- May 6, 2020
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Ah. You seemed a bit upset, and I was confused because I wanted to respond to your concerns in a thoughtful and thorough way.
I don't understand Social Media, Part Two: "Do people really feel Social Media is a Right?"
- Thread starter ObsidianJones
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A service being popular does not make it a necessity. If twitter were to shut down entirely tomorrow, people would have no trouble going about their daily lives.
I would probably say their lives would be immeasurably better off
I dunno some people will. I mean Trump's twitter ban has destroyed the Trump reply guy jobs (yes people were literally earning money and being paid by people to make nasty replies to Trump's tweets.)
Yeah, if we're talking *necessary* services, ISPs should get nationalized way before social media.
And not just because my options for internet are "$75 for 100Gb/s theoretically that used to cost $60", "$50 for 10Gb/s with a data cap which is worse in every way to the deal we could've given you three years ago", "$80 for 25Gb/s satellite internet and god help you if you go over your cap", and "we're setting up a mesh network that runs on crypto currency and the block chain which is totally not a scam, we swear, we even put co-op in the name"
Seriously, a pandemic hit and literally every internet option got measurably worse. When kids had to do online learning.
And not just because my options for internet are "$75 for 100Gb/s theoretically that used to cost $60", "$50 for 10Gb/s with a data cap which is worse in every way to the deal we could've given you three years ago", "$80 for 25Gb/s satellite internet and god help you if you go over your cap", and "we're setting up a mesh network that runs on crypto currency and the block chain which is totally not a scam, we swear, we even put co-op in the name"
Seriously, a pandemic hit and literally every internet option got measurably worse. When kids had to do online learning.
I'm for nationalizing the ISPs but only after we have optic fiber internet everywhere and it's cheap. Otherwise it'll stagnate them.
Social media just need to be regulated to be more apolitical and they can avoid being nationalized.
You realize the reason the US doesn't have cheap fiber everywhere is because the current ISPs purposely let the infrastructure rot while repeatedly hiking prices?
I don't know about the USA, but in the UK ISPs are only semi-functional as a market.
Laying lots of cable in the ground is extraordinarily expensive: digging up the ground, installing it, filling the ground back in. In practice, in many places there is only one, maybe two infrastructure companies and any other ISPs rent it. With so few options, it's no surprise the infrastructure companies are content to sit around, collect the rent and dawdle when it comes to upgrades; with the cost of joining the market, it's no surprise no other players want to get involved as they'll be up to their eyeballs in debt from the word go.
Yep, and the contract is usually from local government. For private companies it's hardly interesting b/c they just lease the same shit bandwith to ISP's as you say. Usually the biggest ISP also controls the infrastructure.
While this is true, US ISPs have received billions in funds from the local/state/federal governments to pay for infrastructure upgrades. They take that money and make none of the promised changes. It all goes to executives and investors.
Why Giving Billions in Subsidies to Big Telecom Won't Get Us Better Service
WIRED columnist Susan Crawford on the dangers of auctioning off public assets to companies like Verizon and AT&T
Mm, that reminds me of one of the nadirs of the British rail privatisation.
There was a major crash about 2000 due to a track failure, and due to systematic neglect, the company that owned and ran the tracks evidently didn't have any idea what state the tracks were in around the country or even the expertise to find out. Rectifying this cost so much that it ended up needing a massive injection of funds from the government... over £100 million of which it gave straight to its shareholders.
If they actually against misinformation, they would have banned Trump well before the election. They needed to make bank before booting him
Verizon was granted a limited monopoly in Montana to "help" them build infrastructure in some very unpopulated rural areas.
Soon as that was up:
Turns out, Verizon did fuck all to improve coverage. Shocker
It's costly to set up and unprofitable to service rural areas as the US knows them. It's the perfect job for public works
Federal Law Enforcement Might Let Some Capitol Attackers Get Away Without Charges for Insurrection | The Root
It shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise, yet it’s still very disturbing to hear that federal law enforcement officials are considering not even
www.theroot.com
They don't in any real sense. If you look closely at the underlying arguments it tends to be less that Social Media is a right and more that they're interpreting the ban to fit their victim complex.
Take Parler as a case in point. The truth behind the matter is that Amazon Web Services had been telling Parler since November that the content advocating violence that they were hosting was in violation of their contractual obligation to use the service responsibly. Around this time they warned Parler that they needed to step up their game and more effectively moderate that content, of which AWS promptly supplied 100 rather explicit examples. Cue the events of January 6, at which point not only had no substantive steps been taken to address the issue, but Parler's CEO indicated the backlog had grown to 26,000. Worse still, in discussions with AWS in the days following, he proffered the very token suggestion that Parler would be looking into creating a volunteer-based reactive system. That is not just a blase approach to a problem they'd been told to address months ago, that's very much 'too little, too late' in light of both the events from what was then a few days prior and the fact that the content in question included the likes of the following:
But if you talk to the people objecting to AWS cutting Parler's services, you quickly notice that they don't know and/or don't care about that context. In their minds the only relevant information is that Parler was billed to them as a conservative site and AWS is not conservative. And you see this constantly in their arguments, which paint it not as the termination for breach of contract after giving them months of forewarning, or Parler dragging its feet about dealing with content promoting of violence, and thereby creating both a safety issue and a PR nightmare for their business partners, but instead as as s political hitjob; as liberals forbidding conservatism (as if they believed that the quotes above were representative of conservative politics, and only liberals could object to it) and therefore banning conservatives out of pure partisan spite.
We saw something similar with the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Once again, the usual suspects didn't know and/or care that the people there were chanting "Blood and soil" and "Jews will not replace us", nor about the concerning concentration of swastikas, valknut, and deus vult crosses. Nevermind that it was organized by literal neo-Nazis like the Stormer Book Clubs and Identity Envropa, and Klansmen like the Loyal White Knights and Confederate White Knights...no no, the only thing that matters to them is that it was the Unite the Right rally, therefore to say that there was a heavy presence of neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and white supremacists at the event must by necessity mean that the speaker is saying that anyone and everyone on the political right is a neo-Nazi, Klansman, and/or white supremacist. Which, frankly, is a breathtaking example of cutting off their nose to spite their face, in that in trying to satisfy a knee-jerk partisan impulse to 'prove' that 'the libs are always wrong', the argument they themselves end up promoting is that the aforementioned groups are representative of regular Republicans...you know, the very argument they're saying liberals are making. It's like they only think of this as some kind of self-contained point-scoring match and don't think of the greater ramifications of the points they're arguing.
Back to the point, however, this is a bit of a recurring trend, seen not just in the above but also in cries of "Trump derangement syndrome", "war on Christmas", and "liberal hysteria" in general. In recent years it's also been seeing heavy use in the realm of "religious freedom/discrimination", perhaps most blatantly in March/April last year when the usual suspects started positing that churches not being excluded from lockdown rules on Easter meant the lockdown was unfairly persecuting Christians (nevermind that the churches themselves were broadly saying that they agreed with the regulations for safety reasons), and then cynically (and baselessly) predicting that when Ramadan came a few weeks later law enforcement would probably give mosques the exemption they wouldn't give churches. Through this, safety measures meant to slow the spread of Covid were recast as anti-Christian discrimination. See also "wait, I don't get a special exemption to discriminate against a protected class because of my 'sincerely held religious beliefs'? How dare they discriminate against me like that!"
In each case, the necessary context and actual rationale for the action is almost religiously ignored so as to present an irrelevant incidental as if it were the driving factor. Moreover by removing all that context it attempts to paint the topic as singling out and bullying their own demographic rather than their demographic simply not being given special treatment.
Objections to Trump's Twitter ban very much fits the same pattern. That Trump has been in flagrant violation of Twitter's terms of use policy for years now hasn't even been a open secret, it was just out in the open, with Twitter explicitly saying that because Trump was the PoTUS they had to weigh the violations against both the newsworthiness of the president's statements and the public interest of understanding his thought process. Cue January 6, and the rest is history. But no, no...it doesn't matter that Twitter had been giving Trump a pass to ignore the rules for years and that the violent storming of the Capitol in his name due to the misinformation he used Twitter to propogate was the straw that broke the camel's back. No, all that matters is that they banned a prominent Republican! Therefore Twitter is obviously conspiring with Democrats and the 'Radical Left' to ban Republicans out of partisan spite! *eyeroll*
At the end of the day it's usually less about a 'right' to social media and more about them ignoring the actual contributing factors to force the event through an "us vs. them" lens.
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According to the principle of free speech, there's no context, no mitigating factors, no "contractual obligations" that ever makes it acceptable to suppress or censor another. Not racism, not calls to violence, not 'hate speech', nothing.
At the end of the day, a few corporations control what most people see, think, and hear, and they decide which opinions are elevated or suppressed. Are you okay with that?
Ok, first of all, everything you just said is wrong. Freedom of speech is not and has never been unlimited, and your interpretation is that there is no circumstance under which it becomes acceptable to suppress or censor another is as idiotic as it is asinine and unworkable.
Second: Do you actually go out of your way to illustrate my points for me? Because seriously, at times it feels like every time you respond to one of my posts I could succinctly respond with "Quod erat demonstrandum".
"you quickly notice that they don't know and/or don't care about that context."
"In each case, the necessary context and actual rationale for the action is almost religiously ignored so as to present an irrelevant incidental as if it were the driving factor. Moreover by removing all that context it attempts to paint the topic as singling out and bullying their own demographic rather than their demographic simply not being given special treatment."