Posted on 06/13/2019 9:44:09 AM PDT by Heartlander
More and more conservatives are saying, Let’s build our own social media platforms, to combat censorship on the existing ones. Whether that’s feasible, I don’t know. But let’s suppose that happened and it worked. Would it be good? I doubt it.
Here’s why. Imagine a conservative Twitter alternative. Call it Cwitter for short. Who would use it? And who would still use the original Twitter? The answer is obvious. People on the right would talk to each other on Cwitter, but hardly anyone else. The original Twitter would still attract everyone from just right of center all the way to the Leftist edge. These are the people who already wield the microphone that reaches most of America. Cwitter would be internet flyover country, irrelevant to all the “real” discussion.
Given a new, right-of-center social media startup, a scenario like that is too likely to ignore. And it sounds all too similar to what happened within conservative Protestantism a century ago. J. P. Moreland tells the story in Love Your God With All Your Mind. Liberal, skeptical theology was on the rise, fueled by German “Higher Criticism” and the Darwinian challenge to natural theology. Conservative scholars, feeling unwelcome in the older schools yet hoping to maintain a bulwark of truth, opened conservative colleges and seminaries.
Arguably, they succeeded in that. But in the process, they disconnected themselves from the main currents of scholarship. They may have been strong in theology, but they became irrelevant to virtually all other intellectual pursuits. And this sent the message that theology — and God himself — had nothing to say about the questions of the day.
Now we know that they never needed to retreat in the first place. In philosophy, history, sociology, linguistics and more, conservative believers are taking center stage again. I see encouraging signs even in biology, the most God-resistant field among the sciences.
Not that the parallel is perfect between then and now. Theological conservatives weren’t literally being censored, shut down, mouths taped shut, in mainstream institutions a century ago. They left for other reasons. Maybe they weren’t welcomed. They might have been shunned. Maybe they even left for fear of being intellectually overwhelmed. They faced an imbalance of power in the institution, but it wasn’t nearly as total and absolute as it can be in social media today.
And yet for all the good Christian colleges and conservative schools of theology have done — which is plenty — there’s a sense in which they really did back out of the intellectual conversation of the day. They quit. At a time when they could still have shown up in the journals and the conferences, if not in the classrooms, they walked away. They could have fought the fight where it needed to be fought, but they pulled aside to their own private conversations instead.
Of course, Twitter and Facebook aren’t exactly the most inviting homes for deep intellectual colloquy. (YouTube can be, if you look hard enough for it, but you have to know where.) So again, the parallelism isn’t perfect.
Still, even though Twitter and Facebook aren’t hotbeds of scholarship, they’re still home to a major part of American discussion. That’s why I worry that establishing a separate, parallel Cwitter would be too much like cwitting — er, quitting. The same principle applies to Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and any others.
That doesn’t mean I have an ideal solution to the question raised by private businesses practicing censorship. It’s a new problem and a difficult one.
But we must resist as much as possible, as long as possible, any recommendation to let ourselves be pushed aside. We’re not flyover thinkers. We don’t belong in some separate-but-equal, walled-off social media universe. And we can do no good for the overall conversation if we let our part of it be shunted off to a side room.
Tom Gilson (@TomGilsonAuthor) is a senior editor with The Stream, and the author of A Christian Mind: Thoughts on Life and Truth in Jesus Christ and Critical Conversations: A Christian Parent’s Guide to Discussing Homosexuality with Teens, and the lead editor of True Reason: Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheism.
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They don't realize it is they who need to "do something". George Washington and the rest of our founding fathers prayed to God for help and guidance, but they "did something" in a big way, risking everything they had.
Wrong. You can go to twitter and read tweets all day long without having an account. Facebook will give you a popup that comes up from the bottom of the screen but you can still see stuff. Facebook pages, like what a business would have, are completely viewable to the non-logged in public.
All these alternative social sites simply present you with a log in/register page and before you can see anything else, you must register or log in.
mewe.com has pages like facebook but what good is it to have a page that only logged in users can see?
“BTW, CWitter is a no-no for a name.”
Change the W to L, and there would be LOTS of interest by practically everyone.
True. By nature, conservative business ventures are built on ROI, not “fairness “, “giving a voice to the community”, or similar emotional claptrap. Most social media has succeeded in ways never envisioned by the founders.
I disagree that a Ctwitter or Cyoutube or CFacebook would fail. I think it would be a “King has no clothes moment” where it will all of a sudden become apparent that all the boycott threats are merely bluster from the Gay Cabell or whatever name you give it and that they just do a lot of raving and ranting, along with their pet CEOs, teachers and politicians.
Noboody likes to think they are being cheated out of their just due, and that’s what will happen when the people who give second thought to the “agenda” would convert like a stampede to a new platform. Perhaps not facebook, it’s entrenched and very many users have to much vested in it while caring nothing about who advertises on it. It will certainly pull all the ‘demonetized’ users over who in turn will help fund the platforms with from the fees they earn.
But this is all pipe dreaming until IP, copyright and trademarks are revoked because they refuse to service everybody equally and thus disenfranchising them.
After all that the question remains. What do the Cplatforms do about real Nazi advocates and real troublesome race baiters?
IP, Copyright and trademarks need to be revoked under under disenfranchisement reasons.
You can’t see anything on twitter unless you login can you?
“But Twitter and Facebook are also closed systems.”
Ah, but not so much when they started and were still fighting to take over the market. You used to be able to view most stuff on FB without an account, and the same was true for twitter. You only needed an account if you wanted to view private stuff, send PMs, etc.
(With apologies for overwriting your carefully chosen HTML emphasis tags in a simplistic blockquote style -- I'm sloshed and lack the patience for the painstaking editing work required to accurately reflect said HTML tags in a blockquoted passage.)
Instead of a Twitter alternative for conservatives, there needs to be a Twitter alternative run by conservatives for everyone. Make sure the algorithms stay clean and fair, according to rules/guidelines that are clear and available to everyone who uses or views the site.
It ain't rocket science. And it can't be set up as an echo chamber exclusively for like-thinking people. It needs to reach out to everyone and allow misguided people to have the opportunity to receive a conservative or libertarian perspective.
All these alternative social sites simply present you with a log in/register page and before you can see anything else, you must register or log in.
On the Twitter home page, there's a button to log in and one to sign up. If you're not a member or don't want to sign up, that's as far as you're going.
The Facebook home page is similar, giving you the option of signing in or signing up. Otherwise, you go no further. When I bypass the homepage by going directly to a Facebook site, a dialog box pops up demanding that I log in or sign up.
The Gab homepage features an "Explore" button that allows for reading some of the posts on the site.
Haha, my guess was that “liberal” leftist “leaders” like Samantha C*** and all their immature followers/voters would especially want to leave the C in....
If you do that it will only attract conservatives. The idea is to get relatives and friends to move to a better platform, so it needs to simply be a censorship free platform that lets all views exist.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump
You can go there and read all the President’s (or anyone else’s) tweets without being logged in. You’ll get a little pop down on the top right to log in or register but that’s it.
All the other’s I mentioned, all you get is a blank page with a login/register form. Can’t go any further or see anyone’s posts.
Wait:
Just checked out gab.ai. Looks like they allow you to see some stuff now without being logged in. It was completely closed originally.
But their system is screwy. Anyone can “follow” you and when they do, you get to see their posts unless you “mute” them. I got sick of going there and having to mute 20 new jackasses every time I logged in.
parler, I haven’t looked into yet but as per the article, we can start all the social networks we want but people are too lazy to move and don’t want to leave their “friends” behind. You end up with a bunch of little echo chambers like gab. Jew haters and actual white supremacists who think it’s fun to write nasty posts about black people all day and use the N word, usually preceded by F-ing.
It needs to be a new concept, not just a copy of or slightly different version of fb/twitter. Both of those were brand new concepts when they came out which is why they became so popular.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump
True, they do make it look like you have to log in/register but it’s not so. You can read Trump’s tweets all day long without logging in.
Facebook does have a popup that takes up half the page but you can shrink it by clicking “Not now”, especially on “pages” like a business page.
https://www.facebook.com/homedepot
I just noticed gab has that explore link. I don’t think it did originally and I don’t go there anymore because constantly having to “mute” people is a pita
. . . These Communists built nothing on their own - they took over the institutions we built.
- O’Sullivan’s First Law:
All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.
I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don't like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point Michels's Iron Law of Oligarchy takes over — and the rest follows.
It would be interesting to find out where the cash flows of these social media platforms are coming from, and who may be pulling the strings from behind the scenes.
They managed to de-platform gab.ai for a while, by going after their infrastructure.
They would similarly try to shut down any other conservative social media if it threatened to become successful.
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