4 ms·

"I've been hearing this a lot lately, surprisingly from people who consider themselves to be politically left. I say surprisingly because historically, leftist

"I've been hearing this a lot lately, surprisingly from people who consider themselves to be politically left. I say surprisingly because historically, leftist ideology has been quick to solve problems with corporate behavior with regulations, whereas traditionally it's been the right pushing laissez-faire." On this web site when I hear people talking about controlling what social media platforms do via regulation, most of the time it seems to me like passing a law where the government says the following journalists must have articles each week on the New York Times front page. (And none of them are actually going to be journalists so much as "journalists") Other people see it more like passing a law saying the telephone company can't block your telephone access. I guess my point is framing every discussion of social media as "regulation good or bad" isn't very useful.

dane-pgp 4y ago
Fortunately there are a couple of bright lines that can be drawn between those two hypothetical laws. Firstly, there is only one front page of each edition of the NYT, and the page has a very limited data/readability capacity. On Twitter, every user's page is a front page if you want it to be (although admittedly the recommendation of people/tweets by "the algorithm" starts to feel like an editorial decision, which invites further scrutiny). More significantly, though, once an organization has built a social or telephone network, it is actually more expensive to disconnect or delete messages based on the opinions contained within them than it is to just allow them to continue moving between users. This is in contrast to the (physical) NYT, where editors necessarily have to whitelist every piece of content, and forcing articles past that whitelist has significant cost implications (even if no one reads them).

dane-pgp 4y ago

Fortunately there are a couple of bright lines that can be drawn between those two hypothetical laws. Firstly, there is only one front page of each edition of the NYT, and the page has a very limited data/readability capacity. On Twitter, every user's page is a front page if you want it to be (although admittedly the recommendation of people/tweets by "the algorithm" starts to feel like an editorial decision, which invites further scrutiny). More significantly, though, once an organization has built a social or telephone network, it is actually more expensive to disconnect or delete messages based on the opinions contained within them than it is to just allow them to continue moving between users. This is in contrast to the (physical) NYT, where editors necessarily have to whitelist every piece of content, and forcing articles past that whitelist has significant cost implications (even if no one reads them).