The means by which Twitter could make money is by catering to advertisers, and those advertisers often had strict political biases. Musk complains about this often.
Going by surveys, a lot of black people are against increasing immigration. Openly crossing that line is often justification for dropping the internet hammer. One gets the sense that, at some point, the hammer was used with more restraint.
You know you can find plenty of racist and sexist scribbles all over the internet, not [deleted]. According to your logic: proof that they are not censored!
You’d look for people who couldn’t get business loans, couldn’t rent a storefront, couldn’t find a lawyer who would work for them to file lawsuits around their censorship, couldn’t leave their captor’s estate, couldn’t look at someone the wrong way without getting beaten to death, etc etc.
I actually struggle to imagine a worse way to track censorship than looking for lawsuits lol.
There are many possible worlds that are far worse than Jim Crow. Sure. What does that have to do with reality again?
Should we be alarmed about people ordering at restaurants given that we can't guarantee they have no intention to eat the entirety of planet Earth?
He was the owner and publisher, and his viewpoint, while not exactly establishment, was well within the Overton Window where it was published.
> when you look at abolitionist articles or early drafts from the Seneca Falls Convention, you are not likely to find a bunch of scribble marks or other equivalents to the [deleted] tag that litters the internet today.
Because their weren't user content platforms with the owner exercising post-publication editing, for technological reasons. The ideas that were censored were just never published (sometimes because those holding them were murdered for expressing them), not published and then edited partially after the fact.
There were cases of this happening, often in the South, but in many other places it was not common practice.
The consolidation of much conversation onto 'platforms' with the internet makes the act of censorship a lot more obvious, and tends to set people's 1984 alarms off more. We mocked China for deleting scores and scores of Weibo comments, but here we are doing the same.
Today, you have private companies managing content on their own platforms according to their own policies. The government can and does ask for certain actions and, unlike China, companies are more than welcome to decline those requests.
To the person who considers the outcome of something like Weibo covered in deleted comments and only having survivors parrot narrow lines, this is a bad thing, even if the cause differs.
I don’t get the sense that the hammer was ever used with more restraint. Rather, I get the sense that the people complaining didn’t care about the hammer when it was only wielded against others, and have decided to speak up now that it’s finally being used against them.
When moral repugnance really did have to get addressed between a national divide, the hammer did get dropped down on one side of them (the Civil War).
So culture shifted underneath the issue, just like is happening today with all sorts of issues of moral repugnance.
Ideally, ethics would prevent us from mixing business with politics and pleasure, but maybe there is a balance that would allow for a way to fund these social projects we say we value so highly, but turn out our pockets when it's time to drop a dollar into the plate as it gets passed by.
I'm tired of watching democratic institutions shrivel and die only to be replaced by plastic replicas.
Seemingly fundamental forces keep tearing down our Towers of Babel, and I wonder if we'll ever learn that the best organizational patterns for humanity are smaller groups responsible to and holding responsible the state. Whenever we try to do things bigger than that, we end up getting all authoritarian and creepy.
Are we going to continue to allow capitalist enterprise to have a say in public policy conversation (concessions stands outside the town square)?
Ideally no from an ethics perspective, but then we as a populace need a way to and habit of contributing directly ourselves to fund social services ("dropping a dollar in the plate" - reference to collecting tithe during Catholic services).
They're tired of seeing public services starved of funding, then privatized and replaced by corporate, profit-driven ("plastic") replicas.
Basics of human nature keep undermining our attempts to build giant organizations together. We need to make and keep government a local, small-scale, accountable practice we all participate in, rather than one giant federal tent nobody is connected to - that gets Orwellian.
Hope that helps and hope I represented it faithfully.
That's how we used to fund public debate. Now we fund it by watching advertisements scroll past tweets by journalists and politicians, debating and sharing memes. Meta and Twitter reap those profits now.
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." –A.J. Liebling
I just think it would be cool if the public had some kind of ownership over the debate, rather than someone else who gets to determine the terms under which it occurs. The internet was supposed to be our public square.
Even better if the public can profit from all the money that gets generated from selling our attention. We can use that for public services, like you mention.
You did a great job, though. Thanks.
But also, insofar as "town square" means that everyone can contribute, it's a better analogy for the Internet than it ever was for newspapers. There are no gatekeepers! Social media companies may have big megaphones, but they absolutely do not set the terms of acceptable discourse.
Like, what is it about the Internet that doesn't fit your description?
So for-profit worked... and then it didn't, at least in the form of newspapers. Twitter also worked, but it's even-handedness is in question, and there isn't good competition if you don't trust it to be honest.
So you're answering something, but it's not what I said.
Money is power. People who want power want to use it. They’re not just dragons sitting on their hoards.
yeah, those bloody socialists.