But unlike traditional media organizations, there are far fewer laws in place regulating the responsibility that comes with that reach.
It is an interesting problem, and I'm not sure there is a good solution, other than try to combat it head on with education (how to properly evaluate the information you accept), and possibly PSAs.
You are free to say or feel whatever you want in your own living room, amongst your friends, private function, your head, email, decentralised hate-sites or even reddit or 4chan.
Precisely the problem with Facebook is that they are actively stirring the pot to sell ads. They are making money off this stuff.
>it was taking off?
E-Mail is the first useful mainstream service of the Internet. It's already in reasonable use since the 80s. Not sure when one would consider E-Mail having taken off - no History expert. But at some point Spam was a big issue and it was covered in the news, same was true for phishing.
Spam seems to me a solved problem. Phishing at least to some degree, I think it's quite unlikely to get successfully phished as a GMail user.
Actually Social Media is so far quite expectional, being the only proprietary centralized service that survived that long. Compuserve, AOL and other domestic solutions were eventually obsoleted by E-Mail and WWW.
Email is a different beast, being private communication. But Usenet is exactly what you describe, a decentralized forum. And unsuprisingly it had both the best and the worst of humanity in there.
You get one guess as to which of those two got portrayed more in the media.
Relatedly, assuming it's wrong for Facebook to host this content, where should the line be drawn when it comes to systems that are already decentralized? Is it wrong for email systems to transport emails with such content? Is it wrong for a browser to render such web pages? For a feed reader to allow subscriptions to such a feed? Does the answer change if a "centralized" component is involved (eg: webmail, a vpn or http proxy, or a web based feed reader)?
- are you exercising administrative control over the system?
- have you been made aware of the content?
That makes it clearer; there isn't a general obligation for every email sysadmin to check every message for terrorism, but that doesn't mean that hosting their email after you've been informed about them is a totally innocent act. Providing software that is installed on the customer's systems (no administrative control) is generally fine (the browser/feed reader examples), but the web based ones re-assert the administrative control element.
When you have decentralized social media infrastructure, hopefully, the cognitive overload of being active on all of them will be overwhelming enough to prevent people from not paying too much attention to it. And hopefully, it will remain out of our political lives.
When email was taking off, the media was still making vast amounts of money from print editions.
Now that this part of the industry is rapidly dying, it has pivoted to outrage-driven ad-clicks for revenue and their content has tailored itself appropriately.
The decentralised stuff will probably be left alone until people start getting killed by it in the West. Once that happens there's a choice: allow it to escalate or start banning it.
It's very hard to imagine a country that makes everyone submit to the TSA allowing decentralisation to continue once it's used by a non-white terrorist group to start blowing up airliners.