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?
I feel like this censorship is mostly caused by centralization of information on closed/proprietary platforms, and the stakeholders of these platforms put it upon themselves to censor content they deem inappropriate or incompatible with their bottomline.
People can say that these platforms are privately-owned and freedom of speech is only about government censorship, but where do you speak when these platform are well established and chances of dethroning them with a decentralized and open alternative are slim to none?
From my perspective, social media censorship is a huge threat to our rights and democracy and these executives decided they were going to use their massive influence to set the bounds of acceptable discourse at the population level. That behavior is the root problem.
I'd prefer the government is hands off to the extent possible, but something has to be done one way or the other. Ideally the platforms would be painfully fined or even people sent to jail for what they did with the Hunter Biden laptop story which AFAIK illegally changed the result of our presidential election.
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.
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?
An underlying issue is the formation of the digital world - what once was a town square is now a (ex.) Facebook page, or network of Twitter followers.
The mechanism of communication exchange have changed so rapidly, that compelling companies to abide by free speech is a tough legislative decision. Yes, they’re corporations and can decide who to have and who not.
But an emergent phenomenon are people using these services as their lens to the world. This was obvious in the last election, red or blue, it was obvious whose side big tech was on. They were not unbiased, as I think they should be.
I’d say just as AOC wanted to get a list created of trump political supporters/affiliates (not general public, but a stepping stone away) and essentially cancel them, the same rhetoric is used to ban forms of speech. “It’s for the better”.
Another reason for controlled speech is a patronizing one, that “you’re head/emotions can’t handle X form of speech”.
Let people decide what they want to see. If I want a censored Twitter, or Wild West Twitter, let me choose. Though I understand the impracticality of forcing this on a corporation.
The only thing banned should be what is illegal. Let legislatures and judges determine it.
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.
The censorship is an inevitable result of tollerating these tech companies and their promotion of content moderation.
If we are under attack from a foreign adversary, then the logical thing to do would be to firewall our social medias off into national siloes.
Instead, they use their positions to censor our speech amongst eachother, promote their own political ideologies, and cause everyone to live in a state of unknowingly being censored, shadow banned, algorithmicly limited, etc for having a very human opinion that differs from that which the platform seeks to amplify.
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.
As long as companies like Twitter are openly embracing country specific censorship I don't see this happening anytime soon. Just looking at the recent developments - Megaupload, Google Profiling and Twitter's new found love for Censoring doesn't make me hopeful that Tech companies will stand up for the interests of their users.
Regulatory hijacking but of private entity. Reddit, YouTube, and such have already made clear and they no longer pretend to care about free speech and instead have an agenda
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.
At what point can we finally admit there is a coordinated war on against freedom of expression online?
The platforms censor on their own accord, the government pushes the platforms to censor even more, the legislature is talking about ways to make the platforms censor more yet.
It seems they're afraid of the situation where anyone can publish to anyone regardless of content. Our efforts should be along these lines, on the most popular of devices.
TikTok doesn't even let you access bio links in a normal browser, and you can't copy them. You can get banned from TikTok based on what you have listed in your bio link webpage on a different service.
Instagram doesn't linkify URLs in comments or descriptions.
Apple doesn't let things in the App Store unless they're firmly PG13. This is what killed Tumblr and ruins the photography site 500px's native app.
There are whole domains of URLs that you can't even send in DM on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, or Discord.
Personally I delete my accounts on these and use Signal exclusively, but how do we solve for the society-wide censorship problem?
I'm going to be honest I wonder if the censorship and content policing isn't having a worse effect than allowing the content in the first place. Tech companies have demonstrated a very clear liberal bias (which in itself isn't a bad thing necessarily). However by removing/censoring content they are actually legitimizing it because people don't see these companies as a neutral third party but rather a biased dictator of information.
I have distant family that has bought into the conspiracy theories. But now that Youtube has started directing traffic away from their channels and putting up these warnings they feel under attack and have only doubled down on their beliefs. It makes it a lot harder to work with them/discuss these issues.
When 49% of the country voted for a man who is currently the sitting president by law, and you can't even retweet his tweets it's pretty upsetting to them. They feel like they are under attack by the Big Tech companies. I know why Twitter did this. But it's only creating far more polarization between the rich people in power (aka Big Tech) and these people.
This is really an absurd fantasy. People would not have pressured tech companies to censor for years if there was any market demand for more censored platforms. People know how to use the block button, and the only reason they demand censorship is to prevent other people from seeing something that offends them, which an alternative to twitter doesn't solve.
Lets be honest here, twitter, reddit, google, etc didn't decide to censor all of a sudden. They were pressured into censoring. By whom?
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