One of the biggest problems with social media is the fact that social media companies are financially incentivized to keep the public at large from knowing. Twitter has long refused to answer exactly how many of its users are bots as a percentage of its user base, Facebook did the absolute bare minimum in cooperating with Senate Intelligence in 2017 relating to Russian propaganda, etc.
Kara Swisher said it best in an interview with Preet Bharara around the time of the Russian propaganda scandal: "The Russians didn't hack into Facebook and manipulate its servers. They were users of Facebook, they were users of Twitter. They used these platforms exactly the way they were designed to be used."
And as you pointed out, some "bad actors" are not even bots, they are real people working on behalf of some organization.
It would be nice if more people were aware that the hyperbolic content they see on social media is possibly(probably?) either not a real person's thoughts, or has been influenced by some disingenuous source
The problem is that many wouldn't believe it if they were told (i.e. "this is what big tech wants me to think"). This is essentially what happened when Facebook and Twitter informed users that had interacted with suspected propagandized content.
Particularly after this current purge, social media companies have lost most of their authoritative credibility. Combined with a political culture that embraces wild conspiracy theories, you'd just be adding fuel to the fire.
The vast majority of tech workers that receive equity stakes in pre-IPO/acquisition companies don't ever see any financial windfall from their stakes. These guys will be just fine.
This is so true, and it doesn't get discussed enough. Folks like Medhi Hassan and Jonathan Swan are a completely different kind of journalist than most of the folks that occupy the airwaves, and it's really frustrating to watch the news when you know people like that are setting a much higher bar than everyone else.
Nonprofit news organizations are a thing and I've been incredibly positive about their future (full disclosure: I used to work for a nonprofit publication).
The nonprofit model encourages much more direct community engagement through conferences, festivals, and long-form interviews with local, state and national leaders.
A major hurdle that nonprofit and higher-quality news outlets face is that the major media players have dopamine-driven news down to a science, and it's a lot easier to consume a small and practically meaningless soundbyte than it is to sit and listen to a politician have a challenging discussion with an interviewer for an hour. The attention span of the average American isn't equipped for higher-level discourse as it's not nearly as exciting and rage-inducing as watching CNN/FOX/ABC/??? network.
The most popular podcaster right now is Joe Rogan, who does 2-3 hour interviews. Doesn't the popularity of his content suggest that Americans are very interested in higher level discourse, but have long been denied it?
> Doesn't the popularity of his content suggest that Americans are very interested in higher level discourse, but have long been denied it?
This is probably true to degree, although Rogan specifically is a pretty polarizing example due to his proclivity for hosting guests that aren't always welcome elsewhere. It's hard to say how much of his popularity is due to his interview style versus his politics. I also expect that the demographic breakdown of podcast listeners aren't reflective of the country as a whole, it probably skews a bit younger.
Long-form interviews with political leaders aren't a new genre, I suspect they just don't get as much attention as the more soundbite-y forms of news, but I could be wrong.
Boring-ass long-form interviews with nonagenarians like Charlie Rose or the 60 Minutes gang don't get much attention because they are without substance. Rogan isn't necessarily trying to embarrass his guests, but neither is he desperate to support the status quo. So, occasionally, something true gets said. Like, once an hour. Still better than the nonagenarians.
Rogan seems like one of the most un-polarizing forces in media right now. He can support Bernie Sanders, a left wing position, and oppose trans rights, a right wing position. Almost everyone else is more pushed into either the left or right pole.
You've touched on a huge problem I see with the US political system. Everyone is bucketed into one of two buckets. Everyone in each bucket must have all of the beliefs of the other people in the bucket. If you are in one bucket, you support Trump, think border walls are a good thing, support blue lives matter are anti LGBT and are anti-abortion. If you are in the other bucket you take the opposite views on all of the those topics and more.
For me it shows that the tribalism has completely overtaken US politics. If everyone was making up their mind independently or even semi-independently the odds of everyone in the same bucket having the same beliefs would be close to 0.
Well yes, that's what "polarizing" means, that everything is pushed towards one of two groups, rather than being allowed to be anything in the middle. That's why it seems to me that Rogan is not polarizing, because his opinions don't strictly belong to one of the two groups.
I see tribalism taking over as an inevitable consequence of the electoral college voting system, and I'm always startled when people tout vague calls for 'unity' as something worth doing, rather than implementing ranked-choice ballets or similar and just solving the problem.
I'm not accusing you of that, btw. Just saying it for me.
One thing I really envy about parliamentary systems (like in Germany, the Netherlands, etc.) is having lots of parties, with all sorts of different takes on the issues. I do think Americans fall into the trap of thinking there are only 2 possible political philosophies, Liberal and Conservative.
I don't think it's fair to say that he opposes trans rights. I saw him talk about recently transitioned people in MMA. I'm not a big follower of his, but I think his views are more nuanced than a blanket "he opposes trans rights like right wing people".
I don't listen to him now that his RSS feed is defunct, but ISTR Rogan supported every right of trans people except the right of trans women to compete in women's athletics without informing competitors of their gender status. This came out after multiple women MMA fighters were hospitalized with life-threatening injuries.
This nuance is enough for certain trans activists to damn him completely, but that is hardly a universal judgment.
The problem is classifying "trans rights" as left wing, while those have (almost) nothing to do with the left/right spectrum.
Another example, on that spectrum this time : Trump's anti-immigration stance is a very typical leftist position. If this sounds preposterous, see this :
I fully agree with you and this just proves the point. If everyone was thinking for themselves from first principles or even just using their memories they'd remember which side of the immigration debate they are supposed to be on. You don't even need to go back that far, up until Trump the right wing were very pro immigration because their industries rely on a steady flow of cheap and under-paid and exploitable labor. Exactly the thing the left are traditionally against.
Trump was a very odd presidential candidate. He basically was super-populist (fund Social Security/Medicare, get rid of immigration), and indeed seemed like he had no firm commitment to the Republican party. I actually hoped that he'd end up governing from the center (especially after the Dems took the house).
But then he got elected, and essentially governed as a standard trickle-down Republican, with a side order of conspiracy theories and showmanship.
Like, it's important to remember that Bernie Sanders was anti-immigration without stronger labour standards, and that many Trump/Sanders voters (in 2016) liked the other candidate more than those in their respective primaries.
The US just needs one set of people who'll actually do good things for the lower half of the populace, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.
An ideal would be someone like Rogan but with a spine and some teeth, someone willing to stand up to his interviewees and bite them a bit when they say something outright wrong or fuzzy-headed. It would require the interviewer to, first, get acquainted with the idea that facts are more important than feelings, especially the feelings of the people being interviewed, second, learn the facts relevant to a given interview and have them on hand, and, third, develop a position on the topics relevant to the interview based on those facts and have the basic fortitude and honesty to defend that position. It's difficult, but it would draw in people put off by Rogan's style or lack thereof.
America needs another Dick Cavett for a younger generation in that regard (or multiple!). Less pandering, emotionally and intellectually intelligent, honest, but still relatable and still cognizant of his audience.
It definitely kicks the cynical view that people are only interested in bites that satiate a short attention span.
My town is blessed with an excellent nonprofit news organization: Berkeleyside and its spin-off, Oaklandside. Together they publish 1-2 articles each day, because that's how much news there is. There's really no reason to have the local dailies like the SF Chronicle, the only major-city newspaper to my knowledge to have been openly mocked in a famous movie, or the SJ Mercury News and the other papers of the Bay Area News Group, a Denver company that hasn't printed anything worth reading in the past decade.
Personally I find that Berkeleyside and Oaklandside are full of “personal interest” type stories that are interesting but usually aren’t too important. Some new restaurant opened, a new indie movie is showing. Whereas the SF Chronicle has recently become an excellent source for local coronavirus and wildfire news.
Interesting. I find the primary sources on wildfires, pandemics etc to be so easily accessed that I don't need the interpretations of local newspapers on those topics. What can they tell me that I can't find out by viewing up-to-the-minute satellite and air quality data? Nothing. And in particular I don't need editorial takes like the ones of the L.A. Times earlier this year, crowing about how sprawl protects them from the pandemic. How does that take seem this week? Better to just get stats from health officials' web sites.
On the other hand there's no ready alternative source for restaurant openings and closings. That's just about my favorite topic on Berkeleyside.
Solar didn't magically just appear on the market at a lower price point than carbon-based resources though, it had to go through several iterations which required significant investment capital. This is usually where government agencies like DOE leverage their capital investment programs because private business aren't interested in paying for the R&D to solve those kinds of big problems without a guaranteed success.
Solar is only becoming cheaper today because of the research and capital that was put into developing the technology, not because it's inherently cleaner than coal. To your point, based purely on the market forces (i.e. excluding carbon taxes) coal is still a very viable option. And if the government is motivated to migrate businesses off of dirty energy resources, it also has a motivation to help develop alternatives that the market will accept.
Solyndra[0] was one example of a company that received government support to develop solar technology and became notorious for defrauding the government in the process.
> To your point, based purely on the market forces (i.e. excluding carbon taxes) coal is still a very viable option.
Oh please. Based "purely on market forces" can't exclude carbon emissions. That's a non-negligible externality which your market needs to price correctly. Not doing so is in effect subsidising coal. There is nothing "pure" about this, quite to the contrary. And this has been known for decades.
Markets suck at pricing on negative externalities. It is literally the textbook example of market failure. That's why we need regulation (e.g. Carbon taxes) to step in and make sure those costs are accounted for.
I don't know what kind of hypothetical utopian market you're referring to, but it's not one that exists in human societies.
>Oh please. Based "purely on market forces" can't exclude carbon emissions.
Huh? A bunch of people with no altruistic tendencies, and who are incapable of coordinating through any means but pricing, will not stop overfishing or carbon emissions. I don't get this often repeated thing about how not taxing carbon is subsidizing it, or how cap-and-trade is indistinguishable from naturally occurring markets. Both of those things are clearly artificial constructs built on top of the naturally-forming market. It's like many people are trying to use a perfect society as the zero-mark which all deltas and relative measures are measured from, while the state of nature (and the absence of a policy) is the obvious zero-mark to use.
No. Carbon emissions are hurting everybody on this planet. Even if you ignore plants, funghi and animals, then there are still a few billiom humans around that are participating in your market and get damaged by emissions. A fair market needs to contain provisions for compensation of this damage. Just because you can't see it right away does not mean it does not exist.
Compare it with sewer systems in a city. Many businesses would be much more profitable if they could dump their crap straight onto the street. Municipal cleaning services would need to clean up and everybody pays them. So they'd be subsidised though this. We don't accept this, we have rules against it since it's not fair. They have to pay their share, and excessive generation of crap needs to pay accordingly.
We don't accept this with crap on the street, and we should not accept it with crap in the atmosphere either. It's the exact opposite of a free market. It's misuse of a common resource.
>It's the exact opposite of a free market. It's misuse of a common resource.
Why can't free markets result in the misuse of common resources? I feel like some are trying to square a circle here. Free markets aren't axiomatically the definition of good, and it's okay for something good to not be a result of them. There are these things known as "market failures," where unattended economic activity will lead to people's goals not being achieved. Overfishing and carbon emissions are market failures; far from being the opposite of a free market, they are well-recognized consequences.
Ok sure. That's like saying time dilation is a physics failure in newtonian physics. Technically correct, and entirely unhelpful to solve the problem.
The problem here being that writing "based purely on the market forces (i.e. excluding carbon taxes) coal is still a very viable option." suggests that since we all want free markets we'll need to accept this. No we don't.
We also don't say "well purely on human nature forces we'll have a few alpha males who keep a harem of women and try to kill all competition that's not submissive". Technically correct, but entirely unhelpful to find a way how to move forward.
A free market needs rules. "Free market" does not equate "do whatever you want". Without rules that are enforced, you don't have freedom either.
I think the source of the confusion here is a massive positive esteem laid on the two words "free market," which confuse people into thinking that anything good has to be labeled a free market. Labeling a system that requires government intervention a "free-market" mechanism is, just like in your example, just as much of a misuse of language as labeling quantum mechanics a Newtonian mechanism. Minimum wages, antitrust action, taxes, bans, sanctions, and subsidies are all examples of interventions in free markets, and they can be good or bad, just like the features of the state of nature (a free market) can be good and bad in different situations.
I'm really against this idea of redefining the baseline so that whatever policy choices we like are defined as the absence of subsidies and the presence of a free market. Subsidies are when the government intervenes to give money to those who trade in certain goods. Intervention is defined as doing anything other than letting people sort it out for themselves. Likewise, a free market is not one where everything we don't like is banned, it is a market where there are no constraints on the participants' process of trade and price determination.
You would get the societies depicted in Snowcrash and Cyberpunk 2077. People would hire private security to perform the security tasks they need, just like multinationals do in third world countries. If you don't want that to happen, one has no choice but to restrict the freedom of at least one market. (The market for mercenaries.) Some countries go further and restrict other markets, for example the markets for weapons. It does not make any sense to call gun control a free-market mechanism, that's just not the right use of the term.
Freedom and rules are two sides of the same coin. Just doing whatever you want in a market does not make it a "free market". If somebody can go and hold a gun to your head and thereby persuade you to give them your goods for free, that's not a free market. A free market needs enforcement of rules of trade. And those rules include that you don't damage other market participants without compensation. Be it a potential bullet to the head, the mentioned "crap on the streets", or carbon emissions in the atmosphere.
>If somebody can go and hold a gun to your head and thereby persuade you to give them your goods for free, that's not a free market.
It's a free market if you can hire private security to stop them. The ban on the violent trade (often called the "monopoly on violence") is an example of an area in which modern liberal democracies do not permit complete freedom in the markets they host. I guess the slogan could be, "not every policy liberal democracies like is a free-market policy."
In a fully free market, slavery, selling of body parts, hard drugs, murders, torture for hire, kid porn, kid workers, nukes owned by private citizens etc. would be fully allowed. Very few people actually want that.
The "state of nature" does not include property rights. Markets rely on those property rights (a form of regulation), and are therefore a fundamentally artificial construct.
no markets--free, 'naturally-forming', or otherwise--are devoid of rules, whether they be implicit (e.g., dollars as trading medium, refrain from taking by force, etc.) or explicit (e.g, trading hours are 9-5). there is no 'good old days' where markets were free and the traders were good, upstanding people by happenstance.
it's just as 'natural' to prohibit the ability to unknowingly harm others without pricing that into the transaction.
>no markets--free, 'naturally-forming', or otherwise--are devoid of rules, whether they be implicit (e.g., dollars as trading medium, refrain from taking by force, etc.) or explicit (e.g, trading hours are 9-5).
9-5 trading hours are not a rule of US markets. If there was demand for trading at 8, people would organize to do that - and in fact they have, it's called after-hours trading.
Dollars as a trading medium is also an example of a non-rule. In a free market, all currencies would be lawful for transactions. In fact, in the US companies are free to sign contracts that numerate quantities of money in any currency. The only legal privilege of the dollar is its role in taxation - hardly an aspect of the free market.
Finally, the rule against taking by force is enforced by the executive branch of a democratically elected government. It is not possible to call that a free-market mechanism. A free-market mechanism for security exists, it's where you hire rent-a-cops, or in third world countries, where you hire mercenaries.
so is your argument that those off-the-cuff examples are not really rules because they're arbitrary or fuzzy (like every other rule, convention, or custom)?
the point is that there is no real world 'free market' that meets your idealized (and arbitrary) conditions.
> Solar didn't magically just appear on the market at a lower price point than carbon-based resources though
You are ignoring the entire point of the post you are replying to.
Extracting coal and burning it has massive external costs. Massive health costs to the workers and even people just living near coal extraction. Massive devaluation of land near the coal mines. Huge issues with non-carbon solution. That's all before the concerns about climate change. Few people were compensated for the massive destruction of wealth/ health & quality of life in the region. In many places the companies extracted every ounce of coal then when the lawsuits started pouring in, the company went belly up.
Once you take into account all the costs outside the costs of acquiring the land and extracting the coal, coal is vastly more expensive.
> and became notorious for defrauding the government in the process
Where's the evidence for that? The major point was that Solyndra bet on the wrong horse with CIGS; they were unknowingly doomed to fail from the start.
What happened with CIGS? There was a privately funded CIGS company here in Austin TX that also didn't make it (even though the founders and investors were solid) and I've not gotten a straight answer as to why - esp. confusing because the first quals looked very good.
Well, nothing. That's basically the point. Or, at best very little happened with it. "It wasn't getting cheaper faster than silicon was" is the most concise answer I can come up with.
I'm not sure your point in bringing up Solyndra; with that notable exception, the fed's investments in renewables turned a decent profit. It's actually a problem, in hindsight: the program was supposed to take risks on innovative ideas and companies that would be difficult to find via traditional channels, but Solyndra had such a chilling effect that the DOE stopped taking those risks.
Yeah, I meant to add the caveat that it was one of the most publicly notable government energy investments for the simple fact that it ended up in scandal, since many aren't even aware that the government invests in companies like this. I wasn't trying to criticize the initiative.
> Solyndra had such a chilling effect that the DOE stopped taking those risks.
It's frustrating to see that a private company's bad behavior wound up being a stain for the government like this.
Was it even bad behavior? I recall that there were allegations at the time that Chinese business were dumping solar panels onto the market and that meant Solyndra couldn’t compete. Though I’ve also found some news sources saying that the high prices for polysilicon caused a bunch of players to enter the market to produce it, causing prices of poly silicon to crash and Solyndra couldn’t compete. Either way it seems to be bad luck unless the CEO and board knew those were huge risks and intentionally downplayed them.
Edit: It just seems unclear to be what the supposed fraud was.
> It's frustrating to see that a private company's bad behavior wound up being a stain for the government like this.
Do not be confused into thinking there was no government collusion. Not only was solyndra a cesspool of revolving door players, it definitely knew how to play the government contracting game. I used to deliver food for ill low income housing clients and on one complex I visited saw old solyndra tube on top of the building. Someone had to look at this project and see it as a cost plus opportunity for an unrelated and unnecessary product; and now that housing block is saddled with unsupported infrastructure. Who is going to pay to remove those solyndra panels and put some other solar system up there?
> It's frustrating to see that a private company's bad behavior wound up being a stain for the government like this.
Definitely! Sorry if I came across as defensive, I'm just used to people using Solyndra to criticize the whole program. On the whole, the DOE made a big impact. It's just disappointing that one bad actor reduced that impact by turning into a political hot potato.
Freedom of speech as laid out in the 1st amendment protects individuals from being arrested or censored by the government for speech. It does not protect individuals who violate the TOS of a private company, nor does it provide blanket protection in all cases of speech. Inciting violence and making false statements of fact are not protected forms of speech under US law[0]
It's really interesting to see other folks' digital minimalism setups.
> It’s all well and good removing all social apps from your phone, but if the strong desire is still there to check these types of services, you will find a way to do it.
You can mitigate a lot of your urges to check social on your phone by using a service like Freedom[0], which is what I use. It allows me to set web and app blocklists and schedule them as needed. Usually, the urges go away after a couple of weeks. Ultimately, the goal of digital minimalism is to change your behavior in regards to your device usage, not change your device to appease your urges.
The two biggest changes that helped me dramatically reduce phone usage was to A) go full grayscale on my phone and B) to add the screen time widget to my home screen. Grayscale instantly makes the phone less visually appealing, which helps to put it down faster and to reach for it less. The screen time widget on my home screen allows me to instantly see how much time I've been on my phone, which I then use to decide if I really need to do what I unlocked the phone for.
Speech in the US has always had limits, the idea that America has pushed for completely unlimited free speech is not true, and incitement and false statements of fact are some of the cornerstone cases in which speech loses its protection under the 1st Amendment[0].
Speech has never been, and will never be, completely protected without exceptions in the US.
Most of the discussion seems to be centered around freedom of speech and enabling dissenting voices, no matter how violent, but I think we're missing the bigger picture here.
This represents a vast check on presidential power that exists purely in the hands of these incredibly wealthy and powerful social media executives. I don't necessarily disagree with Twitter's decision given the events of the last few days, but this undeniably strips Trump of a major source of power for him, and that merits a discussion of the role that private social media companies play in our discourse and presidential function as well.
edit: imagine trying to run for re-election without a social media presence. It's hard to imagine that anyone could mount a serious campaign without it, let alone win.
Disagree that presidential power should bleed into private companies. He entered into a contract with Twitter, broke it, and Twitter ended things on their side.
> He entered into a contract with Twitter, broke it, and Twitter ended things on their side.
I agree, and I'm not saying that Twitter acted in the wrong here. Imagine a hypothetical scenario where Dorsey threatens a president to say or not say something under penalty of deplatforming. That's a pretty significant lever to have over POTUS. That's the point I'm trying to make here.
In that case, the President will hold a press conference and ger coverage from every TV and YouTubel Channel and Facebook page, not to mention tens of thousands of Twitter users.
how did he break the contract with Twitter? the tweets twitter references hardly seem to encourage mob violence.
twitter subjectively interprets their own set of rules and it's clear there's a double standard.
when politicians on the left encourage protests and riots that result in the destruction and burning of private property, there are no repercussions.
and i'm not attempting to say that two wrongs make a right; encouraging violence or mobs is wrong, but Twitter's enforcement of their own rules is clearly influenced by political ideology.
I sincerely doubt that Twitter actually significantly enhances presidential power. Unlike normal people presidents can get on national TV to directly communicate with the general public. He’s got plenty of ways to message millions of people like mass email, or even just sending a letter to news agencies etc. Twitter was useful politically, but it probably hurt as much as it helped.
Further the president can literally call in air strikes or offer blanket pardons etc. They are often called the most powerful men in the world for good reason.
The ability to use Twitter (or the newspaper) is not a presidential power.
Certainly it is true that it is hard to run a campaign without a media presence. That has been true for hundreds of years. Competent candidates have entire teams, if not the vast majority of their campaign, figuring out how to effectively contract with private media entities (whose freedom is protected by the First Amendment) to get their message out. That incompetent candidates exist is not a reason to change this system.
There are lot of comments like: 'I do not support him but...'.
I'm not from the US so will use example from my country.
I do not mind if my prime minister was banned from Facebook even though I'm ok with him (didn't vote for him, but we have more than two parties).Facebook is just some private company for me. It is monopoly in a way and pain that most of my social circle is locked there. But for any public figure? There is public broadcaster. It already is not good that he is not using his PR team that much.
You have put too much power in to the hands of private companies. Public broadcaster can be (and often is) misused for propaganda of ruling government. But so can be private one (and often is). But at least there is stil this balance of public/private spaces.
But I know this is irrelevant in the USA which tries to implement some utopias (like free speech) but others are considered as immanentization of the eschaton.
He has been using the platform for a long time and spreading all kinds of misinformation but Twitter did not take any action against him in the past. The platforms are available for anyone to behave in a civil manner and not cause unrest in the country.
I think you are trying to make a reasoned argument and engage in meaningful debate, but can we really make the argument that the person with the nuclear codes, in control of a budget of trillions of dollars, receives any power from a free online publishing tool?
As I noted, you realize the federal government has a nearly inexhaustible source of funding, right? I bet they could build a twitter clone if they were really worried about it.
Jack Dorsey knows the future lies within uncensorable social networks. Guess what he has in mind with blockchain and al.
If we would have kept all the tweets as 144 chars as text only, a full copy of all tweets would have been possible through a compressed distributed blockchain.
It's not just social media but Big Tech in general - Google is pretty much the only way the majority people look for information on the Internet, so I'd say it has an even larger amount of power in influencing what people see.
I actually think that Trump, of all people, is the worst to try to make that case with.
At the click of his fingers he’ll have cameras from every major news network and reporters from every newspaper in a room to listen to what he says. Inevitably whatever he does say will be on Twitter instantly. Not that it matters that much because the majority of the country aren’t even on Twitter. They read about his tweets in news reports.
I don’t buy that Twitter is a source of power for Trump. It is his communication medium of choice, certainly. But his power has always been in making controversial statements that generate headlines. He doesn’t need Twitter for that.
I dunno. I think this is precisely an example of why hard cases can make good laws - not that were making laws here yet, but the OP definitely brings up a good point about the general matter.
Something really weird happened with Donald Trump.
He had a tendency to say things like "I got twice as many votes as Obama did when he was reelected." (I don't think he actually said that one, but it's hard to find a real example when... they deleted his twitter account.)
And then that isn't true. Trump got ~74M, in 2012 Obama got ~66M, that's not twice as much. But it's more. So if they run the story correcting it, they're running a story that tells people that Trump in 2020 got more votes than Obama did when he won in 2012.
At some point the media got tired of this, but what are they supposed to do about it? If they don't correct it, the claim stands unopposed. If they do, they're still running the story Trump really wanted, telling people he got more votes than Obama.
They eventually started omitting the context. So then the headline becomes "Trump lies that he got twice as many votes as Obama" and then that's the entire story. No mention of how many there actually were. But that didn't work, because then the first comment on the story is from some Trump supporter providing the actual numbers and you're back to having a story about Trump lying that still benefits Trump.
So then they want to do something about the Trump supporters because they keep providing the inconvenient context that Trump's controversy generator left there on purpose. So they censor them in some way. But then the supporters feel wronged -- being punished for saying something true -- so they support Trump even harder and it backfires.
The whole thing made them so angry that they're now willing to cross every line in order to destroy him. But the current strategy seems to be to censor him as much as possible so that nobody sees the rebuttal to the rebuttal because nobody sees the rebuttal because nobody sees the original claim.
Which might actually work to destroy Trump, but only by destroying a structural pillar of the democratic process at the same time. And anybody who thinks that such a weapon, once used, will only be used once, is delusional.
To some extent, it’s a problem Trump brought upon himself by relying so much on social media. If Twitter had banned Obama, well, people would barely have noticed, really. Most politicians just aren’t dependent on social media in the same way Trump is, and are generally much better behaved on it.
And what’s the alternative? Force them to provide service to every crazy person?
> This represents a vast check on presidential power that exists purely in the hands of these incredibly wealthy and powerful social media executives. I don't necessarily disagree with Twitter's decision given the events of the last few days, but this undeniably strips Trump of a major source of power for him, and that merits a discussion of the role that private social media companies play in our discourse and presidential function as well.
This is the fourth estate in everything but name. It doesn't have the same protections as the press, but it's no different than it was decades or even centuries ago, when media moguls could focus the heat.
Culturally, we aren't taught to think critically enough about how businesses operate. In an environment that espouses entrepreneurship to the max, we don't spend enough time talking about if companies lie to us or not, how do they plan to monetize, etc.
There's just no way that Facebook wasn't planning to monetize this platform when they wrote this article. Frankly, situations like this should be treated like deceptive advertising practices.
Just like in the political arena, there are very few consequences to just flat out lie to people, and that's unacceptable.
This article was written before FB acquired whatsapp back when it was still its own company.
That being said, it was "only" 20 months later that FB acquired it, so it's hard to believe that the ideals discussed in this article were no longer in the founders' minds when they accepted the deal.
IIRC, the WhatsApp founders had an agreement with Zuckerberg to keep WhatsApp ad-free. I'm not sure whether that agreement was written, or merely verbal. Nevertheless, Zuck appeared to honor that agreement for a time.
But of course, all roads at Facebook lead to ads – and they were pressured relentlessly to monetize. This is why they both left Facebook, and even left a large pile of $$ on the table:
If anything, one could argue that makes it even _more_ clear that they knew what FB was intending to do with whatsapp and that it wasn't aligned with their principles.
One of the biggest problems with social media is the fact that social media companies are financially incentivized to keep the public at large from knowing. Twitter has long refused to answer exactly how many of its users are bots as a percentage of its user base, Facebook did the absolute bare minimum in cooperating with Senate Intelligence in 2017 relating to Russian propaganda, etc.
Kara Swisher said it best in an interview with Preet Bharara around the time of the Russian propaganda scandal: "The Russians didn't hack into Facebook and manipulate its servers. They were users of Facebook, they were users of Twitter. They used these platforms exactly the way they were designed to be used."