I posit that the problem is that an overwhelming volume of our national speech (and indeed international speech) is completely at the mercy of a tiny handful of corporations. Further, these corporations have demonstrated an ability to steer public opinion and credibly even unilaterally influence elections. This is simply too much power and these companies' rights to regulate their own platforms must yield to the greater need to secure our democracy.
Effectively, I think it's an antitrust problem in that the power of these corporations is so great that it threatens our national sovereignty, as the large trusts of the 20s did (although I don't think the large social media companies have flexed that power as egregiously).
>>I posit that the problem is that an overwhelming volume of our national speech (and indeed international speech) is completely at the mercy of a tiny handful of corporations. Further, these corporations have demonstrated an ability to steer public opinion and credibly even unilaterally influence elections.
How is any of this fundamentally different from how television operates? Anyone with a camera and a broadcast license can do same things (and already have). On TV, if you don't like what your seeing, the solution has been to change the channel. On the Internet, if you don't like a website, find another one.
>>This is simply too much power and these companies' rights to regulate their own platforms must yield to the greater need to secure our democracy. Effectively, I think it's an antitrust problem in that the power of these corporations is so great that it threatens our national sovereignty, as the large trusts of the 20s did (although I don't think the large social media companies have flexed that power as egregiously).
Anyone can start a forum or website for near-zero in seed money. In the 1920's, the same couldn't be said for an oil company. Facebook's privacy violations threaten personal liberty but I fail to see how you reconcile that issue with antitrust law. Making them utilities or breaking them up doesn't solve the underlying issues of what you're trying to accomplish. In other words, it's wrong tool for the wrong job.
> How is any of this fundamentally different from how television operates? Anyone with a camera and a broadcast license can do same things (and already have). On TV, if you don't like what your seeing, the solution has been to change the channel. On the Internet, if you don't like a website, find another one.
My grievance wasn't "I don't like what I'm seeing" for any value of "I", it was that social media companies have too much influence by virtue of the volume of speech subject to their control. All television companies combined don't control as much speech as Twitter alone (1 broadcaster x millions of viewers versus millions of broadcasters x millions of viewers).
> Anyone can start a forum or website for near-zero in seed money. In the 1920's, the same couldn't be said for an oil company.
Obviously this is a falsehood. You could easily start an oil company in the 1920s, but it wasn't going to compete with the giants of the time, just like a website that I might start tomorrow isn't going to compete with Facebook or Twitter. But I'm not very interested in whether the cabal of social media giants amassed their influence legitimately versus the anticompetitive practices of the 19th century trusts; I'm more interested in the fact that the problem is the same: too much concentrated influence threatens democracy. If you oppose the Citizens United ruling, you almost certainly agree with me, at least in principle (you might disagree about whether social media giants have amassed so much influence as to threaten democracy, and that's fine).
> Making them utilities or breaking them up doesn't solve the underlying issues of what you're trying to accomplish
How would you know? Per your first paragraph, you think I'm trying to solve for "I don't like some website". :) I'm solving for "they have too much influence" which is what antitrust legislation is about (you might take some narrower perspective that it's exclusively about preventing certain kinds of business practices
The telecommunications act of 1996 basically allowed for media conglomerates and non-media companies to buy up and basically propagandize media orgs. Like for instance: Comcast buying NBC. It took us from > 500 nationwide media orgs to < 6 that control 95% of the media on the web or tv.
That's all on the "free market" and "unregulated capitalism" the right "loves" so much.
Maybe the answer is end that bill, split up all the media, and maybe have a max # of "users" per social media company so that they need to basically "spin" out other companies for the next 10 million users, and each block of 10 million users have their own group so that no groups have max control... seems like the equivalent of 500 media orgs with different agendas at least they have some differing opinions.
Now Sinclair Broadcast group basically sends the exact same word-for-word script to thousands of local tv stations, and we just accept it as truth.
Twitter and Facebook are the least of our problems... media is broken in America period, and that's because of lack of anti-trust against media conglomerates as well as repealing the fairness doctrine. Not sure what a good solution is, but twitter/fb/etc are small wheels. If there's no newsweek, fox, brietbart, cnbc, nbc, msnbc, cnn to post news stories there'd be no sharing of news period on these platforms, of course then htere's just no news online...
Ideally it'd be nice if media ads were overhauled to guarantee that media doesn't get blind-sided by special interests... like Humana pulling ads if they're too supportive of medicare for all, it'd be nice also if we ended lobbying in congress and enacted anti-corruption laws at every level of government to ensure money stays out of politics and the the U.S. government self-funded all elections and at an "equal" level. If I ran against Bernie Sanders, we'd get equal $$ and that's that, no donations etc.
At least then how far someone gets is more on merit, organization, and how well they can budget -- things that are admirable in an elected official. Ability to fundraise has no bearing on how you can govern because you don't hold fundraisers for social projects, the military, etc - you tax the people or print new cash.
Let’s talk about this “demonstrated ability to steer public opinion and unilaterally steer elections”. I believe you have fallen into an intentional conflation of ideas here. Social media as private platform with terms of use that other people promote on, versus the social media company acting with their own political agenda. Those thongs are not the same.
We’ve seen many disinformation campaigns proliferate on FB, Reddit, 4chan, Twitter, et al, but with the notable exception of 4chan, these campaigns are promoted the company’s executives, but rather amplified through algorithms developed to promote time on site. Zuck only cares about money. He doesn’t care if it’s coming from cooking tips, flat earth memes, or a 6 hour expose videos about how satanic pedophile aliens are eating children in the basement of the Alamo. It is the users posting the misinformation that are attempting to manipulate elections by utilizing a third party’s engagement promoting algorithms and platform. This distinction is very important, but gets intentionally muddied. FB isn’t manipulating the election, as much as Simone trying to manipulate an election are being stymied.
Furthermore, when we actually examine the claims of “censorship” they end up falling apart pretty quickly. It will be a clear cut TOS violation, by a person that unfailingly has had a long history of getting passes for TOS violations. Which makes me wonder, why were they getting so many extra chances. (Case in point: Alex Jones and YouTube.)
You also have the same people screaming about how they’re being censored, regularly appearing as the most shared pages on FB.[0] When you dig into even more, there’s nothing there.[1]
So what is going on here? It’s a replay of the 70s and 80s. Newspapers are dead, and so the “liberal media elite” canard (and we know it is a canard, because Bill Kristol and Rich Bond have admitted it.[3]) needs a new target. And just like then, if it doesn’t have a particular political bent, its “unfair”. And you know what? The whining is working again.[2]
What exactly did Kristol say? They article says he "is on record as saying that the 'liberal media' canard is often used by conservatives as an excuse to cover up for conservative failures", but doesn't include a quote or citation. (Putting "liberal media" in quotes doesn't count as a citation, since he uses the term all the time.)
I have zero doubt that this is a behavior they've used, but it's a little weak to say that he's "on record" without pointing to the record.
I’ll give you three direct quotes and a link to all three.
Bill Kristol: "I admit it. The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures."
Rich Bond, chair of the Republican Party in 1992, during the 1992 presidential election: "There is some strategy to it [bashing the 'liberal' media]. If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is 'work the refs.' Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one."
Pat Buchanan during his 1996 presidential campaign: "I've gotten balanced coverage, and broad coverage-all we could have asked. For heaven sakes, we kid about the 'liberal media,' but every Republican on earth does that."
>I posit that the problem is that an overwhelming volume of our national speech (and indeed international speech) is completely at the mercy of a tiny handful of corporations. Further, these corporations have demonstrated an ability to steer public opinion and credibly even unilaterally influence elections
This is the Democratic party and Mainstream Media line. I vehemently disagree with that. So OP was correct. We can't even agree what the problem is. One half of the population blames Russia, Twitter, and 'misinformation' for their nominee's election loss and now wants blood and openly advocates for censorship of their political opponents.
Ironically the facts are essentially the exact opposite. It's Thomas who is mad about his candidate's loss and feels it's Facebook's fault for suppressing "conservative speech", and argues for common-carrier regulation so that it doesn't "happen again". Democrats and the mainstream media have nothing to do with this other than being things that you don't like that virtue signal what side you're on.
On the other hand if you think Russia isn't doing their best on social media, and that they're overwhelmingly pushing for Trump... you're willfully ignoring the facts, and the conclusions of multiple law-enforcement and intelligence studies. Of course this is only a temporary thing - Russia pushes for whatever will produce the most chaos both domestic and also in our international alliances and on the world stage. Right now that is Trump and that faction of his party, but they use the green party similarly, and hypothetically if the Republican party fractures and the democrats become ascendant on the US political stage then you will see them push unqualified green-party wacko candidates to do similar kinds of damage. The healing-crystals lady (Marianne something?) already has some suspicious stuff going on iirc.
Also, there is of course a point to be made here about the subtle acknowledgement that a large amount of "conservative speech" these days is in fact hate speech in political clothing, targeting immigrants, minorities, LGBT, etc, or violent extremism such as the capitol insurrection, advocating the overthrow of democratic governors (yet another incident last week from the leader of the Michigan GOP), and so on. That is what Facebook is taking down, and that is what Thomas and others choose to identify as "conservative speech".
> This is the Democratic party and Mainstream Media line
It was in 2016, but after 2020-11 it's become a prominent conservative position as well. People disagree with respect to their specific concerns about how the social media giants might use their influence, and that's actively a good thing because it means that our solution space must be nonpartisan--we're looking to reduce the power of social media giants irrespective of the giants' political alignment.
Let’s be honest here, the two aren’t complaining about the same thing. One side is complaining about lax enforcement of TOS violations, while the other is trying to claim that a private actor enforcing rules on their private property is violating their rights. One is pointing out preferential treatment, and the other is complaining that they aren’t getting enough preferential treatment.
I think both sides want more aggressive enforcement of TOS violations, or at least I see a lot of lefties advocating for more aggressive enforcement while righties are advocating for consistent enforcement. In whatever case, I'm not really interested in ToS concerns for the purposes of this thread.
> the other is trying to claim that a private actor enforcing rules on their private property is violating their rights
I sympathize with this argument insofar as "their private property" has become the de facto public square, and it's absurd that one company should have the ability to evict someone from the public square. But I'm not actually that interested in the power dynamics between the company and any given individual, but rather about the implications associated with one or several companies having such control over the public square--they can unilaterally influence public opinion and steer democracy. Too much concentrated influence.
And if you're one of the folks who were complaining that Russia was able to manipulate Twitter's algorithms to decide the 2016 POTUS election, you necessarily agree that Twitter's algorithms have the potential to decide elections and Twitter pretty clearly has direct control over its algorithms, thus you necessarily believe that Twitter has the potential to unilaterally decide POTUS elections.
You "vehemently disagree" with the "Democratic Party line" that "speech is at the mercy of a handful of mega corporations with the ability to steer public opinion"?
That being the case...
I assume you must feel that speech is not threatened by the likes of Facebook and Twitter and thus you would certainly agree there would be no reason to regulate them. They should be free to exercise their corporate free speech rights to censure content for any reason or no reason at all. Right?
Effectively, I think it's an antitrust problem in that the power of these corporations is so great that it threatens our national sovereignty, as the large trusts of the 20s did (although I don't think the large social media companies have flexed that power as egregiously).