RE: Independent Media Duped, Begging Government to Regulate Social Media
Well, I'm glad your informative posted lured me in to comment! Thank you. :)
There is another approach to regulating social platforms that neither of us anticipated in the post thread, and that is voluntary adoption of the Internet Bill of Rights by social platforms. Not only is that a possibility, it just happened! Here's a post with links to the news article and related info. To summarize EFF is championing the Manila Principles On Intermediary Liability and Minds.com has adopted them.
Alternative social network Minds.com has debuted a digital bill of rights amid accusations of bias and political manipulation at Google, Facebook, and other Big Tech companies.
https://steemit.com/informationwar/@justmeagain/alternative-social-network-minds-com-has-debuted-a-digital-bill-of-rights-amid-accusations-of-bias-and-political-manipulation-at
Cool, that's good of them to adopt. But will they always align with it ;)
Inaction costs nothing, so I can't see why they would adopt censorship policies. I've been following the Facebook situation. To summarize, the April and July hearings and the May 1 shareholder meeting resulted in demands from 2 big shareholders to pressure FB to get strict with censorship, ensure 'fake news' and specifically Jones are deplatformed and MSM are always top of the feeds. FB hired thousands to do what the shareholders demanded.
July 25 they had a shareholder conference call and shareholders were told that the 4th quarter profits would be 20%. That's a decent profit for a mid-life company. The profit for previous quarter was double that, but because of the surveillance and censorship demands from the shareholders, hiring expenses would be up 60%.
Well, at about 3:30 one or more shareholders dumped stock, likely while still on the call. The cost was $120B to Zuckerberg!
So, the moral of the story is that censorship is expensive, while allowing free speech is FREE of cost for the platform. I'm sure Ottman knows it.