It's a positive thing for these ejections to be across the political spectrum, because it makes the demand for distributed moderation come from across the political spectrum. I hope that demand congeals on support for an open blogging protocol, such that people can very easily post once and direct it to multiple platforms or any listener. If this becomes popular enough, and posts aren't owned by a particular platform…
Or.... The media companies just like to have the middle-of-the-road, dont-rock-the-boat-too-much parties who will kowtow to them and give the masses the ILUSION of political choice.
This shut down story is another tale in the impending international regulation, and maybe breaking up, of what is comically called 'big tech' ('big' does not begin to describe the sizes involved, the naivety is staggering). As newspaper barons before them, the internet has not policed itself adequately enough, according to the governments of the world, and now they will act in unity to take back some control. And the…
What makes you think the future will be so dystopian? In Western countries such as the United States citizens have a high level of political participation and awareness of various issues. If the government attempts to unilaterally throttle the Internet there will be such a large uproar that our political leaders will be overturned on the next election. Plus, the newly voted-in Democratic leadership has a policy of ad…
I've yet to see a strong political movement on something that actually matters. Everything is half-assed and the major movements all fail. Look at Bernie, the Wall Street bailout, China buying out our mortgages, the war on: Iraq, Afghanistan. And these are just recent memory. The will of the American people has been long controlled. Now they only care what the oligarchs tell them to like unions, universal healthcare, living wages, parental leave, a free internet are either un-capitalistic or communistic.
> ... have been removed from Facebook with no explanation given
At the very least, this should be unacceptable. You shouldn't get banned for something if you aren't told what you did. If it was for use of the word revolutionary, it should say so. Or if they called for some leader's heads, it should say so. Then they could avoid doing the same in the future and we could all agree with or criticize the rationale.
As it is, it's likely similar to "a big neural network said so" which tells the users nothing. Facebook's free to run themselves this way but it's sure dickish. Imagine if the government or your boss made rules that way. "Drivers will be ticketed if our models say so."
> They are demanding to be reinstated immediately. LOL. You were using someone else's website - Zuck's, to be specific. If you demand that he allows you to post on his site, could I make demands to post on your site? I'm actually glad these are finally happening. People need to learn to go back running their own services, under their own domain, owned (bought or leased) hardware, etc. The current "social" media + clo…
Agreed except for the cloud part. Buying your own hardware, configuring and maintaining it is a high bar for most people, even technical people.
But we do need distributes systems and we need a lot of competition in the hosting space (it’s not terrible now for lost things if they’re small but big services may have problems).
Facebook is a private platform: they're free to block any content they want, malicious or not.
Excellent, let's reduce everything to "it's a private company, end of story". Such a simple approach, no need to think any further. I assume I can also beat my children as long as I do it inside my private house?
Not trying to take a stand in the argument of whether the companies should be allowed to use the "private platform" excuse to get rid of any content they don't like, but I disagree with your analogy specifically.
>I assume I can also beat my children as long as I do it inside my private house?
Beating children is illegal for anyone by law already. Removing something spray painted on your walls or deciding what books people get to discuss in your own book club isn't illegal, and neither should it be. I hope you understand the nuance here, and why it makes your analogy flawed.
This shut down story is another tale in the impending international regulation, and maybe breaking up, of what is comically called 'big tech' ('big' does not begin to describe the sizes involved, the naivety is staggering). As newspaper barons before them, the internet has not policed itself adequately enough, according to the governments of the world, and now they will act in unity to take back some control. And the…
I mean, newspapers have escaped regulation for a hell of a long time - in the UK Leveson was defanged and the "part 2" that would have enacted real change was quietly dropped.
The UK has strong libel laws[1], which I can only assume act as a counter-weight, so that's a bad example really as it's more complicated than you make out.
[1] far too strong in fact as far as I understand it
This shut down story is another tale in the impending international regulation, and maybe breaking up, of what is comically called 'big tech' ('big' does not begin to describe the sizes involved, the naivety is staggering). As newspaper barons before them, the internet has not policed itself adequately enough, according to the governments of the world, and now they will act in unity to take back some control. And the…
> Citizens will require a personal licence to access the internet, and anonymous use will be illegal.
A lot of users IDs are already tied to their ISP. A simple date/timestamp and a IP address would probably identify the majority of users (in the US).
This shut down story is another tale in the impending international regulation, and maybe breaking up, of what is comically called 'big tech' ('big' does not begin to describe the sizes involved, the naivety is staggering). As newspaper barons before them, the internet has not policed itself adequately enough, according to the governments of the world, and now they will act in unity to take back some control. And the…
> and anonymous use will be illegal. Super interesting that you mention this. I was just thinking the other day about what an absolute dumpster fire "the internet" is due to anonymity (obviously that's not the _only_ reason, but it's a non-trivial reason). This idea that "Let's give people the ability to be anonymous, and somehow, that's gonna make us all bond together and be better" is pretty hilarious in hindsight.…
This sounds like a great way to take away what may be the only outlet to feel some sense of belonging for a gay teen in a fundamentalist religious family in a deeply conservative part of the world.