It is about time these companies take some action. I'm happy to see this come to fruition. No President, or elected official, should ever have anything other than private social media. If you want to talk to the people, host a town hall, or get on tv. Let's put some normalcy back into this country.
Years ago, the government debated ways to get all the data on as much of the population as they could. They tried hundreds of ways. Then cell phones came out. They started tracking texts and calls. The Snowden happened. (He should be pardoned, by the way) Now, to get around Snowden, we have apps that allow us to post much of this info online, voluntarily surrendering this information. I know that sounds crazy and conspiracy theory-ish, but the government loves it. It gave them exactly what they've been after for 25+ years. Also, if you don't think China, Russia, Iran, ISIS, etc. aren't harnassing social media (facebook groups and the like) to sew discord and hype all this up, you're kidding yourself. These companies really need to re-evaluate themselves after what's been going on. They need to decide what's more worth it: corporate greed that could potentially split this country into a civil war or readjusting algorithms to say maybe money, greed, and selling you that shiny new razor that they think you need isn't worth all of this. Banning Trump is a big step for them. I'm certainly glad to see it. Next they need to coms together from an engineering level to fix the real problem. I'm sure all of this sounds crazy to you guys. Maybe I seem like a lunatic going off on a tangent. This is a real issue though. It's one of the many things guys like Yang were so keen on getting into the public eye.
As long as the internet is still there there will be other forums that will sprout up and people will find ways to circumvent them. Obviously big money making operations like Facebook or YouTube won't exist but we'll go back to things like sharing email strings, IRC chats and Pirate Bay. If we want to look at how successful policing the Internet will be consider the Great Firewall. For all that the PRC has put into it it is remarkably porous. Even the PRC realizes that there is only so much they can do to police the internet including social media because it would take massive resources and would be detrimental economically to severely restrict it. My own view has been that the problem isn't a matter of speech on these sites but how the algorithms work to reinforce messages and essentially radicalize people. Sites like FB aren't anywhere close to post anything and everyone has the same chance of seeing anything but specifically target content. For example as a someone interested in martial arts I see a lot of "recommended" posts about martial arts and ads about martial arts. What happened and what the Russians used was understanding that creating content and ads with names like "Angry Patriot" wouldn't just be drifting out in the sea of content but would actually be directed to the people most amenable to that. So if in 2014 I had posted "Hillary Clinton is a Criminal!" chances are I would soon start seeing a bunch of recommended content and ads for things like "Clinton Cash" and "The Truth of Benghazi." I think finding a way to address how those targeting algorithms work will go a long way to reducing the radicalizing ability of social media.
So I decided to look at some of garbage that the insurrectionists and some of the usual suspects on the forum probably consume. Thedonald forum or something similar. https://thedonald.win/
Absolutely - but the difference between Twitter and FB vs email, IRC, and Pirate Bay is the ability to reach the random masses. The white supremecists and militia types have always and will always be there. The difference now is that they have social media to organize and brainwash unsuspecting people. Wednesday's protest organized on IRC has like 50 attendees and doesn't have the boom of Trump's microphone to promote it.
