The public square in crisis mode or is it?
The current public square is largely shaped by numerous actors from governments across the world to wealthy billionaires. This is not the way that it should be. Everyone deserves to have their voices heard even if they are wrong. You do not prove a man a liar by cutting out his tongue you only prove that you fear what he says.
The benefits of centralized sites is that for the most part they work as intended. Even though they are for profit the people who run them typically want to make money so they will try to make it a product that people want to use. They can not just remove everyone and everything.
The drawback of centralized sites is that they can be used for other means such as political power or to strictly enrich the owner. They have complete control over the algorithm of their respective sites. If they believe something that turns out to be wrong and they push for that then we may all be force fed it without even knowing it. For example this is Mark Zuckerberg as quoted from PBS “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today,” he said, without elaborating. “We’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.” This also proves that the government can be wrong as well. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I do know that anyone can make a mistake.
So should we trust the goodwill of owners? That is an absolute no! Always take everything with a grain of salt and do your own research. It is hard to tell who to trust today because everyone says that they are right and really it is just an opinion. Opinions can and will change with time.
Should we then investigate decentralized environments? This is a possibility but to go with the constitution of the United States we need to really be prepared for what that means. You will see hate speech because it is still protected speech. According to Stanford University where they quoted Justice Alito “speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’” Hate speech is not the same as calling for violence or harassing which are still crimes.
Now the question is, should the government intervene? This is a tough question, and people will always look at who is in power. Republicans will say no if a Democrat is in office and Democrats will say no if a Republican is in office. I don’t think that is the best way to run a platform either. Speech will possibly get stifled depending on the shifting winds of our nation.
Do we own what we say to each other? Not even close when it comes to social media. The company owns that account not you. For example, according to a CNBC report Alex Jones Info Wars account was to be used in his bankruptcy sale and Elon Musk objected saying that he owns the account not Alex Jones so it can not be sold. This statement right there proves that the accounts and anything on the sites/apps are not our own.
This is a problem that will persist for a long time to come. There really is no true answer on how to fix it yet but maybe in time we will find a happy medium of centralized and decentralized public squares that we can share for everyone to see.
I will leave it to you if it is a crisis mode or not?