The (tenuous) argument in favor for censorship of social media is that Internet companies might be held responsible if people did Bad Things and blamed the content they'd read on social media. Mercy. With an argument like that, given the number of Bad Things done by people reacting to drugs that may cause anything to pop into their tortured minds, you'd have to censor everything. It'd be easier just to stop teaching people how to read. Let literacy be the peculiar property of the ruling class some corporations seem to want to re-create.
But considering the Twitter foul-up that went into our last dog post makes me consider: Why don't we hold social media responsible for what they do censor?
Twitter has been imposing a certain amount of censorship on all non-paying accounts, apparently, just to motivate people to pay for Twitter. This has of course generated a pushback, which I hope will grow. We should never pay to use any Internet social media. Paid ads might be tolerated just for the purpose of A/B testing, demonstrating to sponsors that nobody trusts or respects corporate advertisements, that a paid ad like "50% Off All Sticker Prices" might attract some customers but a free ad from someone spontaneously tweeting "I like what I bought on sale at Store X this week" is even more profitable for Store X.
So, on a Monday, some Twit I don't know tweeted something like "Please help! This dog is scheduled to be euthanized tomorrow." Because this was a free user whose tweets were being "filtered" so that they trickled into one of my Tweeps' home page at a predetermined rate, such that the Tweep would see more ads and tweets from paid accounts than tweets from fee-free accounts, the Tweep saw and retweeted that message...on the Wednesday. I saw her tweet on the Thursday after the dog was supposed to have been killed on the Tuesday of that week.
Was the dog killed? Is it worth encouraging Twitter's fee-paying, non-listening, control-freaking accounts to open Twitter and find out? I've not done that because nobody can do everything and I can't be a full-time animal rights activist as long as I have to be a full-time Glyphosate Awareness activist. You can, of course, investigate what happened to the dog as you think best.
If the dog was killed, was Twitter to blame? I think a valid case could be made that Twitter was to blame. People tried to save the dog. Twitter interfered.
The redeeming social value of social media is that they make it easy to communicate emergency messages to groups of acquaintances fast. While everyone deplores the way that means teenyboppers broadcasting "emergencies" like "All cool people wear a purple shirt tomorrow," for adult users it does mean things adults would call emergencies.
Like, "Tracy, U R abt to be evacuated fr path of approaching hurricane. Beat the traffic. Come here now."
Or, "Family, I'm stuck in traffic bc hwy bridge collapsed & traffic is being diverted onto 1-lane rds thru sm town I've never visited B4."
Or, "Dog that looks like 1 Tracy reported missing last wk is at monthly-kill shelter."
If those messages don't reach people at the time intended, real harm could be done. If the messages don't reach people because people are walking away from Twitter, leaving the paid accounts to scream at each other until they get tired and Twitter goes bankrupt, then the friends who didn't get the messages will have only ourselves to blame. (It's a chance I'm willing to take because all of my Tweeps can easily find my public e-mail address.) But, if the messages don't reach people because they are using Twitter, or some other social media site, and the site randomly "filters" private users' messages so that they trickle out at the speed of rush-hour commuters being detoured through the one-lane streets of a boring little town they've never visited before, then the harm done would be Twitter's (or the other site's) fault...and the Mean Street's Monthly Kill Dog Pound would be entitled to send Twitter the bill for the gas it used on the dogs.
Twitter has engaged in censorship of specific types of content at the behest of corporate sponsors that wanted to block the flow of information unfavorable to their products. Twitter no longer supports real-time conversations about Glyphosate Awareness, although at least Twitter hasn't been adding robots' refutatins of every worthwhile message on that topic. That happened with the coronavirus vaccine marketing drive, though. I don't remember seeing it happen with my account because I wasn't being followed by companies that produced COVID-19 vaccine, but I saw it happen to Tweeps who were. They'd tweet something legitimate and factual, such as that children are more likely to have advertse reactions to vaccines than they are to have significant symptoms from COVID-19, and get links to "the latest COVID-19 information" supplied by the corporations tacked onto their tweets.
What happens as the various government health agencies increasingly concede that the COVID-19 vaccine was a bust, that most people do seem to have survived it without ill effects but, if anything, being vaccinated against one strain of the virus increased your risk of noticing symptoms from the next strain? Should Twitter be subject to a class-action suit from people who had adverse reactions, or lost friends to reactions, to a vaccine that turned out to be worthless?
It's one thing to find out that you're allergic to the kind of protein used to rear the killed bacteria or virus in the vaccine, as people often do, by going into anaphylactic shock minutes after having the jab. That reaction is not new or unusual, and though it looks horrible, usually no harm is done. In fact it could be claimed that patients who go into anaphylactic shock right in a clinic where they can be treated at once, and know afterward that they should avoid eating chicken or pork or whatever, are better off than patients who might otherwise have got into situatins where anaphylactic shock could not be treated and might have killed them.
It's another thing to have valid warnings, e.g. "Vaccines for the original COVID-19 are USELESS against the delta strain," censored because they didn't fit into a corporation's selfish narrative, be bullied into having an unnecessary vaccination, and be injured by a reaction. Even if it was just common-or-garden-variety anaphylactic shock in a clinic where your life was saved in minutes, the patient's head might have hit something solid as she fell down. And if that happened because she failed to receive confirmation that she was at greater risk from an outdated vaccine to which she was allergic anyway than she was from the virus, I can see why Parag Agrawal has been so protective of his own privacy.
And what if people have criminal intentions, but are subconsciously motivated to stop themselves by making it easy for law enforcement to find him? On uncensored social media an idiot might tweet to a friend, "Let's just clean out that convenience store near the bus stop where the clerk insulted us when we took friends in there for snacks before the party...tomorrow night." The idiots tweet their plans on a Wednesday evening, say. On the Thursday night they approach the store and find it full of police officers. "Here to clean out the store, are you?" drawls a policeman, as two others move to block the door behind the idiots. The store is safe.
But on censored social media the idiots can't even carry on their normal, non-criminal sort of conversation about which of their teachers are most senile, which games and TV programs are most stupid, which of their other "friends" acted most idiotic that day, etc., so their frustration builds up; they're sent to talk to counsellors who think they're least likely to be sued if they recommend popular "medications," one of them develops Prozac Dementia (even though the drug he's given happens to be some other brand, not Prozac), and before he dies from injuries incurred in the process of blowing up the store he still says Twitter did it. It was a secret code message Taylor Swift signalled just to him in her latest super-commercial-hit video. See, these celebrities know kids aren't allowed to have a real voice on Twitter any more but they're young enough to understand. Meanwhile the grieving relatives of the three employees who were in the building realize that, if the kid had been able to tweet about his intentions, police could have been watching the store, and they sue Twitter.
This web site does not condone violence but I can't say that I blame people who might feel moved to call corporate executives in the middle of the night to scream, "I'm awake at this hour because I'm in pain from a reaction to a vaccine that YOU told me to have, which I should never have had, and which didn't even keep me from having the disease later, but I know this particular pain was caused by the vaccine because it started before I had the disease, and it's YOUR FAULT, YOU LYING, LOUSY, SELLOUT SCUM." Or, better yet if they give the matter mature consideration when they're fully awake, have their lawyers send the corporate executives letters that say the same general thing in more intimidating words.
Actually, I sort of like that idea. I like the image of Parag Agrawal and Elon Musk spending the rest of their lives--and they are young men--going to court, being ordered to pay damages, working on desperation jobs to pay all the damages they owe people who have been harmed by censorship, having to work 24 hours at a stretch if they ever want to replace their current pair of shoes.
I think the time may have come for a federal law saying that, if individuals use social media to post things that demonstrably do material harm to others--defamation of character, breaches of privacy, death threats, false alarms, etc.--those individuals bear full responsibility for their actions, but, if social media sites interfere with the transmission of useful information in a way that demonstrably does material harm to others, those social media sites can be sued down to the shirts off the backs of every employee they've got.
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