You could call that one close, yes, since the direct alternatives to YouTube have not taken off in the same way YouTube did
And even that's not entirely true, as both Facebook and Twitter also host videos. Also, Facebook can easily be used as a public microblogging service like Twitter, via public posts and its "subscribers" feature. And Twitter can be used with a private account that only follows friends, with optional access to additional newsfeeds via lists & trending topics, thus making it work much like Facebook.
All these services are in direct competition with each other, even though many people use all three.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: No one is forcing anyone to go to Jones social media page
Facebook is close, if the market is defined as posts between friends with a newsfeed from outside the immediate circle.
Well yeah, if you narrowly define a market as a very specific set of features then everything is a monopoly.
Subway definitely has a monopoly on restaurants that serve submarine sandwiches alongside wraps and baked cookies. The Cartoon Network has a monopoly on cable television networks that exclusively air animated shows. Dave & Buster's has a monopoly on chain restaurants with multiple card-operated arcade games. Nintendo has a monopoly on family-focused home game consoles with motion controls.
And yet all these companies in fact face huge amounts of fierce competition.
Re: Re: Re: No one is forcing anyone to go to Jones social media page
There's a pretty direct connection between Alex Jones, promoting Alex Jones on Twitter and Facebook, and some real meatspace harm.
I didn't say there wasn't, did I?
Not sure if this is the comment you meant to reply to, but my snarky mention of the Beatles as a trio was simply pointing out the inherent absurdity of listing three companies and saying they are a "monopoly" since that, y'know, is by definition not what that word means.
OK, by putting everyone in their filter bubble, Facebook and Twitter have been able to avoid the business issue....or is there more to it??? Or am I just not looking on a long enough timescale?
I think the "filter bubble" aspect is somewhat overstated. The analysis does diverge a bit for Twitter and Facebook though.
For Twitter, a huge part of the appeal and core function of the site is the ability to connect with people outside your immediate circle - inasmuch as it has filter bubbles, they are extremely porous. This is reinforced by nearly every aspect of the design of the site: retweets, subtweets, notifications of what people in your network like or follow, hashtags that link to an open feed of other people from all across twitter, prominent trending topic links that do the same, etc.
Moreover, core to Twitter's appeal is public figures or just interesting people maintaining a public presence. Twitter and its userbase do not benefit if more people make use of its "filter bubble"-ish capabilities like having a private account or muting all replies.
So to take a specific and widespread example, there is a huge problem with constant and frankly insane harassment of women who have a large twitter presence, especially in certain industries like game design. They face an unduly disproportionate amount of aggression - including coordinated harassment campaigns employing tactics to get around the muting/blocking features that exist. This has driven many women off the platform. Twitter doesn't want this. They could also switch to a private account, and put themselves in a stronger filter bubble, but Twitter doesn't want this either - nor do they.
Facebook is somewhat different because it has many different usage patterns and a larger "private, immediate circle" aspect in some respects. However, interconnection is still a big deal: public pages and events are very important to Facebook, and important to its advertising business model. Facebook provides lots of routes out of your "bubble", showing you popular pages or those your friends interact with, etc. It is also home to several large and more public general-interest forums, such as the Facebook pages of major news organizations, popular TV shows, etc. - and it does not want these places ruined by toxicity either, because then these all-important large organizations might pack up and leave.
And that's just the briefest look at these platforms and how people use them. I won't even get into YouTube, iTunes, Steam, Wordpress, Wikipedia, app stores - all platforms facing these same challenges and all with unique needs.
The whole idea of "filter bubbles" is real and it is very much a factor and a force in how we communicate and consume information in 2018, but it is not an absolute or even necessarily the most dominant trend - and it's not an automatic solution for the challenges of Twitter or Facebook.
If you are not a social media user, then you lack the experience of how certain kinds of content can proliferate and turn a platform into a place nobody wants to be.
And yes, it's true that "people who don't like or are offended by someone's post won't be back" and... here's the thing: social media companies want users, they don't want people to leave and never come back. And they also want to be a place frequented by celebrities, experts, politicians, interesting people - because that's good for their business and their brand.
So when persistent toxic behavior by some subgroup of users is proliferating and driving away other users, especially high-quality users, it becomes a business issue for the platform to figure out how to foster a better community.
Plus at the end of the day, some people don't *want* to be the owners and operators of a forum overrun with holocaust denial or misogynistic harassment or racist insults or what-have you. Many talented people don't want to work at a place like that. Companies and advertisers don't want to partner or be associated with a place like that.
As this post points out, this doesn't mean the solution is "just try to ban all the bad stuff". But, sorry, your "grow the fuck up" attitude isn't going to fix anything either, or change this situation at all. And if you want to see what a totally unmoderated social media platform looks like, try signing up for gab.ai
Additionally, it was more common to use paid email software. The email capabilities were an important selling feature of Lotus Notes for enterprise users, and Outlook was an important selling feature of the early MS Office suites for home users.
(p.s. I do acknowledge that you are not actually arguing for these automatic matching restrictions on Facebook to the gov't - I'm just attempting to highlight how messy things become when people start confidently applying this "public square" language to Facebook. I just don't think the two are so easily comparable, for a whole host of reasons.)
The public parts of Facebook, like the Infowars pages, are like a public square.
Wouldn't that also mean that all public page operators themselves are barred from moderating content or blocking users from their pages? You can organize a rally in the public square and invite who you want, but you can't prevent other members of the public from attending.
If the World Wide Web is the thing that's transformative and unprecedented, why are you deeming multiple individual services like Facebook and Twitter to be the public square?
Large though those platforms may be, they still represent only a small fraction of the public's ability to publish content and engage in speech on the web.
Yes, people make money off e-mail in all sorts of ways, but that wasn't always the case, only now that it's an established protocol in wide use
I'm not sure that's true. In my experience, in the early days of widespread public adoption of the internet, email service was very much a part of what you were paying your ISP for.
Most people had ISP-hosted email, and it was more clearly understood by the early adopters that by buying internet service you were getting the necessary infrastructure to make use of multiple different protocols - not just the ability to make http requests and access the world wide web, but also things like an account on a news server (owned and operated and maintained by your ISP) to access Usenet, and an account on a mail server (same) in order to send and receive emails.
While the email protocol itself was open and free, it was only later that ways to make use of it for free became ubiquitous - and indeed in the early days of free webmail, people questioned whether it was even a sustainable service to offer, much less a profitable one.
Re: Choosing what content winds up in your Newsfeed
Good idea and there's already a fully established and open platform they could base this on: RSS. Pretty much every website out there already has an RSS feed ready and waiting.
I've been thinking about that a lot lately. Imagine a web where much of modern social media grew out of RSS rather than proprietary platforms. I can envision a world where the hosting/publishing functions of Twitter and Facebook are totally distributed and syndicated, and they are instead focused on being end-user applications for viewing/aggregating content in your chosen way. There would be capability tradeoffs and different engineering challenges for sure, but man does it sound better than what we've got...
It's so easy to envision how we could have gone down that path instead than the one we did, but now we face the much more challenging question of how we get from here to there.
If Facebook is the "public square", should people have any expectation or protection of privacy for the data they generate there? Should Facebook have any obligation or ability to enable and respect private/public settings on posts, groups, events, etc? Is all the data Facebook stores on people's conduct in the public square equivalent to government records, and subject to FOIA requests?
So should Starbucks be regulated as the public square? In my estimation, far more people have conversations with both friends and strangers in one of America's totally ubiquitous Starbucks locations than they do in its public parks and town squares. To use Mason's vague standard, I suspect that Starbucks Corporation in 2018 has, in many ways, a level of power that "historically" (which I take to mean in the late 1700s when the bill of rights was written) was only held by governments.
People keep using this term to refer to social media as though it's now indisputably true. But it's not. In fact, it's pretty silly. Maybe you could argue that the internet as a whole is the modern-day public square, but the idea that each and every major web platform or social media service is "the public square" makes no sense.
when you become powerful enough to do things that historically only governments were capable of doing, the restraints that we have historically placed upon governments must be applied as well
The restraint placed on the government is that it is not allowed to make laws that prohibit speech. Facebook is not capable of making laws.
Re: Internet sites have every right in the world to kick people off
Anti-discrimination laws are a separate, specific thing that block the unequal provision of services on the basis of certain protected qualities such as race. They act explicitly as an exception to the more basic idea that a private entity can deny service to anyone it chooses - and generally yes, they apply equally to online services.
While there may be a separate (though related) discussion to have about such laws and their impact on various rights, they don't change this broader analysis and they certainly don't apply to the question of blocking based on political positions, viewpoints, etc.
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re:
You could call that one close, yes, since the direct alternatives to YouTube have not taken off in the same way YouTube did
And even that's not entirely true, as both Facebook and Twitter also host videos. Also, Facebook can easily be used as a public microblogging service like Twitter, via public posts and its "subscribers" feature. And Twitter can be used with a private account that only follows friends, with optional access to additional newsfeeds via lists & trending topics, thus making it work much like Facebook.
All these services are in direct competition with each other, even though many people use all three.
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: No one is forcing anyone to go to Jones social media page
Facebook is close, if the market is defined as posts between friends with a newsfeed from outside the immediate circle.
Well yeah, if you narrowly define a market as a very specific set of features then everything is a monopoly.
Subway definitely has a monopoly on restaurants that serve submarine sandwiches alongside wraps and baked cookies. The Cartoon Network has a monopoly on cable television networks that exclusively air animated shows. Dave & Buster's has a monopoly on chain restaurants with multiple card-operated arcade games. Nintendo has a monopoly on family-focused home game consoles with motion controls.
And yet all these companies in fact face huge amounts of fierce competition.
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: Re: Whichever of mine, I can't see because censored...
You've got a word trick there, is all.
Ah yes, that awful trick where words have meanings.
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: Re: Re: No one is forcing anyone to go to Jones social media page
There's a pretty direct connection between Alex Jones, promoting Alex Jones on Twitter and Facebook, and some real meatspace harm.
I didn't say there wasn't, did I?
Not sure if this is the comment you meant to reply to, but my snarky mention of the Beatles as a trio was simply pointing out the inherent absurdity of listing three companies and saying they are a "monopoly" since that, y'know, is by definition not what that word means.
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: You've put your finger on something...
OK, by putting everyone in their filter bubble, Facebook and Twitter have been able to avoid the business issue....or is there more to it??? Or am I just not looking on a long enough timescale?
I think the "filter bubble" aspect is somewhat overstated. The analysis does diverge a bit for Twitter and Facebook though.
For Twitter, a huge part of the appeal and core function of the site is the ability to connect with people outside your immediate circle - inasmuch as it has filter bubbles, they are extremely porous. This is reinforced by nearly every aspect of the design of the site: retweets, subtweets, notifications of what people in your network like or follow, hashtags that link to an open feed of other people from all across twitter, prominent trending topic links that do the same, etc.
Moreover, core to Twitter's appeal is public figures or just interesting people maintaining a public presence. Twitter and its userbase do not benefit if more people make use of its "filter bubble"-ish capabilities like having a private account or muting all replies.
So to take a specific and widespread example, there is a huge problem with constant and frankly insane harassment of women who have a large twitter presence, especially in certain industries like game design. They face an unduly disproportionate amount of aggression - including coordinated harassment campaigns employing tactics to get around the muting/blocking features that exist. This has driven many women off the platform. Twitter doesn't want this. They could also switch to a private account, and put themselves in a stronger filter bubble, but Twitter doesn't want this either - nor do they.
Facebook is somewhat different because it has many different usage patterns and a larger "private, immediate circle" aspect in some respects. However, interconnection is still a big deal: public pages and events are very important to Facebook, and important to its advertising business model. Facebook provides lots of routes out of your "bubble", showing you popular pages or those your friends interact with, etc. It is also home to several large and more public general-interest forums, such as the Facebook pages of major news organizations, popular TV shows, etc. - and it does not want these places ruined by toxicity either, because then these all-important large organizations might pack up and leave.
And that's just the briefest look at these platforms and how people use them. I won't even get into YouTube, iTunes, Steam, Wordpress, Wikipedia, app stores - all platforms facing these same challenges and all with unique needs.
The whole idea of "filter bubbles" is real and it is very much a factor and a force in how we communicate and consume information in 2018, but it is not an absolute or even necessarily the most dominant trend - and it's not an automatic solution for the challenges of Twitter or Facebook.
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: No one is forcing anyone to go to Jones social media page
Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are a monopoly
And The Beatles were a mighty fine trio.
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: I've said it before...
And yes, it's true that "people who don't like or are offended by someone's post won't be back" and... here's the thing: social media companies want users, they don't want people to leave and never come back. And they also want to be a place frequented by celebrities, experts, politicians, interesting people - because that's good for their business and their brand.
So when persistent toxic behavior by some subgroup of users is proliferating and driving away other users, especially high-quality users, it becomes a business issue for the platform to figure out how to foster a better community.
Plus at the end of the day, some people don't *want* to be the owners and operators of a forum overrun with holocaust denial or misogynistic harassment or racist insults or what-have you. Many talented people don't want to work at a place like that. Companies and advertisers don't want to partner or be associated with a place like that.
As this post points out, this doesn't mean the solution is "just try to ban all the bad stuff". But, sorry, your "grow the fuck up" attitude isn't going to fix anything either, or change this situation at all. And if you want to see what a totally unmoderated social media platform looks like, try signing up for gab.ai
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
The public parts of Facebook, like the Infowars pages, are like a public square.
Wouldn't that also mean that all public page operators themselves are barred from moderating content or blocking users from their pages? You can organize a rally in the public square and invite who you want, but you can't prevent other members of the public from attending.
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
If the World Wide Web is the thing that's transformative and unprecedented, why are you deeming multiple individual services like Facebook and Twitter to be the public square?
Large though those platforms may be, they still represent only a small fraction of the public's ability to publish content and engage in speech on the web.
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: Re:
Yes, people make money off e-mail in all sorts of ways, but that wasn't always the case, only now that it's an established protocol in wide use
I'm not sure that's true. In my experience, in the early days of widespread public adoption of the internet, email service was very much a part of what you were paying your ISP for.
Most people had ISP-hosted email, and it was more clearly understood by the early adopters that by buying internet service you were getting the necessary infrastructure to make use of multiple different protocols - not just the ability to make http requests and access the world wide web, but also things like an account on a news server (owned and operated and maintained by your ISP) to access Usenet, and an account on a mail server (same) in order to send and receive emails.
While the email protocol itself was open and free, it was only later that ways to make use of it for free became ubiquitous - and indeed in the early days of free webmail, people questioned whether it was even a sustainable service to offer, much less a profitable one.
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: Choosing what content winds up in your Newsfeed
Good idea and there's already a fully established and open platform they could base this on: RSS. Pretty much every website out there already has an RSS feed ready and waiting.
I've been thinking about that a lot lately. Imagine a web where much of modern social media grew out of RSS rather than proprietary platforms. I can envision a world where the hosting/publishing functions of Twitter and Facebook are totally distributed and syndicated, and they are instead focused on being end-user applications for viewing/aggregating content in your chosen way. There would be capability tradeoffs and different engineering challenges for sure, but man does it sound better than what we've got...
It's so easy to envision how we could have gone down that path instead than the one we did, but now we face the much more challenging question of how we get from here to there.
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: Re: A Small Matter of Control
E-mail's a protocol and it's everywhere, but who's making money off of it?
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: Re: Re: Re:
If Facebook is the "public square", should people have any expectation or protection of privacy for the data they generate there? Should Facebook have any obligation or ability to enable and respect private/public settings on posts, groups, events, etc? Is all the data Facebook stores on people's conduct in the public square equivalent to government records, and subject to FOIA requests?
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: Re: Re:
What's the practical difference here?
Are you honestly asking me what the practical difference between Facebook and the US government is? How much time do you have?
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: Re:
That the largest internet platforms (particularly twitter and facebook) are becoming like monopolistic public utilities is largely not disputed
I'd like to dispute that, thank you very much.
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re:
the modern-day public square
People keep using this term to refer to social media as though it's now indisputably true. But it's not. In fact, it's pretty silly. Maybe you could argue that the internet as a whole is the modern-day public square, but the idea that each and every major web platform or social media service is "the public square" makes no sense.
when you become powerful enough to do things that historically only governments were capable of doing, the restraints that we have historically placed upon governments must be applied as well
The restraint placed on the government is that it is not allowed to make laws that prohibit speech. Facebook is not capable of making laws.
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: Internet sites have every right in the world to kick people off
Anti-discrimination laws are a separate, specific thing that block the unequal provision of services on the basis of certain protected qualities such as race. They act explicitly as an exception to the more basic idea that a private entity can deny service to anyone it chooses - and generally yes, they apply equally to online services.
While there may be a separate (though related) discussion to have about such laws and their impact on various rights, they don't change this broader analysis and they certainly don't apply to the question of blocking based on political positions, viewpoints, etc.
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