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Perhaps this is me being overly cynical, but a state-run social media platform seems like a recipe for massive, invisible, unchecked government surveillance and
by larkeith 9y ago
Perhaps this is me being overly cynical, but a state-run social media platform seems like a recipe for massive, invisible, unchecked government surveillance and/or censorship. The last several years have made it abundantly clear that many parts of the US government do not consider privacy a right, and while our rights to free speech remain intact, I do not believe it is safe to assume this will remain the case across future administrations. In the worst case, a sufficiently popular administration could abuse state-run social platforms to locate, silence, and/or arrest dissidents, paving the way towards China-esque authoritarianism.
While such an extreme scenario is, needless to say, unlikely, the idea of centralizing the majority of social media under the control of a government that has shown increasing interest in mass surveillance remains something I am exceedingly dubious about.
- EggsOnToast 9y agoI agree and this is why I would argue in favor of parallelism rather than replacement with regard to private social media platforms. I think it's important that there is a platform insulated from domestic intervention, but I think it's just as important to have a platform that isn't vulnerable to outside economic influence. Right now the best solution I can think of is to do both separately and just accept that one will probably be redundant to the other most of the time.