10 ms·

GOP’s Big Tech plan ignores consumers, targets censorship of Republicans instead

36 points by eysquared 5y ago

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Big Tech could stop being Big Brother and then both consumers and Republicans would be happy.
- metalliqaz 5y ago
  The panopticon of big tech seems to be a natural result of advertising-supported Internet media. Consumers have definitely proven that they don't mind enough to change their habits. So the government could put strong privacy protections in place, that might reign in some of the "Big Brother" behavior of big tech. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for the GOP to endorse that.
  - rektide 5y ago
    There's still no evidence it'll get anywhere but I continue to believe that #selfhosted (a general idea not a specific thing) philosophy will slowly snowball into something. There's at least two fronts, having good enough software to be compelling, and having the ops situation be radically easier. Honestly I think Social Web (a general idea not specific tech) is kind of in a doldrums, has some interesting projects, and a lot of enthusiasm, but there's a lack of key innovators. I'd probably get outright spat on by some but I truly think Kubernetes is the first diy-able enough platform to be interesting for ops, and I do think we're not far off from having some fairly good out-of-box autonomic systems, & that would change the game. Alas multi-tenancy is still extremely early days for nearly everyone, & crude, needs a lot of work, but that is kind of optional, but in the end is a key enabler for interesting home computing. Reciprocally Kubernetes really requires multi-cluster capabilities, clusters as cattle, & right now that's a cowpath we need paving.
    - metalliqaz 5y ago
      You're talking hosting tech when the value of social networks is 99.9% in the breadth of the userbase.
      - rektide 5y ago
        The Social Web is built around Protocols[1]. Rather than try to compete with big tech by building a bigger monolithic system, either paid for with ads or some other way, the goal is to give folk an expansive suite of capabilities across many sites. Or in the cases of protocols like Web Annotations, anywhere they go. [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/ https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/
        metalliqaz 5y ago
        That would be wonderful, but will Twitter and Instagram participate? I'm doubtful.
- jude- 5y ago
  Until Republicans start using Big Tech to coordinate violent anti-democratic insurrections and dissuade people from getting vaccinated against a global lethal pandemic. Big Tech owes them nothing -- they're not entitled to their infrastructure and distribution networks. Let them build their own.
  - mizzack 5y ago
    Yeah! And let's have the taxpayer fund it! And subject it to common carrier regulations! Yeah?
  - kerkeslager 5y ago
    You seem to be under the impression that building their own infrastructure will be some sort of barrier for multi-billion dollar organizations. I totally agree that many members of the Republican Party are criminals and should be in jail, but we need to prosecute the crime, not throw away free speech and start surveilling everyone. When people coordinate violent anti-democratic insurrections, we should throw them in jail along with the other terrorists. When people dissuade people from getting vaccinated, we should take away their medical licenses when they have them, and hold them responsible for manslaughter when people die from Covid based on their lies. More laws aren't going to help when Democrats don't have the spine to enforce the laws we already have.
    - jude- 5y ago
      > You seem to be under the impression that building their own infrastructure will be some sort of barrier for multi-billion dollar organizations. I'm still waiting for the Republican (formerly alt-right) alternatives to YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to get anywhere near the formers' popularity. Also, a lot of tech folks won't work for these companies in the first place. It takes more than money to build a FAANG company. > More laws aren't going to help when Democrats don't have the spine to enforce the laws we already have. I didn't say anything about creating or enforcing any laws. All I said is that Big Tech is well within its right to kick off unscrupulous users, even if they happen to be the ruling party. The alternative -- passing laws that unconditionally force private entities to host the ruling party's content, including propaganda, calls for insurrection, and vaccine misinformation -- is far more objectionable and authoritarian. Especially so if you believe that building your own infrastructure and distribution networks isn't an unreasonable barrier to entry in the first place. Of course, I'm all for prosecuting the criminals who instigated the insurrection and botched the COVID response to the fullest extent of the law (among other high crimes and misdemeanors). I agree with you that the Democratic party needs to grow a spine and take a stand on this. But, why not both? Why not retain Big Tech's power to decide who can use their platform and who cannot? Last I checked, FAANG isn't infrastructure. Like, what would a reasonable regulatory alternative be, that doesn't just devolve into regulatory capture and erect lobbyist-designed artificial barriers to entry that nominally restrain FAANG's power, but practically impose too high a burden for anyone to challenge their market position?
- entropicdrifter 5y ago
  Big Corps, much like liquid flowing downhill, tend to flow towards whatever makes them the most money for the least effort, with no regards for ethics except where their bottom lines are affected. Regulations and criminal laws change the terrain. We could make them flow where we want them to, but we don't.
  - cheezymoogle 5y ago
    Regulations and criminal laws are like dams or levees; With predictable flows, artificial waterways can safely operate within reasonable tolerances assuming everything was done faithfully. With unpredictable flows, modifying the course of a waterway typically causes unanticipated problems downstream. Regardless, it's still water and will still flow downstream. No dam or levee is going to change that, just as no regulation or criminal law will change the basic motivations facing corporate entities at any scale (i.e. min-maxing self-interest).
  - tuesdayrain 5y ago
    >Big Corps, much like liquid flowing downhill, tend to flow towards whatever makes them the most money for the least effort People say this a lot but it's not the case when the CEO is an ideologue. A few weeks ago I was at a meeting where our CEO said customers were unhappy about the company's choice to insert politicized messages into its products. He said that they could potentially lose as much as 50% of their revenue because of it. And he still felt that he was doing the right thing.
    - cheezymoogle 5y ago
      If you're a self-interested min-maxing CEO that makes a disastrous or unpopular decision, hiding behind ethics or morality will not (immediately) result in charges of incompetence. This could just as easily be dishonest signalling by the CEO as it could be integrity. In the current cultural climate, putting political messaging in your products creates an immediate double-bind: you immediately anger part of the total market, but if the messaging is then withdrawn, you anger another part that did want it, with residual anger from the original anti-part of the market (some of which won't return in any case). In this situation, if the pro-political market is bigger, then it's just more rational to stay the course and claim the high ground.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- brodouevencode 5y ago
  > Obsession with supposed censorship This opinion piece forgets or (more likely) completely ignores that these companies have in fact censored people including a sitting president. People, including some doctors, were being censored because of thoughts on the Corona lab-leak theory (which seems to have some meat to it), hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin (both of which have been proven safe and moderately effective, though the jury is still out on long-term effectiveness), and vaccine hesitancy (mRNA vaccines are still new and the public has a right to be a little skeptical). Right or wrong, that is what happened. This action is investigating the perceived coordination among the major social media networks that engaged in such censorship. This coordination, if true, is a version of antitrust because it is anti-competitive much in the same way OPEC is an anti-competitive organization. I don't think however that attacking section 230 is going to solve this. I also think that those claiming censorship are going to have a hard fight in court to prove their case, because tbh they don't have much of a case - there are other outlets and other ways of communicating. That and I frankly don't like the thought of the government pressuring companies on matters of speech or press. However this action is _not_ claiming traditional antitrust rules have been violated as the author attempts to inject. The Democrat plan is more traditional antitrust in that it wants to break up companies rather than prevent coordinated censorship.
  - iammisc 5y ago
    You are broadly correct. > The Democrat plan is more traditional antitrust in that it wants to break up companies rather than prevent coordinated censorship. Well of course republicans are going to be against this. We have anti-trust legislation (DOJ needs to actually enforce it, like the Trump DOJ did with Facebook, but it got thrown out for some reason). Passing a bill with the express purpose of targeting certain corporations comes too close to a bill of attainder for me. And I support breaking up the big tech companies.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    Under the current neoliberal economic consensus, private enterprise is completely within its rights to decide who to amplify and who to deplatform. According to this view, the term censorship only applies when governments act.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  I think the Republicans are fine with Big Brother, based on their actions at least as far back as institution of the Hays code in the 30s. They just want to be the ones playing Big Brother.
  - iammisc 5y ago
    The Hays code? The Hays code was instituted by a trade association, not the GOP.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      The Hays Code was instituted by a trade association responding to pressure from religious and family groups of the type that are now a key section of the GOP base (at the time, they were not particularly associated with the GOP because theb first half of the double overlapping partisan realignment—New Deal + Civil Rights—that resulted in that association had only just started.)
      - iammisc 5y ago
        At the time, the religious group being responded to (Catholics) were solidly democrats. Catholics have been solidly democrat until 2016. There is no way you can blame the GOP for Catholic behavior.
        dragonwriter 5y ago
        > There is no way you can blame the GOP for Catholic behavior. There's no way you can meaningfully associate the modern political parties with pretty much anything of the 1930s, because aside from the names, little is the same about the parties. You could blame the Hays Code on pressure from Catholic social conservatives, and observe that that is now a GOP constituency, but how meaningful that is depends very much on what you are trying to get to from it. > Catholics have been solidly democrat until 2016. No, they haven't; they’ve been split roughly evenly between the parties for much longer (this data only goes back to 1992, and shows it true the whole time): https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/09/13/2-party-affiliation-among-voters-1992-2016/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/09/13/2-party-affi...
war1025 5y ago
I have little faith in the government to do anything about the overbroad reach of tech companies, but I do think it's pretty obvious that there has been coordinated censorship of right wing accounts. Add to that the fact that Republicans are in fact also consumers, and I don't think it's fair to say they are ignoring consumers. Edit: As usual here, this post sympathetic to Republicans is immediately downvoted through the floor. It is still technically here, just grayed out and downranked to the bottom of the feed. I think this is similar to much of the censorship we've seen. "We're not censoring anyone, we're just preventing people from seeing things we disagree with"
- Yoric 5y ago
  > I have little faith in the government to do anything about the overbroad reach of tech companies, but I do think it's pretty obvious that there has been coordinated censorship of right wing accounts. I'm not entirely sure. Seen from a distance, it looks like happened to Republicans in 2021 exactly what happened to Muslims in ~2016: social media companies finally decided to take action against the violent factions that used the rest of users to hide in plain sight. According to a paper I read a while ago, it worked against Da'ech, Al-Qaeda, etc. without harming regular Muslim users. I hope that it can work as well against alt-right violent movements without harming regular Conservatives. Now, do I believe that social networks should have that much power? Not at all. But I believe that focusing on actions that Conservatives are aimed against all of them is counterproductive. We should rather aim at breaking these ~monopolies. > Add to that the fact that Republicans are in fact also consumers, and I don't think it's fair to say they are ignoring consumers. Well, they seem to be ignoring most consumers to focus on a single group. Is that a better formulation?
  - war1025 5y ago
    > I hope that it can work as well against alt-right violent movements without harming regular Conservatives. Great. I'd like to see them do the same with Antifa and co.
    - belltaco 5y ago
paxys 5y ago
Can't really take anyone seriously on matters relating to tech unless they at least support broadband expansion/net neutrality/municipal ISPs, especially since all of these lead directly to large corporations having less power over the internet. Last I checked the GOP's position was the exact opposite.
iammisc 5y ago
I mean republicans are consumers too. EDIT: apparently HN shills don't believe republicans are individuals who consume things? Are we not human now too? Come on this is ridiculous. Based on the last election, 'Republican' can include at least 75 million people. That is a significant portion of the country. What part of my statement was wrong. Articles like this dehumanize republicans. If you're okay dehumanizing 75 million people, then I guess my statement is wrong.
- danShumway 5y ago
  The public GOP position for a pretty long time has been that increasing competition and trusting the free market will resolve inequalities and unequal access to platforms. I think it's worthwhile and meaningful to point out that their strategy of tackling big tech does not align with that ideal. It is meaningful to point out that the GOP is directly trying to legislate speech for large companies rather than address market forces that consolidate power in the hands of those companies. Looking at the attitudes behind efforts like Florida's tech law -- I don't think that's dehumanizing, it's just interesting. We're seeing a massive flip in the "conventional" wisdom about GOP's market philosophy: > "Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are functionally the public square of the digital age. It is wrong that these platforms control and censor speech with impunity." That's a surprising thing to hear from a supposedly free-market Conservative political party. I think it's interesting that the GOP's official statements focus almost entirely on censorship and on government regulation of hosted speech, instead of on the market itself and on consumer-driven outcomes. If that comes across as dehumanizing... :shrug:, I don't know, my opinion is that it's healthy to critically examine party lines and think about the motivations behind them. And it's not like the title is wrong: the GOP genuinely isn't targeting consumer choice or general consumers right now, they're specifically and very narrowly targeting a subset of consumers, they specifically care about Republican censorship. They're not even targeting broad censorship -- they're not talking about sex workers or LGBTQ+ demonetization. There's a little bit of an implication I hear behind the GOP's official statements, to me it sounds like they're saying that they are fine with big tech as it is, just as long as it stops censoring Conservative voices. Which, yeah, I think that's meaningful to talk about.
  - 5y ago
JohnTHaller 5y ago
Requiring a private entity to spread your lies seems... rather un-American.

36 points by eysquared 5y ago

Mountain_Skies 5y ago

Big Tech could stop being Big Brother and then both consumers and Republicans would be happy.

metalliqaz 5y ago
The panopticon of big tech seems to be a natural result of advertising-supported Internet media. Consumers have definitely proven that they don't mind enough to change their habits. So the government could put strong privacy protections in place, that might reign in some of the "Big Brother" behavior of big tech. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for the GOP to endorse that.
- rektide 5y ago
  There's still no evidence it'll get anywhere but I continue to believe that #selfhosted (a general idea not a specific thing) philosophy will slowly snowball into something. There's at least two fronts, having good enough software to be compelling, and having the ops situation be radically easier. Honestly I think Social Web (a general idea not specific tech) is kind of in a doldrums, has some interesting projects, and a lot of enthusiasm, but there's a lack of key innovators. I'd probably get outright spat on by some but I truly think Kubernetes is the first diy-able enough platform to be interesting for ops, and I do think we're not far off from having some fairly good out-of-box autonomic systems, & that would change the game. Alas multi-tenancy is still extremely early days for nearly everyone, & crude, needs a lot of work, but that is kind of optional, but in the end is a key enabler for interesting home computing. Reciprocally Kubernetes really requires multi-cluster capabilities, clusters as cattle, & right now that's a cowpath we need paving.
  - metalliqaz 5y ago
    You're talking hosting tech when the value of social networks is 99.9% in the breadth of the userbase.
    - rektide 5y ago
      The Social Web is built around Protocols[1]. Rather than try to compete with big tech by building a bigger monolithic system, either paid for with ads or some other way, the goal is to give folk an expansive suite of capabilities across many sites. Or in the cases of protocols like Web Annotations, anywhere they go. [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/ https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/
      - metalliqaz 5y ago
        That would be wonderful, but will Twitter and Instagram participate? I'm doubtful.
jude- 5y ago
Until Republicans start using Big Tech to coordinate violent anti-democratic insurrections and dissuade people from getting vaccinated against a global lethal pandemic. Big Tech owes them nothing -- they're not entitled to their infrastructure and distribution networks. Let them build their own.
- mizzack 5y ago
  Yeah! And let's have the taxpayer fund it! And subject it to common carrier regulations! Yeah?
- kerkeslager 5y ago
  You seem to be under the impression that building their own infrastructure will be some sort of barrier for multi-billion dollar organizations. I totally agree that many members of the Republican Party are criminals and should be in jail, but we need to prosecute the crime, not throw away free speech and start surveilling everyone. When people coordinate violent anti-democratic insurrections, we should throw them in jail along with the other terrorists. When people dissuade people from getting vaccinated, we should take away their medical licenses when they have them, and hold them responsible for manslaughter when people die from Covid based on their lies. More laws aren't going to help when Democrats don't have the spine to enforce the laws we already have.
  - jude- 5y ago
    > You seem to be under the impression that building their own infrastructure will be some sort of barrier for multi-billion dollar organizations. I'm still waiting for the Republican (formerly alt-right) alternatives to YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to get anywhere near the formers' popularity. Also, a lot of tech folks won't work for these companies in the first place. It takes more than money to build a FAANG company. > More laws aren't going to help when Democrats don't have the spine to enforce the laws we already have. I didn't say anything about creating or enforcing any laws. All I said is that Big Tech is well within its right to kick off unscrupulous users, even if they happen to be the ruling party. The alternative -- passing laws that unconditionally force private entities to host the ruling party's content, including propaganda, calls for insurrection, and vaccine misinformation -- is far more objectionable and authoritarian. Especially so if you believe that building your own infrastructure and distribution networks isn't an unreasonable barrier to entry in the first place. Of course, I'm all for prosecuting the criminals who instigated the insurrection and botched the COVID response to the fullest extent of the law (among other high crimes and misdemeanors). I agree with you that the Democratic party needs to grow a spine and take a stand on this. But, why not both? Why not retain Big Tech's power to decide who can use their platform and who cannot? Last I checked, FAANG isn't infrastructure. Like, what would a reasonable regulatory alternative be, that doesn't just devolve into regulatory capture and erect lobbyist-designed artificial barriers to entry that nominally restrain FAANG's power, but practically impose too high a burden for anyone to challenge their market position?
entropicdrifter 5y ago
Big Corps, much like liquid flowing downhill, tend to flow towards whatever makes them the most money for the least effort, with no regards for ethics except where their bottom lines are affected. Regulations and criminal laws change the terrain. We could make them flow where we want them to, but we don't.
- cheezymoogle 5y ago
  Regulations and criminal laws are like dams or levees; With predictable flows, artificial waterways can safely operate within reasonable tolerances assuming everything was done faithfully. With unpredictable flows, modifying the course of a waterway typically causes unanticipated problems downstream. Regardless, it's still water and will still flow downstream. No dam or levee is going to change that, just as no regulation or criminal law will change the basic motivations facing corporate entities at any scale (i.e. min-maxing self-interest).
- tuesdayrain 5y ago
  >Big Corps, much like liquid flowing downhill, tend to flow towards whatever makes them the most money for the least effort People say this a lot but it's not the case when the CEO is an ideologue. A few weeks ago I was at a meeting where our CEO said customers were unhappy about the company's choice to insert politicized messages into its products. He said that they could potentially lose as much as 50% of their revenue because of it. And he still felt that he was doing the right thing.
  - cheezymoogle 5y ago
    If you're a self-interested min-maxing CEO that makes a disastrous or unpopular decision, hiding behind ethics or morality will not (immediately) result in charges of incompetence. This could just as easily be dishonest signalling by the CEO as it could be integrity. In the current cultural climate, putting political messaging in your products creates an immediate double-bind: you immediately anger part of the total market, but if the messaging is then withdrawn, you anger another part that did want it, with residual anger from the original anti-part of the market (some of which won't return in any case). In this situation, if the pro-political market is bigger, then it's just more rational to stay the course and claim the high ground.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
brodouevencode 5y ago
> Obsession with supposed censorship This opinion piece forgets or (more likely) completely ignores that these companies have in fact censored people including a sitting president. People, including some doctors, were being censored because of thoughts on the Corona lab-leak theory (which seems to have some meat to it), hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin (both of which have been proven safe and moderately effective, though the jury is still out on long-term effectiveness), and vaccine hesitancy (mRNA vaccines are still new and the public has a right to be a little skeptical). Right or wrong, that is what happened. This action is investigating the perceived coordination among the major social media networks that engaged in such censorship. This coordination, if true, is a version of antitrust because it is anti-competitive much in the same way OPEC is an anti-competitive organization. I don't think however that attacking section 230 is going to solve this. I also think that those claiming censorship are going to have a hard fight in court to prove their case, because tbh they don't have much of a case - there are other outlets and other ways of communicating. That and I frankly don't like the thought of the government pressuring companies on matters of speech or press. However this action is _not_ claiming traditional antitrust rules have been violated as the author attempts to inject. The Democrat plan is more traditional antitrust in that it wants to break up companies rather than prevent coordinated censorship.
- iammisc 5y ago
  You are broadly correct. > The Democrat plan is more traditional antitrust in that it wants to break up companies rather than prevent coordinated censorship. Well of course republicans are going to be against this. We have anti-trust legislation (DOJ needs to actually enforce it, like the Trump DOJ did with Facebook, but it got thrown out for some reason). Passing a bill with the express purpose of targeting certain corporations comes too close to a bill of attainder for me. And I support breaking up the big tech companies.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  Under the current neoliberal economic consensus, private enterprise is completely within its rights to decide who to amplify and who to deplatform. According to this view, the term censorship only applies when governments act.
cratermoon 5y ago
I think the Republicans are fine with Big Brother, based on their actions at least as far back as institution of the Hays code in the 30s. They just want to be the ones playing Big Brother.
- iammisc 5y ago
  The Hays code? The Hays code was instituted by a trade association, not the GOP.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    The Hays Code was instituted by a trade association responding to pressure from religious and family groups of the type that are now a key section of the GOP base (at the time, they were not particularly associated with the GOP because theb first half of the double overlapping partisan realignment—New Deal + Civil Rights—that resulted in that association had only just started.)
    - iammisc 5y ago
      At the time, the religious group being responded to (Catholics) were solidly democrats. Catholics have been solidly democrat until 2016. There is no way you can blame the GOP for Catholic behavior.
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > There is no way you can blame the GOP for Catholic behavior. There's no way you can meaningfully associate the modern political parties with pretty much anything of the 1930s, because aside from the names, little is the same about the parties. You could blame the Hays Code on pressure from Catholic social conservatives, and observe that that is now a GOP constituency, but how meaningful that is depends very much on what you are trying to get to from it. > Catholics have been solidly democrat until 2016. No, they haven't; they’ve been split roughly evenly between the parties for much longer (this data only goes back to 1992, and shows it true the whole time): https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/09/13/2-party-affiliation-among-voters-1992-2016/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/09/13/2-party-affi...

war1025 5y ago

I have little faith in the government to do anything about the overbroad reach of tech companies, but I do think it's pretty obvious that there has been coordinated censorship of right wing accounts. Add to that the fact that Republicans are in fact also consumers, and I don't think it's fair to say they are ignoring consumers. Edit: As usual here, this post sympathetic to Republicans is immediately downvoted through the floor. It is still technically here, just grayed out and downranked to the bottom of the feed. I think this is similar to much of the censorship we've seen. "We're not censoring anyone, we're just preventing people from seeing things we disagree with"

Yoric 5y ago
> I have little faith in the government to do anything about the overbroad reach of tech companies, but I do think it's pretty obvious that there has been coordinated censorship of right wing accounts. I'm not entirely sure. Seen from a distance, it looks like happened to Republicans in 2021 exactly what happened to Muslims in ~2016: social media companies finally decided to take action against the violent factions that used the rest of users to hide in plain sight. According to a paper I read a while ago, it worked against Da'ech, Al-Qaeda, etc. without harming regular Muslim users. I hope that it can work as well against alt-right violent movements without harming regular Conservatives. Now, do I believe that social networks should have that much power? Not at all. But I believe that focusing on actions that Conservatives are aimed against all of them is counterproductive. We should rather aim at breaking these ~monopolies. > Add to that the fact that Republicans are in fact also consumers, and I don't think it's fair to say they are ignoring consumers. Well, they seem to be ignoring most consumers to focus on a single group. Is that a better formulation?
- war1025 5y ago
  > I hope that it can work as well against alt-right violent movements without harming regular Conservatives. Great. I'd like to see them do the same with Antifa and co.
  - belltaco 5y ago

paxys 5y ago

Can't really take anyone seriously on matters relating to tech unless they at least support broadband expansion/net neutrality/municipal ISPs, especially since all of these lead directly to large corporations having less power over the internet. Last I checked the GOP's position was the exact opposite.

iammisc 5y ago

I mean republicans are consumers too. EDIT: apparently HN shills don't believe republicans are individuals who consume things? Are we not human now too? Come on this is ridiculous. Based on the last election, 'Republican' can include at least 75 million people. That is a significant portion of the country. What part of my statement was wrong. Articles like this dehumanize republicans. If you're okay dehumanizing 75 million people, then I guess my statement is wrong.

danShumway 5y ago
The public GOP position for a pretty long time has been that increasing competition and trusting the free market will resolve inequalities and unequal access to platforms. I think it's worthwhile and meaningful to point out that their strategy of tackling big tech does not align with that ideal. It is meaningful to point out that the GOP is directly trying to legislate speech for large companies rather than address market forces that consolidate power in the hands of those companies. Looking at the attitudes behind efforts like Florida's tech law -- I don't think that's dehumanizing, it's just interesting. We're seeing a massive flip in the "conventional" wisdom about GOP's market philosophy: > "Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are functionally the public square of the digital age. It is wrong that these platforms control and censor speech with impunity." That's a surprising thing to hear from a supposedly free-market Conservative political party. I think it's interesting that the GOP's official statements focus almost entirely on censorship and on government regulation of hosted speech, instead of on the market itself and on consumer-driven outcomes. If that comes across as dehumanizing... :shrug:, I don't know, my opinion is that it's healthy to critically examine party lines and think about the motivations behind them. And it's not like the title is wrong: the GOP genuinely isn't targeting consumer choice or general consumers right now, they're specifically and very narrowly targeting a subset of consumers, they specifically care about Republican censorship. They're not even targeting broad censorship -- they're not talking about sex workers or LGBTQ+ demonetization. There's a little bit of an implication I hear behind the GOP's official statements, to me it sounds like they're saying that they are fine with big tech as it is, just as long as it stops censoring Conservative voices. Which, yeah, I think that's meaningful to talk about.
- 5y ago

JohnTHaller 5y ago

Requiring a private entity to spread your lies seems... rather un-American.