Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

This is a broken framing of the problem. There are deeper principles that undergird our common articulations of "American founding principles". The "freedom of speech" as generally conceived and understood is couched in many assumptions about the memetic environment.

Jack & Zuck have created platforms which really exacerbate the problems and highlight just how broken those assumptions are. If you're going to start policing content policies of Twitter, why not then also Fox News & Brietbart?

Remember: It was Republicans that got rid of the "equal time" policy on the public airwaves. At least then, we understood that there was finite bandwidth & public attention, and journalism had to adhere to basic standards in order to have a right to the spectrum.

Modern tech has aggregated and sliced up the ENTIRE AGGREGATE attention space of society, and pro-business, anti-regulation, VC bubble mentality means that it's somehow un-American to ask if that mere act of technology is a good and proper thing to do to a society.

BTW @webdevMason this is what I meant by "attention is a commons". Any individual's attention surely belongs to themselves. But if tech can aggregate the bulk of the collective attention span of most people, then that system - an attention market, a broadcast tool - is a commons.

If we don't treat it as a commons, then we have no business sniping individual players of that attention economy and saying, "Jack you are an asshole for censoring right-wing shitposts", while ignoring Brietbart & Rush Limbaugh.

If we treat it as a commons, then we have the basis for holistically tackling the whole enchilada. We might even conclude that massively scaled reach is *intrinsically* problematic, and disallow such technology (e.g. by rendering it liable to libel lawsuits, etc.).

The only reason the platforms can grow the way they did is because of certain legal safe harbor (e.g. CDA 230) and a lack of case law that held them liable for the things they facilitated. A couple of cyberbullying lawsuits with hefty fines could really change things.