get your own website 
WAPO: “ We’re better off without Trump on Twitter. And worse off with Twitter in charge.”
- Thread starter mastermind
- Start date
Isaiah Bradley
Banned
coup attempt? lying, misleading, exaggerating doesn't empower citizens
threats of violence? there're laws already in place to address this
social media censorship? repel 230 to force consistent censorship, backed by clear guidelines that can be scrutinized
It’s a private company and truth be told, people are fine off without these social media companies. They don’t make products that are essential to life.
mastermind
Rest In Power Kobe
It could happen? It has happened. When Facebook banned extremists group pages a few years ago, they also banned black organizations.
Peter Parker
Superstar
You should be banned from this thread until you can write a 2 page essay on the meaning of this article, no fukking way you actually read it
Kyle C. Barker
Migos VERZUZ Mahalia Jackson
Honestly I think the world was better off without them.
But hey, this is where we're at now
I'm sure, ADOS and FBA groups will be labeled extremists by cacs...
... and well intentioned policy will once again hold blacks down.
Not sure how many times we will have to watch this movie before we stop falling for this sh*t.
We must stop extending the ability of our oppressor's to decide whats ok and whats not.
... and well intentioned policy will once again hold blacks down.
Not sure how many times we will have to watch this movie before we stop falling for this sh*t.
We must stop extending the ability of our oppressor's to decide whats ok and whats not.
Ozymandeas
Veteran
Poor Trump, the big bad tech companies banned him. Our freedoms are slowly being stripped away by the left. Tech companies have too much power. GTFOH.
Imagine somebody saying it was unfair if Saddam Hussein was still alive and got banned from Twitter
Imagine somebody saying banks have too much power if a violent white supremacist group got flagged and blacklisted by all banks
He incited a riot that ransacked our Capitol, got five people killed and right now D.C. is on red alert because they're afraid something might happen.
Fukk him.
Imagine somebody saying it was unfair if Saddam Hussein was still alive and got banned from Twitter
Imagine somebody saying banks have too much power if a violent white supremacist group got flagged and blacklisted by all banks
He incited a riot that ransacked our Capitol, got five people killed and right now D.C. is on red alert because they're afraid something might happen.
Fukk him.
mastermind
Rest In Power Kobe
Its either right wingers who aren't upset with monopolies despite supporting free markets, or its people who can't see past "why are you mad Trump was banned from Twitter," when the title of hte article is "Its good that Trump is off Twitter."This thread is filled with people who either didn't read the article or have the reading comprehension of 3rd graders.
This article is absolutely correct, social media giants have way too much unchecked power and influence on us. They can't be allowed to continue on as they are.
You guys keep repeating that tired cliché about the 1st amendment and government, etc but are missing the entire plot here. People never listen to reason until its too late though
This is the American educational system.
I'm sure, ADOS and FBA groups will be labeled extremists by cacs...
... and well intentioned policy will once again hold blacks down.
Not sure how many times we will have to watch this movie before we stop falling for this sh*t.
We must stop extending the ability of our oppressor's to decide whats ok and whats not.
Are you suggesting that there should be government intervention preventing social media companies from doing to others what they did to Trump?
Free Market 
Take the Profit Out of Political Violence
Censorship isn't the right approach. Just stop letting Facebook earn money fostering violence.
Today I’ll be writing about how to think about big tech in the context of political violence. I’ll also cover the first antitrust-related move of the Joe Biden era, an important personnel change at the Federal Trade Commission.
And now…
Who Draws What Lines?
The Capitol Hill riot shook American politics, with the prospect of a violent challenge to an electoral outcome creating a sense of frightening possibility, as well as offering a reminder of just how fragile democracies really are.
In the aftermath of the violence, we are seeing large technology firms engaged in overt and explicit censorship of an organized political faction. Such a reality might have appeared shocking, even a fake conspiratorial fantasy, just a few weeks ago. And yet, Twitter removed tens of thousands of conservatives from its service, AWS refused to allow Parler on its hosting facilities, and Trump has not only lost his voice online, but he isn’t even able to sell red hats through Shopify.
This bans aren’t crazy. While it’s hard to find a more blatant exercise of unregulated and arbitrary monopoly power for political purposes than what big tech just did, it’s also hard to find a political purpose – the violent overturning of an election - more worthy of suppressing.
And yet, now that Trump and QAnon have been muzzled, proponents of big tech political control are arguing for a broader set of bans. For instance, former Facebook executive Alex Stamos recently explained on CNN why it is critical to mobilize private infrastructure to deny the ability of conservatives to communicate. Stamos is not some isolated character, but represents how Silicon Valley elites think about the problem.
On this segment, Stamos discussed how traditional press freedoms are “being abused” and calls for communications firms with market power to collaborate to suppress domestic right-wing extremism, including both social media icons popular on YouTube and conservative TV channels, the way they did content from ISIS. "We are going to have to figure out the OAN and Newsmax problem,” he said. “These companies have freedom of speech, but I'm not sure we need Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and such bringing them into tens of millions of homes.”
Stamos’s view is deeply disconcerting, and I think he even feels uncomfortable with it, which is why he has to use imprecise words like “figure out the OAN and Newsmax problem” instead of saying what he really means, which is that it’s time for a small group of media and tech barons to work with political leaders to censor things they don’t like. And make no mistake, that is what Stamos is seeking, and that’s what’s beginning to happen. YouTube is already censoring press coverage of rallies around gun rights because the corporation’s algorithm found that the coverage "violates our firearms policy." There’s going to be a lot more of that, and big tech will do it overtly and unapologetically.
I’m sympathetic to the concerns that Stamos (and many Democrats) have. A society simply cannot exist without drawing firm lines about what kinds of behavior are and aren’t acceptable, and violent riots to overturn elections are a red line. And yet who draws these lines? For Stamos, the answer is a narrow and powerful clique of insiders. That is also unacceptable, because empowering private unaccountable tech firms to draw those lines is also an overturning of self-government.
Gang Violence
The argument in which Stamos is participating is not new. The Capitol Hill riot wasn’t the first act of violence induced by social media. The UN essentially accused Facebook of fostering a genocide in Myanmar, and ethnic divisiveness all over the world, as well as strife domestically is now a common result of social media. I’m reminded of this article in 2018 on how Facebook fuels gang violence in Chicago by making gang taunts go viral. Similar to what happened in the aftermath the Capitol Hill riot, tech firms got aggressive in censoring gangs. This created a problem, however, as one professor specializing in gang work noted. “At some point,” he asked, “Are you just taking down posts from black and brown kids?” The analogy of platform monopolies trying to regulate gangs of teenagers vs two parties in a polarized political system isn’t perfect, but it’s not ridiculous, either. Humans are humans.
Rather than seeing the polarization and monopoly problems in isolation, it helps to recognize that the cause of both is a policy framework that has shaped the internet into a series of dominant platforms who radicalize their users. Sure, conservative infrastructure mattered; rioters used Parler as an organizing forum. But more important to their movement were mainstream platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. These services, unlike Parler, made money by selling ads as the riot occurred. Facebook even placed assault weapon ads next to the groups organizing an overthrow of democracy.
The problem gets more interesting when one considers the motivation behind the riots. When the rioters attacked the Capitol, they did so not to destroy democracy but in their minds, to save it. Steeped in an years-old ecosystem of disinformation and rage, most of them sincerely believed they were stopping an election from being stolen, and in what one analyst called an Extremely Online Riot, tweeted and broadcast their attack to their fans and followers. And here’s where the business model problem comes in. Instead of marginalizing the violent cranks who exist in every society, social media over the past decade has turned them into stars. For instance, Alex Jones’s monstrous claims about mass shootings reflect a deranged individual, but YouTube recommending his videos to users 15 billion times reflects a policy problem.
One consequence of Google, Facebook, and Twitter’s main business is to act as a radicalization engine. They do this by selling advertisements targeted using data gathered through intrusive surveillance. Because they profit from advertising, they want keep users on their sites for as long as possible to sell more ads. As a result, the platforms tend to show sensationalistic or otherwise addictive content, to keep people using and the ad money flowing. They also gamify it, putting Like buttons, retweets, and video view counters to keep people hooked.
The user experience decisions and algorithms encourage inflammatory or conspiratorial content and harms our mental health and the ability to participate in rational politics. “In a targeted advertising model,” privacy experts Jeff Gary and Ashkan Soltani have written, “misinformation and conspiracy theories are often the product, not an accident.” Facebook, with its addictive user interface designed to maximize engagement, has helped foster deadly mob attacks worldwide. And Google has provided ad services to 86% of sites carrying pandemic conspiracies. This environment affects all of us who use these platforms. I suspect, for instance, that much of the Russia-gate paranoia among liberals was fueled by the performative nature of the platforms on which many journalists discussed the topic.
We have a set of laws, everything from defamation to harassment to product liability, that would ordinarily have made publishers or products that foster harmful social pollution illegal. But those laws are inoperative online. In 1996, lawmakers sought to encourage ‘Good Samaritan’ behavior on the part of technologists, giving them legal immunity so they could curate their platforms to eliminate anti-social behavior. They authored Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to immunize social media and tech firms from responsibility for what their users do with their service. The goal behind this law wasn’t bad. The real effect however has been to encourage all sorts of illegal activity - like harassment, defamation, fraud, incitement, as long as it is done online. These platforms, though they make money from this behavior, are immunized from any costs of it, under the false premise that they are merely conveying speech.
You can still sue individuals and firms for defamation. Indeed Dominion, which makes voting machines, just used defamation law to force a conservative magazine to post a humiliating apology admitting it falsified information to damage the firm (with no outcries about censorship). But you can’t get at the entities that are knowingly re-publishing this information - and selling ads so they can profit from it - far more effectively than the original source. The problem is, as Jason Kint noted, “velocity and targeted reach without liability.”
It goes beyond defamation, into problems like fraud and harassment. Scammers often create fake Facebook accounts impersonating military personnel and use those accounts to lure lonely women into sending them money. When the solders return home, these women are waiting for a romance they think is real. Obviously, the scammers are committing fraud, but Facebook is also profiting by selling ads and collecting data as the scam happens and expending little to no effort to stop it. And why should Facebook? Facebook bears no liability for this behavior, because Section 230 immunizes it from legal claims like negligence. Similarly, Grindr knowingly enables stalkers to use its platform to harass and, in some cases, induce violence against victims, but bears no liability for doing so, because of Section 230. And yet, these platforms cannot be held liable for any of the harm they cause or profit from.
Repealing Section 230 or reforming it so platforms who profit via advertising are not covered, would reduce the incentive for social media to enable illegal behavior. If we did so, a whole range of legal claims, from incitement to intentional infliction of emotional distress to harassment to defamation to fraud to negligence, would hit the court system, and platforms would have to alter their products to make them less harmful. There are other paths to taking on targeted advertising, like barring it through privacy legislation, a law for a real Do Not Track List, or using unfair methods of competition authority of the Federal Trade Commission. But the point is, we need to stop immunizing platforms who enable illegal behavior from offloading the costs of what they inflict.
Once the problem of radicalization goes away, then it becomes possible to solve the monopoly problem. Two months ago, Democrats on the House Antitrust Subcommittee completed a 16-month investigation, and found that Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google essentially control the internet. The subcommittee recommended Congress act to break that control with a new legal framework neutralizing their power. Now, however, they are afraid that doing so would force AWS to carry violent content. That is why ending the shield for business models that promote illegal activity is so important. Doing so would in turn allow policymakers take away the power of tech firms to choose who gets to be a part of our politics.
Both the radicalization and the monopolization are threats to democracy, and both are a result of a business model policymakers have allowed to continue for too long. Or to put it differently, we’ve set up a policy framework in which organizing human beings to tear each other apart is extremely profitable. It’s easy to fix, if we can just calm down and change a few laws.
No.
Isaiah Bradley
Banned
smh. Folks getting their inner libertarian on to cape for a private business they like
No individual/business is above accountability and regulation
..thus why my uncle always says "don't tell me about your plight, show me through your actions"
claim to be target/victim but willingly empower others to infringe on your rights at their leisure, reeks of comfort/complacency
If social media companies and hollywood can juelz earning money as reason to adjust their policies/films to cater to the agenda of governments that are tyrannical/anti-American/anti-gay/anti-free press etc....then to clout chase in the US targeting the President is absurd
No individual/business is above accountability and regulation
I'm sure, ADOS and FBA groups will be labeled extremists by cacs...
... and well intentioned policy will once again hold blacks down.
Not sure how many times we will have to watch this movie before we stop falling for this sh*t.
We must stop extending the ability of our oppressor's to decide whats ok and whats not.
..thus why my uncle always says "don't tell me about your plight, show me through your actions"
claim to be target/victim but willingly empower others to infringe on your rights at their leisure, reeks of comfort/complacency
Twitter wouldn't have banned Hussein and remove "violent," banks wouldn't be able to blacklist "white supremacist" because the criteria of being one changes depending on who benefits...in other words, no consistency is counter productivePoor Trump, the big bad tech companies banned him. Our freedoms are slowly being stripped away by the left. Tech companies have too much power. GTFOH.
Imagine somebody saying it was unfair if Saddam Hussein was still alive and got banned from Twitter
Imagine somebody saying banks have too much power if a violent white supremacist group got flagged and blacklisted by all banks
He incited a riot that ransacked our Capitol, got five people killed and right now D.C. is on red alert because they're afraid something might happen.
Fukk him.
If social media companies and hollywood can juelz earning money as reason to adjust their policies/films to cater to the agenda of governments that are tyrannical/anti-American/anti-gay/anti-free press etc....then to clout chase in the US targeting the President is absurd