Ultimately it’s this unfounded faith that arbitrary centralized players (media, social media, government, whatever) wouldn’t adhere to, or enforce, any incorrect doctrine of truth

Everyone on earth (Especially in America) should be forced to understand this. Corporations in America are legally obligated to act in the interest of their shareholders. Ethics don’t fucking matter to them unless a law says they have to, and as we established, most of our laws regulating corporations aren’t even being enforced in the first place.

I saw a lot of progressives turning into free market libertarians as soon as social media started censoring right wing opinions. Suddenly all I could see was “They’re a private company, they can do what they want!”

Couldn’t have said it better myself. The internet has essentially been in a wild west era since it was created, as the government has pretty much no laws or court decisions saying what information social companies can and can’t regulate. On top of that we’re in an era where the SEC happily rubber stamps every corporate merger under the sun. Now we’re seeing the consequences of that as a majority of information on the internet is controlled by a handful of companies. And on top of that, even if you want to make your “alternative” platform, that’s incredibly hard to do since services like web hosting and payment processing are also controlled by a handful of corporations.

Most major corporations have no business acquiring any other companies, and on top of that they need to be broken up. Just thinking of a few, Amazon owning Amazon shopping, AWS, Twitch, Ring, IMDb, and a fucking satellite internet company is ridiculous. The finance, energy, defense/aerospace, pharmaceutical/healthcare, and so many other industries are all guilty of this. Libertarians couldn’t be more right about one thing, competition benefits consumers, but for some reason the only thing US republicans and democrats can agree on is that we should never enforce anti-trust laws. And internet leftists, the people who you’d figure would be all for corporations being broken up, are silent on the issue. It’s infuriating to watch.

Realistically either a federal court needs to step in or some sort of legislation needs to be passed/updated regarding speech on the internet. A handful of private companies control a huge amount of public communication on the internet. Essentially the internet is the “modern town square” and if you get deplatformed from Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter, your ability to communicate is massively impacted. Unless you’re already an established name by the time you get deplatformed (Like Trump or Alex Jones), being deplatformed basically makes it impossible to have a voice online.

People don’t care for now because the only people being deplatformed are “right wing extremists” but as time passes the definition for what is and isn’t acceptable on major sites will keep getting more and more strict. Even in the beginning it was a pretty grey area where these private companies were removing “misinformation” and citing government entities as the “correct” source. And shortly after the Biden administration became known to work directly with companies like Facebook to remove what they consider harmful information. At what point do we cross the line from “private companies doing what they want” to “the government directing private companies to remove information that hurts them”? For all the people who support these companies censoring topics under the direction of the Biden administration, how will you feel when the next Republican administration does it?

I unfortunately don’t see a way this ends that benefits Americans. Both parties have shown that they want to control speech/information on the internet, since 2019 it’s not only become tolerated, but actually expected. And for the first time ever a majority of Americans support the US government restricting speech online. That scares the shit out of me personally. Congress isn’t going to do shit, the FCC isn’t gonna do shit, and the supreme court certainly isn’t gonna do shit. I don’t want to imagine how the internet is gonna look in 10 years.

We should have never allowed it to get to this point. The endless mergers of tech and media companies that resulted in a handful of companies effectively controlling the internet should have caused riots in the streets. The second companies started “fact checking” posts and removing what they consider false information should have set off tons of alarm bells. And the second the US government started directing tech companies toward posts they needed to take down there should have been riots in the streets. But nobody seems to care because we’re all too busy defending powerful corporations and an authoritarian government because apparently authoritarianism isn’t bad when it only hurts your political opponents.

In 2020-2021 the line “they’re a private company and can choose what speech they host on their platform” was thrown around a lot to defend pre-Musk Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and loads of other social media sites.

Disney is adored by many for “standing up to DeSantis” and doing lots of inclusiveness pandering in their media. People seem to instantly forget that a corporation is literally evil the second some people get wound up over a black mermaid.

A really old meme would be the anti-capitalist who owns an iPhone and $2000 MacBook.

Lots of internet techies are excited about Microsoft acquiring Activision just because it means new video games will hit PC and Xbox quicker.

Speaking of Microsoft, while Bill Gates has become more controversial in recent years, he still has lots of people who love him for his philanthropy while nicely glossing over some of the sketchy stuff he’s done like his association with Jeffery Epstein and how he has recently become the largest landowner in the US.

I’d say the defending of corporate censorship and defending giant corporations that support certain social issues would be the two most glaring offenders.

This place is lame because it’s somehow even more obsessed with politics than Reddit. It’s draining to go to a social media site and constantly be subjected to negative headlines.