Twitter Slapped Kevin McCarthy with ‘Sensitive Content’ Label After Exposing Inflation Under Biden

[tribecavsbrowns]

Originally Posted by AbsoluteVirtue

What is it with all this obsession over social media? Nobody with any commonsense gets their news from twitter and facebook.

This has a "no true Scotsman" flavor to it. You and I both know that virtually everyone uses social media. It's an information-sharing platform; people definitely find news on it just like they find all sorts of information. Smart people and dumb people do this. Everyone does it.

The issue here is that there's an understanding on the part of most people that social media is supposed to be a place for relatively free discussion, short of obscenity, terroristic threats, stuff like that. The implicit deal is that they harvest our data and sell it to advertisers and we get a digital town square where can communicate relatively free.

With that background, it's easy to see how Google or Twitter or Facebook pivoting from that and essentially saying, actually, now we're going to be a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, strikes people as wrong and infuriates them.

[Chowhound]

It's like social media companies aren't really even bother to hide their lefty biases anymore and pretty much openly block anything not lefty approved all under the guise of labeling it misinformation, which pretty much means anything they don't approve of.

Jack Dorsey is such an arrogant A hole. You watch him in congressional hearing and he acts like he can't be bothered to be there and he's just too cool for school man.

[VikingsToValhalla]

Originally Posted by AbsoluteVirtue

What is it with all this obsession over social media? Nobody with any commonsense gets their news from twitter and facebook.

Social media has become the main showcase for public discourse.
It has replaced the townhall, the college campus, and TV talk shows to become the main avenue for people to express ideas.
This is why so many are concerned with social media censorship.

[sholomar]

I'm waiting for these conservative biased forums to get shut down. I'm surprised they are still around... I don't give them more than a few years before google erases them from search results at best, or outright gets them shut down at worst. Conservatives will have to go to Tor, because the internet will be cleansed of everything else. Who would have thought it would have come to this back when I enjoyed the net in it's early days... a carefully controlled wing of the corporate progressive establishment.

[mgdriver74]

The large social media giants are defacto utilities by default because of their influence and should be regulated and treated as such.

When private cable TV services started they achieved pretty much monopoly status and localities did monitor them. Same here.

Standard Oil was broken up due to monopolistic control so not unprecedented.

[swagger]

Originally Posted by AbsoluteVirtue

What is it with all this obsession over social media? Nobody with any commonsense gets their news from twitter and facebook.

Pssst.... you may want to join us in the 21st century....

But seriously, I'm not joking. Twitter especially, but one of the functions that any social media site serves is as a news aggregator. News is broken on Twitter. That's where the journalists ARE.

Your mindset seems to be that "social media" is just random people saying stuff. Much of it is. It's also where every single news organization posts their stories, because that's where the eyeballs are. Nobody goes to Vox.com directly. They go to Twitter, see a link their friend shared, which was originally shared by Vox, and follow the link. That's how the internet works these days.

This is the entire basis for the argument that social media is the "modern public square," which has been affirmed by SCOTUS. It's where people talk about things now. Maybe you go to the Elk's Lodge or beauty parlor to find out what's going on and discuss it, but in 2021, most people use the internet.

Social media sites are mediums, not sources. When some person or organization publishes something to Facebook, it's the person or organization saying it. It's not Facebook saying it. That's the foundation of their Section 230 exemption, and the thing they hide behind as they abuse that exemption. When The New York Times posts something to Twitter, it's The New York Times saying it, not Twitter, or some faceless stranger making some random claim.

In other words, your attitude is akin to claiming that because you heard it on the radio, it can't be news.