If after Gutenberg delivered his first printing press in 1439, and no others were made thereafter, it sure would put a crimp in Barnes & Noble’s business. If the world looked in awe at Henry Ford’s Model T and concluded that nothing like that could be built by anyone else, what do you think would be sitting in your garage right now?
Absurd? Ridiculous? Of course. Equally unfathomable is why we sit back and look in awe and envy at the wealth and power of Google and Facebook.
“We’re going to have to do something about social media,” President Donald Trump said. The accusation is that they “censor” conservative expression in favor of left/democrat/progressive/socialist opinion. Not to put too fine a point on it, but censorship is a legal restriction carrying civil penalties for violation which bumps right up against freedom of speech.
Before you ashcan this as another liberal screed, I am a solid conservative and a one-hundred-percent supporter of Trump’s considerable accomplishments to date.
Monopoly Shmonopoly
I hear it said that social media is a monopoly. “Googling” social media produces a list of the top 15 sites. Fifteen. And there are more; these are only the top sites. Doesn’t sound like much of a monopoly to me. Compare that with political parties which totals two. Maybe that’s where our attention needs to be focused. But then, you can’t fix stupid.
I have a Facebook account which I go to occasionally. Someone having lunch at McSwiggle is supposed to do what for me? Someone posting vacation pictures from a five-star resort is supposed to lift my morale while I sit here splashing letters on paper? It would be useful to know that someone is out of town if I wanted to break in and kidnap their cat, although that doesn’t interest me anymore.
Occasionally, I enjoy commenting on political postings but that doesn’t seem to contribute to the poster’s enjoyment like the response I got recently: “You are either stupid or senile.”
So what is the point of social media and why is anyone upset over the way it is being used? Why does anyone want to waste the government’s time to remedy…what? I don’t get it and I’m not a luddite when it comes to computers. I have 26 semester hours’ credit from learning programming.
Leave Google alone. Liberals will enjoy using it. Conservatives can decide on their own search engine and you can even have a “no-brainer” site for politicians. There is no need for a one-size-fits-all solution.
News Source? You Gotta Be Kidding
I understand social media is where people get their news How pathetic. Or if you do a search, it will only return answers someone else approves of. I hear about algorithms that intentionally discriminate against certain opinions. If you don’t like what you see, stop looking at it. People do a lousy job of staying informed, and tuning in to social media is not going to help. That leaves the biggest question: Who is to do the censoring? The censor I approve of today may be gone after the next election.
Take a look at the history of net neutrality. The Internet functioned just fine for years using a private, non-profit company in Los Angeles to direct traffic. Along came “government for everybody” Obama who gave us net neutrality with the stated intention of turning control of the Internet over to the U.N. It was then repealed by the Trump administration in June 2018.
A few states have initiated rules to maintain net neutrality in their jurisdictions, but net neutrality was always a solution looking for a problem. It’s anyone’s guess what effect a future change in administrations will bring.
Unless Silicon Valley has a corner on all the ones and zeros, somebody get busy and build some competition.
