Tech Censorship

[_honorentheos]

You're right, I conflated the ongoing and pervasive calls for breaking up the big tech giants with this particular news item.

[_honorentheos]

I'm posting this to expand the conversation beyond the OP to the question raised by Schmo regarding techgiant media platforms needing to be held accountable for content on their pages. The issue is one supported by both liberal and conservative voices with different targets but similar aims. Both sides want to see political discourse regulated in a way that favors their own political positions. Liberal advocates want to see more moderation of content that aligns with what some might call "cancel culture", demanding they be regulated or broken up through anti-trust laws. Conservatives want to see big tech broken up because they argue the people in charge of writing search algorithms and other decision makers are biased against conservative views. They argue there need to be alternatives to Google or Twitter where a conservative publication or group isn't being financially punished because the big players are antagonistic to their political views.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/artic ... 43486.html

[_EAllusion]

I think connecting the political desire to use anti-trust legislation against Facebook and google with pressure to adopt "cancel culture" policies is somewhere between wildly ignorant and dishonest. The closest that comes to this is when some liberals who want anti-trust action against big tech connect not doing enough to censor dishonest ads like they incorrectly imagine occurs in other media to anti-trust action, and those arguments either never or almost never make it into the policy arguments. The calls for anti-trust action you see in liberal discourse seem based on fairly standard anti-trust rationales. If you believe in the standard arguments for anti-trust action, it's not hard not to see why Facebook and Google might come in the crosshairs as they have in Europe.

I also think there's a skirting over just how much the complaints about anti-conservative bias are just a fiction invented to pressure big tech companies to be more compliant with favoring conservative interests. It's akin to insisting that conservatives want voter ID because they are afraid of voter fraud. You're just confusing the sham rationale with the motive at that point.

[_honorentheos]

You're welcome to think that and say what you want about it of course. Liberals who advocate to see anti-trust laws used to break up big tech use it as a tandem with wanting to see them behave differently while being above regulation. It's the same stick use to threaten them if they don't. Pretty representative of how these things go. It seems to me you port over arguments you see one Twitter and start having them here without actually addressing what was specifically said. You also act as if I accept or agree with what conservatives comments have said despite that also not being consistent with my posted comments.

You're a duplicitous dude.

[_honorentheos]

Here's another article on the subject that isn't inherently taking political sides but focused in the issues:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ab/612238/

[_EAllusion]

You really have to contort reality pretty hard so it fits within your "both sides are bad" frame.

Elizabeth Warren is a good example of someone who has advocated for anti-trust action against big tech in significant detail while also representing a prominent liberal voice calling for it. Please point to where in those arguments you see the rationale being a lack of "cancel culture" content moderation or evidence of a quid quo pro to avoid it. Cite a liberal think tank piece that does so.

You rely on the passive label "liberal voices" to underwrite a false claim that you obnoxiously use to present it as a deeper truth neither side can see. The interesting thing is there already are examples of anti-trust action against big tech out in the wild that are based on fairly standard anti-trust reasoning updated for how big tech captures market share with prominent liberal voices in America tending to go "yeah, that." But, by all means, cite examples that run deeper than what a few randos said.

I know it's not as fun as calling me duplicitous for writing a specific response to what the Erik Erikson piece you linked is saying, but hey, both sides, amiright?

[_EAllusion]

The simplified version of what's going on here is simply that liberal leaders are threatening anti-trust action because they dislike monopolistic behavior and conservative leaders are threatening it because they want to influential media monopolies to be more efficient conduits to spreading conservative narratives ala other media platforms they have more control over. Efforts to make the former look like the latter or the latter like the former, be it they based in dishonesty or a misguided sense of needing to make everything a false equivalence, distort an accurate understanding of what's occurring.

[_honorentheos]

Jesus. The reality I'm arguing here is there are two unrelated sides to the issue with many views and arguments throughout. Schmo brought it up as, "How is it a bad thing that Blackburn wants big tech regulated when I agree they should be held accountable for the content on their platforms?"

Many vocal critical of big tech on the left wants what Schmo advocates. They hold up threats of anti-trust litigation as the stick in a similar way that conservatives do but towards very different ends. Warren represents a more true economic position that would see platforms like Amazon not sell Amazon-branded products, for example but so do others who aren't Democrats. That particular example is hardly a partisan divided position.

Conservatives complain they are being treated unfairly. As I said in my first post, that is largely an issue with what has been captured in the term "conservative" as much as anything.

But let's turn this into just one more "very serious people both sides every issue playing into the destruction of society orchestrated by right-wing media."

You don't have to look very far to see your last post reduced liberals into one of many positions and conservatives into lacking genuine voices arguing against monopolies. All there is to say about that is wow.

[_honorentheos]

Here's another article for those who want to know things rather than baby bird the crap EA regurgitates from playing troll wars on Twitter as what everyone who knows things already knows so if you think differently or view it as multi-faceted you are lying or being played:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/14/tech ... llows.html

[_EAllusion]

Unless you post that article in the form of a picture of an actual newspaper, I'm afraid I can't trust your Internet source. Do you just believe everything you read on the Internet?

Anyway, your source you got in the form of 1's and 0's instead of real ink is exactly touches on just about everything I described above. That the closest you see is not anything remotely like what "cancel culture" refes to, but rather wanting tech firms to do more to regulate accuracy in content that appears on their sites.

That's why when you write, "Liberal advocates want to see more moderation of content that aligns with what some might call "cancel culture", demanding they be regulated or broken up through anti-trust laws," I respond with, "I think connecting the political desire to use anti-trust legislation against Facebook and Google with pressure to adopt "cancel culture" policies is somewhere between wildly ignorant and dishonest. The closest that comes to this is when some liberals who want anti-trust action against big tech connect not doing enough to censor dishonest ads like they incorrectly imagine occurs in other media to anti-trust action, and those arguments either never or almost never make it into the policy arguments."

It is what I wrote, not what you wrote, that is described in that article.

The article also displays naïveté or indifference about conservative motives taking by them at their word which skirts exploring underlying motives that don't take much scratching at the surface to see.

So when you write, "Conservatives want to see big tech broken up because they argue the people in charge of writing search algorithms and other decision makers are biased against conservative views," I reply with, "I also think there's a skirting over just how much the complaints about anti-conservative bias are just a fiction invented to pressure big tech companies to be more compliant with favoring conservative interests. It's akin to insisting that conservatives want voter ID because they are afraid of voter fraud. You're just confusing the sham rationale with the motive at that point."

That conservatives, like Charlie Kirk, referred to in this Internet piece say they favor regulation of big tech due to perceived anti-conservative content regulation is a claim that doesn't have to be taken at face value anymore than when conservatives, like Charlie Kirk, say they oppose voting by mail because they are worried about voter fraud has to be believed as a good faith argument.

But, both sides, amiright? Both sides do it. Both sides. Liberals and conservatives. Both sides.

What's rich here is your understanding of what's going on here is shallow, naïve and driven by your deep desire to avoid being those things.