I would say we have a lot of choices of platforms. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn aren’t the end of all social networks and social platforms, they’re just parts of a larger ecosystem.
So maybe we can have it both ways. Maybe social platforms can regulate themselves into being the places they want to be, and we can move on when they don’t serve us anymore. Free markets are actually pretty wonderful in that way insofar as they provide us choices and we can take them or leave them.
He still has his radio show. He still has his website. He still has a Wikipedia page. I’m not going to go trolling through a bunch of social networks I don’t use to see if I can find the guy, but presumably he has a means of asserting an online presence somewhere besides his website.
I think his podcast was removed from the Apple Podcasts Directory, but if there’s a valid feed URL, then there isn’t anything stopping you from pasting the URL in to any podcast app.
That’s just online. Again, I don’t know the guy’s life, but there isn’t anything stopping him from having an active social life or a prolific writing career. I don’t like the guy, but are you going to tell me the guy has no options just because Facebook and Twitter kicked him out of their gardens?
The problem I have with these discussions is that we aren’t talking about it in a more nuanced manner. The problem with Facebook and Twitter and their kind isn’t their size, magnitude or shape on the public discourse. If it weren’t them, it would be partisan newspapers and newsletters and cable networks pretending they have integrity and objectivity that they don’t. I’m sure they have some measure of integrity, I’m sure they strive to be objective, but I vastly prefer when people And networks fess up to where their biases lay.
Well Facebook and Twitter destroyed what was status quo, fine, I have no problem with that. Have they contributed to negative polarization? That’s much less clear, but I’m leaning towards no. Negative polarization is near as I can tell, an old English tradition and near as I can tell, runs through Catholics, Protestants, Barkers, Quakers, Whigs, Jacobites, Revolutionaries, Loyalists, Federalists, Anti-Federalists, Federalists 1.5, Democratic-Republicans, Democrats, Whigs, Republicans, Unionists, Confederates, Progressives, just to name a few off the top of my head.
If there is a problem Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. it’s that they collect enormous amounts of data, not just directly but they buy and sell with data brokers and use that to confirm or reconfirm identities. This by itself wouldn’t even be an issue except that they are bad stewards of our personal data. That’s a problem, and one worth focusing on, but let’s not pretend they are anymore powerful than they are, or that they are a cause of our society’s rifts.
The splits in our society are real, but they are older than Silicon Valley. Technology will not fix them. Social media will not fix them. The only thing that will do anything about them, and only then, very slowly, is actual factual dialog between people like you and I, and the fact that you and I are even having this discussion is because we have a choice in how, when, where and with whom we would like to talk. This isn’t Facebook, and this isn’t the Post Office or the Forum in Rome and somehow we’re able to talk anyway.
I’d say that’s at least one point in favor of the free market.
On the one hand, Twitter, Facebook, et al. are "basically" town/public squares - they are also private companies. So we either regulate and minimize private companies ability to silence speech as they see fit, which is their right - or we allow them to exercise their own rights, thus bending to the masses and appealing to the lowest common denominator through censorship.