When the private companies start getting billion dollar contracts with the government, or are lobbying politicians for laws massively benefitting the companies in the long run, it's safe to say the decisions behind the "private rules" will be impacted accordingly.

Nothing is a perfect system, I support the one I feel has the best chance of ensuring a stable but evolving society. Not restricting things has resulted in the governing body of the US getting attacked by an angry armed mob inside a federal government building. So that's not a viable option for a stable society. The government is both subject to changing political whims and has a history of overusing it's control in various situations. So that's not a viable option for an evolving society. Thus we get to the shitty but potentially best compromise option. Just like democracy itself.

How is it best for a society to evolve by suppressing diversity? In this situation, I'm talking about diversity of ideas relating to politics.

Have you ever considered why Silicon Valley exists in America? It's because as America grew, it welcomed in people from all over the world with extremely different backgrounds with extremely different ideas about how to do things. Over time, that situation resulted in extreme innovation where the best ideas prevailed.

>How is it best for a society to evolve by suppressing diversity?

Because radical change generally leads to very bad things so you want a slow evolution which means you suppress ideas so they spread more slowly and thus society has more time to process them properly.

>Over time, that situation resulted in extreme innovation where the best ideas prevailed.

And the existence of giant corporate beasts, massive wealth concentration, massive income inequality in the bay area, spread of socially destabilizing ideas, foreign influence over elections, privacy failures, etc., etc. And many would argue many of the ideas, especially recently, aren't revolutionary but rather simply better ways to cheaply exploit people and hide externalities (that society but not the company pays for).

> you want a slow evolution which means you suppress ideas so they spread more slowly

So is this your viewpoint on all forms of diversity, such as racial and socioeconomic inclusion? Or are you selectively changing your definition as you go?

> And the existence of giant corporate beasts, massive wealth concentration...

This has nothing to do with what we're discussing here.

> foreign influence over elections

So you recognize foreign influence over elections, but think it's ok to silence people whose underlying animosity is rooted around accusations of foreign influence in the most recent election?

> and hide externalities

Interesting choice of words considering you're in support of literally hiding externalities of the situation as a whole

>So is this your viewpoint on all forms of diversity, such as racial and socioeconomic inclusion?

Yes. Although in the US we've been working on socioeconomic and racial inclusion for the last few centuries so I feel that's moving slowly enough for society to adjust. Communism shows what happens when you move on the socioeconomic side too quickly and it's not pretty.

I do find it funny how some people think racial and socioeconomic inclusion is a new thing that is just now happening. Do you people never pay attention to history, ever?

>This has nothing to do with what we're discussing here.

You talked about the glory of change in terms of SV. I mentioned the dark flip side of change in terms of SV. You can try to cherry pick parts of the story but I'll keep pointing out that you're doing so.

Would you support breaking the near-monopolies that certain organizations have?

Yes although that's a tangential topic I feel related more to power concentration in a society. None of the organizations have close to a monopoly on communication or content. They simply all agree right now which is generally how implicit social rules tend to function. Eventually they'll start to disagree again in one way or another.

They all have American left wing bias. Personally I'd prefer if they had either European left wing bias or European right wing bias, but right now we only have one option and that is the American political bias which is a really shitty situation. I can't wait for Europe to either ban them in some way or reign in their rights to moderate.

What is to stop any European companies from starting their own social networks? They are not monopolies, and are much less of monopolies than other de-facto monopolies which are allowed to exist without being regulated as such, such as ISPs in the US.