zlacker

>>prawn+(OP)
The wave of bans from the muskjet thing has been quite dramatic.

It'll be interesting to see if the people who've been lauding musk for his supposedly pro free speech attitudes will reckon with what's been happening in actuality, or if they'll just accept this as "freedom for me but not for thee".

>>c54+C6
As one of those people: yeah, this is pretty terrible. I don't think being allowed to share the exact location of individual private jets is nearly as important for the public discourse as some of the other stories Twitter has censored in the past (pre-Elon), but this still represents a significant departure from what Musk was promising before the buyout (that basically anything legal to say would be allowed). I'd much rather he have erred on that side of things.

Hopefully this makes more people aware of just how much power social media companies have, and have always had, over the public discourse and that results in the institution of legal and/or technical measures that limit that power across the board. I'm not optimistic though, given how much of the public attention right now seems to be focused on admonishing Elon personally rather than on the overall system that makes this kind of censorship possible.

>>Ajedi3+Bd
> rather than on the overall system that makes this kind of censorship possible

What do you think this system is?

>>absrd+dj
Basically:

1. A small number of large tech companies have collectively managed to gain a huge amount of control over what information millions of people are allowed to see.

2. There are nearly no legal restrictions on how they're allowed to exercise that control.

I'm not sure precisely what the solution to that should be, but the problem only exists as long as both 1 and 2 remain true, so you could theoretically approach the problem from either of those angles, or both.

>>Ajedi3+tm
These companies have less power than a small amount of media companies had in the past, if anything. Where were you going to go for TV news in 1950 outside of the major networks? And unless Chrome/Safari/etc build content-based blocking "allowed to see" is an ENORMOUS stretch. "A small number of publishers have large reach and exercise certain controls over their media" is more accurate.

As for whether or not their should be legal restrictions on what publishers can publish... take your best shot at suggesting some legal rules. I think there would be holes that you could drive a truck through that would upset you regardless of your own views.

Not everyone needs a global megaphone. And nobody intrinisicly deserves one.

>>majorm+vo
Go back even further and you’d have real media power — the newspapers of the 1890s. The time of Hearst vs Pulitzer was quite a time for newspapers and showed the power of publishers.