This part seems true and seems to be easier for non-Americans than Americans to see, which I suppose is not surprising.
Americans have always been good at policing uniformity by and among themselves. The puritanical streak of shaming and stigmatizing and threatening runs deep. This is the country of extraordinary political and cultural freedom, but it is also the country of religious fanaticism, moral panics, and crusades against vice. It’s the country of The Scarlet Letter and Prohibition and the Hollywood blacklist and the Lavender Scare.
The "puritanical streak" is making one of its periodic historical comebacks right now.
That's not much of a counterargument. The question could be phrased as "How much room is there still for debate?" and the answer is clearly: less and less, and dwindling rapidly.
What's so different between Minneapolis and Wisconsin that hordes of Wisconsinites would come to town to do things that Minneapolans would never do? That seems implausible, at least to a know-nothing outsider like me.
For sure, but why would the Wisconsinites be behaving any differently in terms of violence, looting, etc.? I suppose it could be selection bias. Maybe it takes a higher level of anger to drive a couple hours than to go someplace local, and that's more correlated with violent behavior.
The argument is that it's getting there. It's the leading platform for public debate in the US right now. Journalists spend their days refreshing their Twitter feed, so the effect isn't just in the size of Twitter's platform but its influence.
Twitter is a plague on public discourse. We'd be better off as a society if it were never invented. If I knew how to put the genie back in the bottle, I would advocate for it.
It’s absolutely not. I don’t follow anything political, neither Obama nor Trump. Among 1200+ people I follow are all from AI/ML/biotech/space research. Most of them are academics. I throughly enjoy my feed and it’s my go to place to stay up to date as well as some fun nerdy conversations. Tweeter is a hammer, use wisely.
it's easy enough - make it a paid-for service and regulate - read ban - free versions.
not going to happen because apparently people paying with their attention instead of dollars in manipulative ways is just fine. the argument goes that they can always not read it, but that's a false dichotomy in social networks and why i'd like to see twitter, google and facebook get labeled as utilities.
I'd love to see ISPs become utilities, which would be the first step.
Disclaimer: I work for Google, this represents my personal opinion, not that of my employer, etc.
Google, the search engine, I could see being a utility. The rest is iffy. Now, how you disentangle that from the rest of the business... I can either see it being impossible or essentially already done (depends whether you think their existing ads system is biased in some way that regulations/utilit-ification would change - I'm not in ads, I wouldn't know).
Twitter and Facebook as utilities... I mean, I'm not sure I buy it. What kind of utility is it? A utility is something I imagine to be somewhat required by society. A search engine is kind of required in modern society. Facebook and Twitter are incredibly easy to do without.
POTUS is on Twitter. If you want access to his tweets, you absolutely must use Twitter.
Maybe it's a policy problem of the US in particular and politicians in general instead of Twitter/Facebook being an utility. As is, status quo is for me that they're utilities for that single reason.
This POTUS is a huge abnormality that I hope can be forgotten to the annals of time and a jail cell. I would hope not to use him as an example of anything that represents normalcy, like accessibility of his tweets.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall when a legal team responsible for supporting this narrative has to tackle the issue of regulating the platforms as a public utility, but not the Internet providers that carry them.
I think you'll quickly lean in the opposing view after reviewing those viewpoints, because if Twitter was a utility it would have been declared one at some point in the previous 11 years.
My point is that websites are fundamentally different from resources you extract from the environment and the eagerness by some to treat them as such is specious.
It has as least as much to do with not fact-checking the claims of people you agree with. Politics is replete with lies. Remember "all 17 intelligence agencies"?
The idea of neutral just-calling-balls-and-strikes fact-checking in politics is a fantasy. The only thing that actually works is debate.
That's because these companies function in a way that is between the private and public sectors, and are getting more so. There are plenty of precedents for this, e.g. utilities, and the way we generally address such gray areas is regulation. It's interesting in this case that the side that usually calls for regulation is citing the arguments of the side that's usually against it, and vice versa. (Corollary: no one actually has any principles about this. People care only about their side and pivot like a weathervane depending on its interests. Is there even a single example to the contrary? That would truly be a mutant.)
It's exactly the opposite. People are going to cringe at their hamfisted and obviously partisan interventions and their transparently hypocritical justifications for them. I don't agree with the opposing side politically but this is a losing move. The fact that their "head of site integrity" is an extreme partisan is icing on the cake. I'm surprised to say this, as someone who despises Facebook, but Zuckerberg seems to be playing this smarter, trying desperately to appease both sides. It reminds me of a guy standing with a foot on each of two diverging trains, but at least he isn't shooting himself in the foot.
I'm sorry, I fail to see how having a more informed electorate is a partisan issue or a "losing move". That concept implies that the party this is "against" is only successful when the voters aren't well informed. The only side twitter is against is an intentionally misinformed userbase.
The political leaning of the head of site integrity is irrelevant, his job is a branch off of infosec and can be simplified to combating spam. If one person was using 10 accounts to hype up a fake cryptocurrency, the head of site integrity would be in charge of taking action to fight that. This case happens to be harm reduction in politics and not finance or health. Unfortunately there has been somewhat of a harassment campaign against the head of site integrity because people continue to misunderstand his role.
Facebook is currently synonymous with fake news. I think that in the long term, people will stop trust it completely, similar to how they've learn to avoid clickbait titles on articles.
I have to disagree with you about Facebook/Twitter comparison. To me it looks like Facebook is obliviously annoying everyone at the same time. Twitter doesn’t look great but does at least seem to be aware of this and trying to improve.
The US has no hope of recovering from this circus show if you can't mentally separate people from parties. Trump being a dangerous idiot does not mean all Republicans are, nor does it mean all Dems are great. There are good people on all sides but this reductionism makes it impossible to see that.
Americans have always been good at policing uniformity by and among themselves. The puritanical streak of shaming and stigmatizing and threatening runs deep. This is the country of extraordinary political and cultural freedom, but it is also the country of religious fanaticism, moral panics, and crusades against vice. It’s the country of The Scarlet Letter and Prohibition and the Hollywood blacklist and the Lavender Scare.
The "puritanical streak" is making one of its periodic historical comebacks right now.