Calls for violence and election-critics were encouraged by current social media in some countries. It looks like many social media platforms have bias based on the political affinities of their owners.

I see no reason for any government or any party to trust the social media, mobile OS platforms and messaging anymore. A new set of tools is about to loom hopefully.

Is this really different than old media? Seems like all networks are biased - these are just more powerful, centralized networks.

> Is this really different than old media

Yes. People never handled daily small talk with their friends and family via the Letters page of e.g. The Times, so it was never antisocial to change newspaper, to boycott a newspaper entirely, or to go without any daily paper at all.

There are plenty of direct messaging apps and services people can use to continue to do so such as iMessage, WhatsApp, SMS, email and many more.

The issue is publishing services with discoverability where anyone can see or subscribe to your feed, those are more like a letters page and service providers have a clear interest in what they are publishing for you.

It's an interesting point I had not yet considered that most private internet censorship seems to relate to some political issue or moral value that primarily plays in the U.S.A..

That, and of course financially complying with pressure from the Chinese government to be tough on whatever independence movement it struggle with now — Catalonia was of course free to chant it's independence.

That's because you have no idea what's happening elsewhere. Here in Czechia we have our own version of the problems USA faces (regarding "censorship"/deletion of content), and nobody has any idea what's happening in the USA.

I am not from the U.S.A..

I merely noticed that much of the censorship and cultural policing on large platforms such as GitHub, or even the new Linux code of conduct seems to be mostly applicable to situations that pertain to the U.S.A. exclusively.

Yes. And it’s beyond ridiculous when these are imported and translated literally to be used as propaganda tools in countries with very different issues. Like the European ramifications of Qanon or some versions of identity politics...

Or, of course, how with Google AdSense the entire world must live under the U.S.A.'s notedly quaint aversion to nudity, because allowing it on a website will severely reduce advertisement revenue.

It's quite interesting how many international websites would forbid me from posting scenes from Dutch television programming because the adult U.S.A.-man is apparently more damaged by nudity than the præpubertal Dutchman.

Yes, that as well, along with the fetishisation of violence. Even more horrifying is how this is being internalised as “how we should behave” in non-US countries.

I don't know what about QAnon do you mean. It was a serious problem here. It's not even about the topic itself, it's about the comments under the posts.

https://www.expats.cz/czech-news/article/pro-trump-anti-covi...

This sort of things, for example. I am more familiar with the UK, France, and Germany, but your example is on point.

I suspect at the beginning there is a kind of identification and a contrarian reflex (“you won’t prevent me from speaking so I will say the vilest things just to test how far you’ll bend”). But people doing that end up taking it seriously after having steeped in it for a couple of years. Still, surely they realise that the people they support don’t care a bit about them and live on the other side of the world.

It's American Privilege, pure and simple. Anything tech is pretty much American and so the rest of the world gets dragged into their bullshit.

I find that there is quite a bit of technology that isn't, but that also seems to be less interested in moral police.

GNOME is of the U.S.A. and well known for its livid codes of conduct; KDE is of German origins, and seems to be more lax in this.

Even with Linux, Linus, a Finn living in the U.S.A., has long resisted it and even referenced this difference between Finnish and U.S.A. culture, but eventually relented.

I got the impression the Linus wasn't given much choice.

Is there an open-source project, US or not, that the Code of Conduct saga hasn't touched?

And here we have arrived at the crux of the problem. Should we just throw up our hands and say "Then just don't use American tech"? I think this move by Uganda (and your comment) illustrate the same frustration that we in America feel at the power these monopolies are exerting over public discourse (for some various definitions of "public discourse").

I don't think we can't not use it. But anyone on AWS or GCP needs to have a plan for the case where their business is suddenly deemed unacceptable (for whatever reason) and they may get cancelled.

The entire world cannot now use Parler (disclosure: I've never downloaded or used it) because a hundred or so people broke into a US government building for 2 hours.

Case in point, the fascists in India became very concerned about Trump being deplatformed. They decried it as a lack of tolerance, because they knew there’s no difference between what Trump does and what they do.

Yes. Fascists like Angela Merkel and AMLO must be stopped in their tracks.

> All of the major social media companies blocked a significant portion of the population because of the attempted subversion of democracy in the country.

Where did this happen?

Because I saw some specific tags blocked calling for a VP to be killed blocked (vs some generic "kill all humans" hyperbole)... and specific account blocked after its owner triggered an attack on the Capitol that resulted in 5 casualties (and breaking the rules of the platform for 4+ years)

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Are you trying to say people who were pro-talking about killing Pence and storming the Capitol are a significant population?

Because last time I checked there were still tens of millions of conservatives on Twitter who aren't banned

What I'm talking about isn't so narrow as liberals or conservatives; it's about social cohesion and the censorship that's necessary in order to preserve it. We've been living charmed lives up until now because the ability to broadcast to large audiences has only been within the capabilities of a select few media outlets that were vetted and controlled to varying degrees by the government to make sure they didn't sow too much discord. And this is healthy, because a divided nation loses its international competitiveness and in the worst case risks collapse.

We're now in the unprecedented situation where individual people can out-broadcast even nation states with the help of social media companies, most of which have their head offices in the USA, limiting their dependency upon and reachability from other governments of the world. It's a decent situation all around because having such companies headquartered in a repressive regime would have damaging effects worldwide. But we still run into some problems:

1. Their morals are local, but their reach is international. This has caused a lot of friction in the past, and that friction will only increase going forward.

2. They're being pressured to bow to local "truths" or risk being banned in a number of nations. These "truths" generally come to light from local issues, and while they can be easy to decypher in autocratic regimes, they absolutely will NOT be so easy to arbitrate in functioning democracies. We'll eventually reach the point where every social media company will need a team of sociologists and political strategists in order to figure out what's behind every government's complaints over what's being broadcast by their citizens, and how best to respond (making them higher arbiters of truth than even the government). The national self-determination issues alone are staggering.

The endgame of this is increased government regulation and increased pressure for a single national "truth", which must be defended vigorously in order to keep the government functional. The increased conflict between these American companies and local governments will increase to the point where eventually the companies will win and essentially set the policy of truth worldwide, which leaves us in a very centralized and fragile state when it comes to corruption, especially since companies - unlike governments - have only profit as a motive, and do not answer to the people.

This is so so many words about a overly discussed slippery slope, that do not address a very simple point.

You said this:

> All of the major social media companies blocked a significant portion of the population because of the attempted subversion of democracy in the country.

Where is this large population? Who is this large population?

Thus entire comment you typed is an distressingly large stretch if you can't identify the population you're using as a diving board to truly go into the deep end here.

In this case, the population is Parler members. But the instance and people involved are largely irrelevant; it's merely the illustration of a point that will become more and more pronounced as more people realize this power. And it'll be confounded by the fact that no company can be fully up to date with the local foibles of country X and their issues that the company must now decide the truth of and censor whomever they believe to be the bad actors (yeah, good luck!).

Although social media companies have allowed more of us to broadcast to an unprecedentedly large audience, we're not actually ready for the Pandora's box this opens in terms of free speech, corporate rights and obligations, and national sovereignty. The near-term solution will be selective censorship by companies and blocking by governments unhappy with the censorship choices (for both good and bad reasons). But as the decade drags on, we'll be forced to recognize our lack of psychological adaptability to this kind of influential power that can destabilize societies to such a degree (by individual, group, AND state actors), and try to come up with a least-worst solution that we're probably not going to like.

It's not like this is completely new; larger countries with information dissemination advantages have used that power to destabilize smaller countries for centuries, most recently in South America and the Middle East. But it's quite another thing to be on the receiving end, by anyone able to harness a sufficient audience (i.e. not just state actors), and find yourself unable to effectively defend against it.

Nope.

Definitely not buying that was the original population mentioned: it doesn't follow your original claim and it doesn't follow your reply.

> All of the major social media companies blocked a significant portion of the population because of the attempted subversion of democracy in the country.

Parler users are not a significant portion of the population.

They were not blocked by "all social media companies", their app was removed from an app store.

If you're trying to implicate the people who were using Parler... again small population and the over lap between banned from social media and using Parler is far away from a "significant portion of the population". And many are of a certain political leaning, they are not representative of that population.

This while comment chain was built on an event "banning a significant portion of the population population" that doesn't exist. End of story.

I'm not interested in discussing doomsaying based on made up events.

Nothing said in this thread is a novel thing, it's the same tired what-ifs that ignore the "what-happened". When your argument doesn't even stand without leaning on made up events and slipper slopes, it's not worth much.

I can see now that this discussion will not be fruitful.

Already been quite fruitful

Once again it's been proven that, even after facing the worst case so far, presidents using their platform to threaten nuclear war... people still have to resort to embellishments and straight up fabrications to support doomsday theories that just haven't panned out.

Twitter did not falter in their dedication to avoid censorship until people's blood were quite literally on this person's hands before finally taking a stand.

It's probably been a difficult 4 years for some people at Twitter turning cheek after cheek, they're earned their extra 11 days of rest.