Yeah, those are good points but a participatory democracy doesn’t mean communities (like a church group) can’t govern themselves. It means literally the opposit

Yeah, those are good points but a participatory democracy doesn’t mean communities (like a church group) can’t govern themselves. It means literally the opposite of that. As an example, in Germany nudity is much less of a taboo than in the US. Facebook has a blanket ban on nudity for American cultural reasons. A nudist event in Berlin can be argued for and against in Berlin by the communities involved. They can talk about it in council, protest, write letters, vote or get politically involved. On Facebook people can’t effectively do any of those things. They just enforce America’s squeamishness from on high. If Facebook and Twitter want to be an online version of the public square, people need the right to govern our own communities online as we do offline. I like Reddit’s moves in this direction with community moderation of subreddits. I’m not a free speech absolutist - I like that entire subreddits can still be banned if they become too toxic (as we saw recently). But this makes people really angry because Reddit’s internal governance is entirely unaccountable. An unelected monarch is ruling over a bunch of small community run spaces. The next healthy step is for the monarch to be replaced with a board of directors or something - who are themselves accountable to the users. But like all kings throughout time, reddit has no incentive to do that. And on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube it’s much worse. At scale, the editorial choices made by their content algorithms are inordinately powerful, invisible and actively destructive to society. I don’t know the right way to reign in this stuff. But I’m worried that if we don’t, society at large won’t survive the partisanship, extremism and conspiracy thinking that these editorial algorithms en masse create. I agree there’s something deeply wrong in Washington. I wish us technologists were making things better instead of making things worse.