[pembrook]

When you grant the government more control over the world to supposedly “protect” you, unfortunately those powers aren’t always wielded by people you would have voted for.

But this is often fine if there’s real harm there. Eliminating the harm often outweighs the risk of centralized abuse of power.

But when the harms you’re supposedly protecting against aren’t actually real (the social media hysteria is a classic moral panic), you’re simply creating legal levers for control over all media that is just waiting to be abused by bureaucrats and government employees, most of whom are non-elected. Even the elected Commission has already proven they will happily force through unpopular legislation in bad faith.

People’s naive inability to understand the mechanics of this is astounding to me. You do not grant powers to government that aren’t absolutely necessary because they all power is abused and government power is implicitly enforced via a gun to your head.

[jampekka]

The government is an institution protecting us from commercial interests. The government also protects against e.g. abject poverty and dying of easily treatable medical conditions. And also upholds e.g. property rights, which you probably hold absolutely necessary.

Society works on balance of power. The government is part of that balance. Ideally the government serves the interests of people, that's the democracy part. In practice that's far from perfect, but it's still not some absolute evil constantly repressing us.

[pembrook]

Yes and commercial entities aren’t some absolute evil constantly repressing us either.

Both government and private entities have checks on their power in the form of voting (government) or in the case of commercial entities, the market itself (voting with your dollar). Both entities can and do abuse their power.

However, only one group is always granted a monopoly and legally allowed to force you to comply and buy their products at gunpoint (government).

[intended]

Your model has a major gap in it.

Markets don’t come into existence ex nihilo. They come into existence by regulation setting the rules to ensure that the system works for humans.

You have nothing without regulation and government power, setting up the rules and enforcing them.

Further, when we look at the merits of the case which is driving this entire conversation, Meta acted in a manner that most people would consider evil.

And the market is rewarding them for it.

[jampekka]

More or less the definition of a state is that it upholds the monopoly of violence within its borders. In modern liberal states that monopoly comes with extensive regulations on how, when and by whom violence should be used. This is called the rule of law. The regulations are usually broadly enumerated in the constitution or similar basic law, and in more detail in ordinary legislation. In democratic states these are ideally determined by the population, usually via some representatives.

Sorry if it sounds like I'm stating the obvious, but this is the rationale why many people think that some powers may be granted to the institution with the sole legitimate power to force you to comply at gunpoint.

[pembrook]

Yes and I’m not arguing against the theory, I’m arguing against the reality of how governments actually work in practice. (Hint: they aren’t perfect)

The worlds worst atrocities; genocides, mass murder on the scale of millions, Mao’s Great Leap Forward (the largest mass starvation event of all time), constant wars, authoritarian brutality that exists globally today, etc…

None of these things are due to the actions of supposedly “evil” capitalist companies.

There’s far more capacity for harm in your own government than there is in any private company.

So I'll restate my original point which nobody seems interested in addressing head-on: granting government the ability to meddle in things is inherently dangerous, and should not be cheered on especially when we’re talking about regulating the entirety of modern media. One poorly placed sentence in a piece of legislation and suddenly you've opened the door to killing all freedom of the press when the cultural wind changes.

As a Finnish person (guessing by the name Pekka -- I also live in Finland), you will find this difficult to understand because Finland is tiny, hyper-nationalist, ethnically homogenous, and Europe is currently peaceful. But just imagine what Finland would look like today if the civil war went the other way. I think you might be on the other side of this argument.

[Hikikomori]

Unless they regulate how algorithms can work rather than filtering what they can show?