Before you posted either link, I linked directly to both of the OPs that I was referring to. Neither was from you. That yours was merged was certainly something that I didn’t notice, but that doesn’t change the fact that I referred to an OP by lissener and an OP by DemonTree, neither of whom are you.
I totally agree with the OP, at least unless and until actual regulations come into force. Twitter is a private business, and thtey can kick you out, just like you shouldn’t go into a grocery store, threaten customers, and expect to not get marched out of there by police.
If new laws force Twitter to not boot people when they want to, then the laws need to force them to control white supremacy, conspiracy theories, etc, as well. I would certainly welcome that, though that would drive many social media companies out of business.
Oh. So not one of the OPs of the thread that you had been participating in, restated again after merge, made even more clear, but one that had been locked pretty quickly due to lack of any debate. An OP of the thread you were in and the subsequent restating of it? You can’t understand that question.
Glad you made that clear that such is the basis of your not understanding the questions being asked in the thread.
Thank you.
Okay…
Glad you asked, as no, you most certainly do not understand.
Then please tell me what I misunderstand.
Here’s the post.
It sure does read like a concern that larger players may be influencing the government so government should not be involved in regulation of them. Because government involvement means larger players have then have more power, or “influence”, over the government.
What am I misunderstanding?
If by “before” you mean “after” I linked to the post that contained the OP identifying it as such, then yes you did. From a portion of the thread that a post took pains to correct you then when you claimed it was not an OP of the thread. And where you dismissed the other OP creator’s endorsement of that as the point of the discussion.
Then yes. You can clearly fail to understand questions that you refuse to read or acknowledge.
Well, I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me it’s not so much that these companies are actually influencing or pushing the government in any particular direction, but that the (probably well-intentioned) policies of government sometimes have the effect of helping to entrench established businesses at the expense of competition and to the detriment of smaller or newer companies.
It’s also, for me, the fact that regulation in areas like this might end up exacerbating some of the very problems that it’s attempting to solve. I also don’t, as a general principle, want to leave decisions about what I get to see, or not see, in the hands of the government. That’s really no better, as far as I’m concerned, than leaving it up to Twitter or Facebook.
I also think that a lot of this depends on how we understand debates over freedom of expression. If we’re going to confine it to the government, then it’s relatively easy to say that Facebook or Twitter can legally boot you off their platforms for basically any reason, or for no reason. But I also like to talk about free expression beyond the constitutional issue, as a broader question of principle, and while I agree that social media platforms can drop anyone for basically any reason, I would also tell them (if they were to ask me) that they should adopt the widest possible latitude for speech on their platforms, and should only drop people for very specific (and clearly defined) types of legal violations.
The speech issues and the corporate control issues run together in a few different ways. Many of the same people who are cheering Facebook and Twitter for deplatforming Trump and other right wingers would be screaming blue murder about excessive corporate control over speech if those same platforms decided (for whatever reason) that they didn’t want to host the speech of, say, Bernie Sanders or Black Lives Matter or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez or whomever. I’m not trying to argue some sort of false equivalence between what Trump says and what those people say, but if you accept that the private platforms can kick off whomever they want, you have to accept that they might come for people that you like, for any reason or for no reason.
I think that one of the things that worries me the most about the current calls to regulate social media or limit Section 230 is that those calls are coming from both liberals and lefties like Joe Biden and AOC, as well as right-wing authoritarians like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson. They all have different reasons for their arguments, but for all of them, it seems to boil down to, “I want these companies to limit access for people and viewpoints with whom I disagree.”
One issue with social media is that each platform (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is a sort of walled garden, with its own users and its own content and its own advertisers and its own rules. And consumer have to make platform choices. If all your friends are on Facebook, but not on Twitter, then you’re basically restricted to Facebook if you want to interact with them. This system locks people in to a few major platforms, and tends to give disproportionate amounts of power to those platforms.
One interesting proposal to address this problem is outlined in this essay by Mike Masnick (founder of Techdirt), in which he advocates an internet based more on protocols rather than platforms. That is, he supports a set of public and openly available protocols upon which individuals can build their communications interfaces. It’s a rather long essay, and I can’t explain every piece of his argument in this short post, but his basic position is that moving from platforms to protocols would allow much more end-user innovation and and flexibility and choice.
More generally, I just think that current efforts to regulate social media in the name of “good speech” or “truth” or “accuracy” or whatever are coming at the issue from the wrong angle. All of this would be far less of a problem if more people would be open to ideas with which they disagree, and were willing to use their critical faculties to actually evaluate sources of information. I’m not sure how to fix that particular problem, but I’m not sure that papering over it by constraining choice is the way to go.
It appears to me that people have REALLY short memories here. It wasn’t that long ago that everyone was on Myspace. Heck, even more recent everyone was talking about Snapchat was the social media platform of the future, and then Instagram cleaned its clock (to note, Snapchat is still healthy, just no one is treating it as the new biggest social media company). Now TikTok is massive.
The barriers to entry in this market are really easy. Now, there is indeed an argument on anti-trust issues - Facebook bought Instagram to stave off a rapidly growing competitor. There is nothing saying Twitter or Facebook stays the dominant social media company. The fear is that those companies buy any competitors that may challenge them.
Moderating
Don’t personalize your arguments.
Everything after your use of the word “so”.
You follow up here is slightly better, yes,
this is somewhat true. Replace the last word with “the market that is being regulated”, and you are pretty close to understanding.
didn’t the USSC and AOL hash all this out like back in the early 90s when they upheld someone getting banned for porn trading and the court basically said "AOL is a private company and your paying for the privilege of renting their private space and you have to abide by their rules or else? " and the else being the termination of service aka the infamous “TOS”
also a week or two after that I remember singing the first EULA id ever seen acknowledging that fact
And that may be an interesting avenue to explore, that of interoperability.
As you say, if all your friends are on facebook, then you have to be on facebook to communicate with them on that platform. I don’t know that that really creates a monopoly situation, per se, but it can create some undesired consequences.
If it were more like email, where I don’t have to be on AOL to send a message to someone on AOL, then maybe that would be a worthwhile remedy to look into.
Still pretty complicated from a number of standpoints, but it would be more reasonable to ask social media providers to open up their platforms than to ask them to be under regulation.
In the end, my concern is that any regulations that can control how twitter or facebook operate would end up being the end for the SDMB and small sites like it, and I think that the existence of the SDMB and small sites like it are far more important to allow freedom of expression than regulating the freedom of expression for twitter.
How does that work if someone blocks you from Facebook? Can the blockee create a profile on Twitter and message you from there, getting around the block? Not to mention different social media networks have different rules to send messages to people.
There are people who have different personas on different social media networks as well (I for one am far more vocal politically on Twitter than I am on Facebook and far far more than I am on LinkedIn), so they don’t want anyone to be able to reach them on any network.
You express a thought often expressed about any potential government regulation for many industries: concern that despite good intentions they might do it wrong; better therefore that there are less regulations and less government oversight. Coal, oil, banking … all.
Personally I don’t buy it for oil, for banking, or for the media platforms.
Me too.
There is of course a balance, whether the freedom of expression is a citizen or a corporate person. Agreed very much that those who actually believe in the importance of freedom of expression understand the importance of protecting the freedom that allows expression of that which you disagree with, that may offend you.
That said it must be noted that several posters here are consistent in their strong support of corporate persons freedom of expression. Twitter and the group of dominant platforms should, to their take, be able to have unfettered freedom of expression, promoting whatever disinformation, information, or perspective that they see fit and in their best corporate interests. Personally I am not as hard line for free expression (for either corporate persons or individuals) to the point that its rigid defense overshadows every other consideration to the public good.
While you had in fact stated “government” in that space, okay.
It is a position that seems a bit counterintuitive to me. So wanted to be sure I got what you meant.
Usenet, I think was public?
OK but your post was in Great Debates and there is a General Questions answer, so we started debating.
A bit out of date but this webpage was quite interesting to me, from Rikke Frank Jørgensen of the Danish Institute for Human Rights
Key quotes:
As we engage in civic life and public deliberations on various platforms, the boundaries for the right to freedom of information, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, privacy, etc, is set by companies. While states have a legal obligation not to restrict, for example, freedom of expression and access to information, except in specific legally justified cases, a company have wide discretion in how they define their services, and the type of expression allowed.
Moreover, the online business model implies that the activities that constitute public life is transformed into commercial value. As such the online public sphere is no longer a public sphere, but rather a private business. In response to this, scholarship has suggested that the human rights responsibilities of companies that have the capacity to impact democracy in a way traditionally reserved for public institutions should increase (Laidlaw 2015). The scale of responsibility should reflect both the reach of the company and the infiltration of that ´information, process, site, or tool´ in democratic culture.
Sort of agrees with what I said about fuck Twitter specifically but…
Something that’s always bothered me is how computing ToS work in general. How are these not unconscionable contracts? In many cases, the ToS aren’t even available until after you’ve purchased the item. And in any event, the average person can’t be expected to be a contract expert, nor to hire one for a $65 purchase.
Another example is the auto companies claiming I only have a license to their software. I purchased a new car about a year ago, but I never signed a licensing agreement.
This has always bugged the shit out of me, and I’ve wondered why some do-gooder group hasn’t gone after them
Have you ever bothered to read one? Here’s an excerpt from the ToS for Amazon Lumberyard (an open-source game engine, these terms are part of the Amazon Web Services contract):
“42.10. Acceptable Use; Safety-Critical Systems. Your use of the Lumberyard Materials must comply with the AWS Acceptable Use Policy. The Lumberyard Materials are not intended for use with life-critical or safety-critical systems, such as use in operation of medical equipment, automated transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, aircraft or air traffic control, nuclear facilities, manned spacecraft, or military use in connection with live combat. However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization.”
~Max