined Twitter was a good place to administer a function of world leadership.
I don’t care that Trump got kicked off Twitter, but I’m worried that unaccountable billionaires have so much power over what views are promoted to their vast audiences. It’s not like they even have to follow their own rules, there’s no appeal if you’re falsely accused and nothing to make them kick off someone who does break the ToS.
It’s dangerous in the same way as governments allowing one person or company to own too large a share of the traditional media, which is another current problem.
This is a reasonable concern (about the wealthy and powerful), but it has nothing to do with left vs right, or social justice/“wokeness” (if anything, those wealthy and powerful largely favor right voices since the right wants to make sure they retain every bit of their wealth they can).
I think the wealthy and powerful are on their own side, and just making use of whatever beliefs on either side benefit them. There’s this phenomenon of corporate ‘woke-washing’ where companies make statements supporting BLM or put rainbow flags all over their branding for pride month while continuing to exploit their workers. They are interested in looking good and in their bottom line, not in actually helping anyone. It would be a mistake to assume left-wing views won’t be similarly censored when they don’t suit the CEOs.
Right. But this is part of how a free society should work – bad people can/should be pressured to do good things even if they do it for the wrong reasons. It’s a good thing when a company sanctions white supremacy on their platform or among their employees, even if they do so for cynical business reasons.
Who wants to tell him about private medical insurance or private prisons?
Anyway, even if you’re mostly wrong on this, welcome to the discussion of why communications monopolies are bad and net neutrality is good. It’s been going on for considerably long time before your particular ox was gored.
You’re operating under a serious misconception. I’ve been worried about free speech for years and this is just the latest issue in a long list. Also, private prisons are a bad idea, we don’t want to give businesses a motive to encourage more crime/more criminalisation.
I assume you mean when they don’t allow it? It’s fine when it’s something obviously bad, but it’s not always so clear cut. We don’t want our self-interested corporate overlords deciding questions of morality, that is for the people.
And there is a more long term problem. The company that puts a rainbow flag on its website but is still anti union, donates to the government who then concentrate on social justice issues that don’t affect the company’s bottom line. Which is not to say social justice issues are unimportant, but so are class issues, and they have been neglected for too long.
Yeah, but the people do get to vote on corporations, they vote with their wallet. If a corporation does something that they don’t like, they can boycott it, and encourage their friends to do so.
It is in the self interest of exactly those corporate overlords to please the public, in some ways, even more so than it is in the interest of politicians. As much as some decry the notion of “cancel culture”, that is exactly what it is when the public gets to vote on the actions of corporations.
If everyone stopped using twitter tomorrow, what power do they have?
Getting money out of politics is rather important, but is a completely different problem, and probably outside the scope of this thread.
Social justice issues are not contrary to class issues. That would be exactly the notion of “intersectionality”.
Can someone enlighten me as to what exactly we’re debating?
I’m pretty sure we’ve demonstrated that an internet soapbox is easy to set up. It’s also hard to take seriously accusations of censorship when those who claim to be censored have far more power to be heard than the average Joe. Hell, POTUS can simply put his musings on whitehouse.gov or call a press conference if setting up mastodon or creating a Gab account is too difficult. Hell, this fucking crazy lady has a microphone and is on TV and still thinks she’s being censored.
Yes… I’m using the “penalize” meaning for sanction.
Sure. So the disagreement is on these particular instances, not whether corporations can/should do this sometimes.
Yes, this can also be a problem.
What is it we disagree about again?
To @DemonTree and anyone else who thinks Twitter’s response is a restriction on Trump’s freedom of expression: what’s the functional difference between a Trump tweet and a post on whitehouse.gov? Both are easily accessible by billions of readers. It might be currently easier for Trump to tweet but a few days of coding would make it possible for him to “tweet” on whitehouse.gov.
From my perspective, as the creator of one of the threads that merged into this one, we are debating the degree of power over the debate in public square that a few CEOs now have, how they exert that power, and whether we as a society (expressed as users, product, consumers, customers, and citizens) decide if there is:
- a public interest in controlling disinformation and hate speech
- a public interest in having the square contain a wide diversity of opinions and ideas
- a need to have some system that balances those dynamics such that a few individuals alone do not have excess effective and arbitrary control over what is contained in each bucket, lest they at some point do the censorship work of the autocrats for them in return for opportunities to make more profit.
Some would claim that so long as the weapon of shutting down expression is aimed at my enemy then that is all I need to know. Some recognize that the weapon that can be turned against my enemy when its owner sees it in their best interest to do so, can just as easily be used against me, when its owner sees it in their best interest to do so. And want controls placed on the weapons use before it is turned in that direction. If we wait until it is faced that way it is too late.
Some here argue that there is no concentrated power to any worrisome degree. I at least am not convinced of that by the arguments made here.
This glosses over the fact that large companies have been buying up all of the other newspapers.
Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp. They have purchased 82 other companies. Twitter’s mergers are easily in the dozens.
I am definitely beginning to believe that portions of the internet that we consider “free” will need to be regulated like other communications platforms. We would be livid if you could only talk to people on phones on the same network, and those phone companies could kick people off the network if they didn’t like what they had to say.
Would that destroy Facebook’s valuation? Maybe. Regulation of the telephone industry certainly screwed over some big companies back then too. But wouldn’t Facebook be a far better platform if rather than being paid for by advertisement (and thus monetized through your own addiction, heightened emotional state, and personal information) it was just paid for with cold hard cash like any other communications tool?
Some would say that using the passive voice of making claims of other’s arguments is a poor way of framing another’s position.
This ignores the point that it is trivially easy to create your own “newspaper” at any time. It is far, far easier to create an internet platform than it ever was to start up an actual newspaper.
How long did it take Parlor to get up and running? Who is buying up the SDMB?
At no time in history has it been easier for someone to put their voice out there. What is being complained about is that people are not being guaranteed an audience.