The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck
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https://www.instagram.com/Aboujahjah/
They also removed the account of slain Palestinian journalists, this time including Pulitzer winning Al Jazeera's Anas Al-Sharif - although it seems it is back now: https://www.youtube.com/post/Ugkx0kN5mUZDFsw7OgRiY3ElLx9DgjM...
It seems that there are repeated waves of account deletions affecting those not in power and only if you raise a huge stink is it undone but only on a per-account basis. And each of these waves slowly erodes those voices. It sort of feels like a strategy.
That's why it's paramount that we as somewhat privileged, informed people now chose truly open and distributed platforms (mastodon, etc) instead of keep on posting x and other zucker-SM network links that keep users in their walled zoo.
But it depends, as much of the solutions to our current problems, that things are solved correctly on the root. In this instance, trustworthy government and transparent processes that guarantee zero-knowledge and free, equally, genuine speech and discussions.
You seem to be assuming two things. First, that there is an "easy" solution to this which is available as a result of centralization, and second that there isn't a decentralized one.
The first one is pretty hard for a service which is trying to use a gamable algorithm to show you posts from total randos, regardless of centralization.
As an example of the second one, suppose that your feed shows entirely or heavily disproportionately posts/reposts from people you follow and the people they follow, and you can turn off the second one for specific people. Then if you don't follow bots, you don't see bots. Replies show up if either the reader or the original poster follow the reply poster, and by default for the poster of what it's a reply to or if they choose to make it visible to everyone who follows them.
Now bots can show up to post replies, but only one person will see them and they'll be at the end of the list and marked as someone they have no connection with. On top of that, the user's client can do any kind of algorithmic bot detection they want.
Bot traffic is sometimes detectable only at scale.
They why are the entities with scale seemingly unable to detect it?
https://philipdick.com/mirror/websites/pkdweb/short_stories/...
[1]: https://www.972mag.com/social-media-ukraine-palestinians-met...
I was surveilled and harassed by the FBI during this time as well.
I've put some of this online on substack
As someone banned from Reddit, this violates TOS and (for me) resulted in a ban based on some kind of fingerprint that survives cookie wipes.
The best you can do is keep appealing every day. My friend just got hers back after 667 continuous days of appealing.
Spez is very, very aware of how fucked-up the Reddit ban/appeal system is. He's about to get his yearly dogpiling at ModWorld.
Can't have that on Reddit. Honestly, getting your account deleted is them doing you a favour.
IDF detained the Americans but let him go because he's a public figure. The rabbis are still detained. Go figure.
On Twitter, you can't get away from some random offensive racism, e.g. against Indian students at football games, or whatever the 2 minutes hate is ranting about on a certain day. In BlueSky, I get all signal and pretty much zero noise.
BlueSky also has far better tools for stopping dogpiling than Twitter, by stopping the quote-tweet phenomenon. All around a much much healthier place if one chooses the healthy direction.
https://bsky.app/profile/safety.bsky.app/post/3mukm26duos2c
Amazingly, the top replies to their post about targeted harassment are from accounts trying to redirect anger at several accounts that are common targets for dogpiling. It's deeply baked into the BlueSky culture and I don't know how it came to be like that.
I've tried to prune my feed to keep it out, but now the problem is that journalists I follow eventually find themselves targeted by a BlueSky dogpiling campaign and leave the platform.
EDIT: A lot of responses are trying to blame the dogpiling victims are saying the problem doesn't exist. Let me give you one recent example, where Rick Brewster made a proof of concept of Paint.NET running on Wine and got dogpiled so hard that he deleted the post and backed out: https://bsky.app/profile/rickbrew.bsky.social/post/3muiv4phe...
Also a reminder that Mastodon isn't one place. It's a network of instances. Bluesky is one and only one.
You go and open an account and post anything even remotely positive about LLMs and AI. You'll also get a harassment campaign against you as well.
Doesn't matter if you're localLLM, green energy, etc. AI = evil and there is no middle ground.
And Mastodon is a federation of disparate servers. But they are by and large extraordinarily ai-hostile nearly everywhere.
Reach the people, but make clear that there is an authoritative source that is ~not~ less rented.
The point of the protest is to prevent him from making himself a king.
> And couldn't even change the name of the art center, so not that powerful.
This is really weak cherry picking. He has successfully removed medical care from millions of Americans, started foreign wars of aggression, destabilised several countries, probably tanked US international reputation for a generation... he is incredibly powerful.
A bunch of European countries (including all of Scandinavia) are constitutional monarchies, and they don't devolve into the sort of anti-democratic behaviour we're all seeing from Trump. As a UK resident, I would prefer if the UK were a republic on general principle, but I fail to see the monarchy causing any real large-scale harm to society (individuals like Andrew notwithstanding).
The real point they should be making is "no more despots". Some despots are kings, but some are styled presidents, such as Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un.
Also, legitimately elected or appointed officials become despots all the time. Hitler had a plurality (but not outright majority) of votes in 1932. Salazar was an MP and minister of finance, and actually legitimately tried to resign from that role several times over many years before he was eventually nominated to the role of prime minister. Ferdinand Marcos won the Philippine presidential election in 1965 with some amount of intimidation, and the Philippines only formally became a military dictatorship under his rule in 1971.
In many ways, that's the scariest scenario — people who legitimately get elected to power, and then use that power to solidify their illegitimate rule.
> except they don't like the guy's policies and conduct.
That too, but his conduct rises above "policies I don't like"; he has shown direct contempt for the other branches of our government. For example, his administration has essentially dismantled or destroyed various functions in violation of the Constitution: take USAID as an example here: USAID is an agency created de jure by Congress, yet it has been de facto dissolved by the administration. We all learned, I think, in grade school, that the job of the executive is to implement the laws passed by Congress. From an article at the time about it:
> “The President does not have constitutional authority to ignore a statute that establishes a department or agency,” says Saikrishna Prakash, a law professor at the University of Virginia.
He holds the judicial branch in contempt too: quite literally any time any judge does anything he disagrees with, the judge is blasted as "left-wing radical", even and including cases where the judge was a GOP-appointee. Further examples include ignoring judicial orders and depriving people of access to the courts by physical force (see the many cases of the administration's removal of people from the country; to put it one way: "For depriving us, in many Cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury", or "The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene" — Justice Sotomayor, joined by Kagan & Jackson.)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/29/the-slopagan...
Trump acts like a king, even if he was elected. He gets tributes and requires deference, clearly visible from the foreign and corporate donations, and behavior of the Republican Party. Or take the "super intelligence" thing, him dictating what a technology shall be called, lest you become an ENEMY OF AMERICA. Or the repeated attempts to silence the media. If we consider the Kennedy Center you brought up, Trump's name was on there, then removed by court order. His response was to close it in spite. The Kennedy Center remains closed to this day, until he gets his way.
Trump has tried to violate most of the Bill of Rights. There are reasons people see every day for why NoKings sticks and resonates.
I do agree NoKings (and broadly the far left) have really bad messaging, a product of echo chambers (imo). I suspect the Democrats will learn the wrong lessons from the midterms... sigh.
Like first of all I would call a person who tries to pass the checks and balances of a democracy, even if they fail, the target of the ideals or “no kings”
And while we can disagree with the extent to which any one act or bribe elevates someone to dictator, and whether or not all the accusations are true, can you not understand why someone caught up in the narrative ecosystem happening over the past few years may develop the perspective that Trump is trying to consolidate power?
Also “no folks who incrementally Test the limits of power and fail” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
Before I get hated out of existence, please note that I don't like either party or political tactics in general because they've devolved into politically commercialized populism without any empathy or critical thought. Just as an example, deportations under Trump are roughly on trend with Obama, Trump targeting activities are similar to Obama targeting conservative groups with the IRS, Obama lied in the SoTU about the gender wage gap, Obama was hard on journalists (highest prosecutions?) Like Trump has been, and Obama ignored court orders such as issuing immigration permits in violations of a order similar to Trump ignoring orders. I could sit here and hope that any of these abuses results in better oversight, but that would be naive based on the history.
Edit: if you're going to disagree, at least contribute to the discussion.
I spread the words of Michael Sandel to hundreds of left wing people, so they might come back towards the center. That they might acknowledge their complicity in creating the situation we find ourselves in. The constituents of NoKings is far more diverse than you know. Try joining us next time to see with your own eyes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp5qsEuUOWo
> making yourself feel morally superior to others
One might wonder if your comment here falls into this category.
There's no reason why Emperor Zuck's court can't be disrupted by some monkey king yet to appear.
We're at the dawn of the Third Age of the Internet.
Someone has to be the Frodo to take Facebook & Twitter's rings into Mount MySpace and melt them down into the same puddle of lava as the legacy media that came before them :)
Which is to say that it matters very much? The dollar only has value because people say so as well.
I thought it was mostly because the IRS only takes dollars, and they have guns [metaphorically].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
Although it didn't aim to replace "traditional" social media, it became enough of a threat to US homogeneity.
Even though TikTok doesn't even try to improve its messaging and friend UX etc, a lot of young people in Asia (outside China) use it as their primary platform.
I don’t use WhatsApp, which just means I’m not on the group chat. Nobody uses my preferred option because nobody but me is on it, which means not much actual chatting is happening.
It's urging/educating people to rely on Facebook as little as possible, since it is not committed to being a neutral platform.
If you support free speech, you should support facebook's right to express their own political views.
But that does not mean you have to support facebook's political views, or the way they exercise them!
When I see comments like this, I despair at how poorly people understand the basic concept of free speech. Hopefully you're just trolling.
Facebook is not a person. Facebook should not have "rights" nor "political views".
The silly idea of treating companies like persons and giving them any "rights" at all is what got us into this mess in the first place.
In the USA, the supreme court has ruled a corporation DOES in fact have rights. Like the lawsuit of advertising medicine that a state banned-- the SC ruled that was infringing the rights of corporations to "express" their speech.
As someone from UK, I find this whole "Corporations have more rights than I do" very disturbing but thats how it is
What I'm seeing is an argument for, "I don't like Facebook's speech. I think you shouldn't like it either. So I think we should all walk away."
98% of the time people are talking about the former, and the only ones confused are the people assuming they're talking about the latter and linking the face-palm-worthy "showing them the door" XKCD.
I'd say damn near 100% of those 98% will still cite the constitution, sometimes even crying "1st amendment!" in lieu of "free speech," so I'd say your overall point is wrong. They are basically saying both at the same time, with intent, while still not understanding it.
How is it obviously not true (genuine question)? I am not an American myself, but used the American definition as it's the simplest (it's very absolutist, as per my understanding). But what definitions exist where it is not defined in terms of how the government can treat you? I'm from Canada. We have concessions against hate speech, for example (maybe the US does too, though? I'm not sure). But "free speech" doesn't mean you are free criticism from fellow citizens or even businesses based on what you say.
What do you feel would be the good-faith way to respond to such people?
Surely it's not by sidetracking into pedantry about the law, which at the end of the day both they and you know that's not what they're really fired up about.
If the explanation is that they feel that other people have an obligation to listen to them, then I don't care.
My freedom of speech includes the freedom to reject other people's speech. If they can't tell the difference between a disagreement and suppression of speech, then that's their problem. The generous interpretation is that they don't fully understand the issue. The realistic explanation is that many people value their own freedom of speech over the freedom of others to the extent that they view disagreement with their views as an attack on their right to hold their views.
Essentially, "freedom for me but not for thee", and I don't rightly care about what enemies of freedom are "fired up" about.
But at the end of the day, much of what conservative "free speech" protests against big tech have been about has been that big tech drew a line on things like violence and hatred of protected classes, and conservatives don't like being told that their ideas, while legally allowed, are not welcome in polite company.
Suppression of misinformation during one era is suppression of protests in another era.
You're right that the reality of the current day is what TFA is about - but GP is mentioning that we built this reality.
There's clear moral valence to this issue. The popular (mis)understanding of freedom of speech as applied to corporations is in direct contradiction to the notional principles of western sociopolitical ideology. Resolving this conflict is only difficult because of our conditioning.
The left suppressing lies only opens the door to the right suppressing the truth, because the right was an enemy of truth and a spreader of lies from the beginning. The answer can't be "allow the lies so the truth has a chance to survive", that's just a compromise that brings us further from the truth.
Demanding neutrality on truthfulness in mass communication, especially during extreme political turbulence, is a terrible idea.
That is the whole point. if you add power while you're in office, you better believe that power will be used against you while you're not. It's not about good vs bad, it's about giving power to an organization that itself can be flipped good or bad by one election.
Of course "ours==good, theirs==bad" is a different, dangerous cognitive problem, but institutional power creep is orthogonal and needs to be fought regardless to protect all of us from that power being used against all of us. That is a prerequisite to civil society wherein we're forced to live with people with completely different world views.
Because right now, platforms can and do cave to government pressure, so they're just thin proxy enforcement arms against dissent.
It must be so nice to live in this imaginary world where the left does no wrong whatsoever but the right is the evil incarnate.
Furthermore, who decides what lies are and what truth is and who is responsible for enforcing this?
It leads them to become the very bigots they think they are fighting against.
I agree with GP that the arguments one makes should reflect one's actual reasoning, e.g. "I believe it's wrong to say thing X and therefore I support deplatforming in that instace". But because "I support deplatforming in every instace" sounds stronger many people falsely claimed that to be their reasoning. And now they're forced to deal with the consequences, i.e. being called hypocrites.
I suspect that the argument you're referring to is more like "free speech does not imply that all deplatforming is unacceptable." Again, it is not the case that the only 2 consistent views are "all deplatforming is unacceptable" or "all deplatforming is acceptable."
And this incident (negligent takedown of a community on an important day) demonstrates the point perfectly.
The reason to not platform hate speech is the same reason you're not allowed to yell fire in a theater or bomb in an airport without their being one. Or say you're going to kill the president. Even the US has limits on what can be said, including liability laws. You can't just defame your neighbor and not face legal repercussions if they take you to court.
One can imagine this argument during the Salem Witch trials. "She's a witch" wasn't just a joke back then. It could get someone burned at the stake.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean that I have to tolerate a business platforming hate speech. Any platform that stands behind the "free speech" of neo-nazi groups, white supremacists, and violent nationalists deserves criticism for turning a blind eye to what they are enabling. The First Amendment wasn't built to protect citizens' speech from each other; it was built to protect us from government censorship. Facebook doesn't have a legal responsibility to protect that, and I as a consumer can expect them to take an ethical stand against things like ethnic cleansing.
And that is exactly the point the author here is making. Facebook, X (Twitter), even places like Fediverse instances and Bluesky/AtProto sites are privately run spaces with no obligation to respect your freedom of speech.
If you choose these spaces to organize your political cause, you put your movement into another person's hands. Stop doing that. Host your own infrastructure, make it easy to recover and migrate, and start organizing outside of corporate-controlled areas.
Turning to Facebook for political organizing "because everyone is there" is like doing your town-hall meetings at Walmart "because everyone shops there", and then wondering why small businesses don't feel represented in your town anymore.
It's easy to blame big tech, but you can also ask your local bar why they only advertise events through Mark Zuckerberg, and ask why their website is mostly just links to Mark Zuckerberg's websites. Ask them if they have considered that Mark Zuckerberg might not a good obligatory middleman between them and their customers. The core problem is that people have accepted the lie that these corporate-controlled spaces are "the public square", when they are the exact opposite.
In unrelated topic, each person decides how much to spend spend/borrow/save as it is private decision to make, but to control inflation government manipulates bond interest rates which force public to change their behaviour.
That's somewhat true currently.
If you ship mail or packages with UPS, FedEx, Etc they are allowed to open and inspect what you send. The USPS is not allowed to do that, not without a warrant. When people ship drugs via mail they use the USPS for that reason, that it's more difficult for them to obtain warrants to discover suspected drug shipments while a UPS or FedEx will happily open any package they suspect may not be legal to send.
First of all, there's a massive difference between transporting a private package from point A to point B vs hosting someone's speech on a privately owned platform and broadcasting that speech through a privately owned network, with wider consequences that do not come into play when dealing with private correspondences between parties.
Next, paying a fee to a private company to ship your package confers certain obligations about what you are entitled to, when you are utilizing a privately owned platform for free, you are not entitled to anything.
Finally, a private company is certainly within their rights to refuse to ship your package based on an any legal criteria they choose.
> But we should claim the right to suppress them [intolerant ideologies] if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
It came from Karl Popper, the guy better known for philosophy of science and using "falsifiability" as a primary criteria for what's science/not-science.
That the "free speech" crowd that said "we must allow all hateful and intolerant speech" sure does seem to quiet up when those advocating for open societies get silenced!
It should also be noted that [EDIT] the preceding sentence to Popper's quote is omitted: "In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise."
Popper was a serious philosopher, such a trivial and unserious engagement with the idea doesn't pass muster.
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1) popper was not a communist, quite the opposite
2) I am not a communist, quite the opposite
3) it's not an unquestionable gospel, it's something to be considered and carefully see it it applies, or is valid
4) I have literally never seen another person cite the Paradox of Tolerance, something that I learned about decades ago, so imagine my surprise at your sarcastic response.
If this is such a common response in your experience, why don't you have any critique of it, other than strawmen?
Deplatforming people organizing a peaceful protest is very different. If you cannot understand how that is different, then I worry about your critical thinking skills.
they're saying to avoid the whole argument entirely by not using a platform that can deplatform at all
Most people haven’t spent any time moderating online communities, so they don’t have to test their beliefs against reality. This is fine, frankly you saved yourself being stuck in a fractal hell scape.
However holding to this idea that the “opposition” was deplatformed, is superstition.
I’ve seen communities start with 0 moderation, and become wastelands filled with hate speech, misogyny and harassment. Which then forces moderation to be introduced.
This happens so often, that this happened to the hate groups who were kicked off of Reddit.
Communities have celebrated the introduction of moderation, and celebrated the imposition of rules that mean you can’t be harassed, attacked and targeted.
(I dislike Musk for many reasons but you cannot tell me there were 'no problems' with old Twitter or that every criticism was a 'nothingburger')
That's the root problem. If you want the websites of (some?) private companies treated as common carriers that's a reasonable position to take, but Twitter was/is working as designed.
(If I was king for a day I'd force all social media to only present you with posts from people you'd actively followed, and to present those posts most-recent-first. I think that single UX change to timelines would clear up many problems we currently have).
I dropped Facebook when I realized that their app was snooping on who I called and who called me.
How does that work? People post on FB or IG, AND THEN phone you / write a letter? doubtful...
In the case of major events, my brother usually lets me know, for example the death of an aunt. Everyone close to me knows I don't use FB, so if they want me to be aware of something in particular, they can text or call me.
why is this doubtful?
i am also disconnected from fb/ig/etc. and that is exactly what happens. family or close friends make a post for something important, and i get a call or text. for smaller stuff i get caught up at some point whenever we next talk on the phone for a regular catch up.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not some anti-Facebook snob looking down on everyone else. But I have greatly reduced my use of the platform and only really use it for some groups I'm part of. While I do interact with family and friends, saying I use Facebook to "stay in touch" these days is a bit of a reach in most cases.
The Montgomery bus boycott lasted 381 days. People walked miles and organized carpools to work for over a year.
Now we can't even imagine making the sacrifice to send our friends and family an SMS, let alone getting them to download Signal when they kinda don't want to.
I think that is simply an illusion though. I have high social needs, and no amount of social media ever fed them in a healthy way.
Just because you are hungry, doesn't mean you should immediately reach for the bag of chips. It's important to reflect how often you do so, and whether that is getting you where you want to be in life. It's hard but really really important.
A lot of people say they are very lonely despite spending all their time on social media. They then change nothing.
It doesn't work
Seriously, Mark Zuckerburg doesn't really care that one person left his platform, but he actually would prefer you stay...because if enough do it will affect earnings. But you should leave Facebook not to upset Zuck, but to stop upsetting yourself with what's on there.
I don't like (most of) the content on those sites. This is not surprising. The content is aimed at people who can't use Signal. Such a person is different from me in many ways.
Twitter boosts Elon Musk and the things he is interested in.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/15/elon-musk...
I don't have specific complaints about Instagram or TikTok, other than the algorithm is controlled by oligarchs.
Widespread algorithmic control and corporate spam spreads architecture?
>They are actually usable by normal people.
Usability is just one dimension. If your site is perfectly usable, yet steals your credit card number and sells it to the highest bidder, it is still a shitty site, just not in usability.
>This is a big reason they are popular.
Really FB/Meta became popular long before they were at their current level of shittiness. Really FB wrote the modern book on new levels of shittiness like selling social graphs and tracking people along with connecting all kinds of other data and stealing information from your phone with overly huge permissions and data gathering.
That is the main issue. I am on mastodon but following someone on another instance of mastodon is not easy for "regular people". Until that is solved people will stick to items like twitter and meta.
AFAIK, most people on Bluesky are on the "main" instance, so that tends to end up being a centralized community which can suffer from the same issues.
For me, I found it too difficult to locate "my peeps" on other instances, so I switched to Bluesky.
But yes, a solution is for people to host their own content/sites. Or "protocols not platforms"
In a perfect world yes. In the reality we live in no.
Why is this the case?
1. Any site that is politically active and capable of upsetting people WILL BE ATTACKED. Can you afford a terabyte of data a second coming your way? Probably not. So you put it behind CF, but now you're vulnerable to their policies closing you down.
2. Any site that is politically active and capable of upsetting people WILL BE ATTACKED. What are you going to do against floods of child porn or death threats posted by users pretending to be on your side, but actually working for the opposition?
3. Any site that is politically active and capable of upsetting people WILL BE ATTACKED. You are now in charge of your website security. Are you any good at it? How are you going to pay for it to be secured? How do you trust the people doing the security?
4. Any site that is politically active and capable of upsetting people WILL BE ATTACKED. How do you plan on getting people to come to your site? If it's upsetting enough to the powers that be any messages containing links to your site will disappear from Meta/X/Google. You are going to have to find neat an interesting, and probably expensive ways to get your message out.
We have consolidated the internet down to a point where it is very very easy for a few small groups to control the general discussion, especially across large diverse groups of people.
You have to hide like a little mouse in the shadows. Meanwhile the cat gets to track your every move. The cat gets, not only to defend itself where ever it wants, it can say anything it wants about you without you with you having no way to defend yourself.
Can if the cat is both evil and particularly smart it will set up things like its own No Kings forums where every person is tracked and manipulators either block or allow messages based on how much they can control the audience into reaching the opposite goal they actually want.
When someone goes looking for you, who are they going to find? With the modern net, probably not who you want them to find.
The problem with that is people are "lazy": they're typically not going to expend extra effort that's not needed to solve the problem in front of them. It's pervasive, and it's one of the big reasons "friction" reducing technology can be really problematic: it turns necessary behaviors into issues of self-discipline (e.g. exercise becomes forcing yourself to haul yourself to the gym regularly in your spare time, instead just walking everywhere because you have to in order to go about your day).
So, IMHO, if you want people to use "open, decentralized, and user controlled" tools in 2026, you have to ban the centralized alternatives. Otherwise you're yelling at clouds, as most people will default to the lowest friction alternative they have access to.
I used to use a multiprotocol client, Pidgin, to chat with people on a couple of different platforms. But of course now a lot of chat is on things like Facebook and Google Chat which are supported only by plugins. But even that is still not enough because I will have to have an account on each of the platforms.
Chat really needs to be like email or SMS; you ought not to need an account with the provider of the person you are sending messages to.
Think about how long it took to get email spam under control (and even so it remains a problem). Think about the ongoing problems with spam phone calls. Now pretend you are someone with no technical background, someone who only sees the UI and does not really understand what happens behind it -- you are not seeing spam on closed systems, you are seeing spam on open systems, what are you going to choose? Also keep in mind that there are worse forms of abuse than spam.
But seriously, there's zero incentive for the folks building these clients to make them interoperable. In fact there may even be disincentive, since the more folks they have on their platform, the more valuable the platform is.
Bringing it back to the topic on hand, this is very much an area I wouldn't want to see a heavy handed EU legislate something that just further cements the incumbants and makes everything worse forever... just like mandatory micro-USB would have been. I can totally see the EU legislating something like a mandatory Meta communication protocol with compulsory attestation from Meta servers.
Maybe aside from the increased attack surface and trust issues...
If you want people to adopt your thing, it's got to make their life easier, right now, full stop.
But somewhat counterintuitively, you can do that by making their life a little harder first.
For example: leave Facebook/WhatsApp, refuse to communicate over SMS. Have good reasons for each, so you don't come off as unnecessarily difficult. Explain that Signal is far more secure and private than either and just as easy to use. Then using Signal is making it easier to communicate with you. It worked for me.
I left the whole Facebook ecosystem about 10 years ago, but never deleted my account. I left it up as a tombstone that makes it very clear I'm not there and tells people how to contact me.
There are certainly parts of my life that would be more optimized if that weren't a constraint.
There are also legal issues that kill decentralized/user-controlled systems. Copyright and child abuse are the most prominent, along with terrorism and drug trafficking. Who gets sued or prosecuted when the system is open, decentralized, and user-controlled? The users, and that's why peer-to-peer filesharing died, why so few people are willing to host a Tor exit node, etc. Before talking about banning centralized systems we need to talk about updating the legal system so that it does not force centralization, which is a much bigger project and much harder to get right.
> that's why peer-to-peer filesharing died
p2p file sharing is still huge, though. Most people just put their seedboxes behind a VPN to avoid getting DMCA notices.
I disagree. You don't have to ban the centralized alternatives (which is problematic) -- but you do have to make the alternative as frictionless as possible.
Right now they have it both ways. They have the users, money, and data and they speak through their moderation decisions while being legally immune from consequences.
I'm not exactly sure what the answer is, but we can place two constraints
1. Anyone can say anything online, free speech for individuals
2. Algorithms that act as "editors" are not free speech and should be regulated.
Perhaps the answer is to say that social media algorithms can only be chronological and M0% from your direct network.
Reposts and quotes seem to be one of the core features that enable virality and dog piling. We need to "slow the spread" - to borrow a phase from one of our least favorite times.
Another thing we need is a privacy preserving method for proving humanism online.
1. Publishers. Think CNN, NYT, WaPo, etc. These are first-party sites;
2. Platforms. Think any social media site. They host user generated content ("UGC").
Section 230 doesn't use this exact language. But what it does is remove the strict liability from UGC for (2). So if I post something defamatory on Facebook, Meta isn't liable as long as they satisfy their obligations for moderation, takedowns, etc.
My opinion is that social media sites are essentially cheating. They're now a third category. They enjoy the benefits of being a platform while acting like a publisher.
Think about it this way: let's say a group of users make 1000 posts supporting Ukraine and 1000 posts supporting Russia in the current war. Posts from some of each might make defamatory of erroneous or intentionally false claims. But I, as the platform, use algorithms to surface certain posts and suppress others through a newsfeed, a recommendation panel or whatever. I can tweak that algorithm to surface the pro-Ukrainian posts or the pro-Russian posts. I am essentially taking a position and acting like a first-party publisher but I don't have strict liability issues.
So I don't think we need to repeal Section 230. I think we need to treat content suppression and promotion as being a publisher because that's what you are.
Section 230 was a Trojan Horse.
If they want to be treated like an innocent carrier (i.e., telco), they must kill their algorithms.
No news media company writes or says the reports of the journalists they publish or broadcast, but they are nevertheless responsible for that content.
If social media wants to control the algorithmic feed for profit, they must be like any media, "fully responsible for their content", and must be held accountable for it.
You do realize that will accomplish the exact opposite of what you're trying to achieve right?
1. Too stupid to make a plan that could possibly work
2. Too lazy to execute on a plan that could possibly work
Knowing this is a useful signal. It tells me their judgment is terrible, and I should not listen to them ;)
> 1. Too stupid to make a plan that could possibly work
> 2. Too lazy to execute on a plan that could possibly work
Your comment is a pretty good example of what not to do: society/technology makes good choices harder, so flog individuals about their lack of self-discipline when they don't do yet-another hard thing. People only have so much time and self-discipline, have some empathy.
The only thing the flogging does is give the flogger the chance to feel unjustifiably superior.
> Knowing this is a useful signal. It tells me their judgment is terrible, and I should not listen to them ;)
What you're doing is a generalized method to dismiss anything and anyone:
1. Find a thing.
2. Search for some aspect that isn't perfect. Viciously criticize that aspect.
3. Dismiss the whole thing on account of that aspect.
The only thing that using Instagram tells me about these activists is that they weren't setting out to solve some ideological communication technology problem. They had other priorities.
TFA (and you) are just discounting the power of network effects. Tells me that your judgment is poor and I should not listen to you ;)
Instead, go to where people all are, real life in the real world. I go out and talk to people all the time. I listen to them before telling them. I'm more interested in getting people talking than I am in changing their minds (right now) and providing them with ideas they are unlikely to hear online. I see my "sapphire gals" (retired nokingers) becoming less extreme, not repeating the shallow talking points. I hear them asking new questions.
Talking and working with others in person is 100x better.
(yes, there were "irc channels" on telext)
The only reason activists would switch to something else is if Facebook gives them a reason to do so. I doubt this one incident is enough of a reason.
Amazing.
That's pretty boring, platform agnostic, and not particularly inciteful though I suppose.
What Facebook has is an opaque process run by AI with no way for most people to appeal.
Now I think it’s pretty clear that the main limiter of speech is not the government but rather a handful of private companies, so the first amendment is no longer adequate to protecting speech. We need to pass laws about opening these platforms once they reach a certain size. Will we get more neo-nazi profiles? Sure, but that’s the trade off for having a platform for positive revolutionaries and journalists and I think the trade off is worth it.
It was really strange. The author seemed to be shocked at (then) Facebook's culture of not getting involved in politics. The author was a part of the effort to convince zuck to be more politically involved. Getting him to meet with heads of state, starting with a junta responsible for atrocities.
In full disclaimer, I didn't finish the book. But it was shocking to me what the author was admitting to. It's like the scene in The Big Short where Steve Carell asks "Why are they confessing?" to which the answer was "They're not; they're bragging"
This isn't a new problem. We've always had a few gatekeepers that steer the public narrative. This is a problem that the internet provides a clear opportunity to help solve, but has seemed to fall short. It's a clear blow to all of us techo-optimists.
even OAI and Ant are better options
Typical ways of overcoming censorship is creating own lingo, so that it goes past censors or distribution of physical leaflets, underground press and organising resistance offline.
You don't need to do this all at once, you shouldn't let "perfect" be the enemy of "progress" - every single proprietary platform you migrate away from is a win: you gain more freedom and more ownership over your digital life every time you do it.
Decentralized platforms, federated platforms, self-hostable platforms are where you want to be. Think bluesky, signal (warning: bluesky and signal are still effectively centralized), fediverse, matrix, nostr, peertube, briar, simplex, mastodon, lemmy, loops, stoat, zulip, xmpp, irc, pixelfed, Mail-in-a-Box, nextcloud, cryptpad, linux, lineageos, grapheneos, etc.
Meta Takes Down No Kings Instagram During Protest Day
Kind of hurts/helps the point, but yeah generally, you should run your own website? Is this the return of the old web?
The bit about "the worst people's accounts" just sounds like a refutation of everything else in the article. The problem was always that it was up to interpretation who "the worst people" are.
IDK why so many people want to die on this hill of not forcing social media companies to extend free-speech rights to their userbase. Facebook didn't accidentally wind up in this position where their TOS can effectively censor entire political movements on the Zuck's whim. They spent decades purposefully angling for this by acquiring competitors and encouraging people to use their platform for any and all communication. They own the audience.
>But there is a better solution: build tools that are open, decentralized, and user controlled. And then actually use them instead of just giving more power to Mark Zuckerberg to shut down a protest organization’s account in the middle of one of its big protests.
Not happening LOL. The decentralized platforms have been there for 10-20 years, hardly anybody uses them.
Back when the shoe was on the other foot, the right tried to make *several* alternative platforms and there was widespread collusion amongst all levels of infrastructure providers to push them off the internet. The same will happen to any platform which seeks to effect political change and attains enough critical mass that it could plausibly do so.
Wow, what spin.
There was no collusion. If we look at Gab, Stripe and PayPal had had numerous issues for a long time leading up to them not accepting payments. I love how you ignore -why- providers cut ties with them: The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter planned and coordinated his efforts on Gab, and when Gab was repeatedly warned about it, refused to do anything. Similarly, though this administration made a lot of it moot, many of the Jan 6 riots were coordinated actively there, same thing (and yes, riots - it was shown in evidence that these were the people who were planning to hurt politicians, staff, law enforcement, and see if they could "capture" Mike Pence to stop his role in certification).
And they were offline for less than a week.
Parler? AWS said that they'd reported over 100 posts to Parler that were active and specific plans for violence and incitement, and been ignored. Following the FBI investigating Parler for its role in coordinating violence on Jan 6, AWS pulled the plug.
It's on the App Store, on Play, now.
But categorizing that as some kind of disagreement on ideology is a hilariously bad take that ignores active coordination of crimes and violence on those platforms.
Conveniently ignoring the fact that he livestreamed it on Facebook and their moderators refused to delete it.
Of course thats far from the only time that somebody planning an act of terrorism has a history of concerning posts but somehow other social networks are hardly ever held to this standard.
>Parler? AWS said that they'd reported over 100 posts to Parler that were active and specific plans for violence and incitement, and been ignored. Following the FBI investigating Parler for its role in coordinating violence on Jan 6, AWS pulled the plug.
Well if they were really that "active and specific" they should have called the FBI too. But once again, this sort of standard should have sank every other social network decades ago if it was actually applied equally. Social media is always used to incite riots. Why are you acting like this is unheard of? We have entire social movements with hashtags in their names.
None of the faceless legal corporate entities should be trusted; many explicitly argued against common carrier to preserve power over discourse that benefits them
Got suspended on Bsky for pointing out they too rely on data centers; free speech is not possible online.
Not even talking about toxic political speech, just physical fucking truth that might impact the bottom line for a small team of tech bros.
There will be no doubting the genius of the SV PhD crowd never mind they too, a minority of the global population, are temporary and deluded self selecting meat suits with no ability to ensure the future cares about their effort; it's all so clearly just selfish laziness
Am raising my kids to be prepared to denigrate and marginalize Millennials as Millennials hit their glazed over elder phase so my kids generation can be free of the same thought policing and social conservatism
> Or, it could just be that Meta’s automated systems suck.
To be clear, that doesn’t make it right in any way. I just hope that now that both sides have felt that way we might actually see some change.
I know as someone who expresses views contrary to the State Department position online on various platforms and sites that I get held to a much higher standard. Throttling, shadow banning, comments and content being put in review, suppression, accusations of violating ToS for doing something as inocuous as describing someone's argument as "utter nonsense" and so on. All while the establishment view can post with impunity. I get held to a much higher standard.
If you want to see how the state treats anyone who protests, look no further than Renee Good and Alex Pretti, murdered in broad daylight by untrained Brownshirts under the color of law. The First Amendment is becoming increasingly theoretical.
They're not deviating from their mission; they're returning to their Dark Enlightenment roots.
You could say the same about techbro culture as a whole - it comes from the missile men culture of the 1950s-1960s, which was . . . pretty cozy . . with some personalities of the Old European Right. To this day you still hear "well we weren't able to get to orbit without the god-given aid of Glorious Aryan Rocketmen". When the truth is a little more venal, more like the various departments of the armed forces couldn't keep their daggers out of each others' backs. But the seemingly-hippy-ish libertarian culture of the Valley was a veneer on some very dark crap.
ANYWAY. The same technologists have also given us the tools to create true open communications, it's just we haven't been living under the barrel of the gun for long enough yet. I suspect all the tricks will be coming out before too long.
To his credit, he’s an adaptable Machiavellian .
- TikTok is controlled by Larry Ellison
- CBS news is controlled by Ellison's son
- The Ellisons will soon own CNN as well
- Twitter is controlled by Musk
- Facebook, Instagram and Threads are under Zuck
- WaPo and Amazon Prime by Bezos
- Old time favourites like Fox and WSJ owned by Murdoch
The owners of this media are also very explicitly involved in pro-Trump editorial content. In short, the playing field is wildly lopsided and unreliable and no tech (decentralized social media, lol) solution will work. Ultimately people will have to elect politicians to explicitly break up and clamp down on this hive of scum and villainy, but people aren't there yet, mentally. Such a solution seems wildly inappropriate today, but my guess is that another 10 years of the last two years will change a lot of minds.
all the bullshitting about complaining about centralization, third party this and that, freedom of speech, can't take that shit seriously. somehow they uniquely find only violations of these from people in the "other" side of the aisle. it's just so exhausting and obviously bad faith engagement. and the right isn't really any better, they do the same thing, just flipped. i think it's about time we mostly just admit: libertarians are fools (that used to be me LOL), and nobody in western culture genuinely cares about "free speech". everything they support is free speech, everything they dislike is "hate speech" (notice how the narrative changed). it's all so obvious to anyone who zooms out and looks at the larger trends. just get over it and embrace authoritarianism. just be honest about who you are.
if the No Kings people truly want to be taken seriously, the best thing they can do is just admit they are wrong about their whole schtick. unfortunately the chances of that happening are exactly zero % since pride stands in the way.
watch and observe. literally nobody believes in free speech. people believe in policies and agendas, and "freedom" is just a tool used to push it. the right wing does this, especially in economics, all the time, where they want the rich to be "free" to fuck the poor. take a step back, observe the trends, and be honest with yourself, and it will be quite obvious that freedom itself is just a tool used in politics, nobody actually believes in it as an end to aspire to. this isn't 1980 anymore. milton friedman is long gone.
We got Internet moderation.
Watch out what you wish for.
It's the Right wing politicians too. Look at Texas and pornography laws or the IRL book bans. We live in a politics of Win At All Costs, Dominate Those Who Think Differently, i.e utterly broken and anti-democratic.
The problem is the Oligarchy, the are thick from money, power, and hubris
It was the right who wanted to repeal Section 230 and have the government take over all social media platforms and regulate them, and make it illegal to ban their speech. The left never wanted anything of the sort.
There’s a reason autocrats hate protests. It’s because they’d much rather that opposition become doubtful of whether other opposition exist out there.
the grift works though, in part because the changes they protest for usually take a toll on the system over time, until the system soft or hard collapses. then you get social unrest. that's exactly you're seeing in france now. i dont even feel bad for france.
But characterizing opposition to Trump as “just leftists perma-complaining,” is incorrect. He’s the least popular POTUS in American history.
This administration has been repeatedly found in court to be violating the law and the US Constitution. It is not a partisan expectation or leftist complaint that the government must follow the law.
And the noisy guy says, "this is to keep away all the tigers and bears!" And his friend says "but there are no tigers and bears anywhere to be seen!" and he goes "See what I mean!"
Then later in history you had Robbespierre who campaigned on "democracy" and "we must overthrow the monarchy, then things will be great" ... only to installed himself as a dictator, because only he knew the true morality that people should obide by ("terror is a virtue"). No kings... and then what? No CEOs... and then what? Then we just get a different king / CEO / whatever. Their true shackles are in the people themselves, in their own behaviour, in whom they give attention to. Don't give attention to Facebook and Zuck will have no power.