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Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

What should social media do with directed propaganda campaigns?

If one side of an argument poisons the discourse, what then?

Should both sides poison the well?

Whatever they want. This is how all media companies have exercised editorial control for decades. The only difference here is people feel some strange sense of ownership over Twitter that they do not over The New York Times.

Because users are creating the content.

You created it but you gave it away the moment you posted it.

Right, just like I give my labor away to my employer. Still, there are reasonable limits and laws on how workers are treated. Likewise, social media is due for the same.

I am super confused by that counterpoint. You essentially have to have a job in a modern economy. You don't have to post to social media. This gives your employer an outsized degree of influence in your personal viability. Hence the government regulates the market exchange of labor for money.

I'm having a really hard time seeing how that relates to the government getting involved with a media company because you don't like what they did with short blog you posted as a passtime.

What's more the government doesn't do much to protect your work product as an employee. Generally that's down to contract which most companies ensure you sign away any rights to.

No, I don't have to have a job. I can live on welfare, I can go live in the woods, I can farm, go Amish, etc.

We have the concept of worker rights. Those were fought for after the turn of the 20th century when the nature of work itself changed. The human rights issue of our time has to do with individual sovereignty on the internet. I strongly support all regulation that brings these internet monopolies down. Break them up. Force them to federate. Force them to respect privacy and encryption. End the tyranny, period. I don't care if it's coming from a government or a corporation. End it.

If you're calling Twitter a media company, then they should be subject to the same regulations that other media companies are subject to: which include libel and fraud. They're not allowed to commit those things, but social media gets a pass.

Yes, government sets a minimum wage, they force 1.5x pay over 40 hours, there's workman's comp requirements, safety requirements, discrimination protection, etc etc. There's thousands of labor laws, look them up.

My point was not that you "must" have a job to survive. It is that for most intents and purposes, you must have a job to participate in modern society. Giving up a job in most senses means giving up a place in society. The same, at least in my opinion, is untrue of social media.

I certainly never said there were no such thing as labor laws.

I agree regarding Twitter being subject to the same rules as other media companies. I think the "editor vs platform" argument is the kind of thing lawyers love to wax on about and is otherwise sophistic nonsense. A platform under centralized power is a publication, period. Its maintainers are its editors.

I don't think Twitter is good or should even be left to its own devices necessarily. I just don't happen to think it is all that special or important. I think if we're not doing anything about traditional media conglomerates we shouldn't do anything about Twitter either.

But I don't have any problem rethinking how massive we let certain industry players grow or realizing that size itself can be a problem. As I said in another part of this thread.

> Personally, I am not opposed to restructuring the relationship of the individual to big corporate businesses. But at the same time we have to be honest about the fact that this isn't really something all that special. And if we want do this kind of restructuring to social media, we should consider those changes within an entire landscape of companies that reap all kinds of benefit from society and externalize all kinds of costs onto it.

Twitter has user generated content and feels like a conversation. Unfortunately, the conversation feels like shouting a lot of the time.

It's not strange at all. People naturally feel a sense of ownership over Tweets they create.

And yet we're not having an extended conversation about editorial control over "letters to the editor". Somehow, after years of gatekeeping of all kinds in media, deleting some 140 character headline level information is a crisis.

My guess is that there is a kind of entitlement at work here. The rise of social media was predated by lots of techno-optimism regarding what the internet would do for humanity. And the rise of social media itself was wreathed in a kind of "victory for democracy" zeitgeist that these companies often played into themselves.

But in reality, Twitter is a big corporate media business just like any other. And what's happening here is people are realizing the hard way that business is largely unaccountable.

Personally, I am not opposed to restructuring the relationship of the individual to big corporate businesses. But at the same time we have to be honest about the fact that this isn't really something all that special. And if we want do this kind of restructuring to social media, we should consider those changes within an entire landscape of companies that reap all kinds of benefit from society and externalize all kinds of costs onto it.

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