This was a rant I originally posted on Facebook on January 15th, 2021
“You don’t want this tool used against your enemies because you’re next or it’s already been used against you” is for no-fly lists, offshore prisons, grand juries, travel bans, gulags and secret police. Being banned from social media is more like “I’m used to it being used against me and it’s totally hilarious when it’s used against thin-skinned grievance mongers”.
That said, there are totally legitimate issues with the internet. Fosta-sesta, dmca, and all these other pieces of legislation that restrict your rights online come to mind, as do a host of privacy issues and biases. Propagandists have a snazzy new megaphone. Bad actors have large prizes awaiting for them with hacking, phishing or good old fashioned espionage. The canary in that coal mine is sex workers, not your favorite shock jock youtube grifter. Facebook’s real name policy was an assault on trans people and people escaping abusive situations. The same can’t be said of them finally enforcing rules against ableist slurs.
Twitter is hypocritical for not banning every single person who violates their terms on their site, but they could go a long way to signalling that they’re serious if they deleted more propagandists. It sure makes my blood boil to see official CCP members make excuses for ethnic cleansing. MBS and his swarm of twitter bots played a role in harassing Khashoggi, before he got tired of batting him around and just had him butchered.
People are being indoctrinated into death cults when that’s not what they signed up for. They just wanted to follow their nephew’s blog, they just wanted to reconnect with classmates and cousins. So why do they suddenly think Satanic panic 2.0 is real? There’s no easy answer to this because back when the internet was very, very different, that was already a thing. That guy who suicide bombed Nashville’s telecommunication infrastructure wasn’t a q nutter, he was just a classic lizard people believer. It’s hard to tell because qanon is an amalgam of all other popular conspiracy theories. And I certainly remember stuff like that back in the days before myspace and friendster.
The paucity of websites people visit presents problems, but they are more subtle. Larger firms are actually better equipped to offer the even-handed public forum many people, lately conservatives in particular, claim to want. If you passed a law that social media must be even-handed politically, that would be a boon to facebook and a blow to upstart competition thereof. Security is also intrinsically difficult and it’s not remotely surprising that Parler, a relatively new entrant, got it wrong. Although they might also be especially bad at it based on some of the mistakes I’ve seen, it’s not something that comes naturally to most web devs! If you had more competition, you wouldn’t get less restrictive rules on net. You would get a patchwork of different rules. Join a forum or a facebook group or comment on a blog to get a taste of what that would look like.
The elephant in the room of course is intellectual property, the real cause of most demonetization on youtube and an increasing threat to memes and works of art. Big IP is the bigger corrosive force on legislation than big tech. The latter wants it to be easier to get work visas and some public investment on better infrastructure. The former wants prison for torrenters and for Mickey Mouse to remain out of public domain until the heat death of the universe.
This is an eternal frustration. You care about subject X. Most people don’t. Some subject makes it convenient for them to ad hoc blurt out sound waves vaguely suggesting concern about X. You’ve never seen it before from them and you know they’ll be gone just as soon. You want to use the opportunity to actually, earnestly talk about X, but most of the population has already shoehorned the subject into an electoral political narrative and will read whatever you say through such a lens.