You misunderstand me. I don’t support this activity. But I do respect private property rights. Ordinarily I might say “let the free market settle it” but these companies have become monopolistic and predatory.
I was responding to the poster who mentioned repealing section 230. My thoughts are, if you open these companies up to liability for 3rd party posts, they will become shells of what they are now. Maybe that is what some people want. It’s not what I want, per se, unless the market decides these platforms are manipulating not just elections but the thoughts and information feeds to billions of people on earth. It is one giant MK Ultra experiment. Too bad more people don’t realize it. I am not on any of these major platforms and never was.
So my opinion is, force them to act like public utilities. They can’t, and don’t, shut off your power, phone or internet because they don’t like your dinner conversation or the newspaper you read. These platforms should be treated the same way. They should not be allowed to interfere with the free and open conversations and flow of information in any way, and heavily fined (or, sued) if they do.
And FWIW, that’s a separate argument than the antitrust matters. Twitter is probably not an anti-trust case they are just one platform. But facebook, google, amazon, apple and others are monopolistic and predatory. They should be broken up into small bits, and in the case of Amazon at least in such a way that the bits will compete with each other. There is plenty of precedent for this, from the railroads to Standard Oil to the movie industry and even more recently the case against Microsoft. The suit against Google is just the beginning of the problems with big tech controlling information, thought, speech, advertising, news and more.
Good to see where on the same page here. The big problem is young people live on their phones. They got all their information from Big Tech. In my opinion we need a new bill of rights for the internet age. Anything short of that and Democrats will use their power to create a one party state like California.
Also, Amazon is building a new warehouse down the road from my place. There are now more huge amazon warehouses than walmart STORES in my area now. And amazon warehouses are growing like weeds. In another decade or two they will dwarf even walmart. That’s definitely standard oil territory in my book.