[c4n4rd]

Tweeter and all others you mentioned are private corporations. Their goal is to turn profit to their shareholders - NOTHING MORE.

He who believes these companies exist as a way for the mass population to voice their opinion and as a way to exercise democracy should rethink what these companies are all about.

Note: I do not necessarily agree with that they do, just pointing out what they are all about.

[sillyquiet]

The scary thing is when you realize the so-called news organizations, for the most part, have exactly the same motivations. NYT, WSJ, et al are, after all, corporations too.

[arca_vorago]

Oblig infographic: http://www.morriscreative.com/wp2011/assets/2012/06/info.jpg

[eli_gottlieb]

Well of course. Who was enough of a sucker to believe that the means of education, information distribution, and public discourse should be privately owned and operated for profit?

[cmdrfred]

So much better if the media was owned and controlled by the government?

[eli_gottlieb]

No, by journalists!

[1337biz]

That's why they need to feel the pain from consumer backslashs. Just look how ridiculous the Pepsi outrage did become.

[fullshark]

And look at how quickly everyone forgot about it

[TeMPOraL]

What outrage? Serious question, I wasn't even aware there was one recently.

[Nadya]

Look up "Pepsi Riot Commercial".

There was a brief and short-lived outrage against Pepsi for a distasteful commercial where a (generic, but people attribute it to BLM) riot was ended by giving a police officer a can of Pepsi.

Or at least, that's what I gathered from reading about it on random comments from unrelated threads on Reddit because I'm out of the loop myself.

E:

Twitter? Meant Reddit. Unimportant change.

[fullshark]

A good run down, with a live link to the commercial: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/business/kendall-jenner-p...

[Karunamon]

Fine - I'll accept that once Twitter stops pretending they were responsible for the Arab Spring. And Reddit stops talking about how they're a place for free expression. And so on.

By all means, curate your own back yard however you want. But misleading your users as to the nature of that curation should be actionable somehow. Enforced echo chambers are fine and dandy, so long as they are disclosed as such.

[hashkb]

Funny. The real world does not work that way. Misleading the public is what power is for.

[zeteo]

> Tweeter and all others you mentioned are private corporations. Their goal is to turn profit to their shareholders - NOTHING MORE.

Not sure what that's supposed to mean. Would it be OK for a food company to use expired ingredients if it increased their profit, or for FedEx trucks to run over people if it helped their bottom line? Private corporations have various degrees of responsibility to the general public, depending on how much harm they can inflict. Twitter has become a major platform for public discourse and it's not like people can move their followers elsewhere. Using Twitter's power to suppress certain kinds of (otherwise acceptable) public statements should be a big no-no.

[nommm-nommm]

Since 'expired' food is almost always perfectly safe for human consumption there's nothing wrong with selling expired food and there's entire stores that have that business model. - http://www.delish.com/food-news/a46182/wefood-denmark-expire...

http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/inside-bostons-expired-food-...

I used to go into a small store when I was a kid and ask for the expired bread. They'd come out of the back with and entire friggin garbage bag full of bread that 'expired' yesterday. That bag was $1.

FedEx truck running over people is illegal whereas Christian bookstores only stocking pro-Christian material is perfectly legal and good business.

[jerf]

You seem to have added to c4n4rd's post the assertion that this is OK. I don't think it was intended that way. The point is not "This is ok because it lines Twitter's pockets", it is more "This is why it is happening. What else did you expect?"

[zeteo]

I think we should expect more, the same way we'd expect food producers to not poison us and truck operators to not run us over. Twitter has become a major platform for public discourse (including elections) and needs to at least have some transparency into their deletion and shadowbanning decisions.

[z4chj]

That comes from government regulation. The FDA keeps your food from poisoning you. As of now, there is no structure in place forcing twitter to keep the spread of information alive and well.

[jerf]

I'd also point out that structurally, food companies are strongly disincentivized to quickly kill their customers, as they'd like to sell you something tomorrow, too. (Slowly killing their customers is a potential strategy, though anyone who wishes to dance on capitalism's grave with that has a lot of very pointy questions to answer about the government's involvement with the way the food industry may be slowly killing us.)

Twitter is mostly incentivized to keep eyeballs on their site no matter what. If that means using highly sophisticated machine learning algorithms to lock people in a soft, warm filter bubble in which they are eternally flattered for their opinions and never encounter a reason to leave, so be it.

In fact arguably Silicon Valley's biggest social-media challenge they are facing right now is that the world is trying to force them to recognize that not everybody wants to be locked in the same bubble that a Silicon Valley liberal does, a lesson that they are still trying to resist. It would probably be worth billions for Facebook and Twitter to give up on that dream and instead help people into their own custom soft warm filter bubble. If they don't do it, somebody else will.

I'm not celebrating this, simply observing that every month the money gradient Facebook, Twitter, and so on are facing to head down this road is going to get steeper.

[JackFr]

I think your analogies are strained.

A better analogy might be to a broadcaster, who because of a monopoly on a scarce public resources, does have certain responsibilities.

But Twitter isn't a broadcaster (nor are they a public utility), and their value is in their network, which they literally have spent billions of dollars creating. It's theirs to do with as they see fit.

[zeteo]

The broadcaster has also spent billions for their network [1] but that doesn't absolve them from responsibilities. Like it or not, Twitter has become a major platform for public speech and it's practically impossible to pack up and take thousands and millions of followers elsewhere. So yes, they have a monopoly on a scarce public resource and should act accordingly. At the very least they should have transparency for their deleting and shadowbanning process. The people who've brought in thousands of followers and kept them on Twitter should have a minimum of rights too.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-rakes-in-45-billion-from-wirel...

[JackFr]

Your argument seems to be that Facebook and Twitter are so successful they need to be treated as a public service.

You feel justified in controlling the behavior of a public company, not through the commercial code or any legal basis, but because you ex post decided the terms of service everyone agreed to upset you.

[metaphorm]

> It's theirs to do with as they see fit.

I don't think you should take for granted that this is true. Even privately owned things still must abide by the law of countries they operate in, and even that is just the most crude level of regulation and responsibility a public service has.

Yes, public service is still public even if privately owned. Anything operating open to the general public in this way has certain responsibilities (above and beyond the law) that go along with that. We live in a civic society and we depend on participants in that society living up to their responsibilities as citizens (including corporate citizens).

A lot of the problems we have in our society now result from the abdication of those responsibilities by the people (and corporations) that act in public without taking responsibility for those actions.

edit, for clarification:

my point is that private ownership does not remove a thing from social responsibilities. I understand that some people disagree with this, but it astonishes me that they do. The basic premise of civilization is finding ways to live together in ways that are a net-benefit.

[nommm-nommm]

>A lot of the problems we have in our society now result from the abdication of those responsibilities by the people (and corporations) that act in public without taking responsibility for those actions.

Such as?

[metaphorm]

the current state of political discourse, while it has many contributors, is certainly partially caused by the abdication of responsibility of the media to pursue truth.

the current state of governance as well is strongly impacted by the pathologies of shareholder capitalism, which leads to businesses seeking to increase their private profits at the expense of literally everything else, including a scorched earth approach to legal regulation that serves the public benefit. the financing of climate-change denial propaganda campaigns by the coal industry is a very good example of this. another good example would be the private prison industry, and its associated lobbyists seeking to increase rates of incarceration.

this applies to individuals as well though, not just corporations. in many places, people have abdicated their responsibilities to their communities, seeking to live in walled off communities that have no interaction with "others" outside the barricades.

I could go on. I think you get the idea.

[geofft]

I've been thinking for a bit that the unchecked free market is effectively just a layer of indirection on politics.

Sure, the government might not be spying on every word I say, but if the only way for me to connect to the internet is through for-profit companies, who are obligated to spy on every word I say to maximize shareholder value, is there any practical difference from living in a surveillance state?

Sure, the government might not be able to send goons after me in my home or my friend's home, but if the only way to get between the two is a private transportation company that asks for the government's goons, is there any practical difference from living in a police state?

Sure, the government might not be able to control the media, but if the media has the freedom to campaign for whatever candidates they like and send their own leaders to work for the government, and non-compliant media is threatened with the inability to access stories that they need for profit, what is the difference from living in a place with state-controlled media?

I absolutely agree with the understanding that private companies can, and often should, do whatever they want. I am also the sort of person who will argue that Twitter or some Twitter-like service should be censoring violent viewpoints (I am pretty supportive of mastodon.social's Terms of Service, for instance). But that's rooted in the same belief: we need to actively make sure that our society is the society we want it to be. It's not enough to make sure that our government is the government we want it to be, and treat everything between the government and the common man as an uncontrollable inevitability.

Fighting for the government to give freedom to corporations to do whatever they wish is very different from fighting for freedom for people.