I can’t remember if it was Merkel or some other EU leader/PM, but her/his message in the aftermath of 1/6 was very relevant. It was something along the line: we can’t no longer keep such important decision (blocking Trump from social media) in the hands of corporate executives who aren’t accountable. Just imagine if Zuckerberg and the lot blocked Trump (and his cronies) when he started to spew lies and hatreds since November 20 things would have been better.
The social media companies are enjoying unimaginable immunity and impunity.
Maybe they should be forced to have a member in their board to oversea such decision. The member can be a civil servant/judge, member of parliament, lawyer, professor etc. But someone who isn’t driven by the corporate agenda (profit) and can enforce accountability.
Not sure that would work, I would have thought there is a risk that someone joining their board in this circumstance would become institutionalised. Also, these organisations are not strictly driven by profits in the same way a company like GE (General Electric) was for example.
Nick Clegg former Lib Dem leader who was part of the co-alition government in the UK a decade ago has a job with Facebook and has been regularly lampooned for his defence of their behaviour over the last year or so.
I understand your point. But that independent board member can be scrutinized more closely and can even be removed. I’m not saying it’s the best or the only option. Thing is, these corporations lacks scrutiny/accountability and have to be brought under some surveillance.
They would go bust, or need to restructure aggressively, which would ultimately lead to their services no longer being free.
My feeling is there needs to be legislation, but that would have to address the murky world of free speech. At present the State are relying on ‘well you’d have to be an idiot to believe that’.
I’d just like to add that collecting the data is not completely useless and evil, it helps streamline a lot of things…I mean, how can you have an online account for banking without some form of data…or when you log in to shopping online and you have you receipts stored, millions of little things that make life easier…
Collecting some form of data is to me, a price worth paying…
It’s what they do with it that then becomes the issue. Has to be secured and has to be minimal.
Eg, Google doesn’t need to know my favourite football team, but I do like how I don’t have to type in the full address for this website when I want to have a quick glance…
Yes, some collecting is inevitable and also ok if it occurs within a legal and trustable framework. But the issue is that the likes of google, facebook and twitter sell the data to whomever is interested. That should be prohibited.
Just taking a few days off
I was far too much online during and after the US election and things seems to have stabilised now, so I reckon the US and this forum as well, will survive without my constant presence
Shutting down free speech is surely one of the worst things that can be done. We want openness and rigorous discourse, not the silence of totalitarianism.
Be interesting in 10 years when the goobers are all proclaiming, ‘How could we have known??’
The far-right took heart from the president’s winks and nods, retweets and outright displays of support. “Donald Trump, ever since his campaign, throughout his four years in office, has done nothing but pander to these people,” Daryl Johnson, a former senior intelligence analyst at the Department of Homeland Security, told me.
Now a private security consultant, Johnson was caught in a political tempest during the Obama administration, when, at D.H.S., he wrote a report warning of a “resurgence in right-wing extremist recruitment and radicalization activity,” including efforts to recruit veterans. Republicans were apoplectic, seeing the report as an effort to brand conservatives as potential terrorists. Johnson’s unit was disbanded and he left government.
Under Trump, political pressure on federal law enforcement to ignore the far right would only grow. After a white supremacist killed 23 people in a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, Dave Gomez, a former F.B.I. supervisor overseeing terrorism cases, told The Washington Post that the agency was “hamstrung” in trying to investigate white nationalists. “There’s some reluctance among agents to bring forth an investigation that targets what the president perceives as his base,” said Gomez.
