and their use is purely optional.
"There's lots of rapes in these neighborhoods at night" -- well women don't need to be wearing suggestive clothes or walking around without males
"There is illegal surveillance" -- well I don't have anything to hide
"There are a bunch of companies who are arguably degrading the fabric of society" -- that's not my experience
"A problem exists" -- it doesn't apply to every person
When self-righteous outrage mobs believe they have moral authority and are drumming up support for authoritarian interventions is when it's most important to challenge them forcefully. Even if an intervention is necessary in the end, it should be the product of a healthy debate and not an outrage mob railroading through its initial whims.
There is a pretty significant difference between "$villian is doing $bad_thing to people" and "$villian is providing people the option to do $bad_thing to themselves and they are taking it." That's worth pointing out, particularly when $bad_thing is to read opposition news.
http://www.radiohamburg.de/Nachrichten/Deutschland-und-die-W...
One of the "unwords" nominated for 2017 is "sozialtot". That's "socially dead" as a synonym for not having a Facebook account. As for Google, when everybody has their email at google I can craft my packets by hand, Google will still slurp them up. But oh, it's all optional, that goes without saying so it has to be said all the damn time.
> particularly when $bad_thing is to read opposition news.
You don't even know if "and their use is purely optional." refers to even one word more than the headline. If it does, you don't get to pick and chose that conveniently. The article also contains sentences such as
> All of them are making decisions about who gets a digital megaphone and who should be unplugged from the web.
Where does people doing something to themselves even figure into that? We're still at that part where someone blamed the victim and you're contorting to excuse that as something noble at heart, if lazy and inarticulate.