Quote: (08-07-2018 08:28 AM)doc holliday Wrote:
Suits, thanks for the response. I'll respond in greater detail later but I will disagree with you about Alex Jones. While it's technically true that Facebook etc are not public utilities by law yet, they are essentially public utilitiies, platforms by which a large majority of the population communicate over and as such I believe these companies have a responsibility to ensure that free speech is protected. In fact these companies proudly proclaim that they are the guardians of free speech while controlling speech that they don't like. It's a very dangerous path that they are going down and a these tech companies are bringing us to a dystopia where only left wing speech and thought is allowed. Very scary. They absolutely had no business shutting down Alex Jones, even if they currently have the legal right to do so.
The central mistake in this set of assumptions is that the solution to nigh-on monopoly corporate control is to have government come in and "manage" or "regulate" the problem for you. Didn't work ahead of subprime, didn't work after it either. The regulations, in fact, made the problem worse.
Months ago I pointed out Peggy Noonan from Ronald Reagan's era was playing this same Jedi Mind Trick on the readers of the Wall Street Journal: she decries the modern generation because it won't pull its pants up (despite the fact her generation let said moderns drop their pants), and screams at people that Mark Zuckerberg's digital stalking platform should be regulated by government. She then performs a classic one-two punch:
(1) Congress is stupid; but
(2) The only Adults are there.
Nowhere in that analysis does she suggest the rather more obvious thing which requires zero government intervention or regulation to carry out, which is:
(1) Listen, 200 million Americans horrified at the prospect of Zuckerberg being in your n00ds, if you don't like what Facebook does, turn the fucking thing off and delete the entire platform.
And let me underline it again: if you think the prospect of the Zuck being up in your history is bad, imagine the prospect of the government overtly, legally having a justification to do so. "For maintenance of the public utilities in this space."
Alex Jones put himself in this position. Repeatedly, despite apparently knowing Teh Enemy (brackets optional) was onto him and planned to shut him down. If even half the tinfoil he supported on his network was correct, he was in a better position than anyone else to be aware the plug could be pulled at any moment. Most reasonable people, when they see a hurricane coming, start moving their paintings out of the path of the hurricane. Julian Assange had Wikileaks set up to continue operations even when he was under effective house arrest for years, and had those contingency plans in place before the Five Eyes came after him.
What did Alex Jones do? What measures did he take? What alternative platforms is he promoting, or setting up, or commercialising, or doing anything with? Is he on hooktube? Vimeo? Dailymotion? Fuck me, Veoh? Anywhere?
And for God's sake, don't keep calling these services public utilities.
That gives the government even more reason to come in and start regulating them. Government intervention is always a "just the tip" prospect: it starts with naive interventionism, and it ends with the outright destruction of the platform ... oh. Wait. Yeah, maybe the government should come in and regulate YouTube, because that will sign the platform's death warrant.
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm