Social-ist Media
Public options promote the general welfare
Imagine if there was a public option for social media where the only way to “jail” a poster is by a jury of their peers. Community standards established by the users themselves. In fact, that could be the “fee”—you have to moderate content to be able to post content.
There would be no market forces that flood us with promotional shite and whatever the algo has been set to get us to see, to get us to respond, to make us more influential, to make others go buy.
If you 'X' out the ads that your FB friends recommend, you see fewer posts from those friends. When they poll you to see if you want to see more of a given friend's posts, that is a test. Of what exactly, we users can't tell. But it's drawing lines: Those who reply YES, those who reply NO, those who do not reply at all.
The goal, however, is the same—get me to buy like you more, get you to buy like me more, and then find folks that we can influence to buy like us more, and us to buy like them more. If it doesn't end with a sale, Facebook isn't interested—IT CAN'T AFFORD TO BE.
And since private social media cannot work without achieving profitability, the discourse will be limited to only that which fits the current business model. While this has served to temper hate speech, it also chokes out other speech which is offensive to the business—such as that which the state seeks to censor.
In ways, state censorship has been greatly facilitated through private social media, because all that need be done now is pressure a few ownership entities (less than a dozen, really) to silence via algorithm what the state would otherwise find impossible to do through the courts.
Rather than focus on AI, which is also being sculpted in such ways as to ensure the continued rule of the ruling class, we should be taking the immediate infrastructural step of creating a social media platform, by the People, for the People. It would be promoting the general welfare, which was specified as a raison d’etre of the constitution.
Because having to play games when posting about \/\/33D is male bovine excrement.
