Should We Build A Publicly-Funded Social Media Platform? (nytimes.com) 110
What if the problems with social media just can't be solved by a for-profit platform?
Writing in the New York Times, a former Tumblr executive argues the solution might require the creation of a nonprofit publicly-funded social media platform. The mechanics of how a public social media product would work have been fairly well figured out by now: It would be a digital platform that allows people to post and share a variety of media -- pictures, audio, video, text -- to other people in the network. I personally would structure it a little more like Instagram or Tumblr, where I was one of the early employees, than Twitter or Facebook. In other words, it should be built to prioritize sharing things you love over getting attention by simply being loud online... A nonprofit model eliminates most of the incentives for bad behavior. The network would not be under pressure from investors to generate growth at all costs. There would be no incentive to allow fake accounts; in fact the incentives would be opposite, since fake accounts impose costs on the network and provide no benefits.
Unlike for-profit social media, public social media would be explicitly noncommercial -- no brand accounts allowed. In fact, there would be no accounts for any organizations -- this network is for people only. An account on a public media platform would be tied to a real-world, local identity, like a driver's license or library card. Anonymity online has real benefits, and a user name doesn't have to be your real name. The public social media network could keep this information hashed, unscrambled only when action against a user is required, which would make it easier to crack down on fake and troll accounts...
In some ways this structure is very similar to what Facebook once was. TheFacebook started as a platform limited to Harvard students. This restricted access helped behavior on the network: Only people with a verified real-world identity and accountability could get in. This is not the case today with Facebook, of course, or with any other for-profit social platform that depends on getting as many accounts as possible... Public social media is an idea that our civic space can be improved by the creation of a platform organized in the public interest. A thriving digital social network is as vital to the public sphere as a public library, public schools, or even a public water fountain.
Let's build one.
He argues that this community could then work through any issues that come up, adding "This is the key work of a democracy, and establishing those community standards shouldn't be left, as they are now, for any for-profit, unaccountable company to decide."
Writing in the New York Times, a former Tumblr executive argues the solution might require the creation of a nonprofit publicly-funded social media platform. The mechanics of how a public social media product would work have been fairly well figured out by now: It would be a digital platform that allows people to post and share a variety of media -- pictures, audio, video, text -- to other people in the network. I personally would structure it a little more like Instagram or Tumblr, where I was one of the early employees, than Twitter or Facebook. In other words, it should be built to prioritize sharing things you love over getting attention by simply being loud online... A nonprofit model eliminates most of the incentives for bad behavior. The network would not be under pressure from investors to generate growth at all costs. There would be no incentive to allow fake accounts; in fact the incentives would be opposite, since fake accounts impose costs on the network and provide no benefits.
Unlike for-profit social media, public social media would be explicitly noncommercial -- no brand accounts allowed. In fact, there would be no accounts for any organizations -- this network is for people only. An account on a public media platform would be tied to a real-world, local identity, like a driver's license or library card. Anonymity online has real benefits, and a user name doesn't have to be your real name. The public social media network could keep this information hashed, unscrambled only when action against a user is required, which would make it easier to crack down on fake and troll accounts...
In some ways this structure is very similar to what Facebook once was. TheFacebook started as a platform limited to Harvard students. This restricted access helped behavior on the network: Only people with a verified real-world identity and accountability could get in. This is not the case today with Facebook, of course, or with any other for-profit social platform that depends on getting as many accounts as possible... Public social media is an idea that our civic space can be improved by the creation of a platform organized in the public interest. A thriving digital social network is as vital to the public sphere as a public library, public schools, or even a public water fountain.
Let's build one.
He argues that this community could then work through any issues that come up, adding "This is the key work of a democracy, and establishing those community standards shouldn't be left, as they are now, for any for-profit, unaccountable company to decide."
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
More a question of "Why?"
Right now everything is sucked up by Facebook anyway except for some fringe interest forums that don't qualify for the Facebook rules or lags around for legacy reasons.
Imagine what would happen if Facebook and Google went away tomorrow. People would start to get confused and start to work again.
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Because Facebook is Evil and many of us avoid it for that reason.
They steal privacy in exchange for giving you things available for free on the internet, if you are marginally computer literate.
Oh, I can't send a mass email to my friends, labelled as "Social Update", better post it to Facebook.
Oh, I can't make a simple blog website to advertise my club, better make a Facebook page for it.
Oh, I want a dating website that invades my users privacy, so I will make it so you have to sign on using Facebook.
Like it or not, Facebook is perceived legitimacy (Score:3)
I know what you're saying that Facebook provides services that anybody can replicate but...
Sending mass emails to friends is also called "Spam" and most non-technical people have been told to not open those emails because they may have links which can do horrible things. Putting the same post on FB is read.
Great that you can create a simple website but how do you advertise it/let people know its there? Again, handing out flyers in club meetings will not result in use or will a hashtag of FB result in more
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To be fair, starting a club page on facebook where all your friends already have accounts is a shit load easier then building your entire website that you have to get hosting for and then get everyone on. You also have a lot more maintenance to worry about.
I do like the idea of rolling your own website for your club and associated forums, but let's not pretend that's easier then a few clicks on facebook. 99% of the people could not actually get this built on their own. I bet there are /.ers that can't do it
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The problem is how it creeps in:
One is too lazy to go to a Web forum, so they will move the group from that to Facebook.
One is too lazy to host support documents, so they will just put those in a group.
One is too cheap to pay the 4 bucks a month, they will just Facebook host it for "free".
One wants access control, so lets Facebook handle that.
One wants a private forum, and FB can give it easily.
Yes, Facebook is cheap. It is a "one stop shop". However, we have been seeing the consequences of this coming up.
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First Amendment is only for the US, the rest of the world have other legislation with new headaches.
Publicly Funded Distillery? (Score:2)
Social Media in all its various forms have proven to divide, inflame, and bully people.
It essentially allows people to express emotional and unfiltered thought at the drop of a hat. People will say things on social media that they would never dream of saying person.
Just say no to social media
Re: Publicly Funded Distillery? (Score:2)
Ya. Completely forgot to include the distillery thoughts.
Oh well.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
There are two distinct kinds of social media, one is real names and the other is avatar based. The real name one is the one that causes the problems because it focuses on attacks on real people and peer pressure marketing and other addictive elements, really quite bad, in the way it is applied, actively socially evil. Pseudonym based social media is entirely different, right of the bat, no real names, all effectively make believe and anonymous, just people making up stuff and playing with social media.
Rea
Newsflash to propopents: Trump in charge of govt (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah that little first amendment thing could be an issue.
I also have some surprising news for the folks who still want the government in charge of more and more of their lives. The head of the government is Donald Trump. "The government should run ______" means "Trump shown run ______".
Granted, the Trump administration is perhaps better qualified to run socialmedia.gov than Obama's team was to run healthcare.gov, but do you REALLY want Trump and his pals in charge of MORE stuff? Really?
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It's a term, not random words (Score:3, Informative)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
I'll quote the first sentence for you:
--
The head of government is either the highest or second highest official in the executive branch of a sovereign state, a federated state, or a self-governing colony, who often presides over a cabinet, a group of ministers or secretaries who lead executive departments.
--
Heck, let's look at the next few words too: ..
"Head of government" is often differentiated from "head of state" (as in
Trump is both head of government and head of state.
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PBS social media run by Daniel Tiger. Actually sounds quite nice, if all you want is liberal pablum.
No (Score:2)
n/t
Yes... (Score:2)
No, Just No (Score:5, Insightful)
This all just reads like the kind of good idea you have when you’re high and everything is going to be awesome. Methinks this guy needs to lay off so he can sober up and start addressing the very real issues with this plan.
Run Your Own; It's Easy (Score:5, Interesting)
No, you should read http://runyourown.social/ [runyourown.social] and run your own social network, with your own rules, and the ability to integrate with other nodes and pull in/export content as you see fit.
My friends and I read it, and threw together a server after about a week of discussing it. We use vanilla Mastodon, though, not Kazemi's fork. We block Gab because we aren't interested in the noise. But--you can do whatever you want!
It's the right way to go, I think. Small, more personally invested social networks that can be federated together. Everyone gets what they want out of it. Except advertisers.
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Big difference (Score:2)
When you get down to it, the two are very, very different. A government has an obligation to serve all of its citizens equally. A megacorp has no such obligation. Try to get some "customer service" from Facebook or Google, and get back with me on that.
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When you get down to it, the state is not different enough from a megacorp When you get down to it, the two are very, very different. A government has an obligation to serve all of its citizens equally. A megacorp has no such obligation. Try to get some "customer service" from Facebook or Google, and get back with me on that.
Not all governments have baked into their laws the idea that they are obligated to serve all of its citizens equally--and, well, if you think that the existence of that obligation somehow means that they actually do serve all its citizens equally? You're very likely a straight White cismale, from somewhere in the urban coastal streaks, of at least mid-middle-class SES, who somehow managed to miss things like the Women's March and Black Lives Matter, too...or you just prefer being able to tell yourself that
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Congratulations for being wealthy enough to be a customer of Google or Facebook. You must own a business large enough to be able to afford advertising, and that makes you an outlier. What about the rest of the vast population that ISN'T a Facebook/Google customer? How do they get their problems answered by Google or Facebook? Even if the government isn't completely perfect, it's a hel
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No, you should read http://runyourown.social/ [runyourown.social] and run your own social network, with your own rules, and the ability to integrate with other nodes and pull in/export content as you see fit.
My friends and I read it, and threw together a server after about a week of discussing it. We use vanilla Mastodon, though, not Kazemi's fork. We block Gab because we aren't interested in the noise. But--you can do whatever you want!
It's the right way to go, I think. Small, more personally invested social networks that can be federated together. Everyone gets what they want out of it. Except advertisers.
How does grandma know which one to join? We had this before, and it was called the blogosphere [wikipedia.org]. Because most people don't want to set up or investigate which micro-platform is right for them, they are going to go for the big centralized one. This is probably great for niche, technical communities and just about nobody else.
That's a great idea (Score:3)
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He doesn't say anything about trolls or wrong think, just no commercial stuff. His method seems reasonably effective - being tied to a verifiable identity would still allow for shilling, but it wouldn't help much with things like corporate spying and data collection. Maybe have a limit of 500 friends per user and everyone else that can only access basic public info and posts.
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That anyone thinks 'friends' is synonymous with 'passing acquaintences' is very amusing.
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I think the problems here are if it's a publicly-funded one or a state-funded. State-funded, it's still going to be probably used primarily to spy on people and violate their privacy like a lanky teen who just got tossed into a supermax's general pop. If it's not tied to any master, just funded by the public, it does seem actually pretty accurate though I'd bring up serious questions about things like if your verifiable identity is going to be outed without your explicit consent--and, well, it tends to be
Re: No, Just No (Score:1)
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true, but it would be always better than having the same crap managed by a greedy corp.
National Public Access (Score:2)
Short Answer (Score:3, Insightful)
No.
It would be fun to watch it implode (Score:1)
To a large extent I consider /. to be pretty non-partisan social media and look at the arguments that end up here - I know it's for profit (and does push related companies' products) but there seems to be some consensus that people's opinions are to be respected.
I don't know how you can create the magic that results in well intentioned, non-confrontational, respectful communications from people who are looking to forcefully make a point. Right off the bat, I can see the Alt-Right saying they have the same
Re: (Score:2)
They do have the same rights of painting themselves as complete authoritarian assholes.
You can even allow users to brand themselves with tags so you can ignore people by their tags.
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Right off the bat, I can see the Alt-Right saying they have the same rights to free speech as the LGBTQ(+ extensions).
They should, too. The fun is going to start when the LGBTQ(+ extensions) resident idiots start demanding otherwise--and I say this as somebody who basically has set up camp in Narnia because I'm tired of the loud idiots setting so much of the public image. Did they miss that we've got our own share of bigots, Nice Guys, Nice Girls, and other such repellent sorts?
Sure (Score:2)
I'm all for it. Hell, I'd even contribute to it's development. Tell me where to sign up.
Ask and you shall receive (Score:5, Informative)
It's called Mastodon, and you should read https://runyourown.social/ [runyourown.social] as an introduction to it.
Then you can contribute at https://github.com/tootsuite/m... [github.com]
And then (Score:1)
Betteridge Law of Headlines: No (Score:5, Insightful)
Repeat after me:
Humans form social groups due to commonality and wanting a sense of belonging. How do you handle immoral behavior? What about something that is considered immoral in one country but considered moral in another? Whose standards do you apply?
ANY behavior you deem immoral is consider moral by other group(s) or cults or vice versa.
WHO determines what is immoral?
Let's take morality out of the question. How about sharing a number? Is that OK? China is SO fucked up that the number 64 is banned due to it being a reference to the Tiananmen Square massacre.
WHO determines what is acceptable or not?
Removing the corporate money is going to do fuck all for a certain group of people wanting to censor another person's right of expression or "anti social" behavior compared to whatever is considered sundered "normal".
WHO determines what is "truthy" ?
EVERYONE has biases. Instead of stifling speech we should be providing a space where everyone can voice their opinion (sans spam and crap flooding) and let users decide what is acceptable via moderation. While moderation is fallible to group think but there is NO solution to trying to regulate human behavior OTHER then social feedback. As kids we were taught manners. Kids these days aren't.
Here is a quote everyone should keep in mind:
There is NO solution to bad teachers other then good teachers and experience.
There is also the issue of cost. While storage is relatively cheap bandwidth isn't free. Who is going to pay for this new social platform?
Any "solution" to the "social media" problem is doomed to failed. Money isn't the problem. Lack of respect is. Everything starts with education.
Re: (Score:2)
Have smaller groups. https://runyourown.social/ [runyourown.social] lays out your exact concerns and how we should address them.
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Instead of stifling speech we should be providing a space where everyone can voice their opinion (sans spam and crap flooding) and let users decide what is acceptable via moderation.
Think about what you just said. Particularly the bolded part. WHO determines what's spam and crap flooding?
Needs to be distributed (Score:5, Insightful)
Much like the jabber protocol, there needs to be a social media platform where the content is distributed.
Conceptually I'm thinking of a facebook page that you run on your home computer, that they publishes your nonsense to your "friends" ( and they do likewise ). Much as the old BBSes used to integrate their message boards, only on a much larger scale.
Having a central repository necessitates a central content authority, and that's rather the problem.
Re:Needs to be distributed (Score:4, Informative)
Mastadon does this. it is a shit show. people fork into their own communities whenever someone shows up they don't like. It's ripe for echo chamber nonsense.
Re:Needs to be distributed (Score:5, Interesting)
It's working just fine for my friends and I thanks. We keep a very small blocklist we don't federate with or receive reports from, and that cuts 98% of the garbage. We also have a wiki which also lists who's on that blacklist and why.
Mastodon is the way forward. We have the technology to solve a social problem with social means instead of trying to use one-size-fits-all technology.
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Mastadon does this. it is a shit show. people fork into their own communities whenever someone shows up they don't like. It's ripe for echo chamber nonsense.
So it's like a million little reddits?
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Having a central repository necessitates a central content authority, and that's rather the problem.
Yeah we can look to social sites where the central content authority is completely hands off to see what a lovely collection of upstanding and meaningful discourse occurs on such a platform. /sarcasm.
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The alternative is to have twats like yourself being responsible for deeming what is and is not acceptable speech.
No thanks. I'd rather have a wretched hive of villainy and scum over step-ford wives.
We need a STANDARD, not a PLATFORM (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no reason that a social media app needs a centralized server farm, or even a single implementing app. Thus, no central organization is needed either.
What we need is an open communications protocol -- a real-time, secure, open, and fully distributed replacement for RSS, SMS, and the whole social media posts/reactions/threads/galleries concept that doesn't rely on people having to know how to set up or join a server and that doesn't involve having to implement dozens of other previous attempts to do similar things (FOAF, etc.).
As for controlling behavior -- this can be done by simply requiring people to be invited by others, and that invitation should have consequences if the invited person ends up being a bad actor (spammer, etc.). Just like in real life -- you trust people based on experience and introductions, and that trust level is inversely proportional to the degrees of separation.
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Yeah indeed. I look forward to our new social platform where every change takes multiple years and complex approvals by committees to complete.
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ActivityPub [wikipedia.org] is what you're looking for. Implemented by multiple providers and clients.
Also, using a bot (feed2toot [gitlab.com]) makes short work of converting RSS. I see no reason to get rid of RSS, either. I use it for podcasts and syndicating content on a daily basis. It works. Leave it be.
Re: (Score:2)
using a bot (feed2toot) makes short work of converting RSS. I see no reason to get rid of RSS, either. I use it for podcasts and syndicating content on a daily basis. It works. Leave it be.
Doesn't it seem like just some standard tag ids and whatnot along with auth and RSS would do this job? Why do we need that whole pump thing?
It would mostly be for video (Score:2)
Video uses too much bandwidth though. Try running a popular video feed off your "unlimited" hosting provider and watch how long until they cut you off.
It would basically be a National Public Access.
One Condition (Score:1)
What is with losers (Score:1)
And them always wanting tax payers to fund their bullshit? Fuck off with your social media crap.
Absolutely. The NSA could run it. (Score:1)
We don't need "Social Media". At all. (Score:4, Interesting)
It is a meme, made up by the "Internet of tubes" crowd of the news media. ... Why?
Just like so many things in the post-Eternal-September world. We let the most clueless lead us.
The problem with online communities is and always will be, the same as with big societies: Anonymity.
Not to confused with privacy, which is important.
If one can't recognize somebody as a person anymore, or distinguish them at all (so approaching or beyond Dunbar's number), one can't feel empath. So everyone devolves into the asshole sociopaths we know and hate.
And worse, we can't even forego anonymity online, as computers do not forget and hence people will never forgive. And forgiveness is essential to a functioning society. Because without it, people are prohibited from being able to ever change and grow. (Try meeting with old friends from when you were still e.g. "the loser".)
"Social media" is the worst combination.of those:
1. it exists to share private things to the public
2. it is not anonymous
2. it causes people to act like sociopaths.
Somebody calculated, that we all did or will do something in our lives, so that, no matter what it is, there are, statistically, 5000 people on the planet right now, with the means and motivation to kill you for it.
All that's missing, is an initial trigger.
Give that 20 years of unforgetting public permanence, and you're practically a dead man walking.
If you want a social gathering... meet people in real life! Where assholery gets your ass kicked, but rarely will happen because you actually get to know people and feel them.
It's also decideldy more real and rewarding than some international political news drama.
Re: (Score:2)
1. it exists to share private things to the public
2. it is not anonymous
2. it causes people to act like sociopaths.
Yep, those three were invented with Facebook. There's no way that something like that existed before the internet, nosiree. Now if you'll excuse me I need to go don my pointy white hood and meet up socially with my friends where we can discuss the "black problem".
Wow that's 3 sarcastic posts in reply to people who don't think in a row. I'm on a roll.
You got it backward. (Score:2)
People are on these platform because they want to become the new superstar. They share things to become popular. That's the entire point of all that crap.
If you remove that incentive, it's going to be empty.
There are many non-profit social networks that are empty, with free software.
No. We should build a new protocoll... (Score:4, Interesting)
... and applications implementing that protocol.
Facebook only exists because Email and Usenet are from the steam age of computing and don't offer the features Facebook has. Same with slack, which is basically a glorified IRC ripoff.
If we replace email with something that offers feasible async offline messaging and threading (encrypted of course) and update IRC and offer apps that implement these and are not shite, then Facebook will go away all on its own.
That's not how fraud works! (Score:3)
I have the pleasure to work with/adjacent to a lot of fraud teams, and this atomic take absolutely makes my head spin.
Fake accounts posting stuff costs the network absolutely peanuts in computing resources. On the other had, designing fraud detection and mitigation schemes at Twitter-scale requires sustained investment in engineering and/or human review farms (cf. instagram in Miami). And I do mean sustained, since preventing it is a losing position in an iterated game. It's a constant fight and the only victory is not losing today and getting to see what the bad guys throw at you tomorrow.
The only way the incentives align is if the fraud/spam is so pervasive it drives enough customers away (or decreases engagement) that it impacts the eyeballs-on-ads metric. And even then, the incentives are only to spend enough resources to mitigate it until the marginal cost of more mitigation is equal to the marginal change in revenue. For a non-profit that's not concerned with ad revenue, there's even less incentive to do anything about it -- certainly not the absolutely risible claim that it "impose costs", as if ferreting it out was costless.
Yikes, this is an absolutely epic bad take.
Govt/public Comms infra has a long history (Score:4, Interesting)
In the 18th century we called these "post roads".
In the 20th century we called this "the phone system"
While we do have the Internet itself as that infrastructure, it should be clear at this point that "social media-like" systems are in fact the preferred mechanism for communication, and the days of a significant majority of end-users having websites of their own is gone. If you want more proof, consider that government agencies at the Federal, State, and Local levels has a crap ton of social media presence, because constituents rely on those presences to direct them to websites -- people can't even find a "Contact Us" form any more.
In that light, it makes sense to have *some* sort of legally neutral (eg, subject to 1A regulation with none of this "private property" defense) platform available for this. The "network effect" problem of getting people to start using another social media network in the first place could be easily surmounted by simply having government agencies move their official presences over to that.
Frankly, unless there's a major split up of the tech giants (specifically, splitting up consumer marketing and advertising from data collection and multi-cast communication), they're eventually going to get their status as a platform regulated at this rate. This might be the best for ALL involved.
Build one where the users are the customers (Score:2)
I do use
Re: (Score:2)
You mean, ask people to PAY for social media? Good luck with that!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Hear, hear.
Just to comment on TFA:
Unlike for-profit social media, public social media would be explicitly noncommercial -- no brand accounts allowed. In fact, there would be no accounts for any organizations -- this network is for people only.
I can hear the chirping crickets now. What the author doesn't realize is people like fan, company, and organization pages. If they didn't, they wouldn't follow/like/friend/whatever them.
Anyway, I find I have little time and patience for social media stuff today. Do not use my tax dollars for this boondoggle. And get off my lawn.
So like Wikipedia then? (Score:2)
But a page for each individual, even if they're not famous, and updated frequently. Wait, can't you do this in Wikipedia now? I guess you'd need to add "friending" and a report of "friends" latest updates were. Probably couldn't be enough Editors to go around...
No. Social media is stupid. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
FB, Twitter, GoogleAnything, and the rest of the purely user generated "content" sites are a waste of time, energy, bandwidth, you name it. They have zero positive societal value so should not be funded.
They have negative societal value. The correlation between the rise in non-fatal self-harm among pre-teen and teenage girls, the rate of suicide among teen boys, and the rise of social media is very precise.
The benefit is the problem. (Score:2)
The great thing about social media, is it allows people to share information.
The horrible thing about social media, is it allows people to share information.
Anything that lets us talk about making slavery illegal also lets us talk about genocide.
There's no fundamental difference between sharing pictures of cats and pictures that are under copyright.
One persons alternative view is another persons troll.
Bad stuff gets posted.
That's not going to change just because the entity hosting the blog is for profit, no
Re: (Score:2)
There's no fundamental difference between sharing pictures of cats and pictures that are under copyright.
Those cat pictures ARE copyrighted. Copyright adheres the moment a work is fixed in a medium (in the current batshit crazy copyright regime). And Grumpy Cat's owner started suing companies for selling merchandise featuring Grumpy Cat's picture without a license.
Re: (Score:1)
We already have that (Score:1)
Name a Collectivist initiate NYT does NOT like (Score:2)
Try naming a Collectivist initiative, that New York Times does not like... I cannot... For every problem, they trot out this flea-bitten (and debunked) concept of "market failure" and insist, government must do it.
Bullshit. None of the things they listed are necessary — nor even universally useful:
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No, not all other people. Just collectivist assholes — like you.
It is not "government-provided". I pay for it — buying the service I want from a service provider of my choice, thank you very much. That's how things should be, however much you, Commies, want it different, with the loving, benevolent, and omniscient government officials carefully selecting what's best for us — and making it mandatory — while banning the harmful (
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Why? (Score:2)
The author talks about how it could be achieved, but not why. Vagaries about "democracy" and "community" aren't any kind of argument.
So why should I pay for a public FB/Twitter? What's the societal gain here? I can't see any at all. Twitter does not contribute in any way to democracy, quite the opposite. FB makes it easy to stay in touch with your old university buddies, but how is that any benefit to me? I pay for school because school contributes meaningfully to a functional and civilized society. I pay
the NPR/PBS of social media (Score:2)
Who moderates it? (Score:1)
How do they combat illegal activity like child porn?
Who is going to pay for it? (Score:2)
Please don't say "taxpayers." The bureaucracy alone would be overwhelming.
You are kidding (Score:2)
>"Should We Build A Publicly-Funded Social Media Platform?"
Absolutely not. What an incredibly stupid, bad, ridiculous idea. Here we go again- there is no problem that more and bigger government can't solve, right?
It's not and it's not democratic. (Score:1)
For anything to be democratic I'd argue you have to accept complete freedom of speech and anonymity.
Otherwise it simply isn't and people will be silenced in multiple ways. You can of course build such a network anyway and it may provide a more guaranteed access and fairness within its limits or maybe not but to be truly useful for humankind and against all sorts of tyranny it need to be uncensored and anonymous.
Fuck (Score:2)
'Social media' needs to die and go away. (Score:2)
First of all, you can't prevent troll accounts and other fake accounts from being created and exploited, not unless you require strong, multi-factor proof that someone is who they say they are, and demand people use their real name. That alone would create a massively chilling effect on free speech, and since some trolls and other troublemakers woul
Sounds good to me. (Score:1)
Hell no (Score:2)
Fuck no. Who the hell would anybody trust to do this?
Would it shut right-wingers up? (Score:2)
They're constantly whining that Facebook is violating their First Amendment rights and they have no place to spew their hatred. They neglect that the First Amendment only limits the government from restricting speech and that Facebook has First Amendment rights too.
I don't like Facebook, but I recognize that Zuckerberg and the rest of the owners also have their own free speech rights and if I ran a social network I wouldn't want to play host to hateful speech either and I would be the one who got to decide
Bullshit solutions (Score:2)
The basis for the whole fake news frenzy was that social media worked and the people using shared their sources with each other and reached conclusions which were contrary to what the establishment wanted. Clinton was not elected! That can only mean that the Russians have distorted out media! The counter offensive was an umbrella movement of everyone who wants to suppress and control the public narratives, be it the Atlantic Council or CNN.
There were laws controlling what was allowed on social media. These
Built it on the "Fediverse" (Score:2)
Its obvious that for-profit, data-sucking centralized social media is a big problem with our current discourse. Thankfully, we're already well on our way to having real, beneficial tools to provide something akin to the experience of the "big names" but in an overall more healthful way - the "Fediverse". The "Fediverse" is an association of F/LOSS projects relating to social media / communication that are are not just open but also federated (and to a greater or lesser extent, compatible with each o
Publicly owned... (Score:2)
As in paid for by taxpayers. Run by comparatively underpaid staff. Heavily censored in some way - approved communications only etc. Everything recorded and held by state/federal government.
Is that the same, better or worse than Facebook etc?
No we should not. (Score:2)
Nobody's going to be able to agree on a coherent ruleset for conduct.
What're you giving people for their money that they can't get for free? CONTROL OF THE PLATFORM?
If so, what's to stop THEM from exerting undue influence?
What happens if funding runs short?
Not to mention the fact that social media is a wretched hive. PERIOD. Something that encourages the worst from people.
Should we build a publicly funded anything? (Score:1)
It'd be easier... (Score:2)
...to nationalise Facebook. Once that's done & all the unethical conflict generating algorithms & addictive gamification features have been removed, people will lose interest & move, en mass, to some other advertising driven social media platform, where they can get their regular fix of indignant outrage & rant about it like a crazy old lady with a bag of angry cats whenever they want.
Re: (Score:2)
...people will lose interest & move, en mass, to some other advertising driven social media platform, where they can get their regular fix of indignant outrage & rant about it like a crazy old lady with a bag of angry cats whenever they want.
I see you've been reading Slashdot today.
Have you been to a government web site lately? (Score:2)
Was it well-crafted, polished, easy to use? Did it have all the features a site should reasonably have? Was it easy to get around and find what you want?
My guess is, no.
The government isn't that great at building Web sites. Most of them were built using decades-old technology. They work, but they are clunky.
Is this what people will go for in a social media site? Probably not.
Unfortunately, to have nice things, it is necessary to have funding, and motivation to improve. The government usually has little moti
non profit (Score:2)
there are already non-profit social networks available, no funding to build anything needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: THANX BUT NO THANX!!! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
We used to call it Usenet. It was pretty decent overall with self regulating adults until the spammers found it.
yeah. the sad thing is that in the end most of us left and let it die out, following the spammers to web 2.0 land.
Re: THANX BUT NO THANX!!! (Score:2)