Let’s just ban social media altogether. We hate the companies for their utterly evil practices, but we’re glad they eventually suspended some people, but we hate that they’re being used to plan terrorist attacks, but we demand access to the sites all the same, but we selectively deleted some of our accounts.
Social media’s two main uses are as a vector for misinformation and a platform for planning dangerous acts. Meanwhile, the social media companies use these platforms to harvest information and exploit users. Great that we get to see pictures of people’s babies and lunches, but to me that seems badly outweighed by the damage that continues to be done.
I think your amotion is getting to you and your not understanding we are giving our customers the choice not like what other compaines are doing which is censorship and no choice.
Let’s not. Despite the fascists, social media can still be a force for good, offering support to marginalised people who are located in communities where they may not be accepted. I count myself among those marginalised people.
The “social media” sites were created for the sole purpose of “keeping in touch” with people, also known as “spreading gossip and rumors”. Much to the shock of everyone, apparently, the sort of gossip and rumors spread on the social media sites have turned out to the be same sort of gossip and rumors spread by your typical middle-schooler or drunk at the bar.
As someone who’s had to live in northern idaho, let me just say: truly it is a shithole full of stupid racist chuds, and I have never felt safe there for “bein one of them goddamn fagits.”
Even setting aside the racists who just lost their outlets for online ranting, something tells me the company is going to face a huge backlash from thousands of grandmas who were just suddenly deprived of pictures of their grandkids and aren’t tech-savvy enough to understand why.
Most ISP have an extra service called with some marketdroid blurb that basically means you can get some antivirus licenses and they manage the firewall on your router to block objectionable sites.
It could be useful for the non tech savy people. See cringey ad below.
Of course you have to pay for it like 3 eur/month or get your antivirus, configure your firewall and so on, or even use pi-hole.
This is a really important example story to illustrate the greasy details of protecting free speech!
“Net Neutrality” essentially says an internet provider shouldn’t be able to “throttle” any internet site (like Facebook) in preference over another. Note this doesn’t touch what such sites can throttle - and that’s exactly what’s been done versus trump-land recently. Any such latter regulation touching on sites (“platforms”) would directly confront the first amendment, essentially forcing a private company to support a political view they didn’t want to, would suggest reviving The Fairness Doctrine which used to be a FCC function, but which was mitigated to functional non-existence circa a 1984 Supreme court ruling.
That is, one way out of this particular hell (providers vs sites) would be to revive the Fairness Doctrine - accepting as certain a well-funded reaction of full throated screaming and Supreme Court actions. Asserting that like the former view of the “air waves” (the EM spectrum essentially) as public, the internet should be declared to be born and exist in the public domain. (…and for what it’s worth, (exactly nothing!), i think that’s what ought to be legally declared)
Wait this turned out to be real? When I saw the message on twitter yesterday, I assumed it was a phishing scam. “Email me your ISP credentials or else you’ll lose access to twitter and facebook” doesn’t sound legit.
There are numerous solutions available to do exactly that at the level of a single device or an entire LAN.
I know that anything like that impedes the single-click convenience thing and generally requires some amount of resources and/or effort to implement. But then again, so does filtering your tapwater, yet not only does Brita seem to be doing okay in the marketplace, so do many of their competitors.
Thanks for the flashback.
You haven’t lived until you’ve trained someone how to use a mouse. Over the phone. And the person gets excited easily…“Ahhh! I don’t see it!” “Ahhh! Why doesn’t it move right!” etc, etc,
For three hours.
