The problem is that Twitter is a private public square. That contradiction is not something JD can accept, because "his salary depends on his not understanding it.” It isn't reconcilable.
We don't have many examples, in modern times, of of non-companies filling roles like Twitter of FB fill. But, that doesn't mean they can't exist.
The WWW itself is a platform for speech and is a "public square." Wikipedia is another example. A really good example, if you think about it. If wikipedia was a commercial company, imagine the issues they'd be facing... all that authority as an information source.
Meanwhile, we really need to consider the economics of companies like twitter & facebook. Does FB really need 50k employees and a $70bn budget to provide the world with facebook? This isn't a question you could ask about Toyota.
If Facebook fell off the edge of the disc, we would very quickly have a replacement. People wouldn't lack for social media. If Toyota fell off the disc, we would have fewer cars. Rebuilding that capacity would require real resources.. Until then, we'd lack for cars.
This last part is key. Commercial viability is nearly a non-issue. Social media can be viable on a tiny fraction of its current revenue. This explodes the number of possible actions.
I really hope we're not heading for a regulatory shitshow... I hope, but I can't say I'm optimistic.
>Wikipedia is another example [of the public square]
Quite the opposite; Wikipedia is explicitly based on published reliable sources. They have a specific rule[1] excluding information that was not published in such way.
There are certain advantages to this rule, and its utility has been validated through Wikipedia's long, and ongoing, run. Nonetheless this cathedral mindset cannot be compared to a public square in any way other than being a very opposite.
In particular the published reliable sources rule excludes general blogs and public forums and the likes, thus excluding the majority of discourse & voices on the internet. Even expert sources, if self-published, can only be used in limited way and with caution.
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[1] "If no reliable sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
This is wikipedia co-founder writing this.
Whatever issues social media has encountered around politics, covid, etc. are arguably more acute for wikipedia... because of its authority and role as a source of objective information. Meanwhile, it has handled everything much better by default. That's why we don't think of it as part of the social media problem.
I’d like to run the numbers on how long fugitives escape justice when they’re targeted by bounty hunters, placed on most wanted lists or other red notices, or both. It’s not always good innocent guys getting caught by good innocent law enforcement, either. Entrapment and parallel construction exist. Ideally the crimes or criminal intent to justify all this apparatus actually exist too, right? Some people may not care about justifications; feels over reals, basically.
The people involved may believe they are correct to work for private authoritarian companies, or public ones; I guess that’s hypercapitalism for you.
Not surprisingly, network effects are pervasive on the network, and with everything moving to the network, network effects will dominate almost everything unless something is done to deal explicitly with network-effect-based monopolies. Just imagine email if you couldn't email anyone who didn't have an email address at the same company you have yours. Almost all email would begin to consolidate in the winning company, which would then begin telling people what could and couldn't be said in email. They could cut you off from email and destroy businesses for violating whatever "terms of service" they felt like imposing or even accidentally. Too bad for you.
I think the answer to network-effects monopolies is to force them to switch to an open protocol once they crossed a threshold of a certain number of users. They could then continue to offer services, but other companies and agencies could also put you on "the network". Companies could stay small and retain full control or grow and be forced to open so their competitors and users couldn't be locked out (or in).
So ABC, NBC, CBS are all private companies and they are much older than Twitter. How is it that they can be regulated by the FCC?
> Meanwhile, we really need to consider the economics of companies like twitter & facebook. Does FB really need 50k employees and a $70bn budget to provide the world with facebook?
Are you saying that if FB had a smaller headcount or budget, they'd be less influential? A company's headcount and budget are largely a function of the market, and the market highly values FB. If you have a problem with the economics of FB, you have a problem with the market forces that created it. But you end with:
> I hope we're not heading for a regulatory shitshow
If you're not happy that the market created conditions for companies like FB to grow to the size that they are, and you're also not happy that regulation is possibly in the future of these companies, then how would you like to see this scenario play out?
The best scenario is for FB to stay at early 2000 version, where our feeds full of friend's stories, games and some ads. Now it's full of media, arguably some pushes political agenda, intrusive advertising (tracking ads), and a few of friend's feed.
Then imo, not all regulations are good. Because fb is a political platform, the regulation for sosmed is more likely full with political agenda too.
To the second part... I don't have full answers. I would like this scenario play out to a free media outcome. Decentralisation, and ideally, a lot of commercialisation too. More wikipedias, WWWs. Fewer FBs. Disintermediation. Commodification of bottlenecks like youtube has... owning the relationship between video maker and video watcher. The ideals that made the internet work in the first place.
That's not something a politician can give us though. No one decided that wikipedia or WWW would win. It happened. What I want from politicians is a laundry list:
(1) Trustbusting. The Facebook's acquisitions of whatsapp & IG should never have happened, for example. Youtube should be split from Google (and adwords from search... off topic).
Also, modern antitrust needs to recognize the economic realities of these businesses. This isn't a railroad monopoly or Bell. There are no capital costs and there is no major danger of harming the public interest by sinking the industry. Social media will exist whether or not FB is worth $1trn. That money does not represent "capital" in the productive capacity sense, it just represents earning potential.
(2) Different rules for giant companies. Rules should apply only to designated giant companies. The biggest problems are size related. Be explicitly skeptical of size. Data laws. Copyright enforcement. User content liability. Fairness requirements. etc. A normal regulator will enforce the monopolies which create the underlying problems. We need an explicitly "large company" set of rules, including tax rules.
(3) Much stronger fair use and public domain rules. A complete rethinking. Eg, if a politician gives an interview... this should be public domain or under extremely strong fair use protection.
This is another area where we need to consider modern economic realities. For said political interview, you could preserve most of the financial value (and incentive) with a copyright limited to one week.
(4) Non-consumer rights in regards to monopolies. If facebook, youtube or amazon ban you, this is a public matter. It's more akin to blackballing than "please leave this bar." Everyone needs protections from monopolies, especially non consumers. Once companies are in that size range, they need to
(5) Data use transparency laws. FB political advertising is an extreme example. Half the shit they do wouldn't stand the light of day. Some of it is borderline treason. Shine that light. Full data dumps of ads, targeting criteria, etc. Publish ad matching algorithms. Give the public access to everything the advertiser has access to...
... the list gets long.
What were the public public squares and the private public squares before Twitter was developed?
Understanding the historic context of these forums is pretty important.
I would argue there have only been remarkably few public public squares since property became privatized.
Do we not want a public square?
I'd prefer we go a federated route, like Mastodon. That way the servers are private, but the system as a whole is not controlled by a central authority. Can't find a server that will let you express what you want to express? Roll your own. Don't want to hear about Emacs ever again, join a vi-only server, or a never-emacs server.
What in the flat world... ? /s
However, a large portion of humanity use social networking tools so US legislation has a direct affect on everyone and potentially (inadvertently) it has an effect on the democratic processes of other nations.
At what point does it become an international issue?
The US also has a pro-freedom reputation and that is currently really valuable. I never held back with criticism towards the US and won't do so in the future, but on this issue I would staunchly run with the worst hillbilly rednecks you can imagine firing freedom bullets in every direction without an ounce of shame.
Democracy has nothing to do with content restrictions.
I live in the UK and here we have thought police units who will knock on your door to "check your thinking" if you post jokes that are too controversial. While it's obviously a problem that billion dollar foreign internet companies are regulating what we can say online they are at least, for the time being, more aligned to the values of free-speech than many European governments.
That said, I don't have a solution.
I live in a small city in the ass end of the world, but my local politicians, who live a few miles from my home, fork money (a lot of money) over to FB and Google so I can see their ads. They have a huge impact on who gets elected.
You call social media the megaphone of the protests, but when Trump went to threaten the protesters “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” he did it on social media.
Why do information campaigns seem to be failing against the propoganda mills?
Living in underdeveloped part of the world I believed for the most of my life that it was lack of education but having in the US for the past few years I had to firmly discard that notion. I currently believe that it is the inherited values that society imparts on us, and that serves as a lens to view facts that is being manipulated.
The last company I worked for our executives, all highly educated and good natured, for most parts, held political opinions that I thought were only held by the 'idiots' captured by someone on cell phone videos. They had built a successful company on highly educated immigrant workforce, with major workforce still outside the US, headquarter located in a deep 'blue' state with the founder and chairman of the company an immigrant and PhD holder a first generation immigrant but everyone still a vehement, vocal supporter of current anti-immigrants, anti-science, anti-obama/hillary, anti-medicine propaganda.
I don't think it's simply dismissable as biased by financial profit. Is it because everyone near them believes in such and these opinions are manifestation of values they grew up with? Is social media just giving it a loud-speaker. We need to address that somehow I feel.
education in equality. education against racism. education to help people out of poverty. education about diversity. education about critical analysis and discourse. education about religions. (even atheists should have a better understanding about the various religions and vice versa)
people claim a right not to be subjected to ideas that they don't agree with. they want to live in a bubble. this is part of the problem.
these are just some of the points that current education is missing. i am sure we can find a few more.
The 2A arguments are a good example of this. By default you would think many of the 2A advocates would be against federal forces policing (ignoring any context, not taking sides, just using an example). In fact many of the left that aren't pro 2A are calling them out for just that. But from their perspective, for years they've been told they are foolish, uneducated, or just simple people that are wrong. After all of that treatment for their stance on 2A, why would they be open to discussions from the same individuals on other topics?
So the problem is two fold. Both sides are ignorant, both sides get hyper focused on their causes, and don't care about the other sides perspective, or the collateral damage the hardline stances have.
In order for anything to work or be peaceful, we have to stop trying to change each others positions on everything, but instead realize, that for a functioning society, we have to accept, not everyone is going to get what they want.
It's tough. It requires calm discussions on both sides and notably hyperawareness about how one projects themselves. Online media makes it infinitely worse when you don't have the human behavioral cues as part of the narrative. It's why you can read the same line two or three ways and get two or three things out of it based upon the state of mind you enter the conversation at.
Now imagine that you invented a system that would get tens of millions more people emotionally engaged to vote, but they happened to also be the least educated, least nuanced, least mature voters - people who seldom voted before.
Then imagine your surprise when intelligent debate disappears, and politics devolves into reality television.
That is what we've done.
Imagine if we allowed the average person dictact Climate Change policy, rather than the scientists? ...oh wait, we've done that as well...
With media outlets incentivizing things like CTR, journalists are going to use whatever gets more eyeballs. And since people aren't directly paying for their news anymore, reporting using tools like Twitter is what makes them the most money.
If you're going to criticize "lazy journalists", you also have to acknowledge the system that makes it impossible to generate serious revenue without sites like Twitter and FB, because that's effectively what those companies have done.
Mainstream media is in a feedback loop with the internet.
What does a world without social networks look like? I don't think we want that anymore. Because social networks do serve a required function.
For Twitter, I love the fact that I can follow some people that I look upto and get their real time musings.
For Facebook, it's about connecting to friends and people I know and being able to reach out without phone numbers etc.
We are trying to solve this problem the wrong way. So again, gluttony cannot be solved by making a better dish, only way to solve it is to moderate eating
When a stimulus reliably elicits a particular response on a large enough population, you can reasonably say that it's the stimulus and not the individual's failure to apply moderation/critical thinking/what-have-you.
The two things you've said are access to "real time musings" which is absolutely not a requirement in the objective sense, and connecting to friends and people, which is a requirement that can be easily fulfilled by other applications.
Phones and email are still completely viable methods for communicating with anyone. Chat programs such as Signal or Apple Messenger or WhatsApp really only add the additional functionality of group SMS. Otherwise standard SMS is fine.
I think your point about moderating your eating is a good and valid point though.
Let's take the metaphor further. Let's say social networks as they exist today are like restaurants that serve 3500 calorie meals. Sure, a person could choose to pay $30 for a 3500 meal and then moderate their consumption and take the rest home in a doggy bag, but that clearly is not what is happening. Instead what is happening is people are eating the whole dish. And on top of that, the restaurant is adding a ton of stuff that makes the food taste more addictive, and other stuff that makes you not feel full so that you'll want to order that dessert too.
And to beat the metaphor to death, I just don't go to restaurants anymore, I make my meals at home.
They aren't the same type of control at all, implying it is deeply disingenuous like claiming beating your kids with a baseball bat and scolding them doesn't make a difference because it is just punishing them either way.
You invite certain people, people can share things, text or even voice chat. You can curate, you have more control of what comes down stream.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism_in_the_United_Sta...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/ft_20...
What was unexpected is the effect. One had expected that people would feel less concerned by the state of the world, cause they would talk to their friends and family rather than bingeing on the global news.
But instead, this increase in connections created a sort of phase transition in society. It's kind of similar to the article that was posted here the other day, where scientists realized that atoms in a solid glass were more connected to each other than in liquid glass. In a way, social media literally "cristallized" polarization.
Yes, some are insular and don't really develop if that is your thing, but you can always have multiple bubbles.
Their approach was rather one size fits most with many lowest common denominator. Discovery is a damn useful service which is kind of obvious in retrospect with reviewers and guides being something people pay for.
https://torresjrjr.com/archive/2020-07-19-guide-to-the-fediv...
https://torresjrjr.com/archive/2020-07-20-what-is-the-fedive...
The solution to centralised power and control already exists and is thriving, with approximately 2 million users strong. Take a moment to learn about the Fediverse and you'll be asking yourself why you didn't know about this before. Don't complain, act for Internet freedom.
Every account has a default setting that is ultra-curated content, works nicely, politically correct, etc.
Deep in the options, you can ‘unlock’ all (requires 18+ notification, verification, or whatever depending on laws), then it will be an absolutely uncurated FILO sort of absolutely everything going a mile a minute.
The unlocked settings would let you upload code-snippets to do curating, so people could share things and invent new ways to curate.
This solves the issue with the risk of censorship.
Quite scary actually, that the real thing is happening.
Convert all of that whining energy into improving the situation, so as to do more than perpetuate it.
Now, if there is substantial ReasonY that ProblemX cannot be addressed, there is genuine basis for complaint.
also
> don't talk about the problems
How does that work ? No one is going to solve these multi faceted issues alone in their garage. Creating a discussion around them is part of the solution
Secondly, if you are going to make that argument, you should highlight our system is democratic. Slaves in enjoyed capitalist system too, you know.
IMHO, social media companies don’t have a lot of political influence. It’s the reach they create for platform users that’s "the problem".
It's not about "social media companies are censoring me", but rather "social media companies are censoring what I see".
I actually suspect the latter.
The moment they censored anyone re-posting that admin tool on Twitter, it tells you that not only it exists but that they also still actively use it.
Do you think those companies would have that much power without its users?
I think the publisher vs platform provisions do need to be revisited. I think small niche sites and forums could be allowed more latitude in how they curate, but at a certain scale a higher expectation of neutrality should be enforced. Really, just limited to taking down obscenity, porn, gore, etc. If any more grey curating is applied (i.e. these platforms attempting to deem for themselves what is "hate speech") there should significant penalties for not applying it generally; for instance, taking down a Trump tweet addressing BLM for being deemed racist in some way, and yet giving a pass to others saying "white loves don't matter" or the like.
A few giant platforms can't be allowed to be the grand arbiters of what is acceptable public speech and what isn't. The influence they have is scary.
