It should be hard, very hard, because the outcomes of censorship does have real world issues.
One can ban terms, such as overt racist slurs for example. How about banning pronouns down the road because They is angry. Are angry? Still confused. Can they ban Karen now that bitch is a no go? Etc.
Censoring is really tough territory. Sueing someone for harrassing you or assaulting you see a better course, and perhaps streamlining the justice system might serve as a better outcome rather than censorship. Eg. We can use the niger to talk about something like why its wring, the historical use etc. But we cant call someone a niger as its clearly different. but we cant really outright ban the word because many black people use amongst their own. So you ban it but not for blacks. It all gets very hairy very fast. Just sue/arresst on a case by case.
FB etc just dont want to spend money on fixing it the slow way (manpower) cause it will affect their margins. Poor excuse for changing societies rights and freedoms.
The internet makes international platforms self regulate on a whim. As we have all seen recently. But we all see the sign on the wall when we walk in to use the platform that reads they have the right to refuse service. That’s fine in America when the government can’t take away your business and throw you in jail for taking an individual stand. Not so fine in Places that don’t have such impediments to central rule. When Yahoo! Stands up and deplatforms Iran…which it totally can if it wanted to because the government is idk doing stuff antithetical to what Yahoo! Holds near and dear, who’s to say they’re wrong? What if they shut down Japan because they like dolphins not beaten to death and eaten?
All in all, we live in interesting times. Corporate power is enormous. No wonder governments are reacting and trying to restrict them. Who’s in charge?
Yours is the suggestion corporations have more control than government, let me boggle your brain.
Facebook, one of those very large and influential multi national corporations was formed according to their wiki website. here
February 4, 2004; 17 years ago in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Lifelog which was a DARPA project doing pretty much exactly what Facebook does, a government run program to collect information on people to create a life log was considered to intrusive and was terminated on.
On February 4, 2004 the agency shut down its so called “LifeLog Project”. The project’s aim would have been, “to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does”.[27]
Is it possible, just a chance these two things may be connected and if so, it goes back to your original uestion, which is still unresolved “Who’s in charge?”
That’s not the interesting question, the interesting question is did they reach a limit on what they could do legally as a government entity and decide they could do the same thing and more without restraint as a private company.
Well … I just sort of took it as read that had reached that conclusion. It’s always fun to ponder a new conspiracy theory
Anyway, it’s a fairly common technique. During the COVID campaign the UK government hid behind various front organisations to get their message of fear out to the public. As it turned out, it was very easy to get ad agencies, broadcasters, do-gooders, and other naive folk on board. They just had to wind up the big key in people’s backs and off they went.
