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I have a different kind of thought here. Doesn't this make you think about how dependent (or interwoven) our government is on private / commercial companies to

I have a different kind of thought here. Doesn't this make you think about how dependent (or interwoven) our government is on private / commercial companies to communicate with us? I.e. for an entity with such a role in our lives or organization of society, it actually has very few ways to disseminate information of its own, don't you think? If the government didn't have access to TV, newspapers, internet provided by companies, how would someone in charge tell us something? Telephone chain? Emergency broadcast system? Town crier? Post office? I think actually it tells you how little day-to-day power the government has over our lives aside from when you run afoul of the law.

MontagFTB 6y ago
I’ve always seen this as a primary function of the postal service. The government should defend and maintain it as the essential medium of communication that it is. It’s not as fast as most forms of modern communication, but it handles a lot of essential tasks efficiently. On a somewhat related note, never underestimate the bandwidth of a sneakernet.
- kube-system 6y ago
  Absolutely, and this is my go-to argument any time someone says that the USPS is obsolete/unprofitable/archaic/redundant/etc. The point of the USPS is that the government can always correspond with any of its citizens, with an organizational service guarantee.
- beerandt 6y ago
  But even postal longhaul trucking is private contracted, even if it's not to one giant entity. Same for rural route carriers.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    They can’t stop the service though. At most they can delay it while the government changes contractors.
    - beerandt 6y ago
      Isn't this basically true for all the cases listed above? It's semantics at some point. But I don't know where. Ie, even if USPS operated the routes, they're relying on trucks built by private companies.
      - kortilla 6y ago
        No, it’s not the same because the users can still get the same service eventually. Trump will never be able to access his Twitter followers again.
  - rswail 6y ago
    Government contracts don't change the requirements of the Government to deliver the mandated services.
beerandt 6y ago
Expropriation and war-production act type solutions were always sufficient incentives/threats. Once again, case law/legal theory just hasn't caught up yet. It'd be interesting to see if today, a TV station says "We're disabling the emergency broadcast system to pre-empt our (either rational or irrational) fear of misuse." How long till fcc/govt mechanisms have the broadcast antenna turned off? Or the station seized, or whatever the solution is. Is the answer the same if, hypothetically, a foreign "influenced" station does the same thing as a war breaks out? Or, what if a station "ghosts" the system. Just turns it off without announcement? Apply the same questions to everything else you listed above. I presume (and hope) the pentagon knows these answers.
yalogin 6y ago
This is nothing new. It has always been that way. The only thing is there hasn’t ever been a person/president that is so bad at being human that companies wanted to distance themselves from him. That is also because these companies are not media companies. Even now I am sure if he speaks the traditional media companies will carry his message.
- dragonsky 6y ago
  I'm not actually sure of that the news media are willing to carry every message. From where I'm sitting (In Australia) the US news media seems to be quite free and happy to limit their coverage of output from the White House. Now the news media are commercial companies and I'm guessing their thinking is that they don't want to broadcast material that their audience finds distasteful or unappealing so they limit what they broadcast. My first reaction to the banning of the President was to wonder how I get an unedited account of what (however bizarre) he is saying and it's proving to be somewhat difficult. Maybe he's given up and gone back to playing golf so nothing is being said. I think the media companies are in a very difficult position. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been placed in a position of a primary outlet for any number of public personalties and as such have a degree of moral responsibility to clearly and without alteration transmit the words of those personalities. The problems start when the personalities use the platforms and the comment systems associated with them not as a conduit for information but as a soapbox to persuade people to believe dangerous falsehoods and organise illegal activity. The question is, where is the line drawn. Can I post fiction on Twitter? Of course, and there are many authors who do just that, posting stories in small chunks. Can I post satire? Yep, the Onion does this regularly, with their audience fully understanding that what they read is not factual. Can I post blatant damaging falsehoods about identified people? Well yes, but I'm guessing that I could be facing deformation charges, and I'd probably be reported to twitter and banned. So the line is drawn, post what you like, but don't cause damage with false information. This again raises the question, should the news media broadcast the words of public officials if those words are false and potentially damaging? In an ideal world we would have a well educated public with finely tuned bullshit detectors who would be able to safely consume unedited false content, being able to determine for themselves what is and isn't true. Unfortunately in most countries we have a significant proportion of the population who are unable to determine attractive falsehood from fact which leaves the news media in the position of editing/censoring words to try to limit damage.
deleted 6y ago
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yazaddaruvala 6y ago
I mean, they have their own websites and the postal service. But the real answer is, too large of a population of the USA believes the free market is more efficient than government. I don’t know if that is right or wrong, but it definitely leads to an outsized reliance of the government on private companies.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > too large of a population of the USA believes the free market is more efficient than government. People believe this because it is actually true. But its mechanism of operation is competition. It doesn't apply to monopolies or highly consolidated markets, which can be as inefficient as any government. This has obvious implications for the subject at hand.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    More "efficient" at what? Business is supposed to be efficient at making money and does so by excluding non-customers. Government is supposed to be "efficient" at serving all the people -is very hard economically. Post to rural MO, MT or AK wouldn't make it w/o guaranteed service by USPS. Among other services B couldn't do because the "margins arent there"
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      > Business is supposed to be efficient at making money and does so by... maximizing value and minimizing costs so that customers choose their offering over a competitor's. Which makes them more money. > Government is supposed to be "efficient" at serving all the people -is very hard economically. This is almost never even useful. Having mail service to rural areas isn't uneconomical because nobody would offer the service for the right price, it's because nobody would pay the price it actually costs. But if it costs the government $100 to deliver a package, and the recipient would rather have the $100 than have the package delivered to their home (as compared to e.g. a post office box in the nearest town), why are we even doing that? Just let them keep the $100 in tax money they would have paid to fund the delivery but wouldn't have paid given the choice not to.
voidhorse 6y ago
It's definitely a take away for me as well, it shows that private control of communications is a powerful weapon, and it also is revealing how self-serving the politics of most people are. The "right" typically, is in favor of less government, more private industry, etc. They typically feel the government intervening in the dealings of private industry is reprehensible. Yet look at what some of those voices are calling for now. Crying about "de-platforming"--no it's a private company making a choice. As expected, most people have no actual principles and really only claim to believe in something for as long as it's serving their own interest. If you suggested we have some mandates around communications companies and government access to them right now a bunch of "republicans" would be on board even though it stinks of state controlled media. Also, it's quite interesting how much of the seriousness of these blows for this administration stem from their painting the "mainstream media" as an enemy. The POTUS has a significant communications apparatus available to it outside of social/new media/, but this administration has alienated those other sources so significantly they cannot even use them effectively.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  Many liberals, like myself, are appalled by deplatforming as well and are rethinking our support for the modern left. It is an peculiar era indeed where championing freedom of speech, a core part of the Enlightenment philosophy that gave birth to liberalism, is condemned as being right wing.
  - Larrikin 6y ago
    Your post history has a lot of defenses of conservative views but you call out that you are a liberal to try to bolster your conservative points. What liberal views do you believe in?
    - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
      Here's a convenient primer for my beliefs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
mike00632 6y ago
No. Do you forget that the White House has its own website? Trump is 'dependent' on Twitter only because he won't take the effort to write a memo.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  Does anybody read the White House website?
  - wvenable 6y ago
    If Trump starting posting 240-word notices on there starting today, people would read it.
    - whatshisface 6y ago
      I sincerely wonder if the reach would be anywhere near as great.
      - wvenable 6y ago
        If you use a 3rd party to get "reach" you have to play by their rules.
  - mike00632 6y ago
    Do you forget that the American president used to make all important announcements via official means? Has the Obama administration been lost to history?
    - whatshisface 6y ago
      My recollection was that the announcements of the Obama administration had really low engagement. When Obama took the campaign hat off and put the presidential hat on, he occupied a proportionally smaller part of the public mind. Trump did not want to take the campaign hat off because he didn't want to let the amount people were thinking about him go down.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
One thing that is a little tangent to what you said: Maybe the government should create a video hosting service. It should host any legal content. There would be keyword search, and ability to iterate though all videos but that would be the extent of content discovery. Then other people could use that service as the back end and build content discovery on top of it. It would reduce the big barrier to making your own video streaming service with your desired content discovery algorithms since the government service would handle storage and streaming.
duxup 6y ago
We're very much dependent on private companies who of course have their own rights too... but that raises all sorts of questions. I support these folks right to manage their own service as they see fit, but it's also hard to ignore that if enough decided they would act in bad ways, there would be serious consequences.
beerandt 6y ago
I'm reminded that for quite a while, the Library of Congress archived all published tweets.
redisman 6y ago
All our phones have an emergency alert systems enforced by the telecoms and phone manufacturers that you can't turn off.
- mindslight 6y ago
  Most, at least. Settings -> Wireless & networks -> Emergency broadcasts under LineageOS. It's a great feeling when everyone else's phone sounds off for some bullshit.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    AMBER alert! A heavy set man with a 10 year old in a white car 400 miles away should be watched out for.
onion2k 6y ago
Trump's campaign emails are not government comms. The campaign is a business that raises funds to pay for Trump's political campaigning, although lately it seems some of that money has been going on paying off debts from his previous campaigns (https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/nov/10/donald-trump-election-fund-debt https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyl...). As for all the other Trump social media, there are official government accounts for everything that platforms probably couldn't ban quite so freely. The only reason they've been able to remove Trump is that he chose to use his own personal accounts instead.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  They've deleted Trump's tweets on the official channels. He is now banned from posting anywhere on Twitter.
  - jachee 6y ago
    ...because he keeps breaking the rules and spreading baseless claims and allegations, as well as dogwhistle calls to action. There is no right to incite, even under free speech.
- beerandt 6y ago
  Not specific to Trump, but: Honestly, the campaign de-platforming (especially the last-minute ad-pulls) might concern me more than the head-of-state censorship.
- rswail 6y ago
  Trump can put out whatever bullshit he likes on whitehouse.gov. The public servants/administration staff that do that have to understand that if they disagree with what he wants to put out, they can object through official channels, and if that is not enough, quit.
simonh 6y ago
Trump’s private political organisation has nothing to do with the government though. This is a relationship between a private citizen (and associates) and a private service provider. Beyond ensuring both adhere to the law, government has no role here.
tonyztan 6y ago
The President can send a Presidential Alert to all cell phones. This cannot be turned off by the user. https://www.wired.com/story/presidential-text-alert-fema-emergency-history/ https://www.wired.com/story/presidential-text-alert-fema-eme...
brigandish 6y ago
If there's a place for RSS, surely it's here.
evrydayhustling 6y ago
For official communications, the government maintains rights to take over broadcast and cellular bandwidth as well as other channels to communicate directly. This isn't a deplatforming of the government, it's of Trump's political campaigning, which is supposed to be done as a private citizen.
deleted 6y ago
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zaptheimpaler 6y ago
Their power comes from their ability to make or enforce laws on anyone, including people working at those private companies. They don't need to control the actual means of communication. All the services banning Trump only after he is well and truly done with the presidency tell me that government power still works just fine.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

MontagFTB 6y ago

I’ve always seen this as a primary function of the postal service. The government should defend and maintain it as the essential medium of communication that it is. It’s not as fast as most forms of modern communication, but it handles a lot of essential tasks efficiently. On a somewhat related note, never underestimate the bandwidth of a sneakernet.

kube-system 6y ago
Absolutely, and this is my go-to argument any time someone says that the USPS is obsolete/unprofitable/archaic/redundant/etc. The point of the USPS is that the government can always correspond with any of its citizens, with an organizational service guarantee.
beerandt 6y ago
But even postal longhaul trucking is private contracted, even if it's not to one giant entity. Same for rural route carriers.
- kortilla 6y ago
  They can’t stop the service though. At most they can delay it while the government changes contractors.
  - beerandt 6y ago
    Isn't this basically true for all the cases listed above? It's semantics at some point. But I don't know where. Ie, even if USPS operated the routes, they're relying on trucks built by private companies.
    - kortilla 6y ago
      No, it’s not the same because the users can still get the same service eventually. Trump will never be able to access his Twitter followers again.
- rswail 6y ago
  Government contracts don't change the requirements of the Government to deliver the mandated services.

beerandt 6y ago

Expropriation and war-production act type solutions were always sufficient incentives/threats. Once again, case law/legal theory just hasn't caught up yet. It'd be interesting to see if today, a TV station says "We're disabling the emergency broadcast system to pre-empt our (either rational or irrational) fear of misuse." How long till fcc/govt mechanisms have the broadcast antenna turned off? Or the station seized, or whatever the solution is. Is the answer the same if, hypothetically, a foreign "influenced" station does the same thing as a war breaks out? Or, what if a station "ghosts" the system. Just turns it off without announcement? Apply the same questions to everything else you listed above. I presume (and hope) the pentagon knows these answers.

yalogin 6y ago

This is nothing new. It has always been that way. The only thing is there hasn’t ever been a person/president that is so bad at being human that companies wanted to distance themselves from him. That is also because these companies are not media companies. Even now I am sure if he speaks the traditional media companies will carry his message.

dragonsky 6y ago
I'm not actually sure of that the news media are willing to carry every message. From where I'm sitting (In Australia) the US news media seems to be quite free and happy to limit their coverage of output from the White House. Now the news media are commercial companies and I'm guessing their thinking is that they don't want to broadcast material that their audience finds distasteful or unappealing so they limit what they broadcast. My first reaction to the banning of the President was to wonder how I get an unedited account of what (however bizarre) he is saying and it's proving to be somewhat difficult. Maybe he's given up and gone back to playing golf so nothing is being said. I think the media companies are in a very difficult position. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been placed in a position of a primary outlet for any number of public personalties and as such have a degree of moral responsibility to clearly and without alteration transmit the words of those personalities. The problems start when the personalities use the platforms and the comment systems associated with them not as a conduit for information but as a soapbox to persuade people to believe dangerous falsehoods and organise illegal activity. The question is, where is the line drawn. Can I post fiction on Twitter? Of course, and there are many authors who do just that, posting stories in small chunks. Can I post satire? Yep, the Onion does this regularly, with their audience fully understanding that what they read is not factual. Can I post blatant damaging falsehoods about identified people? Well yes, but I'm guessing that I could be facing deformation charges, and I'd probably be reported to twitter and banned. So the line is drawn, post what you like, but don't cause damage with false information. This again raises the question, should the news media broadcast the words of public officials if those words are false and potentially damaging? In an ideal world we would have a well educated public with finely tuned bullshit detectors who would be able to safely consume unedited false content, being able to determine for themselves what is and isn't true. Unfortunately in most countries we have a significant proportion of the population who are unable to determine attractive falsehood from fact which leaves the news media in the position of editing/censoring words to try to limit damage.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

yazaddaruvala 6y ago

I mean, they have their own websites and the postal service. But the real answer is, too large of a population of the USA believes the free market is more efficient than government. I don’t know if that is right or wrong, but it definitely leads to an outsized reliance of the government on private companies.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> too large of a population of the USA believes the free market is more efficient than government. People believe this because it is actually true. But its mechanism of operation is competition. It doesn't apply to monopolies or highly consolidated markets, which can be as inefficient as any government. This has obvious implications for the subject at hand.
- edoceo 6y ago
  More "efficient" at what? Business is supposed to be efficient at making money and does so by excluding non-customers. Government is supposed to be "efficient" at serving all the people -is very hard economically. Post to rural MO, MT or AK wouldn't make it w/o guaranteed service by USPS. Among other services B couldn't do because the "margins arent there"
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > Business is supposed to be efficient at making money and does so by... maximizing value and minimizing costs so that customers choose their offering over a competitor's. Which makes them more money. > Government is supposed to be "efficient" at serving all the people -is very hard economically. This is almost never even useful. Having mail service to rural areas isn't uneconomical because nobody would offer the service for the right price, it's because nobody would pay the price it actually costs. But if it costs the government $100 to deliver a package, and the recipient would rather have the $100 than have the package delivered to their home (as compared to e.g. a post office box in the nearest town), why are we even doing that? Just let them keep the $100 in tax money they would have paid to fund the delivery but wouldn't have paid given the choice not to.

voidhorse 6y ago

It's definitely a take away for me as well, it shows that private control of communications is a powerful weapon, and it also is revealing how self-serving the politics of most people are. The "right" typically, is in favor of less government, more private industry, etc. They typically feel the government intervening in the dealings of private industry is reprehensible. Yet look at what some of those voices are calling for now. Crying about "de-platforming"--no it's a private company making a choice. As expected, most people have no actual principles and really only claim to believe in something for as long as it's serving their own interest. If you suggested we have some mandates around communications companies and government access to them right now a bunch of "republicans" would be on board even though it stinks of state controlled media. Also, it's quite interesting how much of the seriousness of these blows for this administration stem from their painting the "mainstream media" as an enemy. The POTUS has a significant communications apparatus available to it outside of social/new media/, but this administration has alienated those other sources so significantly they cannot even use them effectively.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago
Many liberals, like myself, are appalled by deplatforming as well and are rethinking our support for the modern left. It is an peculiar era indeed where championing freedom of speech, a core part of the Enlightenment philosophy that gave birth to liberalism, is condemned as being right wing.
- Larrikin 6y ago
  Your post history has a lot of defenses of conservative views but you call out that you are a liberal to try to bolster your conservative points. What liberal views do you believe in?
  - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
    Here's a convenient primer for my beliefs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

mike00632 6y ago

No. Do you forget that the White House has its own website? Trump is 'dependent' on Twitter only because he won't take the effort to write a memo.

whatshisface 6y ago
Does anybody read the White House website?
- wvenable 6y ago
  If Trump starting posting 240-word notices on there starting today, people would read it.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    I sincerely wonder if the reach would be anywhere near as great.
    - wvenable 6y ago
      If you use a 3rd party to get "reach" you have to play by their rules.
- mike00632 6y ago
  Do you forget that the American president used to make all important announcements via official means? Has the Obama administration been lost to history?
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    My recollection was that the announcements of the Obama administration had really low engagement. When Obama took the campaign hat off and put the presidential hat on, he occupied a proportionally smaller part of the public mind. Trump did not want to take the campaign hat off because he didn't want to let the amount people were thinking about him go down.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

One thing that is a little tangent to what you said: Maybe the government should create a video hosting service. It should host any legal content. There would be keyword search, and ability to iterate though all videos but that would be the extent of content discovery. Then other people could use that service as the back end and build content discovery on top of it. It would reduce the big barrier to making your own video streaming service with your desired content discovery algorithms since the government service would handle storage and streaming.

duxup 6y ago

We're very much dependent on private companies who of course have their own rights too... but that raises all sorts of questions. I support these folks right to manage their own service as they see fit, but it's also hard to ignore that if enough decided they would act in bad ways, there would be serious consequences.

beerandt 6y ago

I'm reminded that for quite a while, the Library of Congress archived all published tweets.

redisman 6y ago

All our phones have an emergency alert systems enforced by the telecoms and phone manufacturers that you can't turn off.

mindslight 6y ago
Most, at least. Settings -> Wireless & networks -> Emergency broadcasts under LineageOS. It's a great feeling when everyone else's phone sounds off for some bullshit.
- kortilla 6y ago
  AMBER alert! A heavy set man with a 10 year old in a white car 400 miles away should be watched out for.

onion2k 6y ago

Trump's campaign emails are not government comms. The campaign is a business that raises funds to pay for Trump's political campaigning, although lately it seems some of that money has been going on paying off debts from his previous campaigns (https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/nov/10/donald-trump-election-fund-debt https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyl...). As for all the other Trump social media, there are official government accounts for everything that platforms probably couldn't ban quite so freely. The only reason they've been able to remove Trump is that he chose to use his own personal accounts instead.

whatshisface 6y ago
They've deleted Trump's tweets on the official channels. He is now banned from posting anywhere on Twitter.
- jachee 6y ago
  ...because he keeps breaking the rules and spreading baseless claims and allegations, as well as dogwhistle calls to action. There is no right to incite, even under free speech.
beerandt 6y ago
Not specific to Trump, but: Honestly, the campaign de-platforming (especially the last-minute ad-pulls) might concern me more than the head-of-state censorship.
rswail 6y ago
Trump can put out whatever bullshit he likes on whitehouse.gov. The public servants/administration staff that do that have to understand that if they disagree with what he wants to put out, they can object through official channels, and if that is not enough, quit.

simonh 6y ago

Trump’s private political organisation has nothing to do with the government though. This is a relationship between a private citizen (and associates) and a private service provider. Beyond ensuring both adhere to the law, government has no role here.

tonyztan 6y ago

The President can send a Presidential Alert to all cell phones. This cannot be turned off by the user. https://www.wired.com/story/presidential-text-alert-fema-emergency-history/ https://www.wired.com/story/presidential-text-alert-fema-eme...

brigandish 6y ago

If there's a place for RSS, surely it's here.

evrydayhustling 6y ago

For official communications, the government maintains rights to take over broadcast and cellular bandwidth as well as other channels to communicate directly. This isn't a deplatforming of the government, it's of Trump's political campaigning, which is supposed to be done as a private citizen.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

zaptheimpaler 6y ago

Their power comes from their ability to make or enforce laws on anyone, including people working at those private companies. They don't need to control the actual means of communication. All the services banning Trump only after he is well and truly done with the presidency tell me that government power still works just fine.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]