Agreed that it is astute pandering. I found the whole "both sides" thing off-putting because it's negligent. There seems to be a standard of care that comes wit

Agreed that it is astute pandering. I found the whole "both sides" thing off-putting because it's negligent. There seems to be a standard of care that comes with running a social network that isn't being acknowledged enough. A customer who slips and falls in a business due to a wet floor caused by an employee can sue the owner for negligence based on vicarious liability. These networks are property that customers access and use just like physical property. You can put whatever you want in the terms of service but it doesn't change the location and ownership of the electrons. Having also worked on a social network and dealt with bots brigading back in 2016-2017, it is possible to apply facts and logic and ethics to these situations. Worshipping a "network" as some kind of neutral aether is greatly downplaying the significant opportunities for tuning the data streams based on knowledge and compliance. Maybe it's because I'm in Canada where free speech is not what is protected explicitly, it's free expression that's protected as long as it's not invoked at the expense of any other Charter Rights. Hate speech is also illegal in the Criminal Code. These are factual matters that do not get the same amount of unquestioning reverence that free speech without consequences seems to get in some parts of the US. About the historical theory that it's human nature to want kings and nobility, it seems that is mostly just our particular colonial and patriarchal part of the world. I'm not a historian or anthropologist but am pretty sure there have been societies that operated differently.