The social atomization trend in the west began long before facebooks and googles even existed, before the Internet was available to the general public. They, and Facebook in particular, probably aren't helping but they didn't cause it either.
What bothers me the most about these tech giants is the complete about face on free speech. Companies that couldn't exist without it, that couldn't have been founded without the open web (Google) and belief in freedom of communication (Twitter), as bastions of free speech (Reddit) are now busy coming up with new ways to censor their users. This is part of their progressive culture mentioned in the OP but a very specific one.
I don't know how many people still care but this is how they lost all my goodwill towards them.
Facebook's censoring of #Revolution via their claims of moral superiority should frighten the shit out of every free person on earth. While we still have it reasonably good in America, their willingness to suppress speech in good times doesn't bode well for people who will be oppressed during bad times.
The first amendment made it clear that not even the government had the authority to use their vast moral authority, as they exercise through the legal system, to prevent people from speaking and organizing.
But #BigTech has a nuclear option on the speech on the web's most visible ecosystem, social media, through purely market forces and are doing the bidding of a single political party, exclusively. It's not just horrifying that they amassed so much unchecked power, but since 2016 they're actively using and abusing it to suppress legitimate political speech in every nook and cranny they control.
You are totally right. I have seen some posts on some networks that brand themselves as the guardian of free speech. Well if we took them to a Facebook Twitter proportion the same problems will arise very soon. So just may be the problem is with the people too.
If those current big techs were to disappear, would people stop their nonsense and sometimes hated behavior?
I am starting to believe that is not just bad company management or moderation, we definitely have bad actors on those networks too.
I will put my personal feelings on Big Tech Censorship aside for a moment.
I can understand that big corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and a few others have a problem of trying to publish millions of pieces of content a day, as well as numerous complex customer support requests, many of which are truly dumb. Their scale is so massive that they have to use various dumb algorithms to try and perform many of their functions like blocking sexually explicit content towards children. The problem is that algorithms are very far from perfect: even if those algorithms make a mistake just 0.0001% of the time (and I'd bet the real number is far, far higher), they still screw over the lives of thousands of innocent people every day.
Anecdotally, I've had the following happen:
* I've had a real business blocked from Google Ads apparently without a human ever looking at my support request in the mix. Had to shut down the business and let people go because Google offers no way to speak with a live human.
* I've had a business account blocked from a popular payment provider because a receipt had the word Gay in the title: their algorithm apparently thought it was something sexually explicit that wasn't.
What these massive companies must implement is some kind of paid, human support for desperate customer support requests. I don't care if they must charge $20, $50, $100, or even more for to make it feasible to staff an actual human customer support line. But there must be some way for people with real issues to have a reasonably fair hearing on their case. It is reprehensibly evil that there's basically zero way to address so many problems with these Silicon Valley Giants.
PS: Mark Zuckerberg is doubleplusgood, plz don't ban me bro.
Big tech just want to suck in money in peace. They only suppress content to ensure that peace.
They cut out sexual content first because it's biggest nono in the US where they come from. Bigger than nazis or racists. But then people got railed up about other things. Nazis, racists, transphobes, mysogynists, political lies.
Peaceful harvest becomes harder and harder.
No wonder they want to outsource all that noise. They want to be given clear direction which part of the field is safe and which is the part of shifting sands of public outrage.
Zuckerberg is literally just begging to be censored. Censor will set up clear boundaries of safe field current companies can share and keep the status quo since new player won't be able to attack them from the direction of fuzzy boundary because there won't be any.
I'm ok with Facebook and Google censoring their platforms if it prevents people from being radicalized.
If you want to host your own hate page, you can. I think there are a lot of negative externalities of the massive communication infrastructure that people are involved in now that aren't fully understood yet.
Violent crime is down - the number of idiot antivaxers is up, for example. I think we all need to just admit the idea of connecting everyone to everyone else is actually a terrible idea - tech was wrong, the positive techno fantasy was as absurd as communism, and we need to now deal with the beast we've created.
I’d argue FB and Google stopped pretending to be about free speech and such a long time ago with Twitter being the one left that claimed to be a beacon of freedom (while not really being one).
Freedom of speech is about censorship from the government. As much as Silicon Valley companies love to self aggrandize they are not the government and are under no obligation to allow their platforms to be used for furthering hate speech (or anything else.)
In fact I firmly believe sites like Reddit, Twitter and Facebook allowing racism and other horrible crap on their sites in the mid 2000s until recently is what helped make it more mainstream. In the web of the 1990s these idiots would have had to go to their own sites that nobody else goes to. Mainstream sites like Slashdot or whatnot didn’t tolerate it. For some reason after the dot com crash the new round of sites afterward have had some kind of delusion that they need to uphold free speech. And it’s nonsense.
I used to be against this sort of thing, but now I think the faster Facebook, Twitter, and Google make themselves irrelevant for public discourse, the better. Their ad-based business model is just incompatible with free speech, and the more obvious that fact is to everyone, the better.
I still think it's bad when non-branded content carriers like web hosts, CDNs, payment processors and banks ban clients based on ideology though.
To be honest, #3 is a very broad generalization. It wasn't Silicon Valley that gave it up, it was Reddit, Google, Twitter, and FB. The problem is, public perception of "tech" is largely driven by those three companies as they are all handling the largest collections of social media.
The truth is, the powerful have come to realize "free speech" being protected was only a safe position for them when people were unable to organize en mass without serious sacrifices. Now that they have, they feel a need to make it stop.
It is the same reason they killed Unions and tried to kill Protesting. Both are threats to those in power. Online organizational ability is another threat and they are testing the waters on punishing people there as well. They can't stop it, just reduce it.
Disgusting censorship in such a position of power. Corporations like Facebook and Google and Apple shape society. There is no getting around it. It should no longer be acceptable to use the concepts of 'capitalism' and 'privateness' as an excuse for censorship on platforms that have become as good as public utilities.
The open web has never been more important. What next, will Google's Chrome browser start blocking fediverse web domains? That's their 'platform', too.
the real problem here is that we allow google, apple or facebook to control public discourse. we let companies decide what we are allowed to talk about.
regardless of wheter we agree with what's being removed or not, this can't be healthy.
i am not american, so my interpretation may be off, but here is how i understand the problem:
many people would like hatespeech to go away. jet the US constitution prohibits government censorship, so the government can't do much about it. instead they rely on companies like google and facebook to do the work for them.
the companies are also compelled by public pressure to do what the government can't.
contrast that to germany, where hatespeech like the promotion of nazi ideas is outright illegal.
while i haven't verified this, this puts less pressure on companies to censure anything that isn't mandated by law.
public demands for the control of speech can also more easily b etranslated into law, so that the public doesn't need to resort to pressuring companies. on the contrary, they expect the government to protect them from companies that act in bad faith.
it is hard to say which system is better. if there were many small companies each making different decisions about public discourse, then things would be fine.
the problem is not so much the removal of outright hatespeech, but the more subtle influence in for example what is allowed to be posted about the covid epidemic, or other sensitive topics like political opinions, fact checking and all that.
as it stands, i prefer that decisions about what speech is allowed is controlled by law such that we can use legal means to combat abuse.
It surprises me that people still think big tech and social media companies are acting in a free market independent of political considerations. You have high-ranking politicians threatening them on a regular basis and demanding they censor specific users. Not to mention many have contracts with the government and back doors of communication.
Facebook, and Twitter and Google were built by particular libertarian-types who were young and idealistic. They erred on the side of openness and really disliked regulating content. I don't mind them.
The people who are taking over these companies, those people I'm afraid of because they are political and their first instinct is to push ideology and censorship.
I find it very disturbing to see these allegations of censorship directed at large tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and even Google.
I thought that the Internet was the greatest empowerment of free speech in history. Now that so much communication happens through private services, it seems like free speech is effectively being damped.
Can you imagine decades ago, the phone company revoking your phone number because they didn't like what you said to your friends over their wires?
I really want someone to come along who has an answer to all this. I sure don't. Just some observations.
I think the last decades have been an unprecedented experiment in massively scaled two-way communication. People don't really seem to know how to handle the current stage of this experiment. It was a little easier back when it was much smaller communities on Usenet, or even IRC, and most of the time you recognized the same names and could work things out like everyone had got together for a slightly uncomfortable family dinner.
But it's not like that anymore. Hasn't been for quite a while. The scale and speed of things is just hard to fathom now, and we really aren't equipped for it.
Facebook has shared some responsibility in ethnic atrocities [1] [2] [3]. Different groups are now exploiting Facebook's advertising platform to stir up more social unrest [4]. Facebook isn't the only source of trouble; Reddit and other sites are radicalizing youth [5] and struggling with self-policing their most toxic bits [6].
Everyone's concerned about the loss of free speech. I'm pretty far left politically, I get it. It's a big step, maybe the last, towards tyranny. I've been opposed to forcing websites to police copyrighted content (DMCA, SOPA, PIPA). I've been a little less opposed to forcing them to police sexually exploitative content (FOSTA and SESTA -- although I don't love the execution of it).
For people on the political left, who tend to both support free speech and recognize the danger of unregulated firearms, it might be time to take a more careful look at the damage done by massive social networks and ask: what makes this different from gun control?
And is there any way to effectively reduce the spread of misinformation, radicalization of people, and incitement of violence on massive social platforms, without suffocating the free exchange of ideas?
The sad truth is that this is an intense political battle. I would personally favor Elon Musk taking over and shaking things up, any other position is untenable. And, I am saying this as a progressive. I think an open and transparent social platform would be great for the society.
The issue is that managerial class of America, both in private and public sector, are in bed with each other. The government cannot suppress free speech using the frontdoor, but these social media companies (Meta, Twitter) as well as Big Tech machinery (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon) act as a proxy for supressing political speech through opaque algorithms and straight up censorship.
We, liberals, used to be exceptionally devoted to free speech. Just look up ACLU's cases from the 90's and prior. We were against the establishment. Against the managerial class crushing labor. Against the fucking 3 letter agencies.
Now, my own party wants to turn America into an authoritarian censorship dystopia. It's hard to stand by that.
Agreed. But who is pressuring these social media companies to censor. Maybe something needs to be done to stem the absolute power of those pressuring the social media companies.
Lets be honest here, twitter, reddit, google, etc didn't decide to censor all of a sudden. They were pressured into censoring. By whom?
What bothers me the most about these tech giants is the complete about face on free speech. Companies that couldn't exist without it, that couldn't have been founded without the open web (Google) and belief in freedom of communication (Twitter), as bastions of free speech (Reddit) are now busy coming up with new ways to censor their users. This is part of their progressive culture mentioned in the OP but a very specific one.
I don't know how many people still care but this is how they lost all my goodwill towards them.
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