Wednesday, May 05, 2021

Um, What...?

Big Media Matt's sarcasm raises a kind of interesting question: is social media the new 'public square'?

And the answer is simply "No," because the internet is neither public nor a square. The public square is venerated (if only in memory) because it is public.  It is maintained by the public, like the streets, and so protected for the public.  The internet, however, is private.  It's more like a TV station.  The TV station broadcasts what it chooses to.  The local TV station I sometimes watch does "investigative" reports that are sometimes interesting and sometimes laughable.  Rather like an Op-Ed columnist who has column inches to fill despite what's going on in the world (and so some sheer nonsense is published), local news "investigators are sometimes investigating "stories" that are purely based on the fact the public pays no attention to most of what local government does in their names.

Recently, for example, the local "investigative reporter" ran a story about a local school board (there are 30 or more in the area) holding a meeting on Zoom (covid, ya know) and some of the board members were texting each other during the meeting.  It was the electronic equivalent of kids passing notes in class, except these were adults on the school board (volunteers, really, as school board members don't get paid fo their services).  The text messages were discovered by an Open Records Act request (Texas equivalent of FOIA).  They were embarassingly childish; but they were also, by the time the story was told (and the messages discovered), several months old.  An election had intervened since then, some board members were no longer on the board, and yet the intrepid reporter chased the school superintendent (a district employee, not a board member) through a parking lot to get him to comment on the "scandal" of bored adults being childish. 

It was all bullshit, and a gross abuse of the "public square."  Except TV isn't a "public square."  It's private enterprise, trying to give its audience what they want. How different is that from Facebook or Twitter?  Or FoxNews, for that matter?

Yglesias understands that.  Companies decide what "happens" all the time.
If by "arguments" Tapper means "discussions," then, sure.  But the arguments against Facebook's decision are pretty weak; at least the pseudo-legal arguments some want to engage in.  I don't mean just the "free speech/1st Amendment" nonsense, I mean the more basic misunderstanding of legal reasoning that thinks the law allows everything or nothing, with no in-between.  No, the law doesn't, as a general principle, prevent you from shouting "FIRE!" in a crowded theater (and never did, so far as I know), but neither is it so clumsy and awkward it forbids refusing access to an internet platform after you have provoked an insurrection and act of sedition (look it up:  "sedition" is interference with government function, not the destruction and demolition of that government).  You can try to rename that "FREEDOM!," but it's a pretty weak argument.

What Twitter and Facebook did was deny Trump access to their services because he, as Rep. Cheney so memorably put it, crossed the line.  He went beyond the pale.  He endangered the very government he was then representing.

As for Mr. Meadows' argument:  Facebook and Twitter and Google became large and powerful mostly by popular acclaim.  Facebook beat out MySpace simply because more people used one than the other.  Twitter the same; Google the same.  Is there an anti-trust problem here?  Perhaps; but it arises from the nature of the internet, from the need to be on one platform with everyone else who wants to be on that platform.  It's tricky to start a conversation on one phone carrier when someone else is on another phone carrier, if the two are not interconnected.  Cell phones finally dissolved the monopoly of "Ma Bell" (the court ordered break up of the Bell companies really didn't do consumers that much good); and that analogy shows up the problem of "breaking up" social media. Social media platforms don't "interconnect" the way telephones do.  Trump is free right now to start a new platform (follow the example of Mike Lindell!).  But the rest of us are just as free to ignore any such platform (follow the example of Mike Lindell!).  Is that something anti-trust law can correct?

I don't see how.*

This is all fodder for "fundraging," which is really what Meadows is on about.  Trump has declared his interest in running for POTUS in 2024; but he's also said he can't announce because then he's subject to election laws he'd just as soon ignore for as long as possible.  It's all about the grift.  
Trump sent that statement out via e-mail, not via his blog; because, you know, "cancelled." I'm disappointed he didn't say he'd been "cancelled."  I mean, he's completely lost the ability to get his lunatic ideas out: I especially like the idea that a bit of dicta from a now-dead Supreme Court Justice about election law has become a solid Constitutional directive written in black-and-white somewhere in the three articles of that document (does Trump even know the Constitution has three articles? Doubtful.).

It's really too bad Trump doesn't enjoy "free speech" anymore.  We'll never know what he thinks.  Still, credit where credit is due.
Meanwhile, we're already at the "um, what...?" stage of this controversy: So, we should pick a multinational corporation as our sovereign, but we should pick the "right" one? Or we shouldn't pick such a sovereign at all? And Facebook is too powerful because it allows so many people to read stuff by Ben Shapiro, Fox News, Sean Hannity, and Dan Bongino? Or because it allows anybody to know anything about Rachel Maddow's show?

People trying to be clever on Twitter when they are not clever probably deserves its own Twitter thread.
Pointing and laughing are always in order.

*We could just nationalize Twitter and Google (You Tube) and Facebook and make them publicly controlled utilities that have to allow everybody on except people who commit crimes or post child pornography or advocate violating the law.  You know, like inciting sedition and insurrection against the government.

Oh, wait....
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1 comment:

  1. The Thought Criminal1:36 PM

    I love how the Republican-fascists are all calling for nationalizing social disease, uh, media companies so they can spread their social illness of believing insane lies.

    ReplyDelete