Social Media Openness

is this enforced though? culture dictates tolerance of views if the person is being peaceful and nondisruptive, which is not what is occuring in our social media

This is where the dissonance kicks in, because regulation for open discussion is antithetical to my views, since I believe less regulation is generally a good idea. however, in the bigger picture, regulations and government intelligence deals are what allowed socials to become so large and dominate, and enable them to enact control of speech. In essence we are at this point in need of a solution because of regulations to begin with.

show proof, explain

also, capitalism generates corporations, corporations use the state to enforce their regulations
you're spinning in circles barking at your own tail, really

I oppose censorship regardless of whether it's done by private companies or governments. It's just as bad for a private company to violate someone's basic rights as it is for the government to do so. I cannot overstate how depressing it is to hear so-called leftists cheering on censorship and saying shit like "they're a private company so they can do what they want".

That said, I think we're past the point where anything can be done about the likes of facebook. Social media is a fantastically good tool for propaganda and advertising, and even most leftists don't seem to give a fuck about that. As long as money can be exchanged for influence, democracy is fundamentally broken. It is becoming easier and easier to spread misinformation and control the populace, and I have no idea how we can solve that problem.

But there's a difference, malls and diners, although they are public forums, have the primary function of shopping, and thus need to create space for anti-social elements in its structure.
Facebook and Youtube on the other hand have the forum, and the people and content in it, as their product, their goal is to get you to waste as much time as possible browsing, and for that they curate their content, either by making an online bubble or by deliberately stirring controversy in order to rake in clicks.

I disagree with this. The main reason there's so little competition in the field is because of the network effect. Government agencies certainly help fund facebook and their ilk, but social media would have grown this large and cancerous regardless. If it wasn't the government encouraging censorship, it would have been private companies wanting their brands protected from criticism (this already goes on, by the way).

Wake me up when the same governments admit to abuse pedophilia as a censorship hammer for revenue increase, while deliberately putting more children in harms way.

no, it was market forces. learn economics, it's good for you. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

I see this moreso from logical analysis. patriot act, NSA leaks, verizon fiber optic backbone, all illegal gov spying. Why not make facebook where the citizens choose to participate. Then give incentives to that company for influence and growth. These companies pop in and out of the white house revolving doors, and pic related.

I understand your point, and I am no means arguing for monopolistic control, but I believe the corruption and heavily socialist elements of our governmental regulations allowed facebook to become so strong and influential

Agree with everything you say. I don't think we are past the point, I hope something can be done.

so I guess that would be a reason why we need to change the way our socials work then

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I see the conglomeration of users is what creates a larger userbase. so i guess the issue would be not more of how, but what Zig Forums thinks of regulating the censorship of socials.

I was trying to keep Trump's name out of this just to see if there is a difference. What does Zig Forums think of Trump regulating the censorship of socials?

He'll probably fuck it up, but given the current attitudes on the left and right I trust him slightly more than I'd trust someone like Hillary.

throw the book at facebook, make them bite it and then jump down on their head, tbh.

I don't think you know what that word means.

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Socialism is when the government does stuff, and the more stuff it controls and does, the more socialister it is

Why do Americans push this? Like genuine question, why is this the definition of socialism here?

Rhetorical question?

I actually support censorship on websites (Zig Forums will ban you for various things). Everyone knows that if you don't moderate your community it will turn to shit. It'll just be overrun with porn, trolls or just insane robots programmed from a basement somewhere in the former Yugoslavia. That is guaran-fuckin-teed to happen to anyone website which doesn't have rules.

The only difference with Twitter and Facebook is that they aim to grow to include the whole planet in the name of "connecting everyone." Well, what do you do if people on the website are using it to orchestrate a genocide in Myanmar? Hell if I know.

Mainly though I think the real problem with social media is not censorship really but the lack of consistent standards and transparency. I'm reading that the CEO of Twitter personally intervened to keep Alex Jones on the platform even though the employees – the actual workers in the company (!) – wanted to ban him for breaking the rules. Well, right there you have a problem. Either ban him or don't, but at least be consistent in how you apply those rules.

Just use mastodon and gnu social. It's a federation each with their own set of rules.
fuck twitter, fuck cripplechan, fuck fullchan, fuck facebook, fuck tumblr, fuck Instagram, fuck snapchat, fuck leddit, fuck slack and why does the SRA want to use that proprietary PoS anyway, cant they use matrix,tox,or a pidgin protocol?

This is not censorship…this is preventing spam. Censorship only targets opinions, which is always a crime. Remember your own opinion has no holding ground if you don't let your opponents speak. Supporting censorship means being a fascist.

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God, Fascist really has become as useless a buzzword as Socialism has. You're using that word, but I don't think you know what that means.

And all that because you cannot stand someones opinion…a true fascist.

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so why do people complain that a conspiracy theorist was kicked off a platform for videos of people stealing aeroplanes, photos of lunch, and furry porn

You make a good point. I don't know, in the most general case, how to distinguish between well intentioned expression and malicious spam.
As says, decentralization is probably the best solution. Keep the content filtering separate from the content hosting, so if people desire they can see the raw, unfiltered feed.

No. Censorship includes art, literature, and other forms of expression. Burning art galleries isn't any better than burning libraries.

What is "Fascism" for you even lmao

A lot of the consolidation of media was due to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 signed under Clinton. Before that we had dozens of major media corporations, now most of our media is controlled by a small handful, and it's always getting more centralized (see Disney taking control of 21st Century Fox for instance).

wait what? why do I agree with Zig Forums I honestly thought you guys would love censorship

Off topic clarification. I view socialist elements as, government ensuring equal ownership of X. A distilled proto version could be regulations enacted to ensure fairness. So in my mind these governmental regulations that interfered with the market were a poor version of government interference by propping and allowing socials to do the unethical things they do.

This actually made me laugh. Kinda, see above.

Americans being stupid is a stereotypical meme. Sometimes it is true, but intelligence does not equal common sense. We can see this with the world's governmental leaders in the past two decades.

Because some fascist didn't like his opinion. As for the spam…YouTube indoctrinated their followers to indulge in spam. It makes revenue over there.

Which is a form of opinion. If somebody destroys books or paintings it's because they don't like what the artist is saying with it. Doesn't matter if it's on political or personal level. Still fascism.

clarification
restrictive regulations at a face value of ensureing fairness, but end up doing the opposite

stfu liberal

that's not a very nuanced view of socialism

based

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Regulatory fairness is the opposite of socialism. It is a way to enforce the current order by making things a little bit more bearable. Keynesian economics came about trying to save capitalism from itself and not some push by socialists for example.

I mean people shit on Something Awful but Lowtax had this figured out 20 years ago. Everyone who gets banned gets put on a big board with the reason they got banned so everyone can see.

He did an interview here which is pretty good.

nymag.com/selectall/2018/04/an-apology-for-the-internet-from-the-people-who-built-it.html

The one time I come to /leftypol and they call ME a liberal. Now I know why you guys are so low on the board list. Get your shit together and read a book that wasn't approved by your mothers every once in a while. Jesus H. Christ.

No fascism is oppressing everything you don't like.

This really doesn't make any sense. Censorship is basically what "private" means. If you privately own something that means the right to keep other people out as you see fit. If private companies are not allowed to censor people or ideas they don't want in their private space, then there is no such thing as Fox News. There's really no such thing as a left- or right-wing website in general. Without "censorship" you can't combine with like minded people to promote a particular view (which inherently means censoring contrary views in that private space).

Saying "I oppose censorship by private companies" is basically like saying "I oppose the existence of private companies", which somehow I suspect you don't.

The more fundamental mistake here is thinking of Facebook and Twitter as "public commons." They are data-collection and advertising machines. So we're going to have the government regulate them somehow – and that will benefit socialists? Well maybe. I don't really know.

because you are one. also, your computer habits are worrying the rest of the care home, mr. boomer. please go talk to the other boomers in the rec room for once

still brainlet tier.

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that's because you're from a perspective vortex where Zig Forums is imagined to be the opposite of Zig Forums on everything, rather than it's own place with it's own aims, objectives and positions. if it's any consolation, the entire Internet lives in a perspective vortex nowadays.

I agree, I feel the same has happened with socials as well, aside from the need users to get users issue. Another off topic, what do you think of Zig Forums agreeing wholeheartedly with this?

Yeah, I could debate the definition of socialism and it's parallels to our government all day.

I guess there is censorship as a company and employee and their is censorship as a consumer. Chef boy r dee can't tell me I can't enjoy it because I'm fascist, I can still buy their product. Same thing with facebook.

I think this is how we should think of them.

I'm not offended, and I guess it is good I came here then. You guys are honestly nice, and the issues Zig Forums is concerned with are the same issues you are. Once I guess we all figure out it's the jews then the world will be a better place.

It's capitalism

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broken clock etc. though they oppose it for shortsighted reasons

we tend to define socialism in the classic way i.e. abolition of private property and worker self-management

read a book.
I beg you.

Dude
Why so many fags still love that ancient myth

Yes they can. If you were buying product direct from them, they could choose to not sell to you because you're a fascist. Cans of pasta are typically sold by retailers though, not directly by the producer. So in that situation, who buys it is up to the retailer. But if you were buying it wholesale direct from them, yes they absolutely can refuse to sell to you. If a retailer announced it was promoting fascism, Chef-Boy-R-Dee could announce in response that it was no longer selling to that retailer.

No you couldn't. You have a boomer tier understanding of what Socialism is if you think there's any comparisons to be made outside of superficial ones.

Complete disclosure: you are suffering from Stockholm syndrome and associating yourself with Capitalists, while you clearly aren't. Yes, I'm pretty sure you are not top 0.1%.

Seek help.

Indifferent. Since there is no difference between "good/bad" corporations and "bad/good" government.

The only place for any Bourgeois government is at the end of the rope.

More generally I think these Silicon Valley libertarians fetishize "information" like the old slogan "information wants to be free." But that ignores the material differences between the people who own the biggest computers and those who don't. It's an uber-libertarian, techno-dystopian idea.

qz.com/87795/free-information-as-great-as-it-sounds-will-enslave-us-all/

cnbc.com/2018/08/31/jaron-lanier-tech-needs-to-clear-the-trash-out-of-the-internet.html

They aren't.

They're supporting an agenda to make the internet more like TV - easier to censor, fewer choices, and harder to actually take part in. And fundamentally, their relationship with sites like Facebook is a corporatist one - the state is most likely encouraging monopolies here, where Facebook provides stuff they want (spying) and the state will fuck with their competition and make it harder to operate independently.

Trump, who recently brought this up (though others, like Al Franken I think, have brought up vaguely similar suggestions in the past) is unambiguous - the agenda here is obliquely pro-censorship. The opposition to net neutrality allows for ISPs to have the legal capability to selectively censor and interfere in information - something which had previously been challenged by the FCC since the '90s. This goes hand-in-hand with his wife's little crusade against "cyber bullying," which was always a pretty empty term but now proves particularly vapid. And the current FCC, the same one which reversed on net neutrality, also went and shut down Alex Jones' broadcast in Texas.

And to be clear, this isn't all Trump. Congress passed SESTA, which has had the effect of actually shutting down some hookup sections, suppressing sex talk, and taking down several escorting sites and forums. The actual effect on the ability of law enforcement to stop cases of sex trafficking is dubious, as sites like Backpage actually had resources to report ads directly to the authorities. However, it makes it more difficult to talk about sex or run a website on which users may talk about sex.

They're also pushing hard against "fake news" and the political pressure is generating further censorship from these sites of things that are not fake news and organizations that are being branded dubiously. What they're doing here isn't really solving the problem - it was marketing that pushed garbage to the front.

The government has no intention of preventing them from censoring anything. The government is going to use any power it has over them to censor and to make sure that the things they censor are the only things around. Pic related is the current President Pro Tempore of the senate, during his "federal probe into violent video games!" period. This is a moral panic, and it's over access to ideas that the politicians do not like and are nearly unified in not liking.

The only potential intervention the government can do that could be good would be to economically discourage monopolies and encourage affordable competition and small sites that can exist in the longterm. This latter part is mostly about locally controlled, competitive communications infrastructure and keeping the price of hosting and server operation low as well as the prices of other necessities. Some internal federal reforms would be very useful, too - cut relations between social media companies, telecoms, and agencies like the FBI, NSA, and CIA.

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Well in previous post this was mostly in jest. I'm a previous neocon bush lover believing we need to protect isreal, but I have such a disenchantment with media and limited choice (6 companies for 327,000,000 people) that I see the statistical overrepresentation. And multiple other reasons as well. Pic related.

But it's not commonly practiced and hence this issue is where we find ourselves today.
Is private company censorship ok in social media?

I am offended, and so is my 401k. You don't think the USA government has any elements of socialism?

Not 0.1%. Upper middle, if you are talking economic status.

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I mean,
or
not
I was unclear

agree
agree

Do you think this would be successful? How would he enact such a thing? I cannot imagine how he would enact the opposite which is what I would believe to be true.

wait where am i again?

All put there by the forces of capitalism. They got forced into banking and mercantilism by christendom and since capitalism is self-reproducing monopoly they stayed there.

Where? Where could you find the tiniest bit of socialism in the US government? What part of the US government is trying to democratize the workplace?

So still working class, not even close to "the 1%".

So, a prole (or from family of proles).

A couple months ago i did a crusade to find where the world controling jews worked
I did not found much
The are only overepresentid in american media
But you know another nationality controling the american media: the irish
Amerimutt anons should have an explanation
Like people seem to go from mafias to tv shows in the states

Heres my stance on the biggest issue that popped up in this thread, and I'm attempting to be objective.

The US government has progressed from a capitalist republic to a corrupt corprocratic socialism. There are two types of socialism, the theoretical and the realistic. If you concentrate on the realistic, you will find that socialism inevitably results in: a large government enacting regulations, a governmental ruling elite, and a loss of citizen control and assets. So your definition of socialism is
mine is
my boomer definition would be to accept your definition and include realism and likelihood. The end results are the same. The US has elements of socialism because it is succumbing to the same fate, because it enacted policies that mimic socialism even though they may not have been as rigidly defining as you would like. Here's the similarities I'm talking about

Actual examples of an abolition of private assets.

My point is abolition of private property is much too similar to regulations leveling the playing field.

You never once connected the dots between classical socialism and the out of control capitalism that you want to believe is secret socialism.
Didn't happen even once so how the fuck does this puzzle piece together?

See

Everything you call socialism is capitalism in decline.

(coming from my vortex here) what about the jews that put forth the effort to remain leaders of communism, and in turn starved so many russians. Do you believe USSR had a strong Jewish influence?

I don't think there is a home base. I think it is genetic. Germans are punctual, icelanders are stoic, french are dramatic, and jews are nepotists.

but that is our duality, we both see the problems and we both have different ways of solving it. I purposely tried to avoid the following tactic, because I wanted to know what you truly think, but it is inevitable.

How come capitalism survives longer and stronger than socialism?

These are measures introduced by capitalism to keep socialism in check. Marx called it "bourgeois socialism" (still nowhere like true socialism of course). Workers get some gibs from the capitalist government and forget about class struggle for socialism, basically. Why do you think people like Zuckerberg and Elon Musk promote an Universal Basic Income? It is their interest so they don't get strung up and their property taken by disgruntled workers…

How is this not capitalism?

Your mistake, as with any self-avowed capitalist, is thinking of "the government" as a transcedental entity with its own agency instead of a tool of the ruling class - the capitalists

Who were the jewish leaders of the USSR? We got a siberian, a georgian, an ukrainan and a russian and so on. The only jew in the ussr with any control at any point was ⛏️rotsky and he got ousted pretty fucking hard.

We live in a capitalist world where the capitalists control the production, media and the worlds resources. The ussr never stood a chance against that power. It is the very same power you try to defend.

Jews were overrepresented in the Soviet government (less than some minorities like the Baltics however! but you never hear about a Baltic conspiracy) but they were never even remotely a majority. That is straight up a nazi-fabricated myth. The USSR fought against religious Judaism, opposed Zionism, bombed Israel etc…

Also a major part of why famines happened in earlier USSR is because Western governments literally prohibited the Soviets to use their gold standard in foreign trade, and demanded they export grain instead!

Maybe we need a little bit of both.

Then everyone's happy right?

Untill it comes to acting upon what you said atleast and then suddenly Zig Forums changes their mind completely do protect bourg intrest.

No, we won't be happy until all private property is abolished, and bourgs do not exist.

Of course, personal property like houses, cars, computers etc are different.

National pride and culture are good as long as they have a proletarian nature. The USSR promoted culture and art.

No racial boundaries should exist in law, but we should strive to establish a world order where say africans can and will happily and peacefully live in a socialist Africa and develop their own society and culture, only moving if they legitimately have an interest in local culture and customs

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test

natsoc

wtf i love censorship now.

Well that was the best description I had about Not Socialism without hitting too hard on jews and race. Maybe Zig Forums should go NutSac without the race part.

There is no glorification of socialism in media. Sometimes the media will praise socialist countries for minor shit like women's rights to make common people feel like the media is impartial. But capitalist media will NEVER praise the core concepts of socialism - ABOLITION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY. EVEN MARX HIMSELF WROTE THAT CAPITALIST GOVERNMENTS LIKE BISMARCK'S WILL ADOPT ELEMENTS OF SOCIALISM TO PLACATE THE MASSES, BUT THEY WILL ALWAYS REJECT THE CORE DEMANDS OF SOCIALISM. WHAT YOU CALL CULTURAL MARXISM IS CAPITALISM MAKING SMALL CONCESSIONS TO PRESERVE ITSELF.

N.ational Socialism implies class collaboration, a pipe dream of capitalists and workers forgetting their differences because they are bound by nation. That is impossible. Class collaborationism preserves the rule of capitalists. Otherwise, we do not really reject nation. Lenin and Stalin recognized national pride as long as it is proletarian in nature.

trump isn't going to regulate shit. He want's business to stay in America, if he starts clamping down with regulations these businesses will make a flight to safety somewhere like ireland, malta, lichtenstein, gibraltar, lithuania or some other unregulated paradise.

Basically the same way Bush enacted it - with support from congress and the security state, using fear as an excuse to manufacture consent.

I'm a Georgist, for clarification. But I do think that less interference from a capitalist state in information is good for socialists and anarchists. The internet is essentially like a giant library, built on publicly funded infrastructure - the government's job in any case should be to maintain that infrastructure and keep it unfuckedwith. Private monopolies on that are really more threatening than online monopolies, as the former are actually in a position to control the technology and information itself.

There's something pretty basic we could do to prevent the prevalence of monopolies in general - reinstate the strict rules about incorporation which existed in the US's early years. Limit their lifespans and what they can do so they don't grow into these unaccountable extra-state actors we see today. The US was founded in the time of the East India Company, and they looked on that sort of thing unfavorably.

To clarify on this, I meant "the same way Bush enacted reforms which served to broaden state power."

it angers me even I am mostly numb

If the internet is a library, it is the the library of Babel.
Tbh as time goes on I'm more and more skeptical of the underlying dynamics of the technology and humanity themselves. Narratives where a pure thing was corrupted are some of the most naturally attractive stories, but it may well be that the thing here (i.e. the Internet) was corrupt from the start, with an appearance of decline in reality just being the system fully establishing itself.

Not that I'm saying we should get rid of it, since that would be a futile goal. But recognizing it might be something.

It's possible for things to get worse - as simple as that sounds, I think people forget it. There really is nothing inherently evil about the technology of the internet - it's just networks of computers. The presence of bad actors in its creation and, to an extent, during its launch does not mean that it wasn't an incredibly useful technology or indicate that it is somehow immune to being corrupted.

The internet isn't voodoo, and it's been around for quite a while. I don't recall ever hearing how phones were simply evil from the beginning when the Patriot Act officially gave the green light to warrantless wiretapping. The same mechanisms are in place here - hyper-capitalist urges and a paranoid, oversized security state which serves them. If it can generate endless scam calls, TV channels with more ads than entertainment, and workdays filled with redundancy and busywork, it can definitely fuck something else up. The technology isn't at fault.

There are two possible conclusions when you look at the nature of the interaction between humans and the technology: Either the technology is at fault, or humans are.
Remove capitalist market incentives and it's still highly probable you get communities based on attention-seeking rather than discussion building as the natural consequence of free human interaction with the technology. Perhaps even without capitalism, you keep watch statistics on videos, which naturally suggest significance of those factors and leads to users quantifying success by those metrics.

That the technology is useful is usually what makes it dangerous. Imagine, at the extreme end, the grey goo scenario. Rarely is it suggested any malicious actor would bring such a scenario about: Instead, a previously useful technology, poorly thought out or implemented, eats us all. Blame the technology itself or blame the human creator, the end results are the same. For my money the crossover point between a useful and manageable technology to something out of control and uncontrolled came with smartphones making the internet a constant presence, rather than something rooted in a given physical location or clumsy object. (i.e. at least a netbook.) I prefer to blame the technology than blame man because blaming man naturally results in the technology nerds advocating for more technology as the solution to the problem of integrating man and machine.

free speech is a bunch of nonsense and so-called social media censorship is more proof of that than anything. That said, who has the power to regulate what is and is not off limits/what should and should not be given a platform is very important. In this case we're talking about a bourg state regulating bourgies under pressure from its citizenry. I would absolutely support forcing these companies to be less ban-happy.

I’d never heard of this. Everyday I start to hate the US government a little more

'Cept that's not true.
For example, take slavery - the chain, simple as it is, was once an innovative thing. It has a lot of uses. It was also used in chattel slavery. Chattel slavery was a system, a fundamental part of the economy of the time - and this form of conventional slavery is gone in much of the world, though humans and the chain continue to exist.

How humans interact with technology and with objects is absolutely related to how their economies and governments work. In no way is it predetermined without consideration for context.

But having attention-seeking communities is not even a problem. The only related problem is financial incentive for it and, even more so, disincentive for anything else - I was using YouTube before Google bought it, and there was a lot more community to counteract any more vapid elements. In this context, the vapid elements were not a problem. However, Google gradually took the democratic elements out of how featured content was chosen and phased that out in favor of paid content, and additionally they actually deleted a number of community features (usergroups, direct video responses, "friending," and more recently private messaging) and shilled certain content hard enough to make finding other stuff more difficult. Over all, they geared the site more for consumption than it previously was. This is a capitalist pattern.

But vapid content is not a real underlying issue. At heart are the security state (more extreme cases such as China and Russia already are heavily invasive as is consistent with their programs), infrastructure monopolies (actually mostly old telecoms, predating the internet), and the relation between the government and monopolies. The censorship of the internet via corporate/state collaboration is the most severe damage being done, and it's not something which can be penned on the technology or "human nature." To do so is just lazy.

As a side note, smartphones, to this day, can barely run a lot of the internet. They simply weren't designed with the power to do it, and the internet was mostly designed on vastly better machines. They're marketed without acknowledging this, because in spite of the considerable flaws of the technology which inhibit the user, the urge to make max profits is very important in capitalism. As a side bonus, they have convenient built-in cameras which can be activated without the user knowing it, and while their drawbacks restrict a user's ability to participate in or wholly browse the web, they still allow for "consumption" via big social media players. These aspects appease certain parties, and the net effect is the phone companies cashing in on it all.

Do you own means of production? If not, newsflash, you’re not a capitalist

read books

We still chain up prisoners, though. Fundamentally you can't avoid that a consequence of the existence of the chain is the use of the chain for undesirable purposes.
This is an oversimplification of the case: The argument is not that context is irrelevant, but that the nature of the technology itself has a strong impact on how it developers and how humans behave. The car may not pollute the planet to death in socialism, but it will continue to irrevocably change the nature of urban planning and the pattern of goods consumption.
Again, it's a pattern you can reproduce in practice without the profit motive. A socialist may not shut down usergroups, but it's highly likely a socialist trying to build an alternative with wider appeal might outmode them with something that to other observers appears inferior.
if the content is vapid, censorship doesn't matter.
and the rest of the internet is adapting to them rather than vice-versa. you could arrive at the modern smartphone, minus some spyware, through being a hard-working socialist trying to simplify a complex computer down into a pocket consumption device.

that capitalism is to take the bulk of the blame goes without saying on a board like this. what's more interesting of the smaller element of blame that lies in the technology itself, which has to be confronted in the process of developing new technology. The alternative is building nuclear bombs and grey goo with the excuse that it's never the technology at fault, just those nasty humans and their society. An empty planet consisting of nothing but nuclear bombs and paperclip machines would be so peaceful…

I don't trust Democrats, Republicans and especially Trumpists to regulate the internet. They'll all, every last one, push their agenda. Even they shouldn't want it as you never enact laws your enemies can use against you (such in Trump's case net neutrality).

The prison-industrial system is not a consequence of the existence of the chain.

In this case you're just asserting that objects have uses and people use them. This is different from assigning a pre-determined evil to something which ends up altered or used poorly.

I think that's rather different, but I'm not sure if the hypothetical has basis.

It does if there's non-vapid content. And there is. You'll note that we aren't in a YouTube Reacts! comments section right now - that's not saying a lot. Obviously, we both know 8ch is pretty much trash, but I'm fairly sure that this back-and-forth and this board are above the standards of the usual Twitter trough. We have to consider a very real risk of a return to something like obscenity law at this point.

True!
For the most part - though I'd dispute that this would be the case if the technology were simply evaluated honestly. And sales, accordingly, would probably be lower.

I don't see communications tech as analogous to nukes - nuclear weapons indeed carry an immediate threat of mass death. But the dynamic, honestly, is mostly opposite. Out of the veracity of the nuclear threat, I concede some trust in governments to hold them and distrust in private parties to do the same. The internet, on the other hand, is probably safest when the most possible individuals have access to it and control of its infrastructure. A limitation of its control to any "authority" (state or private/corporate) is what ultimately runs the most risk and opens an authoritarian Pandora's box. Though to be fair, in spite of my assertion of a contrast to nukes, I assume this angle is actually what you're going for, no?