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In this case, the population is Parler members. But the instance and people involved are largely irrelevant; it's merely the illustration of a point that will b
by kstenerud 6y ago
In this case, the population is Parler members. But the instance and people involved are largely irrelevant; it's merely the illustration of a point that will become more and more pronounced as more people realize this power. And it'll be confounded by the fact that no company can be fully up to date with the local foibles of country X and their issues that the company must now decide the truth of and censor whomever they believe to be the bad actors (yeah, good luck!).
Although social media companies have allowed more of us to broadcast to an unprecedentedly large audience, we're not actually ready for the Pandora's box this opens in terms of free speech, corporate rights and obligations, and national sovereignty. The near-term solution will be selective censorship by companies and blocking by governments unhappy with the censorship choices (for both good and bad reasons). But as the decade drags on, we'll be forced to recognize our lack of psychological adaptability to this kind of influential power that can destabilize societies to such a degree (by individual, group, AND state actors), and try to come up with a least-worst solution that we're probably not going to like.
It's not like this is completely new; larger countries with information dissemination advantages have used that power to destabilize smaller countries for centuries, most recently in South America and the Middle East. But it's quite another thing to be on the receiving end, by anyone able to harness a sufficient audience (i.e. not just state actors), and find yourself unable to effectively defend against it.
- BoorishBears 6y agoNope. Definitely not buying that was the original population mentioned: it doesn't follow your original claim and it doesn't follow your reply. > All of the major social media companies blocked a significant portion of the population because of the attempted subversion of democracy in the country. Parler users are not a significant portion of the population. They were not blocked by "all social media companies", their app was removed from an app store. If you're trying to implicate the people who were using Parler... again small population and the over lap between banned from social media and using Parler is far away from a "significant portion of the population". And many are of a certain political leaning, they are not representative of that population. This while comment chain was built on an event "banning a significant portion of the population population" that doesn't exist. End of story. I'm not interested in discussing doomsaying based on made up events. Nothing said in this thread is a novel thing, it's the same tired what-ifs that ignore the "what-happened". When your argument doesn't even stand without leaning on made up events and slipper slopes, it's not worth much.
- kstenerud 6y agoI can see now that this discussion will not be fruitful.
- BoorishBears 6y agoAlready been quite fruitful Once again it's been proven that, even after facing the worst case so far, presidents using their platform to threaten nuclear war... people still have to resort to embellishments and straight up fabrications to support doomsday theories that just haven't panned out. Twitter did not falter in their dedication to avoid censorship until people's blood were quite literally on this person's hands before finally taking a stand. It's probably been a difficult 4 years for some people at Twitter turning cheek after cheek, they're earned their extra 11 days of rest.