9 ms·
Instead of debating whether social media platforms should or shouldn't have silenced the president, and what their role was in inciting the crowds to "insurrect
by m-i-l 6y ago
Instead of debating whether social media platforms should or shouldn't have silenced the president, and what their role was in inciting the crowds to "insurrection", shouldn't we be discussing instead how to completely remove them from the political sphere? Never before in human history have we had privately operated for-profit organisations with so much power and influence over the running of countries. Social media platforms should never have been allowed to become the arbiters of democracy.
- kace91 6y agoThere are no ways to separate political from non political discourse. You can only remove social media from the political sphere by removing social media, period. You could, however, try to develop a legal and moral framework for acceptable social media behavior (meaning the way the network itself works, not users' behavior). The particularities that make extreme content rise to the top should be banned/discouraged, rather than embraced in the race for engagement.
- syshum 6y agoThere are ways to limit the influence, such has prohibiting elected officials from maintaining "official" accounts where they announce and do the public's business on the social media platforms. Also making some of the support the social media platform clearly have for some candidates as "in kind" political contributions.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jojobas 6y ago>removing social media, period This is even better, how do we do that instead?
- hourislate 6y agoThe world would be a better place if FB and Twitter did not exist. People often ask when and where did it go wrong, well it went wrong when Twitter and FB came into existence. They both cause more problems than they solve.
- wruza 6y agoI’m pretty sure dang could handle both, but then we’d lose HN. Is it a good trade-off? Hard to decide.
- m-i-l 6y ago> There are no ways to separate political from non political discourse Most large companies (especially in regulated industries) have strict social media policies, e.g. preventing employees from performing company business via their personal social media accounts, with penalties for serious breaches being disciplinary action up to and including dismissal, i.e. it is possible to separate company business from non-company business. Why not the same for those working in the political sphere?
- hharlequin 6y agoBecause typically you want politicians engaged socially with their electorate? Businesses fear liability. Governments should be built on it.
- kace91 6y agoSure, you can ban politicians from engaging in social networks, but that's far smaller proposal than removing the connection between social media and politics. Taking twitter away from congressmen won't stop superpatriotsforbaldeagles.ru from distributing political propaganda, or random people being fed extreme media each inside their bubble. The issue is inflammatory content spreading like wildfire, and direct intervention from politicians themselves is just tiny drop in the ocean.
- pjc50 6y ago> Why not the same for those working in the political sphere? What does this actually mean? Are you trying to ask politicians not to engage in politics? News organisations? Billionaires? Foreign intelligence services? Asking for legal restrictions on who's allowed to speak about what?
- whymauri 6y agoJust wait until you ask them to define what exactly 'politics' is. You'll either get no response or it'll boil down to 'the things I don't like.' And to clarify, this is actually a really important question because it predicates the entire discourse of separating social media and networks from politics.
- melenaboija 6y agoSocial media makes information available instantly everywhere and there is always someone wanting to believe any speech. If there is someone wanting to believe the earth is flat and triangular you will find him fast now. What could take months with massive people gatherings and paper press 100 years ago it can be done within minutes now. Instead of banning maybe educating people on how to consume information could be a way to start. I guess it is almost impossible to educate everybody but it has empirically worked for me and my close environment, after years of educating some of my older relatives I have been able to at least make them read the links before sharing them.
- Gustomaximus 6y ago> Never before in human history have we had privately operated for-profit organisations with so much power and influence over the running of countries Newspapers has this power before. Arguablying more so as there are Twitter alternatives and people can move platforms quickly as we saw with reddit and thedonald.win I guessing it was easier to control before as there were narrow corridors of power to owners/govt.
- danielrpa 6y agoBut social media companies insist they are NOT newspapers - if they were, special rules would apply due to implied editorial control.
- ghaff 6y agoWhat special rules? They're explicitly protected by the 1st amendment in a way that Twitter is not.
- koolba 6y agoSocial media is the stochastic terrorism of journalism. Give enough people you agree with a platform, demote the ones you don't, and boom you've created a narrative without your hand putting pen to paper.
- pclmulqdq 6y agoDefamation lawsuits. Right now, a bunch of people can tweet "John Doe (some public figure) beats his wife" with no verification, and Twitter keeps the tweets up, and doesn't get in trouble when John Doe's life is ruined by the false accusations. What's more, media can then report "John Doe is allegedly a domestic abuser," citing the tweets as evidence that there are allegations that John Doe is a domestic abuser. You see this pattern with pizza gate (some dumb social media posts getting picked up by Republican news), and with Kyle Rittenhouse (dumb, false twitter posts picked up by left-leaning news). In the latter case, the news outlets have been getting sued for defamation because the reporting was damaging and so demonstrably false. Section 230 protection for these platforms erodes all standards of truth for news.
- YinglingLight 6y ago>Never before in human history have we had privately operated for-profit organisations with so much power and influence over the running of countries Big difference is that the American Public no longer swallows what Walter Cronkite tells them each and every night. There is no single channel with as much influence. I defend every 'alternative' channel to the grave. I want media companies to fly under separate banners, not all congeal into one on a Crusade during anything Viacom execs deem convenient.
- yalogin 6y agoSorry but how exactly are you going to enforce that? It’s like saying we should not have let news to be carried over the internet.
- Nextgrid 6y agoI think his point isn't that politics are being discussed on a private platform, it's that the most up-to-date, official communication channel of the President is an account on a private social network instead of on government-owned infrastructure.
- Craighead 6y agoHe literally picked twitter while having whitehouse.gov
- jacobr1 6y agoBut the problem is really one of misuse of the bully-pulpit rather than the the fact it is private. If trump had his own blog on the whitehouse.gov site, hosted on government servers and still posted the stuff he does, would it be the same? I'm sure plenty of folks would proxy the material to various outlets including the twitter.
- Nextgrid 6y agoI think the problem of the president saying things many find unacceptable is separate from the private vs public platform thing. In this case I am purely talking about the latter - the fact that to keep up with what the president says I have to agree to a private company's terms of service, privacy policy (which is against my interest) and have to put up with my personal data being exploited for advertising, the advertising itself and various dark patterns.
- bromuro 6y agoThey all can have a website! And send emails!
- wizardforhire 6y ago
- ab3rC1te 6y agoWell that's because we the idiot people allowed the dirty house representatives to pass bills with a bunch of pork roast stuck inside to hand this country over to China and the UN. I hope we have a Red Dawn
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- snickms 6y agoPersonally, I wish Twitter was one audio-only party line. Two minutes of listening to a million people yelling their thoughts in real rime would reveal exactly what is happening there - and what a complete waste of time it is.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 6y agoThat’s gotta be pretty cheap to implement, if the Twitter API Terms of Service would allow that kind of thing.
- bart_spoon 6y agoIs that much different in the end from Tiktok or Instagram?
- blaser-waffle 6y agoBollocks. Look up Hearst, or "yellow journalism" or the Spanish-American War. Modern social media does it faster but it's no different than the newspaper empires of yesteryear.
- spodek 6y agoAlso the East India Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company
- sjg007 6y agoIt’s the speed and reach that’s the problem.
- insert_coin 6y agoThey said the same thing about the printing press.
- novaRom 6y agoBoth KGB and Stazi did fully control their citizens. Today there's no any serious technical restriction to get compromising information on anyone or better to say on everyone from any county. So, almost total control - see Trump, Farage, LePan, AFD, etc.
- voxic11 6y agoWhat does that have to do with social media?
- novaRom 6y agoAre you serious? The report warns that social media “are now tilting dangerously toward illiberalism” as more governments and “unscrupulous partisan operatives” use social media for repressive purposes. These include not only malign propaganda campaigns at home and abroad, but also growing government use of social media for mass surveillance. “As a result of these trends,” Freedom House reports, “global internet freedom declined for the ninth consecutive year in 2019. https://www.forbes.com/sites/seanlawson/2019/11/07/evidence-mounts-of-social-medias-negative-impacts-for-democracy/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/seanlawson/2019/11/07/evidence-...
- lhorie 6y ago> shouldn't we be discussing instead how to completely remove them from the political sphere? I don't think so. The analogy that comes to mind is the idea of letting kids play outside. People try to justify today's overprotective culture by bringing up things like cars (they existed back in the 70s too) or candy-wielding abductors (really?) or whatever, but the overall theme is this pervasive idea that we can't handle scary things (be it the outdoors or media megacorps) and therefore we should be artificially shielded from them. Instead, wouldn't it be better to teach critical thinking in school such that when you're faced with the realities of the world, you have at least some preparation? The idea of imparting civic responsibility principles from a young age seems to work well for example with classroom cleaning duties in Japan.
- pasabagi 6y agoI think there are many more cars on the road today, and I suspect they are more dangerous to pedestrians (new cars are generally more powerful, so tend to accelerate to dangerous speeds on small streets. Not to even start on smartphones).
- csharptwdec19 6y ago> new cars are generally more powerful, so tend to accelerate to dangerous speeds on small streets. Yes and no and but... Yes - Broadly speaking most new cars are more powerful than they were in the late 70s and early 80s No - Before the gas crisis we has a much larger lust for big powerful engines. But - In the last 20 years especially there has been a mandated (i.e. NHSTA/etc) effort to make vehicles 'less harmful' to pedestrians in case of an impact. You can see some of this in the changes to front fascias/bumpers.
- everdrive 6y ago>No - Before the gas crisis we has a much larger lust for big powerful engines. >But - In the last 20 years especially there has been a mandated (i.e. NHSTA/etc) effort to make vehicles 'less harmful' to pedestrians in case of an impact. You can see some of this in the changes to front fascias/bumpers. You hit on some of the complexity here. Cars are actually much quicker now. In the 1950s, a V8 police car made 85-150 horsepower. So, the bigger engines prior to the 70s were quite slow compared to cars today. As you note, the speed gains must be partially offset (fully?) by the advances in safety: tires, anti-lock brakes, pedestrian-friendly bumpers, and more.
- novaRom 6y ago> privately operated for-profit organisations with so much power and influence They are simply a middle man between foreign agencies and domestic users. Foreign countries really do exploit all those platforms for their own interests.
- Railsify 6y agoThe problem is the choices of individuals. It's not appropriate to blame a third party for the actions of an individual. If you riot or destroy something it is your fault and your fault alone. This is a major problem for our country, it's easier to be a victim than to take responsibility, and there is an entire subset of our population (the woke left) that supports this attitude.
- tomatotomato37 6y agoTo be fair a couple of those platforms are being prosecuted for anti-trust issues. It's kinda weird how the final straw was over VR periphals rather than corporate takeover of the public square but I guess the US just has weird priorities
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ProAm 6y ago> Never before in human history have we had privately operated for-profit organisations with so much power and influence over the running of countries. Newspapers have always had this power, the difference now is it's on the internet instead of print. Once TV's became common place the evening news also had this power. This has always been how things worked the difference now is the reach is larger and the turnaround time is faster.
- Enhex 6y agoself hosting is the solution, everyone already got a computer and internet connection. IPv6 solves the NAT & CGNAT problems.
- claw_howitzer 6y agoNo need for scare quotes around insurrection dude, this fits the textbook definition
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Instead of debating whether social media platforms should or shouldn't have silenced the president, and what their role was in inciting the crowds to "insurrection", shouldn't we be discussing instead how to completely remove them from the political sphere? No. > Never before in human history have we had privately operated for-profit organisations with so much power and influence over the running of countries. Yeah, that's really not true, even if you specifically limit it to media firms (e.g., Hearst at its height), and ignore, e.g., extractive/colonial firms like oil companies, United Fruit Company, and the various East India Companies, and also ignore much of history before the modern period, when there was no real public/private distinction, and the things we now think of as public functions were overtly private property rights exercised, quite often, for personal profit. > Social media platforms should never have been allowed to become the arbiters of democracy. They aren't the arbiters of democracy, only of their own platforms. Just like other media companies.