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Comment by riffic | Hacker News Reader

I don't really care about Twitter or Facebook to be honest. It's not the only game in town.

I'd be more concerned if I bought server hosting from AWS, stood up a WordPress blog about my thoughts on capitalism, socialism, sports, and dogs, and Amazon decides to suspend my account due to my writings.

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There’s already been a test case. Wikileaks. Former AWS customer, they were kicked off for releasing the state department cables.

That was a completely different situation. The Wikileaks cables contain marked classified government information that is still considered classified by the US government. (I will not debate whether or not the basis for their classification is valid.) AWS provides service to the USG, and having unsecured classified anywhere on their servers likely violates the terms of service (between the USG and AWS).

The leaked emails from Hunter Biden's computer were not classified. (Well, at least they weren't marked as classified by a USG entity.) The computer was not "hacked" to obtain the emails either. It was left unclaimed in a computer service shop.

Even if you opt-out from Twitter, etc.

Your political leaders and journalists are tuned in.

Thus your life is still affected.

that's precisely why I think journalists and the public sector ought to put their money where their mouth is. Open web standards can be adopted today with the effect of turning any of these groups into their own Twitter. That particular genie is impossible to push back into its own bottle. They had better catch up or get left behind.

The audience will follow. Trust me, I know audiences move around. They've moved around so many times in recent history and since the conception of the Internet.

Never going to happen. Journalists and politicians couldn't care less about open web standards. They care about where the audience is.

Many pols actually prefer single points of, ah, influence, so they're going to fight you.

Even if you stop subscribing to

   (National Review|Atlantic|NYT|Reason|New Yorker|...)

your political leaders and journalists are tuned in.

Thus your life is still affected. Ergo, we should .... ???

We should make sure that the media landscape contains a wide range of political thought, including ideas that you or I might individually find wrong-headed and offensive. That's how we ended up with the Fairness Doctrine from the 50s to the 80s, when broadcast media was monopolized to a comparable degree as social media today.

Sure. But that presumably does not mean requiring that The National Review carries articles providing a strong case for "cultural Marxism" or that Marxism Today carries articles supporting neoliberal trade policies. In fact, it presumably doesn't mean requiring that any particular medium or outlet carries anything in particular at all.

As you note, there's even less of a monopoly today than there was 50-60 years ago. So why should Twitter (or Facebook or any other similar medium) require any special attention?

Another reply more or less had the same response I had, which is that it's entirely possible for you to start blogging about certain topics (some could be approached from a capitalism/socialism discussion starting point, even) and be shut down by AWS. I'd like to add a bit more though. Deplatforming is commonplace, by all parties with a platform, and its causes aren't just written comments but also artwork and legal commercial goods.

More than the examples the other comment noted, though, I prefer the depressing/amusing history of Gab as they stepped on just about every single centralized service rake and had it hit them in the face for things some of its user base typed. Going through its wiki history page, I'm even seeing some I missed. Here's a list: Apple (iOS app store), Google (play store), Twitter (API), Asia Registry (domain name), Microsoft (Azure), Stripe, PayPal, GoDaddy, Medium, Joyent (hosting), Backblaze, Coinbase, Square, most Mastodon instances (federation won't necessarily save you) and popular Mastodon mobile apps, Mozilla (Firefox addon), Google again (Chrome addon), Visa.

At the end of the day, yes, anyone can spin up Tor or I2P or Freenet or whatever to talk unhindered, they can participate in commerce with decentralized crypto-coins. And despite the struggles one can still find Gab/4chan/the others on the clearnet and participate in the subset of things that got them in trouble for hosting. It only takes a very moderate amount of active will, and you'll have all you want. That it's not exposed passively to people on other platforms is probably no great loss. Still I think it's worth caring a bit about these things as indicators of changes in culture and, following culture, law, even if you like me don't particularly care much if you're reduced to keeping a private journal because no one will host any of your thoughts because of a subset of your thoughts at some point in time.

I will add one more thing, although not directly related to your comment about deplatforming being commonplace. In banking, we call it derisking ( closing customer's account due to <reason> ).

You should have done that instead of posting this comment on hacker news, then. Entry 1, "a reply to lapcatsoftware".

Why use social media?

While referring to a hypothetical blog, you wrote:

>You should have done that

In a way, the New York Post can do exactly this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24781812

These media corporations really should be paying attention to the changing landscape of open web standards. Their entanglement with corporate social platforms for eyeballs will be their own undoing.

I'd love to see open standards proliferate for that reason.

In our current world, they haven't, and you're responding here on a corporate social platform. Because that's where the people are.

What if it were your ox being gored?

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