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[MrRoboto75]

What do you mean I can't use bay12 to recruit people into my insurrection movement?  I'll get banned?

[JoshuaFH]

The contradiction I'm seeing is that if Social Media is free Enterprise, they're free to control and abuse it their own platform as much as they want, as arbitrarily as they please.
If there was a Social Media Platform that was government created, they run headfirst into the problem of abusive consumers that are unbannable because of the freedom of speech, being that the government itself cannot silence people.

It feels like there's no middle ground, there's the cabal of billionaires controlling your life with no accountability, or there's government sticking their hands into places where they have no business being and can only do an inept job at best.

[Micro102]

That doesn't sound like a contradiction, that just sounds like a tough question. A real contradiction would look something like a party complaining that billionaires have too much power while constantly arguing that they deserve their money and tax breaks that they keep giving them, and try to tear down things like net neutrality.

[Random_Dragon]

Such is the question of freedom vs. security that people have been asking for ages, yeah. I suspect that the closest to a desirable outcome would be for all potential abuses of power to be covered by a consistent ruleset, and for its enforcement to be consistent as well. Currently corporations have leeway to enforce (or not enforce) standards of moderation as they please, and that does open itself to abuses of that power.

In this case this does seem like an instance where, even if the 1st amendment applied to corporations as well as the government, they would be given at least some degree of ability to prevent that freedom from being used as a vehicle for criminal acts. Criminal law generally takes precedence over the first amendment in cases were one's use of the first amendment is itself criminal.

Though to be fair, there have been cases, such as the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the Sedition Act of 1918, where the definition of "when is it criminal to exercise your rights" has been abused via redefining what counts as a criminal use of one's rights. The reasonable way to mitigate that would be to ensure that criminal abuse of one's rights are already well-defined, and tested for potential abuses, before one reforms the bill of rights to define what obligations corporations would have should the first amendment be reformed to affect them as well.

[Cthulhu]

Step one would be not having the entire chain from ISP to payment processor to site hosts be a few gigantic corporations that nobody can realistically compete against.  Saying "make your own social media" in today's climate is like saying "move to somalia."  There is no realistic alternative.

It's funny when Trump gets banned from the internet, but the people holding the hammer aren't your friends and you don't get to tell them who to use it on.

[da_nang]

I don't want a government-run website, since there's no way in hell I'm trusting the government to not spy on or abuse the users.

I also don't want a private corporate hellscape where the rich decide what speech is acceptable.

Ideally, at the minimum, I want the underlying providers of telecom and financial infrastructure to be regulated so as to limit their freedom of association in regards to denying service to their customers on the basis of their customers' freedom of speech and associated users. They're service providers, not artists that take commissions.

A sort of protected class, which the Civil Rights Act would imply to be constitutional.

If "build your own website" is going to be a viable, good faith argument, then at the minimum we shouldn't be piling barriers upon barriers of entry.

No-one should be forced to build a separate society in order to have a website. This should be step one as we move towards the ideal of client-side content filtration.

[MorleyDev]

I'll just say it, there has always been some neccesary censorship in society.

If you tell me in person that you think all gay people should be put to death are are all scum or whatever, me and my friends all shame you/kick you out of the pub/punch you in the face until you learn not to say that around us anymore. That's censorship, and it's always been a thing in society. There are things people are not allowed to say out loud by the majority around them will not allow them to keep saying it. When applied by the majority of society it's callled progress. Moderation and therefore censorship has always been needed in public forums.

The current proglem is that the internet creates environments where that kind of civil censorship isn't possible and allows large numbers of those people who previously would have encountered levels of forced isolation in their views to congregate regardless of distance. To allow them to loudly spread them on public forums acts like a virus and infects vulnerable people, creating more of them.

Extreme prejudice must be censored, by neccessity, to allow the continuation of a tolerant multicultural multiracial multisexuality society. The current situation that is growing is that Social Pressures create Market Pressures drive the censorship conducted by private businesses on their hosted public forums. Regulating to prevent that doesn't protect society, it creates the room needed to destroy it.

[Loud Whispers]

Market's still free, they're welcome to go make their own ISPs and payment processors and banks and websites.

Market's still free, they're welcome to go make their own ISPs and payment processors and banks and websites.

Market's still free, they're welcome to go make their own ISPs and payment processors and banks and websites.

Market's still free, they're welcome to go make their own ISPs and payment processors and banks and websites.

Market's still free, they're welcome to go make their own ISPs and payment processors and banks and websites.

lmao

Reminds me of tumblr, onlyfans, twitch, facebook & twitter purging pornographers, smut producers, prostitutes, political ideologues, pirates and people who just existed in the vicinty of 3rd party music for two nanoseconds. In each circumstance people tried producing their alternatives to their former host sites but were hit with the strong arm of government or private corporation; investigations, deplatforming, delisting, financial exchange instruments denied e.t.c.

There's just something fundamentally wrong with having to go full hezbollah state within a state, reinventing the global economy from the ground up, just to shitpost outside the enlightened centrist bubble. Cos even if you have the resources to reinvent banks, deal with server costs e.t.c., creating some nightmarish partitioned financial infrastructure just for your niche, chances are you won't ever be allowed to reach that point

[George_Chickens]

The contradiction I'm seeing is that if Social Media is free Enterprise, they're free to control and abuse it their own platform as much as they want, as arbitrarily as they please.
If there was a Social Media Platform that was government created, they run headfirst into the problem of abusive consumers that are unbannable because of the freedom of speech, being that the government itself cannot silence people.

It feels like there's no middle ground, there's the cabal of billionaires controlling your life with no accountability, or there's government sticking their hands into places where they have no business being and can only do an inept job at best.

I'd much rather ineptitude over shady private companies drip-feeding collectively billions of people personalized information and effectively framing what is and is not acceptable for them to believe by being their primary source of information, news articles and advertising. No singular website or company should have ever been allowed to grow this big and have so much control over free information to begin with.

Social media is specifically designed to keep people in a comfortable feedback loop of what they enjoy, so they keep browsing and consuming. When that's combined with politics you can grow some very strange, insular and extreme beliefs even out of 'normal' people. Take all the 5G nonsense, for example.

These sites aren't comparable to forums, TV or radio stations anymore, they are the biggest organized source of information for the majority of people with internet connections.  This power has been used and abused to make profit at the expense of the safety and privacy of activists, the preservation of data and information, freedom of expression, and god knows how many other things.

It isn't 2005 anymore either, the powers that be are much more tight-knit and the opportunity of a true alternative forming to the cursed internet we find ourselves in now may have passed long ago. This is the walled garden most people have come to accept and are trapped in. Web searches prioritize it, and most people with a connection scarcely travel out of it.

Ideally, they should be broken up with antitrusts and new regulations and we should never allow any tech company to have such power over so many people again. That way, this dichotomy of malicious inept government vs organized malicious corporation wouldn't be as big a thing. Of course, it won't happen, and one day they might be buying elections. But a man can dream.

[MorleyDev]

Broken up, how?

Require them be small enough in users to only be able to serve specific niches, thereby not just creating by mandating the echo-chambers?
Require them to be geographically segregated, thereby enforcing isolationism on people and also shutting down the shared global information that is a great strength of the internet?

I'm all for regulations to restrict their ability to gather and sell information, it's why I think GDPR is a step in the right direction. But I don't see how you can 'break them up' without preserving the benefits or destroying the entire raison d'être for the internet.

You can foribly separate AWS from Amazon Store and YouTube from Google Pixel and whatever, force them to be separate businesses rather than one giant one. But the individual products, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter...I don't see *how* you can break them up into smaller separate businesses.

[MrRoboto75]

I'd rather you go after personalized advertisement, recommended content, and metadata.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The ideological controls of the capitalist class are no more or less powerful than they were yesterday. Preventing that is only possible in a system of decentralized public ownership, as it is for most issues caused by the capitalist class.

Yes, absolutely everything will be used to put a knife into the left, including putting a knife into the right. You live in a right-wing government, it's their job to do that. Welcome to the club.

Nonetheless, censoring fascists is good and also hilarious. Y'all Qaeda For Guantanamo, this has been a Public Service Announcement.

[George_Chickens]

Broken up, how?

For sites like Youtube, I don't believe it to be possible. Only a company the size of Google can possibly handle that level of data, or a government of comparable girth. Either way, you're not going to get an ideal situation. The only way to really stop that would to remove profit from the equation of running an extremely expensive data operation completely, and in that case you're not going to have anything nearly the size of Youtube, unless the entire modus operandi of the economy changes overnight.

More 'equitable' alternatives to Twitter, however, have already appeared, such as Mastodon. The idea behind them being that there is no singular central server, but rather a a list of hosted communities with the software. The list owner may choose to delist objectionable communities, but as long as it remains hosted on its own server, its users can continue to access it. In this case, they'd only control what is immediately visible on their site, and the information would stay up

Is it heavily flawed in its own way? Of course. But I think the flaws of this system are infinitely preferable to these companies having the near-total control they do now. After all, the crazies of the internet split off to their own communities when people decide enough is enough all the time, and delisting them isn't substantially different to what happens to them now. This just takes direct control of the data out of commercial hands. It removes the ability for these companies to report on activists and outright delete information on the behalf repressive governments, too.

The primary reason for my concern with this is that I don't believe Twitter in its current form can adequately be regulated, and the removal of data from their hands would be an important first step. Like you said, you can't just force them into multiple smaller companies, turn them into a niche or regionalize them. No matter what you do, hundreds of millions will be on their site.

Coming to think of it, this discussion should probably be its own thread entirely. It's tangentially related to AmeriPol at best.

[LordBaal]

I propose we go back to having no language and clubbing each other for the best cave and fruit trees.

[Random_Dragon]

I propose we go back to having no language and clubbing each other for the best cave and fruit trees.

Reject words, return to oog.