Nicholas Carr on how to fix social media

Anyone is free to join the channel, no limitations or anything, just an opt-in. Rule is posted obviously and we remind people frequently.

I've lost 4 people because they were upset that this rule is enforced against everyone, out of a group of maybe 20. They wanted their politics to be everywhere and not constrained to one channel.

I never thought this tiny little policy was going to cause such a mess. It has dramatically improved the rest of discussions - you can actually just talk about stuff without people jumping in with their political takes - but it's been an upsetting policy in ways I did not anticipate.

This requires:

* Routes - both parties to be on IPv6 or either party to have something like port address translation on a IPv6 interface.

* Identity - This will require a combination of CA and STUN. The certificate from the CA and corresponding key pair associated with that certificate ensures a user is who they say they are and their keys are respectable. The corresponding key exchange ensures the data is confined to the two parties. The STUN server correlates the unique user ID, such as that which is certified by the certificate, to an IP address.

Anything less is just another game for some media company to use you as a product.

I mean, I can see how sometimes the internet seems to promise even more freedom of speech than in physical spaces and also that sometimes there are not very clear written laws or policies for those digital spaces, paired with unclear or unfair enforcement of those laws and policies.

Makes me wonder what the future of digital governance will look like. Do we have the digital equivalent of cops roaming semi-public spaces like Twitter and Facebook? If so, by whose consent are they governing? Do these orgs hire the equivalent of private security guards or bouncers? Have they already done so through moderators and such?

Anyway, just got me thinking about some of the challenges in the governance of digital spaces.

In the UK TV broadcasters get their licences and general charter terms from the government, based on standards previously contested in law and, I believe, broadly enshrined in statute and/or regulations. One of those terms is a crucial clause to the effect that broadcasters are not allowed to broadcast anything that would make ordinary people throw up over their TV dinner or grannies die of apoplexy, etc.

Various entities, people or single issue political parties for instance, have attempted to get broadcasters to show films containing grisly stuff, and when they meet refusal have attempted to sue broadcasters on free speech grounds. However, the right to free speech does not allow a legal entity or person to compel some other party to shout out noxious views on their behalf. So broadcasters in the UK can exercise their rights against such compulsion and filter out extremal horrors if they wish. The tests they use are designed to maintain the same two or three standard deviations of a normal distribution curve that maximises their customer base and matches the same standards civil law requires to maintain order on the civil scale anyway.

In that context, what are social media companies if they are not media intermediaries between legal entities? Thus they can not be compelled to relay anyone's content to anywhere else if they don't want to. Their T&Cs typically say so anyway.

Folks worried about censorship of their partisan or minority views on such platforms don't seem to get what rights those intermediary companies have. They play nice relaying messages because they like mass market incomes.

So really the issue might be purely about how many messages could MetaFB/Twitter afford to kill off and still be popular enough to survive?

That's because you can't think outside the box. All the greatest iconoclastic truths in human history were labeled "dangerous misinformation" by the authorities.