Local rules instead of global censorship

> And the article does not really answer that, well beyond censorship

Democracies are incompatible with censorship.

> Currently lobbies have more power in the decision process than voters (any political sciences professor will agree). So democracy is a hollow word, or worse: a facade, a lie.

I agree that lobbies have far more power than citizens, and that this is a problem. However, maybe I'm misreading you, but it seems like you might be implying that since we don't have democracy anyway, censorship is fine? Of course, that's not true; we don't want to actively invest in preventing ourselves from getting back to something we can meaningfully call "democracy" by way of legitimizing censorship. Again, probably not your intended meaning, but I wanted to address it anyway.

While we're talking about corporations having too much power, let's talk about social media companies--they can influence our society directly. They don't have to pay people to petition congress on their behalf; they can pay Twitter and Facebook for access (think "Social Dilemma"). Indeed, they have so much power that we were concerned circa 2017 that the Russians were able to indirectly use their influence over us to corrupt the 2016 POTUS election; how much more influence must Twitter and Facebook (and now Chinese-owned TikTok) have over our democracy given that they have direct access to those algorithmic levers? The super rich can now lobby and pay Twitter/Facebook/etc in order to pass their policies.

Americans being confused is hardly something one can avoid.

This piece does a good job reminding me of the larger context for what I've been feeling the past few weeks. Communications freedom is basically my main political issue, but I've had a really hard time caring about The Purge. It seems basically inevitable after what occurred.

What is happening with Big Tech is the same arc as many other instances of American exploitation - an industry springs up around some type of obvious exploitation, but everybody speaking out about it is ignored because they're preaching against business expedience (eg the handful of HN users talking about centralized webapps being a bad idea for the past decade, outnumbered by those with get rich quick startup dreams). Finally the externalities grow too great to ignore and the industry finds itself in an untenable position (financially and socially). The innovative exploiters retreat, while those that bought into the system fight to preserve the status quo, creating a pleb-vs-pleb political issue while the initial exploiters have simply moved on to creating a new manner of exploitation. Even slavery fits this general pattern, and we're still suffering its resulting mess today.

One question I've been pondering is if polarization/propagandization (foreign or domestic) is even possible at the scale we're observing without these centralized watering holes? It's really big tech "social media" that offers this promise of unsophisticated users connecting with socially-distant low-reputation nyms as if they are other good-faith individuals (ie non-Sybil), essentially filling in the companies own reputation in their place. High fanout bad faith actors (political demagogues) will always exist, but it takes an impedance-matching middle layer creating social proof to enable them at such scale. It feels like that would be harder to pull off if people were only connected to closer nodes by default. Although this is probably a hypothetical question now that such structure has already been created.

In the unlikely event that your post isn't immediately removed by the moderators, I just want to add that it is obvious that nobody on the left actually honestly believe the over-the-top hysterical nonsense they have been spouting the past 2 weeks.

Ask them to explain, if these were organized far right militants trying to overthrow the government in the most heavily guarded city in the world, in a building that has it's own heavily armed police force, how come they didn't bring guns?

The left are the ones actually carrying out a coup against democracy, by using the chaos and confusion caused by a pointless protest that spiraled out of control.

> If you want to broadcast to state level, you must have education, journalism rigor, and standup to scrutiny, have to explain inconsistencies or your role is revoked.

And make no mistake, what they mean in reality by the above is always the same, namely that "free speech" will mean you are freely allowed to repeat the talking points of the Party.