Honestly, can you really trust anything about major social media sites any more?
Has Twitter ever been in the news for properly making even a thousand people successful from scratch really ever in the product's life?
They have pipelines of exploitation for everyone that gets "discovered" into contractual nightmare deals, they require tons of free labor and costly hurdles just to become notable and visible on the platform, they extort people promoting their independent work for ad money, they don't protect anyone's privacy, they are VERY MANIPULATIVE in multiple (psychological) ways, they offer very little support or fairness when accounts are compromised, hijacked, or stolen, and they impose a stranglehold on information through lobbies and suppression of independent art and music.
Social media took over the Internet after they wooed everyone into the ideal that they would operate fairly. Now that they have captured full attention, they have turned on users and they offer very little to anyone who doesn't pay, and can't offer reliable security to anyone. There are some serious "God Complexes" going on with having access to the personal data these systems harvest ON EVERYONE in conjunction with mobile devices.
I really hate to say it would actually probably make me feel better if most of the large data monitoring sites/apps went away rather than stayed in place, because they make almost every aspect of the Internet work against us all.
Twitter has had several opportunities to fix how it operates. The platform also generates tons in annual revenue to fix how it operates. Twitter has lots of employees that could fix how it operates. Twitter has also had numerous security breaches, and it regularly causes tons of stress for users. Twitter continues to focus on only pleasing it's sponsors, investors, and execs year after year and repeatedly stretching the promises it was built upon.
I can't say I want to see this whale fail, but I won't miss it if it does.
I think it is clear we need more public regulation over these companies, and a lot of the mechanisms need to be embedded in a non-profit / social utility system, given they DIRECTLY impact politics. Anything that democracy is reliant upon should not be subject to private, opaque control.
In the case of data harvesting, data is the most valuable resource. You can control what people want using data. No entity should have unfettered access to data — it is undeniably evil in the truest sense of the word. Which, in the context of my use, means to decay forward progress or to increase aggregated suffering.
They will not fix these issues until the public makes it so painful not to, that they must. As an example, how is Experian still in business after what they’ve done? They should have had a $100 billion+ fine levied against them, and that fine should pierce through limited liability to the extent that the board of directors and C-level staff are liable for it. The company and any owners of it should be bankrupted and living in poverty after what they’ve done.
Until we make PEOPLE liable for the evils they induce on others, this will keep happening. I don’t get limited liability if I went out and murdered someone, why should the PEOPLE running companies have limited liability when they murder millions with pollution, or with financial terrorism? Answer: they shouldn’t.
Government regulation spans further than just rules engineered by a few politicians, it can be publicly voted upon, and it can dictate minimum standards that are upheld across private business for everyone's safety, which in this case is highly warranted.
It's the best chance we have to stop this horrible trend. Companies have shown repeatedly that they are not trust-worthy nor responsible enough to self regulate.
> Government regulation spans further than just rules engineered by a few politicians, it can be publicly voted upon
You're making a distinction without making a difference. Regulating public forums for their content outside of illegal content has never been not abused. The UK is learning this the hard way with the police "checking the thinking" of netizens.
If you think companies are bad, then imagine politicians. I can switch off to another social media but I can't switch out to another state.
The Arab Spring should have been looked at as a warning sign, but everyone in America was still in full-on neoconservative "we will be welcomed as liberators" mode. No private company should have the power to overthrow governments.
I wouldn't consider that as the success op means...
I mean, surely, it some people were successful, but success of warlords intending to genocide blacks in Lybia or starting a new violent caliphate or kidnapping boys en masse to be child soldiers is not the sort or success I want to be enabled with technology.
> They have pipelines of exploitation for everyone that gets "discovered" into contractual nightmare deals, they require tons of free labor and costly hurdles just to become notable and visible on the platform
For what it's worth, as someone running a high-five-digits account, it is possible to get notable on Twitter - you just have to put in a ton of work to make quality content people are actually interested in.
Sure... In order to build a house, you just need to bring your motivation... And lots of time... And money... to hire an architect and an entire home building company... Without having any income the whole time...
Hard work for free does not make sense in this type of post-pandemic world we live in... It's too "Marie Antoinette-esque" of people to say it's anywhere near reasonable.
My point is, a lot of those wannabe "influencers" who complain the most about "boo hoo, Twitter/Instagram are so unfair" are simply putting out mediocre content.
Has Twitter ever been in the news for properly making even a thousand people successful from scratch really ever in the product's life?
They have pipelines of exploitation for everyone that gets "discovered" into contractual nightmare deals, they require tons of free labor and costly hurdles just to become notable and visible on the platform, they extort people promoting their independent work for ad money, they don't protect anyone's privacy, they are VERY MANIPULATIVE in multiple (psychological) ways, they offer very little support or fairness when accounts are compromised, hijacked, or stolen, and they impose a stranglehold on information through lobbies and suppression of independent art and music.
Social media took over the Internet after they wooed everyone into the ideal that they would operate fairly. Now that they have captured full attention, they have turned on users and they offer very little to anyone who doesn't pay, and can't offer reliable security to anyone. There are some serious "God Complexes" going on with having access to the personal data these systems harvest ON EVERYONE in conjunction with mobile devices.
I really hate to say it would actually probably make me feel better if most of the large data monitoring sites/apps went away rather than stayed in place, because they make almost every aspect of the Internet work against us all.
Twitter has had several opportunities to fix how it operates. The platform also generates tons in annual revenue to fix how it operates. Twitter has lots of employees that could fix how it operates. Twitter has also had numerous security breaches, and it regularly causes tons of stress for users. Twitter continues to focus on only pleasing it's sponsors, investors, and execs year after year and repeatedly stretching the promises it was built upon.
I can't say I want to see this whale fail, but I won't miss it if it does.