Then perhaps we should address these too big corporations issues. It appears, if no big social media corporation existed, and instead there were a bunch of smaller players, we could argue that the customers will make a good decision.
Perhaps, the government should be involved into it (in form of perhaps adjusting anti-trust laws)?
Whoa buddy, that's some pretty limited free market regulation thinking.
There's plenty of laws that only apply on certain companies, after n employees or x revenue. Should be pretty feasible to devise a law that applies to sites with more than n active users such as Facebook and twitter and the likes and not to your neighborhood forum.
How does that mesh with the original post's point?
If we have different rules depending on scale, how is it OK for the rules for large scale social media platforms to be impossible to comply with by large scale social media platforms?
The problem is social media is inherently anti competitive. It relies on network effects, so you have to either limit their size or use utility style regulation.
While the article doesn't mention it directly or indirectly, isn't this exactly what the social media giants would ideally want? Regulation might raise the `Barriers to entry` for any potential new social media site, if there was any chance of a new one coming up and taking a pie out of FB / Twitter, etc.
I'm arguing from an assumption that social media giants are too powerful--they can steer public opinion and even influence national elections (think "Social Dilemma"). I also think they're just bad for our social fabric--they seem to drive up anxiety and antisocial behavior. This is the context for the rest of my comment.
That said, I think you're right that without moderation, the quality of these platforms will suffer. I don't think it will look like Parler et al but rather like Mastodon which is more noisy than vile. But even still, I think it will drive people from these platforms, weakening them, and I think that's a net improvement over the status quo.
I also think there's another interesting possibility which may or may not be practical for other reasons: require social media companies to implement a common protocol (e.g., the mastodon protocol; forgetting what it's called off the top of my head) such that these companies can continue to offer a moderated window into the underlying social network, but they don't own the social network. If you want, you can pack up and leave for another social media provider without leaving your friends and conversations. This weakens social media giants by breaking their monopoly and allowing competition from upstarts (including other revenue models besides ads) and it also allows these giants to moderate how they like.
There's a bold assumption in your position that the regulators charged with wielding the power would do so with greater restraint or less paternalism than the platforms do now themselves.
What I really would expect to result from regulating the big social media players is that you'd simply institutionalize their dominant position. Regulatory regimes tend to discourage upstarts and often do little to reign in incumbents. After 2008 when increased regulation came after those bad "too-big-to-fail" banks... did we end up with smaller, but more diverse banking institutions or even fewer bigger banks that all looked pretty much the same? I could very well be wrong, but my sense is that we didn't move solve that problem and I don't think regulated big social media would be much better than what we have today.
I've run a niche "social media" site for 12 years. There is no tightrope. The problem is that these large platforms want the benefits of scale, without being responsible for dealing with the problems of scale. It is imminently possible to build a thriving social media site that enforces standards of behavior. HN is a good example. However, it is work to actually enforce those standards. It takes leadership. Facebook, Twitter, etc, are not interested in providing that type of leadership, and would likely require both a huge economic investment, and a significant change in business strategy.
Yeah ok, we agree. I don't think smaller companies would moderate better, just that it would be less of a concern when they do it badly. I mean there are small social medias companies right now that don't moderate at all, but it's not a pressing issue because they don't have much impact.
Maybe there should be some sort of condition, like minimum MAU or something. Only regulate those that grow to be huge enough for many people to depend on them. This would exclude startups but would still apply to Facebook and Twitter.
Social media giants are like tobacco companies in the 1950/60s.
If the next president ran on a platform of regulating social media as the harmful and addictive product it is, people would probably be receptive. Everyone knows they have an addiction but without collective action the spell can't be broken.
No social media company is going to regulate themselves, but if there was industry wide regulation they could probably find some peace of mind knowing they can implement more healthy practices without fear of a competitor undercutting them.
Social media above a certain size should be treated as common carriers. There are no reasonable alternatives to them, and today, common public activities activities that are core to our life are conducted on these large platforms. This is not a matter of protecting the freedom of companies to do as they wish - we already regulate companies and restrict their activities in many ways. Private power utilities cannot discriminate against their customers based on their speech or political viewpoints, for example. The same regulations can be enacted to govern these platforms.
I often see arguments saying that someone who is deplatformed/demonetized on these service can just use an alternate service, but I find that to not be the case in practice. Consider that Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have more users than virtually all nations. Their network effects are core to what the product is, which is why there aren't suitable alternatives (especially when they enact censorship in unison). Telling someone to just go use a different platform is like telling someone that they don't need their power utility, since they can just stick a windmill on their property instead.
Finally, I am greatly concerned that these large privately-controlled platforms are essentially outsourcing government-driven censorship and also violating election laws. For example when conservatives did form their own platform on Parler, AOC called for the Apple and Google app stores to ban Parler after the Jan 6 capitol riot (https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-sho...). If a sitting member of the government pressures private organizations to censor others, it should be considered a violation of the first amendment. Leaving aside the technicalities of law, it is unethical and immoral even otherwise and completely in conflict with classically liberal values. Actions taken by these companies to suppress certain political speech in this manner also amount to a donation to the other side. This isn't recognized as "campaign funding" but it is probably more effective than campaign funding at this point. We need to do a better job of recognizing the gifts-in-kind coming out of Silicon Valley tech companies towards political parties based on the ideas they suppress/amplify/etc.
Who will enforce that responsibility? Who decides what's large enough?
> Letting one small group of people
What one small group of people? There are literally thousands of social media sites, and people are completely free to join or quit any one of them. If there were no competition in this space, I might be concerned. But just a few short years ago Facebook was unheard of and MySpace was the "monopoly".
Let customers choose. The customers are not one small group of people.
If the problem with Twitter/Facebook is that they have too much influence (a fair point IMO) and thus need regulation shouldn't we solve that monopoly problem rather than trying to remove the right of forums to choose what content they host?
I'm sympathetic to the argument that Facebook/Twitter/etc. are too large and have too much power for lobbying/influencing public discourse, although I think if anything making them a public utility would make that situation far worse as opposed to just breaking them up or something else to make the market more competitive
But also just because they are big platforms why does that give people a right to be on them? Is my speech less free because I have a smaller audience?
I think you're avoiding the alternative option, that there can be different levels of regulation based on size and power of a company.
There's a rather large difference between Twitter, which has a lot of people using it every day for information, and that of smaller companies. A company like Twitter can influence the fabric of society for good and bad by a large amount, but a smaller company has far less effect.
A single standard is a simple approach, but that doesn't make it the best option.
Looks like different regulations would apply for Twitter, Google and Facebook. Twitter does have some "public square" aspects, as does Fackbook, but Google really doesn't. It's just an ad giant that does some things like Android to increase its advertising efficiency.
What regulations would apply? Everything we've found out about Facebook from Frances Haugen the Facebook "whistleblower" has Facebook actually boosting conservative content. Seems like the old "liberal bias" canard doesn't apply there. Twitter's problem is mostly that the platform encourages dogpiling, and apparently they have a policy of allowing certain bot swarms to operate freely. Twitter should also carefully consider what letting spammers run free does to their reputation: faxing, phone calls, usenet have all fallen to spammers.
I have some emotional sympathy with breaking up any company that goes above a certain market capitalization, but it's really hard to quantify what the limit should be and why.
Treating large corporations as "public agencies" is the definition of socialism, too. I don't know how that could be done consistently - nationalize some companies, but not others seems unfair, and prone to abuse by political parties.
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