JCC The Great Deplatforming of 2021

There must be a better way than defamation suits and arbitrary decrees from social media CEOs.

Alex Jones (partially deplatformed in 2018), Lou Dobbs, Donald Trump. Parler. but the list of people, channels and entire networks in need of a good deplatforming is large. What to do?

Facebook spent $150 million to set up an "independent" review commission. But is it time for federal regulatory oversight of statements pertaining to objective reality?

The global social media bull**** quagmire. JCC, you are uniquely qualified to find a solution. Time to step up.

 

I propose that every time anyone wants to post anything to any website with a traffic greater than 500 unique users per day, they get a sharp electrical shock for every character used. No exceptions regardless of content or the type of post or website. Videos will be assessed based on transcripts.

 

Bring back dueling.

 

I'd be happy for the federal government to moderate objective reality.

Evo Morales was a dictator. Juan Guaido is the legitimate President of Venezuela. Iran is weeks away from a nuclear bomb. Saudi Arabia needs to protect its borders from the Houthis. Israel is a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. The United States needs hundreds of overseas bases because of terrorism or China or Russia or the boogeyman. We can't do anything about the trajectory of COVID-19 for months. Kids need to be back in school now. We don't need to ban fracking in order to combat the ecological destruction of fossil fuels. Pete Buttigieg is qualified to run anything larger than a bread price fixing scam. Bernie Sanders is a misogynist who flaunts his privilege.

 

So we want some kind of free political speech thingy as at least some kind of voice against dangerous lies told by the state, check, but we don't want that bandwidth taken up by people who think vaccines are the mark of the beast, got it. The whole thing's a big bummer.

 

Any platform above a certain number of users, say a thousand, needs moderation.

Social media are like message boards without moderators. It was always going to happen because the moderation hasn't been legislated anywhere. It was just civil. And of course a loss amount.

And it's not just an issue with social media themselves - newspapers have ended on the wrong side of history as well. Looks like they felt they had to, in order to survive in the post-print era. But they all push their articles to social media, where they don't bother to moderate the comments. They're as guilty as Zuckerberg and Dorsey, all of them. Newspapers need moderators on their social media, and Fox News needs a moderator on itself.

 

Yep, Mods, armed with many banhammers.

 

There was never any fact checking whatsoever when it came to the voting machines conspiracies as one example. No facts were ever checked in the making of that story.

 

It's worth noting that platforms such as Twitter and Facebook do have moderators. We need someone to remove those obscene breastfeeding photos.

Seriously, last I heard their moderators are low-paid and often suffer from trauma from looking at graphic images all day.

 

Oh yeah, that's right. I totally forgot. Well, they obviously moderate the wrong things.

 

In the early 2000s, when AOL and MySpace were the big platforms, if you were to predict what Facebook, Twitter, and Google would become 20 years later and how they would overtake the world the way they have, it would be dismissed as just another conspiratorial dystopian piece of speculative fiction that would never actually happen.

You think it's bad now? Social media takeover is only going to get worse in the foreseeable future.

Pretty soon online video game technology and social media will be fused together. Where people will be able to log into their social media the way gamers log into video games now and are able to interact with people from all over depending on who is online at any given time. But instead of playing with a video game character, it's your own avatar and social media built personality interacting with somebody else's avatar and social media built personality. With Google Maps providing the backdrop of places to be. People will absolutely embrace it and flock to it. They'll love it, and they'll prefer to exist in that world more than in the real world. And then inevitably, more and more official things will happen in this platform, kind of like what's happened already with Zoom. We'll have people exercising even more influence in this virtual world that will then carry over into real life. Internet mods already hold too much power over their platforms, imagine the power trips they would be on in this one. Laws and regulations will literally have to come into place where things that happen in this virtual platform could then have real world consequences.

It's bound to happen. But the thing is, you read what I just wrote, and it could easily be dismissed as a conspiratorial dystopian piece of speculative fiction. But does it really seem so far off from where we are today, given where we are today compared to where we were 20 years ago?

 

Video game and social media integration is already happening. Charlie Brooker likened Twitter to a game type system years ago, that it's all about getting hits and followers.

 

I can support that, PG.

 

The deep fake tech is going to get scary, fast.

I have a hard time imagining where we'll be in 20-50 years given the innovations and social changes we've seen in the last 20-50 years. We're in the infant stage of the internet still. As we created these social platforms, we had little understanding of what it all meant or how it would ultimately effect our society. And I wonder if social anonymity has a lot to do with the current state of things, online. Not that I'm advocating for a change there, necessarily, just thinking aloud. I wonder if we'll see that aspect taken away.

 

I mean, sometimes, like with the breastfeeding example. But the graphic images I mentioned are people getting beheaded and generally things that probably shouldn't be circulated on social media.

The fact is that with hundreds of millions or billions of individual users, it would be a massive undertaking to "fact-check" and the results would likely be undesirable for most of us. I think the bigger problem is not the supposed lack of moderation but that these platforms have a profit motive and business model that emphasizes engagement, and the highest level of engagement comes from the xenophobia, racism, bat**** conspiracy theories.

 

Paid? But it was a voluntary gig, right? Right?

 

Well, which do you think can be changed sooner?

 

Neither?

 

Which is the problem - how do you practically mod content from hundreds of millions or billions of users?

Once established, whether positive or negative, a web culture tends to sustain itself without much in the way of mod intervention. To encourage a positive one, it'll be needed at the start - problem is number of mods relative to amount of content.

 

The cultural capital of the U.S. used to be Hollywood, now it's Silicon Valley, and Big Tech hasn't had time to develop the institutional knowledge needed to curate culture to a degree that satisfies the broader society. I think people generally understand that social media is exacerbating social pathologies, the optimistic image of the internet which dominated the 90's is mostly gone even though liberalism still reaches for signs of hope (TikTok teens saving the world, etc.). Elites in government don't know what to do about it though, because breaking up the psuedo-monopolies of Google and Facebook runs counter to neoliberal ideology and would have unpredictable effects on the stock markets, so they are trying to manage crises on a case-by-case basis.

One big difference between Hollywood and Silicon Valley though, is that the latter exploits artists even worse than the former, which makes it increasingly difficult to create culture without shilling for corporate interests at the same time. One of the stranger outcomes of the ascendancy of liberal cultural values during the Trump era is that conservatives have begun to adopt media theories that are not so different from Chomsky.

 

There’s sadly just no good answer to the problem. I want neither CEO’s nor the government being the truth police. That’s just trading one set of problems for another but one with a far less democratic bent. And yet I of course hate how Alex Jones, etc. have used social media.