6 ms·
That private businesses can keep people off of their properties?
by bdibs 6y ago
That private businesses can keep people off of their properties?
- valvar 6y agoPretty sure that is exactly what will change.
- tempsy 6y agoclearly it’s more than that. these companies are more than just private companies they are social utilities. and might be regulated as such in the future. that’s my point.
- dannyw 6y agoI’ve been sitewide banned from Reddit twice. It’s always been this way.
- valvar 6y agoYou're not the president of the United States.
- colejohnson66 6y agoThere really shouldn’t be any distinction. The President, while a very powerful figure, is still a citizen. If we’re going to complain about rich people having privileges that poorer people don’t, then Trump is no different in that respect. Regardless, if Trump wants to, he has official means (through whitehouse.gov) to issue statements. He choose Twitter when he had other options.
- rustyminnow 6y agoIf anything, the president should be held to a higher standard.
- hiimtroymclure 6y agoyou aren't the president. Any future elected official now has to consider if these social media companies are a good medium to communicate with the people. If that elected official doesn't play big tech's rules, the looming threat of a ban might change their mind. It's crazy naive to not see the implications of this
- FireBeyond 6y agoThe President has access to TV (this one mainly uses it to go on long winded rambling call-ins to Fox and Friends), not to mention a fairly comprehensive web platform of his own to communicate. This is a President who wouldn't even use the designated @potus account because he is so narcissistic he wanted the follower count for himself.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agothe implications being??? that it's not a great idea for the POTUS (or equivalent) to consider a private communications platform as their official "channel to the people"? well, duh! who'd have thunk?
- lame-robot-hoax 6y agoThe president has to follow the TOS just like any other user. They aren’t a king.
- fuzxi 6y agoWhat good reason is there for the president to not simply communicate via whitehouse.gov or equivalent? You might argue that it has lesser reach compared to a major social media site, but there are countless individuals and organizations that would jump to be the first one posting a link to a presidential address on social media sites.
- andrewzah 6y agoIt's almost as if there are official channels to communicate information. Ones that aren't private companies.
- mac01021 6y ago
- maxerickson 6y agoThat statement is incoherent.
- dannyw 6y agoIf you say things big tech doesn’t like, you get deplatformed. This applies to everyone.
- maxerickson 6y agoIf you got banned the first time you couldn't get banned a second time. Which is more than just semantics. Suspending an account and the associated momentum without actually banning the person might be a good mechanism to have in place.
- newguy1234 6y agoI get banned all the time from reddit. So much so that I have like 10 alt accounts premade so I can just slowly shift from one to the next. Sometimes I don't even know why I get banned.
- 1propionyl 6y agoNo. Right now, they are in fact just private companies. They are not de jure social utilities, even if they act as if they are de facto. Now, maybe they should be, and should be regulated as such. Maybe we should have a conversation about delegating services which are key to our social fabric to what are just private companies. But that's somewhat orthogonal to the issue at hand. Additionally, should be noted: if the government attempted to coerce or strong-arm Twitter to keep Donald Trump's account online, that would absolutely be a textbook 1st Amendment violation. Corporations are legal persons, and have constitutional rights under the 14th Amendment. Coerced speech is not free speech.
- tempsy 6y agoI didn’t say that they were social utilities right now, I’m saying this could very well spark interest in regulating social media as more than just any old private business with zero regulatory framework attached to them.
- 1propionyl 6y ago> ...these companies are more than just private companies they are social utilities. They are not though. They are just private companies. We can argue until the cows come home about how people see them, how they use them, how they feel about them... but at the end of the day they are just private companies. I agree that we should consider whether that should remain the case. But right now... it is the case.
- wwright 6y agoI think this is an instance of the biggest, most disastrous fallacy of the last half century: that a company is a social utility. It’s not. It’a a bunch of rich people in California. If you want a public utility for communication and socializing, go help build one. Contribute to Mastodon or the rest of the fediverse. Write to representatives (or become one yourself) and propose legislation to fund a public tool that is actually owned by the people. It could even be part of the fediverse! But asking Twitter to do any random thing someone wants because they are a big company is insane and is going to cause us nothing but pain.
- tempsy 6y agohow is it crazy to want to apply a regulatory framework to certain industries? we do that for cable companies, ISPs, banks, publishers, food producers, restaurants, etc etc. So why not social media? The only reason is these companies are “new” and were not viewed as much more than a toy until a few years ago and now we’re seeing the consequences of that.
- wwright 6y agoI don’t think wanting a regulatory framework is bad at all (though I think in the last few decades, we have naïvely tried to regulate companies into doing things that are simply counter to their nature rather than solving problems directly, eg minimum wage vs UBI). A utility is different than a regulated company.
- Bakary 6y agoBut these are the services that people actually use. On Mastodon you end up with... well the sort of person who uses Mastodon. Which means that the people that run those services have some degree of de facto influence, which in turn means that they are likely to end up regulated and constrained by other powerful actors. Today it's rich people in California, once it was rich people building railroads and pumping oil.
- Fifer82 6y agoYou put it more eloquently than I could. It is a private company but it also hosts world leaders as a dispatch service. Something feels off about a single company being able to indiscriminately terminate voices at a whim.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoShould the New York Times be allowed to indiscriminately decline publication of OpEds?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- AgentME 6y agoTrump has no shortage of places that he can speak his voice and people will hear him. He can call any news station right now. He could make an account on Parler or many other social media sites. No specific company is obligated to broadcast his messages. The government can't obligate anyone who doesn't want it to run his propaganda.
- Fifer82 6y agoI do not have any interest in Trump. I trust my American friends will do whatever is best for them and I respect that. This is bigger than that for me. Everyone uses Twitter, news corportations across the divides reference it. If it is being edited from the top, that seems scary is all. In 10 years, maybe no one will remember Trump, but maybe the person who is right for your vote will not have a voice to reference.
- AgentME 6y agoTwitter edits their site from the top all the time. It would look like your spam folder if they didn't. They remove spam, harassment, calls to violence, etc. It would not be popular if they didn't do any of this.
- decebalus1 6y ago> these companies are more than just private companies they are social utilities. No, no they're not. If you or others personally perceive them as utilities, you have skewed perception of reality. I mean not even the ISP you're using to access them aren't considered utilities. It's funny that the same people who applauded Pai for the net neutrality thing are the ones complaining about 'big tech censorship'.
- karaterobot 6y agoI see there's a wikipedia entry about social media as public utility (which I take to be what you mean by 'social utilities' in the sense of regulation). To my knowledge, though, this is just a theoretical construct, not a legal one, yet in this thread it's seems to be taken for granted that treating Twitter as a utility is just another tool in the (U.S.) government's toolbox. Is there any reason to think it actually is? Seems offhand like a stretch, but I'm no legal scholar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_public_utility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_public_utili...
- dionian 6y agothat it gives ammo to section 230 reform
- bpodgursky 6y agoBig tech has gotten away with the monopoly-but-not-abuse-of-monopoly argument for a decade because the platforms were free and available to everyone. If the second point is not true anymore... it's going to start getting regulated like a utility. Your electric and phone providers can't simply decide to stop serving people it doesn't like, and likely, Twitter won't either.
- ineedasername 6y agoElectric & phone providers had use of public resources & space, a right-of-way across private land, etc.
- disambiguation 6y agoToday, Twitter. Tomorrow, FiOS.
- inscionent 6y agoFiOS doesn't have to service you
- phendrenad2 6y agoLet's check the terms they agreed to when we, the people, gave them a monopoly on fiber service running through extremely space-constrained boxes under our streets.
- mortenjorck 6y agoThis is a very relevant point for about 2005. In the years since then, what was once a constellation of internet platforms has shrunken and consolidated to only a handful that are the de facto gatekeepers. Legally, of course, nothing has changed since then. But it's willfully ignoring the unprecedented power of major platforms in shaping popular dialog to compare them to a local supermarket escorting someone out.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y agoHow about private business (Apple) disallowing people to use an app (parler) on their property (iPhone)?
- sixothree 6y agoIt's within their right and probably a terrible corner we have painted ourselves into. But you can't even get people to use firefox. So what to do?
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y agoMaybe Parler users can take a page from BLM's book and have some peaceful protests in front of Apple Stores all over the country.
- sixothree 6y agoSince Parler was a nexus of these terrorists attacks, are you suggesting the same for apple? What are you suggesting? I'm so sick of these vague right wing threats.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y agoWell, protest is the language of the unheard [1]. Or you are suggesting that Floyd protests were terrorist attacks and organized via Parler? [1]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-protest-is-the-language-of-the-unheard/ar-BB14M7Rp https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-protest-is-the-language-...
- sixothree 6y agoWe're two days from a hostile coup and you're suggesting protests. I really don't know what to think about your suggestion honestly.
- 6y ago
- ng12 6y agoMost people acknowledge that social media has an unprecedented ability to sway elections. Wouldn't it follow that allowing them to deplatform politicians is a seriously concerting form of censorship, private business or no?
- ndndmskksk 6y agoI see this comment a lot. What does suppression of free speech in America look like to you then?
- ndndmskksk 6y agoTo follow up, if I would have to imagine it for a book, this is how I would write it — why I think there needs to be better regulation/rights here. How long until it happens to a marginalized population at scale? Generally curious your thoughts otherwise. Thanks and be well
- guilhas 6y agoSo we need the gov to create a public twitter? It is not very hard or expensive, and twitter will loose market