Because any attempt at moderation would be considered infringement on the first amendment and illegal by the US constitution. Social media is a cesspool without moderation.
That's sort of untrue; the history of radio and television in the US has a significant amount of moderation that did not run afoul of the first amendment. See for the current day: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/fcc-and-speech
Aside from that, you're highlighting a US-specific dynamic. Other nations have different legal standards on speech; e.g. Britain has quite harsh libel laws. My assumption is that certainly some nations (not all) would be in a decent position to offer a well-moderated platform that is in line with their legal standards.
I could be misinformed, but couldn't a contractor or independent company just partner with government agencies (local, state, federal) and thus do away with the first amendment infringement issue?
IIRC, this is how some tech is exempt from FOIA requests (because the tech is "private" even though the end user is the DoD).
Allegedly they basically did that with facebook. The CIA venture arm in-q-tel[1] invested. Presumably they could do some loophole where a contractor runs a site that way but it would probably be a huge headache. Iirc there is a clause that governments cant compete directly with private enterprise, at least, the Federal gov.
I mean it already is to some; some people are pushing for social media to be reclassified as a utility, and some people are banging the drums about their rights being infringed because they can't say what they want on social media, citing free speech.
Twitter is going through that right now; it does not have free speech despite being led by a self-proclaimed free speech absolutionist. Truth Social was supposedly to escape Twitter and co's censorship, but it's one of the least tolerant platforms out there. It goes on.
There was a plot point in Madam Secretary about how the FCC is underutilized for regulating things like social media or deepfake videos on Youtube. Obviously, that's a fictional drama where they can hand-wave solutions as needed, but I do feel like in the US, federal regulators are being underutilized, or overall don't have the teeth I would expect.
EDIT: This is an idea that I’ve recently been advocating for; I just don’t know where to start. We have public parks, why can’t we have public spaces? Offer a contract every few years to be bid by large corporations such as AWS, or Microsoft. Administration by semi-public entities such as universities or NPR. Make it join the Fediverse to enable sharing of content.
What am I missing?
EDIT: User submitted content would be bound by CC licensing.
Arguable IMO it could be argued for civic engagement and discourse and education. That’s the charter as I understand for NPR, I don’t see why a public social network couldn’t fall under that.
Misinformation on social media exists today, I don’t see why we couldn’t argue as a society that public discourse on the network couldn’t be perceived as a way to educate the public.
As far a infrastructure, just limit content type and posting limits (time gate posts on topics, or limit 1 post per day, etc.)
Companies would get public data to be trained since everything would be CC licensed. And a contract to be won for reserved services.
Which is “totally” different than US corporations. The American ones also comply with government requests, supply back doors or capture the traffic at an ISP level.
honestly not a bad idea either, a universal laptop program could probably almost recoup it's cost just be obsoleting a bunch of badly negotiated or thought out school hardware/ipad programs lol.
something modular like framework laptop would work well
I don't; FISA courts & Snowden's revelations have basically exposed facts that the US government agencies have open back doors to all data in the big tech companies.
Many businesses actively block communication among employees, by e.g. forbidding the creation of teams in Teams. Some others have a policy to have HR or mechanical turks monitor Slack. Some others add your direct manager to every channel you are.
Why would the government want to facilitate communication between citizens?
> Why would the government want to facilitate communication between citizens?
I have thought about this, and the only idea that would probably be useful for public support is discourse in support of education/information.
Phrased differently, social media amplified disinformation. Arguably if done correctly discourse can be done without uselessness.
In other words, I would argue that social media could be useful for example: to provide near real time updates on public concern: Wildfires, for example.
But I would argue that you don't want government supported "influencers" or, you know, tax payer money being used to post cat memes.
I feel like the author answers his own question- Government is happy to use existing platforms and avoid diverting tax dollars to compete with the private sector.
USPS is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government. They have around 13M visits per day [1]. Their website looks modern although I'm uncertain about their uptime.
Does WeChat not count? It seems like the biggest government controlled social media on the planet. Maybe the biggest social media on the planet period.
Social media is relatively new and has really gone mainstream within the last decade. Also, you could argue most social media are partly government-built since silicon valley was created by the government.
The real question is why we don't have a government email service? Imagine how great it would be if the post office had an email service for your official correspondence. Email is many decades old and still nothing.
A US government run social media site would be terrible. For one, our political parties are extremely polarized, so any subjective moderation would flip with regime changes. To avoid this, it'd just become linkedin. Vacuous virtue-signaling 'safe' garbage.
Both parties virtue signal with safe topics, but they disagree on what counts as safe (or virtuous).
Simple examples: every public Democratic figure will support pride month and every Republican will support the 2nd Amendment, regardless of what they actually think about the issues. If they don't, their own side will eat them.
I agree with your first point, but I’m unsure about the second.
I don’t think many Democrats secretly don’t support pride month or many Republicans secretly don’t support the 2nd amendment, but then go on to publicly show support so their side doesn’t attack them.
There's a certain baseline level of affirmation that's sometimes required for it not to be considered that one specifically disagrees with some hot button topic that was brought up. It's what's being spoken against with the sentiment, "Not everything has to be about X."
It's less that one secretly doesn't support X, just that they're talking about Y right now as a separate issue from X. X is important, and may even be related to Y, but Y is what's being discussed. Such an assertion is often met with, "Oh, so you don't support X!?" and that comes off as hostile, regardless of actual intentions.
The context of that description is LinkedIn, and it's an accurate way to describe interactions on LinkedIn. I get the point you're making about politics, but it's not what GP was talking about (IMO).
I agree that it’s accurate to describe LinkedIn, but the larger context is subjective moderation on a government run social media platform, so I was trying to point out that what’s safe on LinkedIn is generally considered to be good by the Democratic party.
I disagree. Government run social media has no reason to promote engaging(antagonizing) content towards you. You log in, see a post or two from your local, state, and Federal representatives and departments that no longer have to post on a dozen different private social media to disseminate public info and some post from people you have specifically chosen to follow. A chronological feed too, the site doesn't need to keep you scrolling and engaged to view ads.
Open up the API and let people layer their own engagements on top of it.
I dont agree, but thats okay. You and I don't have the same level of trust that future government employees and leadership will be objective and reasonable with their interpretation of what we post to our friends and family, I guess. I hope you're the right one here, but I cant make myself believe it.
Why can't this just be on their website? Not everything needs engagement from the masses.
Also building online communities is incredibly difficult and resource heavy, seeing that we can barely get enough funding for teachers to run their classrooms appropriately would this be the best use of taxpayers money?
Great idea I think we can fund teachers and provide a simple social media site for all.
Think about why this would be incredibly difficult and resource heavy? The US social media site doesn't have to try and serve video reliably while threading in ads to make a profit. Sure people can try to upload video in plain text and create their own clients to ingest it, like I said "Open up the API and let people layer their own engagements on top of it."
It's an infrastructure project, like national highway or the internet.
I'd love to see it (in a hypothetical sense slightly more than the real sense) just to see the "tyrannical moderation" case law that comes of it. If they wanted to add a bunch of "analytics" suddenly there's real government contention around online privacy.
In the long term, it seems like it has a lot of potential to be a Good Thing but it depends a lot on how it actually plays out.
Whether it would suck or not, it’s really the only place where laws the rules would be what the law actually is —-Truly free speech and a platform where people can legitimately vote and be part of the rule making process.
Having a public competitor to private enterprise only improves things like a properly funded USPS over UPS/FedEx or even banking.
Because governments that want to exert that kind of control on the population are already totalitarian, which means they already have control over companies within their borders, including social media platforms. The government doesn't need to build it to control it.
Many municipalities have come up with the idea of developing their own local platforms and fora. Of course that ship had long, long sailed and they soon discovered the mechanics of the network effect.
Also, they didn't have the means and resolve to launch even a small platform. In short: only the trolls were interested.
Now what might have worked, is if at some point a government (or a couple) took over a small, but modestly successful platform (say, Twitter?) claiming that it is important enough as a commons.
Not claiming this is a good idea, but there are precedents with other "public infrastructures" (transport, energy, telcos, banks, harbours, airports, retail). So why not social media, news?
Because if you have a private company that is tightly controlled and essentially acts as a projection of your state, while pretending to be independent of it, you can trick some people into thinking it's a free market. This applies well beyond social media.
Because no matter what country you are in, and what the laws are, or what the culture is, there are better more important uses of state resources. No matter how far left or right someone is on the political spectrum this is not a popular idea.
So you want to take tax money to build a social network. And it continues to cost a lot of money to operate all the time? And it doesn't generate profits? And it just creates a big headache for everyone involved? And the headache never goes away unless we shut it down? Only an incompetent and self destructive government would build this.
92 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadClosest thing I know of is this: https://social.network.europa.eu/explore
Aside from that, you're highlighting a US-specific dynamic. Other nations have different legal standards on speech; e.g. Britain has quite harsh libel laws. My assumption is that certainly some nations (not all) would be in a decent position to offer a well-moderated platform that is in line with their legal standards.
IIRC, this is how some tech is exempt from FOIA requests (because the tech is "private" even though the end user is the DoD).
[1]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-media-is-a-tool-of-the-c...
Twitter is going through that right now; it does not have free speech despite being led by a self-proclaimed free speech absolutionist. Truth Social was supposedly to escape Twitter and co's censorship, but it's one of the least tolerant platforms out there. It goes on.
EDIT: This is an idea that I’ve recently been advocating for; I just don’t know where to start. We have public parks, why can’t we have public spaces? Offer a contract every few years to be bid by large corporations such as AWS, or Microsoft. Administration by semi-public entities such as universities or NPR. Make it join the Fediverse to enable sharing of content.
What am I missing?
EDIT: User submitted content would be bound by CC licensing.
Misinformation on social media exists today, I don’t see why we couldn’t argue as a society that public discourse on the network couldn’t be perceived as a way to educate the public.
As far a infrastructure, just limit content type and posting limits (time gate posts on topics, or limit 1 post per day, etc.)
Companies would get public data to be trained since everything would be CC licensed. And a contract to be won for reserved services.
For example: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/23/china-to-place-government-of...
something modular like framework laptop would work well
They’re very similar to SM In that they support discussions around topic-based threads, invariably with occasional voting features.
I wouldn't trust it. I wouldn't use it.
What if it were open-source software, e.g. like farcaster.xyz, with some level of cryptographic tamper-proof assurances?
But...
Many businesses actively block communication among employees, by e.g. forbidding the creation of teams in Teams. Some others have a policy to have HR or mechanical turks monitor Slack. Some others add your direct manager to every channel you are.
Why would the government want to facilitate communication between citizens?
I have thought about this, and the only idea that would probably be useful for public support is discourse in support of education/information.
Phrased differently, social media amplified disinformation. Arguably if done correctly discourse can be done without uselessness.
In other words, I would argue that social media could be useful for example: to provide near real time updates on public concern: Wildfires, for example.
But I would argue that you don't want government supported "influencers" or, you know, tax payer money being used to post cat memes.
-is used by tens/hundreds of millions of people every day to share and view large files
-have an usable UI
-doesn't go down 3 times a week
?
USPS is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government. They have around 13M visits per day [1]. Their website looks modern although I'm uncertain about their uptime.
[1] https://analytics.usa.gov/postal-service
The real question is why we don't have a government email service? Imagine how great it would be if the post office had an email service for your official correspondence. Email is many decades old and still nothing.
It’s noteworthy to mention that what you are describing is just what one party likes and the other does not.
Simple examples: every public Democratic figure will support pride month and every Republican will support the 2nd Amendment, regardless of what they actually think about the issues. If they don't, their own side will eat them.
I don’t think many Democrats secretly don’t support pride month or many Republicans secretly don’t support the 2nd amendment, but then go on to publicly show support so their side doesn’t attack them.
There's a certain baseline level of affirmation that's sometimes required for it not to be considered that one specifically disagrees with some hot button topic that was brought up. It's what's being spoken against with the sentiment, "Not everything has to be about X."
It's less that one secretly doesn't support X, just that they're talking about Y right now as a separate issue from X. X is important, and may even be related to Y, but Y is what's being discussed. Such an assertion is often met with, "Oh, so you don't support X!?" and that comes off as hostile, regardless of actual intentions.
Open up the API and let people layer their own engagements on top of it.
Also building online communities is incredibly difficult and resource heavy, seeing that we can barely get enough funding for teachers to run their classrooms appropriately would this be the best use of taxpayers money?
Think about why this would be incredibly difficult and resource heavy? The US social media site doesn't have to try and serve video reliably while threading in ads to make a profit. Sure people can try to upload video in plain text and create their own clients to ingest it, like I said "Open up the API and let people layer their own engagements on top of it."
It's an infrastructure project, like national highway or the internet.
In the long term, it seems like it has a lot of potential to be a Good Thing but it depends a lot on how it actually plays out.
Having a public competitor to private enterprise only improves things like a properly funded USPS over UPS/FedEx or even banking.
Also, I wonder why we don't have postal aliases so I can give someone an "address" to which they can send mail regardless of my true location.
Also, they didn't have the means and resolve to launch even a small platform. In short: only the trolls were interested.
Now what might have worked, is if at some point a government (or a couple) took over a small, but modestly successful platform (say, Twitter?) claiming that it is important enough as a commons.
Not claiming this is a good idea, but there are precedents with other "public infrastructures" (transport, energy, telcos, banks, harbours, airports, retail). So why not social media, news?
So you want to take tax money to build a social network. And it continues to cost a lot of money to operate all the time? And it doesn't generate profits? And it just creates a big headache for everyone involved? And the headache never goes away unless we shut it down? Only an incompetent and self destructive government would build this.