You know what’s also chilling? Major tech platforms choosing to publish, amplify, and normalize: white supremacy, antisemitism, serious calls to violently overthrow democracy, conspiracies about the deep state cabal of satan-worshiping pedophiles, the health benefits of drinking bleach, denial of well understood scientific facts, etc.
These things are fine for the town square, since people have free speech, but nobody should be handing them a megaphone that reaches 7 billion people.
Free speech does not mean you are entitled to have your speech broadcast to a global audience.
Honest question, what are you referring to when in regards to published/public content?
All of these topics you've mentioned are and always have been far away from trending ('amplified', 'normalized') pages. You can't go anywhere on these sites and see these topics without searching for them, and when you do the hashtags are either immediately taken over by the rest of the users on the site or taken off of trending deliberately by administrators, often both. Can you provide one example of these topics consistently being 'amplified' or 'normalized' by one of the major tech platforms? I'm talking public content, not private groups. Posts that are 'amplified', not just present. You can find posts from anyone about anything online, so I don't really see what separates these private facebook groups from something like a mailing list. It doesn't seem "normalized" at all.
I’m going by what the article said: “Facebook spent the past year allowing election conspiracies and far-right militia activity to proliferate on its platform, laying the groundwork for the broader radicalization that fueled the Capitol insurrection in the first place.”
Facebook exercises editorial control (moderation) of what user-provided content is published on its site. Therefore if something is there, it’s because their moderation system allowed it to be there. I don’t use Facebook myself so I can’t provide a first-hand example, but it’s increasingly being reported that this content spreads virally through these platforms’ recommendation rabbit-holes and through promotion by end users.
I also don't use Facebook which is why I was asking. Supposedly after some more research it seems that Facebook has a feature that actually recommends private groups to people, which I was not aware of. It's interesting that they choose to do that, then.
The trouble in my opinion comes when these social networks begin to promote content to the user algorithmically. My Twitter feed is filled with content from users I do not follow. It makes up the majority of my feed. Likely, even if it was content that I was following, the most "engaging", or oftentimes "enraging" content, would be the content shown first.
If social networks were largely just content crafted by the people I follow, it would then be more representative towards a digital representation of the in-person social structures that would or do exist.
They make much less money that way though. Your average user would probably also use it less.
Even harder: Who gets to decide who gets the megaphone? I see the problems with "nobody, therefore everybody gets the megaphone", but I see nobody that I actually trust to decide who gets it...
which mythical social media platform choose the amplify and publish "white supremacy, antisemitism, serious calls to violently overthrow democracy", because those I know were and are removing such content
Seriously. That is stuff that nearly everybody's against and is a constant boogeyman brought up by many on the left, but they can't ever seem to demonstrate that it is a pervasive problem. Nobody admits to being a white supremacist because it's basically universally denounced.
But those same folks will happily excuse the whole BLM/Antifa rioting during 2020 where billions of dollars in property damage was caused and dozens of people died.
These things are fine for the town square, since people have free speech, but nobody should be handing them a megaphone that reaches 7 billion people.
Free speech does not mean you are entitled to have your speech broadcast to a global audience.