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The "public square" talk is pure marketing from Twitter. It began in 2009 when Iranians held mass protests against their government and used Twitter as a way to
by rchaud 2y ago
The "public square" talk is pure marketing from Twitter. It began in 2009 when Iranians held mass protests against their government and used Twitter as a way to share information as the state had turned off SMS texts. This led to wall-to-wall coverage on US news channels as Iran is of course denoted as an enemy state, and here was Twitter, an American social network helping spread free speech. This would happen again in 2011 during the so-called Arab Spring.
- mvkel 2y agoIt's wild that a one-time convenient excuse turned into the base expectation of all social media that is impossible to live up to. People are weird.
- krapp 2y agoIt's politics. Until relatively recently, the expectation that social media could be moderated even while acting as a "public square" (which was never a "base expectation of all social media" for anyone outside of a politically vested minority) was not controversial. Now people want to make "algorithms" illegal.