With email, if you don't want to receive someone's emails anymore, you unsubscribe. Or put it in spam (equivalent to social media block) and you won't see those emails anymore.
"Platforms" claim that because they're platforms, they have a duty to "remove toxic elements from the platform". That doesn't work when they're practically monopolies for online speech, i.e. when if you get banned by one and you're famous enough, you get banned by all of them.
Gmail regularly does both of these things to me despite explicit filter rules to the contrary.
If you are a US citizen, even if you’ve never lived in the US (born to a US citizen parent), get on over to https://fvap.gov to get yourself registered and request your absentee ballot. Hurry up, because the deadline for most states is rather soon, and a lot of them still require the registration to happen via paper mail - plus, you need time for the ballot to get to you and for you to mail it back.
As long as the US is going to insist I report all my German income and accounts that I’ve already paid Germany’s well-collected taxes on, you’re darn right I should have the right to vote!
Just don’t have one centralised overlord.
How is this different from the current internet?
> Tying (informally, product tying) is the practice of selling one product or service as a mandatory addition to the purchase of a different product or service. In legal terms, a tying sale makes the sale of one good (the tying good) to the de facto customer (or de jure customer) conditional on the purchase of a second distinctive good (the tied good). Tying is often illegal when the products are not naturally related.
I'm not interested in hashing out a complete argument and coming to a vacuous conclusion with some other random on an internet forum, I'm just saying that there seems to be a reasonable argument to be had in this direction.
It could be effectively a crowdsource / peer recommended model where you opt in to aspects of the bubbles. So my elderly parents could get some of the safety guidance mirroring mine (eg weeding out conspiracy thought or spam) but then also picking up aspects that mirror older peers (eg reflecting their more traditional tastes)
Right now there's a remarkable amount of undesirable content that gets through that ought to be easy to filter. On Twitter you see it a load with searches for regular terms that show up inappropriate content for the term, yet you don't want to set content filtering or it cuts things that are genuinely interesting but edgy!
- Google (including GMail)
- Meta (Facebook, Instagram)
If someone thinks far right content is reasonable and good it would be refreshing to hear that take.
Instead people bend themselves into logical pretzels to oppose the idea of moderation for supposedly “content neutral” reasons. It’s tiresome.
That straw man incinerated and replaced with "mainstream conservative content", you still are not going to get any examples because the one providing that will be voted/flagged into invisibility, or if not that, the resulting discussion will be derailed into quibbling about the specific example rather than the much more important general principle.
It would be not at all honest to imply that this forum is anything but generally hostile to the American right, regardless of how extreme or not the take is. With that in mind, it is no surprise that specific positions are only ever mentioned indirectly, or negatively.
[1]: https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/Details.aspx?id=8759
Should a million or two people be allowed to enter the country with no rules or oversight. Again, far right.
Should parents have a say in child’s education. Far right question.
Those three actual opinions are completely uncontroversial. But people pretend other issues are those issues so they can be the common-sense instant victor.
What mostly gets banned at big social media sites is spam and bots. The political speech that does get banned is overwhelmingly violent.
The right gets banned more because there is no liberal equivalent of the Christchurch shooter, the Buffalo shooter, the El Paso shooter, the Charleston shooter, the Tree of Life shooter.
The last president got kicked from Twitter because he tried to violently overthrow our government.
Kiwifarms was finally taken down by cloudflare only because of immediate threats of violence.
The right wing in the US has a violence problem. Culture war junk and social media moderation policies pale in comparison to this problem.
>Kiwifarms was finally taken down by cloudflare only because of immediate threats of violence.
A single threat of violence originating from a long dormant account which had posted once, in 2018. It was reported multiple times and removed by Kiwi Farms moderators within 30 minutes. It wouldn't be unreasonable to conclude that there might've been shenanigans at play. Possibly by the same actors behind the DDoS campaign.
Imagine if Bell was touchy about letting "undesirables" use their service.
It’s not. It’s about individual private publishers, of which there are potentially infinite. That is the beauty of the internet.
EMail is one such example: there is no meaningful way to filter spam, so the peering relationships between mail providers break down unless they each implement some sybil-proofing on their own side. The end product is that everyone is forced to use a provider like Google, and play a corporate-political game to stay in good favor with their peers. This is because there is no spam-resistance on Email application level
We've seen a similar situation this week with a controversial forum called KiwiFarm taken down by DDoS. They need to maintain a political relationship with their DDoS-protection provider, CloudFlare, who also controls a massive chunk of the internet infrastructure. This is all so that there can be a central entity that discriminates on the traffic, as there's no spam resistance features on IP level.
uBlock Filters, but for Twitter.
uBlock Filters, but for ...
Just let us choose which ones we can activate, and if we want to see the unfiltered list we'll turn it off and refresh.
Sign up for Twitter. Immediately you're greeted with a list of "suggested filters" that will pop up again and again, using dark patterns eventually, until you either give in or are tricked into adding Twitter's highly recommended "safe filter plus package" that uses the exact same shadow bans and biased algorithms used by default today.
Actually, I suspect that such a law would be on even shakier First Amendment grounds, but here's a test that might bring this regulation into the realms of competition law rather than regulating speech:
Whenever a (sufficiently large) platform makes a UI change about which the FTC receive multiple negative comments, that platform is required to run a poll of (some random subset of) its users, with a wording specified by the FTC, asking the users if they like the change or they find it manipulative.
If most users think that the change is negative, then that's a de facto / prima facie case of the platform abusing its monopoly power to the detriment of its users, since if there were a free market then those users would simply move to a competing platform.
You don't receive the OP's messages unless you are friends him them, or change your default settings to allow strangers to message you.
As for phishing attacks: Education is helpful. It would help if organizations with legitimate flows that are indistinguishable from phishing attacks were made liable. (Mortgage industry: I'm looking at you.)