[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

This kind of pressure on companies to censor seems like an end around on the first amendment. It technically is not the government censoring or mandating censorship, but it uses the threat of government power and the power to irritate and harass for companies that don't toe the line. Unfortunately, I can only see this getting worse. For example, if the Republicans come to power in 2022, I can see them having a committee hold hearings on the "riots" of 2020 and subpoenaing all these companies about how their platform was used to organize the protests/riots. Soon, companies will just censor any attempt to organize a protest online.

[cmiles74]

The larger issue, in my opinion, is that people seem to be looking less for clear and understandable information about current events and more for skewed (possibly even false) information that they find entertaining, comforting, etc.

I can understand why some people might think the next step would be to improve the quality of the information from the sources that are providing this skewed, stilted and possibly even false coverage, but I have trouble seeing this working well enough to improve things in any meaningful way. On the contrary, it seems like this kind of news will be even more sought after as it becomes harder to find.

That said I don't have a good solution. Maybe somehow promoting better sources of news or making it easier for these more reliable news sources to generate income.

[MiroF]

> That said I don't have a good solution. Maybe somehow promoting better sources of news or making it easier for these more reliable news sources to generate income.

I think the basic idea is that the government shouldn't be involved in institutionalizing or promoting preferred media narratives of any form.

I disagree that the "larger issue" is that people are misinformed. In fact, I would suggest that there have been several thousand years where people were horribly misinformed on a number of topics.

[throwawaysea]

> This kind of pressure on companies to censor seems like an end around on the first amendment. It technically is not the government censoring or mandating censorship, but it uses the threat of government power and the power to irritate and harass for companies that don't toe the line.

Absolutely. These tech companies know they face the threat of regulation, whether on anti trust grounds or labor issues or whatever. When Twitter banned Trump, they wrote a blog post (https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...) that offered no good reason and pointed at things like his refusal to attend Biden’s inauguration. AOC also demanded that tech companies censor Parler (https://imgur.com/jJo0lEx), and Apple/Google/Amazon all complied. The timing of this sudden and willing compliance from all these companies who historically would resist, was not coincidental. It happened because there was a coming change of administrations, and this compliance bought them favor.

Glenn Greenwald has written many great articles on this topic, but here’s a particularly relevant one: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-sho...