Ok, guys, time for a thread on social media censoring conservatives, #shadowbanning etc.
1) This problem is broader than social media. This is about the anti-civil society left drumming conservatives out of the public square. [1/x]
1) This problem is broader than social media. This is about the anti-civil society left drumming conservatives out of the public square. [1/x]
They don't want our voices heard (Facebook & Twitter), us to own businesses (bake that cake), or participate in respectable discourse (Atlantic & Kevin Williamson). It's important to realize that social media battles are just one piece of a larger societal fracture. [2/x]
That being said, neither of the responses from the Right so far are cutting it. It's not enough, as libertarians want us to believe, to just say Twitter and FB are private companies and can do what they wish. That is a non-solution to a deep cultural problem. [3/x]
But the gov solutions being tossed around by the Right are disastrous. THINK HARDER: Jack & Zuck are pretty awful, but do you want Lois Lerner regulating your online speech??? Handing regulatory control over online platforms to unelected Dems at govt agencies is suicide. [4/x]
It's a tough problem, and I don't have the magic solution. Some ideas, none of them great:
1) Boycotts from the Right are rare, but effective (see Target's transgender bathrooms)
2) Loudly criticize & scare these companies with the threat of regs so they reform themselves [5/x]
1) Boycotts from the Right are rare, but effective (see Target's transgender bathrooms)
2) Loudly criticize & scare these companies with the threat of regs so they reform themselves [5/x]
In any case, we should be putting our heads together and coming up with good ideas for short-term solutions. But long-term, the only real solution is recapture of our institutions of culture. Reagan said in his farewell address: [6/x]
"We were taught..what it means to be an American. We absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country & an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn't get these things from your family you got them from the neighborhood..Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school..[7/x]
"..If all else failed you could get a sense of patriotism from pop culture. Movies celebrated democratic values & reinforced the idea that America was special." Recapturing THAT is the only true way out of our cold civil war, in which social media is only a small front. [fin]
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