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> “Who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear,” Cruz said. That's

> “Who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear,” Cruz said. That's such a ridiculous thing to say. Twitter has the unanimous consent of everyone who is subject to their rules. Every Twitter user became a Twitter user by choice and no-one is going to use violence against them for no longer using Twitter or for creating an alternative. That couldn't be further from the situation with the government. Cruz and other politicians impose their rules on people who never had a choice. The US government did not create the land it claims as its territory, it took control of it by force killing thousands of people. The government is both willing and able to use extreme violence to prevent people from avoiding it or creating alternatives to it. A Twitter user who is angry about Twitter's censorship only has to spend a few minutes to delete their account and create an account with another service (Gab, mastodon, etc.). A US citizen who is angry about the US government's censorship have to abandon their home and be accepted by another government. Even then, the US government may still demand their money and loyalty.

chrisco255 6y ago
> The US government did not create the land it claims as its territory, it took control of it by force killing thousands of people. Yeah, that's true of every nation in existence and every nation in the past. We just happen to live in a relatively peaceful time. Not too long ago, constant war and fighting for territory was all there was, and there wasn't a square mile on planet earth that blood hasn't been spilt for. Twitter is a monopoly and has an outsized influence on politics and news today, beyond any media force in history, perhaps. They're protected by arbitrary legislation from the 90s that prevents them from being held accountable for false or defamatory statements from getting published and shared on their platform. The whole impetus from that protection was to promote free speech. Instead, Twitter has chosen to arbitrarily and selectively mute, shadow ban, lock out, and silence those who they disagree with. I think if they are benefitting from 230 protection, they should not be allowed to engage in this kind of manipulation. Or they should be forced to federate their service with other platforms. With Twitter, individual contributors can spend a decade building up a following of tens of thousands to millions of users, and then with a click, Twitter can take that away. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when we got the right to keep your phone number passed so that you can keep your number when you switch cell phone carriers. That sort of thing does not exist in social media. If I switch platforms, I lose my ability to communicate with my connections. That's a problem. That should be legislated away.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  At some point, the political leaders of the world are going to have to take a side. Either online social networks are publishers, or they are common carriers, or they are something else and that something needs to be defined with sufficient clarity for everyone to know where they stand and what their rights and responsibilities are. If the social networks are to be considered publishers, they can properly be held accountable for the information they propagate. That has to remain true whether the information is blatantly untrue political propaganda and climate change denial and anti-vaccination conspiracy theories or child abuse images and calls for violent protest and revenge porn. But the services also have to have full editorial rights to go along with that responsibility, and if the biggest loudspeakers on the planet choose, for example, not to propagate someone's political speech during an election campaign because the operators of those services don't like the politicians, that's their right. Alternatively, if the services are to be considered common carriers, we go to the other extreme. They aren't responsible for anything transmitted over their network, whether good or bad. They are a mere conduit for information, no different to a phone service or postal mail or the crazy guy shouting in the pub at the end of the night or the Internet itself for that matter. They have to be impartial, including passing on material they don't necessarily like or agree with, without interference or comment. But then the services shouldn't be forever accused of not doing enough to combat whatever this season's political Big Bad is, regardless of the cost or even technical practicality of doing something else about that issue. Censorship is not their responsibility, and enforcing laws against criminal behaviour online is still the responsibility of government through normal law enforcement agencies and judicial processes. Those are the two classical models for big data shifters within most of our legal systems today, at least in the relatively democratic West. If governments want a third model instead, the politicians need to own the issue for once and actually say what they want so the tech firms can do it (or stop trading, or relocate to a more favourable environment, if what is demanded is too unreasonable or unrealistic). But of course then the frequent contradictions in political comment on these networks would be undermined and they could no longer be turned into the fall guys for everything bad that happens online so politicians who haven't managed to deal with difficult issues can save face. I am no big fan of any of these social networks, and I do personally think that much stronger regulation of big tech firms is long overdue, for the benefit of all the ordinary people whose lives are affected by them. But I also believe in fairness and transparency, particularly when it comes to who is legally required to do what and who is legally responsible for what. It's really tiresome to see politicians who wouldn't know an encryption algorithm if you handed them a paper with the algorithm's name in inch-high letters on the cover trying to lecture representatives of businesses that, for all their many failings and problems, are at least doing something that some real people find useful.
dpc_pw 6y ago
Realistically speaking social media companies should be regulated as public utilities. That's just recognizing the fact that they are natural monopolies. Saying "delete your account, and practically ostracize yourself from public discourse into irrelevance" makes as much sense as saying "you don't like your water company? just use another one". Technically we could live in a society in which this is true, but in practice we don't.
- DubiousPusher 6y ago
  I'm a big fan of public utilities but those things are light years apart. Water 1 You must have clean water. 2 You cannot feasibly participate in some other water gathering project in your municipality. 3 Another water company cannot establish itself in your municipality Social Media 1 You do not need social media, there are many healthy ways to stay connected to friends and family 2 You have many choices of social networks where you can spend your time 3 The longest lived major social networks is like 10 or 15 years old and we really don't have any idea how penetrable the market is long term.
- s5300 6y ago
  >>Saying "delete your account, and practically ostracize yourself from public discourse into irrelevance" You know there's this big big gigantic thing called the internet and it's so incredibly big you can make your very own website with your own name on it? If you're relevant to public discourse, people will obviously go to your personal website. If not - maybe you're not so relevant as you thought.
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    That's a cop-out. If there is one thing we have learned from the current generation of dominant tech services, it's that network effects can be hugely powerful in this space. A business with a strong enough network effect supporting its main product or service can, evidently, screw up in almost any other respect and still survive with its network intact and its share price untroubled. And that remains true even if those screw-ups can have catastrophic effects on many little guys who were affected.
- 6y ago
DubiousPusher 6y ago
I've learned over the years that you can learn a lot about a person's true intentions regarding an issue by noting how they otherwise engage with the issue. In this example, Cruz is obviously angry about what editorial control was exercised rather than that it was exercised at all. Given that I haven't seen him railing at Rupert Murdoch or Sinclair for its creeping monopoly of local radio.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  When's the last time an entire news cycle was influenced by what was said on local radio?
  - DubiousPusher 6y ago
    Sinclair's effect of influence is distributed rather than centralized. The two things are asymmetric but that does not mean they aren't both powerful.

chrisco255 6y ago

> The US government did not create the land it claims as its territory, it took control of it by force killing thousands of people. Yeah, that's true of every nation in existence and every nation in the past. We just happen to live in a relatively peaceful time. Not too long ago, constant war and fighting for territory was all there was, and there wasn't a square mile on planet earth that blood hasn't been spilt for. Twitter is a monopoly and has an outsized influence on politics and news today, beyond any media force in history, perhaps. They're protected by arbitrary legislation from the 90s that prevents them from being held accountable for false or defamatory statements from getting published and shared on their platform. The whole impetus from that protection was to promote free speech. Instead, Twitter has chosen to arbitrarily and selectively mute, shadow ban, lock out, and silence those who they disagree with. I think if they are benefitting from 230 protection, they should not be allowed to engage in this kind of manipulation. Or they should be forced to federate their service with other platforms. With Twitter, individual contributors can spend a decade building up a following of tens of thousands to millions of users, and then with a click, Twitter can take that away. I mean, I'm old enough to remember when we got the right to keep your phone number passed so that you can keep your number when you switch cell phone carriers. That sort of thing does not exist in social media. If I switch platforms, I lose my ability to communicate with my connections. That's a problem. That should be legislated away.

Silhouette 6y ago
At some point, the political leaders of the world are going to have to take a side. Either online social networks are publishers, or they are common carriers, or they are something else and that something needs to be defined with sufficient clarity for everyone to know where they stand and what their rights and responsibilities are. If the social networks are to be considered publishers, they can properly be held accountable for the information they propagate. That has to remain true whether the information is blatantly untrue political propaganda and climate change denial and anti-vaccination conspiracy theories or child abuse images and calls for violent protest and revenge porn. But the services also have to have full editorial rights to go along with that responsibility, and if the biggest loudspeakers on the planet choose, for example, not to propagate someone's political speech during an election campaign because the operators of those services don't like the politicians, that's their right. Alternatively, if the services are to be considered common carriers, we go to the other extreme. They aren't responsible for anything transmitted over their network, whether good or bad. They are a mere conduit for information, no different to a phone service or postal mail or the crazy guy shouting in the pub at the end of the night or the Internet itself for that matter. They have to be impartial, including passing on material they don't necessarily like or agree with, without interference or comment. But then the services shouldn't be forever accused of not doing enough to combat whatever this season's political Big Bad is, regardless of the cost or even technical practicality of doing something else about that issue. Censorship is not their responsibility, and enforcing laws against criminal behaviour online is still the responsibility of government through normal law enforcement agencies and judicial processes. Those are the two classical models for big data shifters within most of our legal systems today, at least in the relatively democratic West. If governments want a third model instead, the politicians need to own the issue for once and actually say what they want so the tech firms can do it (or stop trading, or relocate to a more favourable environment, if what is demanded is too unreasonable or unrealistic). But of course then the frequent contradictions in political comment on these networks would be undermined and they could no longer be turned into the fall guys for everything bad that happens online so politicians who haven't managed to deal with difficult issues can save face. I am no big fan of any of these social networks, and I do personally think that much stronger regulation of big tech firms is long overdue, for the benefit of all the ordinary people whose lives are affected by them. But I also believe in fairness and transparency, particularly when it comes to who is legally required to do what and who is legally responsible for what. It's really tiresome to see politicians who wouldn't know an encryption algorithm if you handed them a paper with the algorithm's name in inch-high letters on the cover trying to lecture representatives of businesses that, for all their many failings and problems, are at least doing something that some real people find useful.

dpc_pw 6y ago

Realistically speaking social media companies should be regulated as public utilities. That's just recognizing the fact that they are natural monopolies. Saying "delete your account, and practically ostracize yourself from public discourse into irrelevance" makes as much sense as saying "you don't like your water company? just use another one". Technically we could live in a society in which this is true, but in practice we don't.

DubiousPusher 6y ago
I'm a big fan of public utilities but those things are light years apart. Water 1 You must have clean water. 2 You cannot feasibly participate in some other water gathering project in your municipality. 3 Another water company cannot establish itself in your municipality Social Media 1 You do not need social media, there are many healthy ways to stay connected to friends and family 2 You have many choices of social networks where you can spend your time 3 The longest lived major social networks is like 10 or 15 years old and we really don't have any idea how penetrable the market is long term.
s5300 6y ago
>>Saying "delete your account, and practically ostracize yourself from public discourse into irrelevance" You know there's this big big gigantic thing called the internet and it's so incredibly big you can make your very own website with your own name on it? If you're relevant to public discourse, people will obviously go to your personal website. If not - maybe you're not so relevant as you thought.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  That's a cop-out. If there is one thing we have learned from the current generation of dominant tech services, it's that network effects can be hugely powerful in this space. A business with a strong enough network effect supporting its main product or service can, evidently, screw up in almost any other respect and still survive with its network intact and its share price untroubled. And that remains true even if those screw-ups can have catastrophic effects on many little guys who were affected.
6y ago

DubiousPusher 6y ago

I've learned over the years that you can learn a lot about a person's true intentions regarding an issue by noting how they otherwise engage with the issue. In this example, Cruz is obviously angry about what editorial control was exercised rather than that it was exercised at all. Given that I haven't seen him railing at Rupert Murdoch or Sinclair for its creeping monopoly of local radio.

chrisco255 6y ago
When's the last time an entire news cycle was influenced by what was said on local radio?
- DubiousPusher 6y ago
  Sinclair's effect of influence is distributed rather than centralized. The two things are asymmetric but that does not mean they aren't both powerful.