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📆 January 14, 2021 | ⏱️ 3 minute read | 🏷️ computing

[Video] Fixing Social Media for Good

Recent events have brought the issue of social media censorship to the forefront:

Facebook bans Trump's account

Instagram bans Trump's account

Snapchat bans Trump's account

Twitch bans Trump's account

Twitter bans Trump's account

Amazon removes Parler from its cloud hosting service

Apple removes Parler from the App Store

Google removes Parler from the Play Store

Discord bans TheDonald.win server

Reddit bans r/DonaldTrump

Pinterest censors Trump related topics

Shopify removes Trump's merchandise from its platform

TikTok removes Trump's speeches

Youtube removes videos claiming widespread voter fraud

No informed person is disputing that these are private companies and they have the legal right to do whatever they want (within the bounds of the law) with their platforms. The 1st amendment doesn't apply here. Nonetheless it's very alarming that voices coming from the political left are sympathetic to widespread censorship just because it's Trump. If it were someone within their own ranks being censored they would no doubt be making the same argument I'm going to make about the danger of censorship. Voices coming from the political right actually have a saner viewpoint on the censorship problem in the sense that they can actually recognize censorship as a social problem which Trump's situation has only highlighted.

As amusing as it is seeing adult Eric Cartman's megaphone taken away, having a handful of big tech companies control who gets a voice and who doesn't is extremely dangerous. Once a platform is large enough it is a de facto public forum in the sense that it can be used by anyone to freely spread their ideas. Censorship on it in practice can be as damaging to freedom of speech as censoring a de jure public forum. The good coming from this censorship is people are waking up to the fact that big tech companies can and do censor whoever they want when it suits them. Signal Messenger¹ has even seen a huge increase in downloads² since the censorship imposed after the capitol riots. Uncensorable platforms are needed. Luke Smith³ proposes federated platforms⁴ as a permanent fix for the censorship issue:

Video Link⁵

Federation Versus Peer to Peer

While federation is better than centralization, in practice federation tends toward centralization anyway. Email is federated but a few big providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, iCloud, Protonmail) control the market. Worse yet, all the big providers sell user data. But it's not just email. On the federated communication platform Matrix⁶ users are still heavily concentrated on the default matrix.org homeserver. So it's not true that federation alone fixes social media for good. A peer-to-peer⁷ social media platform could fix social media for good. But I'd still rather see everyone on The Fediverse⁸ instead of the centralized social media platforms used today.

References

🔗 [1]: Signal Messenger

🔗 [2]: huge increase in downloads

🔗 [3]: Luke Smith

🔗 [4]: federated platforms

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