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by chubot 1522 days ago
Not an expert, but how would you incite a riot with the telephone? It just doesn't work.

TV is a closer analogy, but back in the days of broadcast TV, you had to get airtime with one of a dozen networks. (And Trump did this! He had the number 1 show on TV for awhile in the early 2000's. He continued building his brand as a "rich guy who makes deals" there.)

You can't just come back the next day and broadcast another message, i.e. testing what works and iterating. It takes a whole team of people to make a broadcast. Also, the audience would watch TV at home; they didn't have a device to consume the message anywhere. It was fundamentally slower.

Even blogs are slower, although you can definitely get deplatformed for a blog. Blogs lack discoverability; they don't broadcast to followers. In the heyday of blogs most people weren't reading them on their phone.

So social media, and Twitter in particular, is a really effective communication technology for broadcasting sharp messages.

Telephones do have similar issues -- there is a reason that wiretaps exist and that traditionally the phone company was a monopoly with close ties to the government. But they're not a "platform" for broadcast.

1 comments

so, "social networks" are a "very special" kind of webpage that uniquely require suppressing "bad ideas"?