[wwright]

I think this is an instance of the biggest, most disastrous fallacy of the last half century: that a company is a social utility.

It’s not. It’a a bunch of rich people in California. If you want a public utility for communication and socializing, go help build one. Contribute to Mastodon or the rest of the fediverse. Write to representatives (or become one yourself) and propose legislation to fund a public tool that is actually owned by the people. It could even be part of the fediverse!

But asking Twitter to do any random thing someone wants because they are a big company is insane and is going to cause us nothing but pain.

[Bakary]

But these are the services that people actually use. On Mastodon you end up with... well the sort of person who uses Mastodon. Which means that the people that run those services have some degree of de facto influence, which in turn means that they are likely to end up regulated and constrained by other powerful actors.

Today it's rich people in California, once it was rich people building railroads and pumping oil.

[tempsy]

how is it crazy to want to apply a regulatory framework to certain industries? we do that for cable companies, ISPs, banks, publishers, food producers, restaurants, etc etc. So why not social media?

The only reason is these companies are “new” and were not viewed as much more than a toy until a few years ago and now we’re seeing the consequences of that.

[wwright]

I don’t think wanting a regulatory framework is bad at all (though I think in the last few decades, we have naïvely tried to regulate companies into doing things that are simply counter to their nature rather than solving problems directly, eg minimum wage vs UBI).

A utility is different than a regulated company.