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With an actual private, for-profit business, consumers have the power of taking their money and spending elsewhere. In this case, there is a dominant communica
by nanis 5y ago
With an actual private, for-profit business, consumers have the power of taking their money and spending elsewhere.
In this case, there is a dominant communication medium that is not subject to the discipline which the rest of us can impose on it by spending our money elsewhere because the "business" does not rely on our spending. So, bringing up the massive potential harms that can be visited on a society where the dominant communication channels all the do the bidding of political power centers is the only thing we can do. Maybe sufficient numbers of people will be convinced by this.
It seems less and less likely. That is sad.
- ncallaway 5y agoI mean, I agree with you. My point is that the actual harms of YouTube and others are from an anti-trust and monopoly perspective. The problem isn't a private entity moderating their platform. The problem is a private entity that has so much power that moderating their platform amounts to a society-wide stifling of speech. The solution isn't to restrict how the entities are allowed to moderate their platforms—it's to prevent and disallow them from being that powerful in the first place!
- nanis 5y agoWe may agree philosophically, but you are either not aware of how enmeshed political power is with a few large communications platforms or you are purposefully distracting from that point. > it's to prevent and disallow them from being that powerful in the first place! That ship has sailed. The here and now is the fact that we have a communication, tracking, and employment oligopoly in cahoots with the current centers of political power interested in preventing competition to both.
- ncallaway 5y ago> That ship has sailed. It hasn't. Monopolies have become powerful, then been disassembled before, and it can happen again. Standard Oil was broken up, as was Bell Systems. With some new legislation and lawsuits, we could absolutely reduce the power of Google/YouTube and Facebook over online communications. I agree that those entities have already become far too powerful, but we can remove their power, and shred them into smaller pieces if we had the will to. I agree that we may not have the will. But I disagree that the solution is to put more constraints on the speech rights of private entities. You don't fight censorship with compelled speech. You fight monopolies with aggressive anti-trust legislation and action.
- wepple 5y agoYour first argument is essentially that if the general public believe an organization to be bad, they can remove their support for that organization. Why is YouTube any different? People can and do go to other platforms. You’re differentiating between giving value in the form of dollars versus giving value in the form of time & attention.