alt Hacker NewsI think it speaks to the complete lack of government regulation in the area that people see such extreme answers as positive. If any government had seen fit to engage in light regulation of what social media can do people might be happier.
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zombot • yesterday at 2:12 PM
Light regulation won't cut it any more for companies that are too big to jail.
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Evidence suggests the polar opposite.
Governments have been working on regulating platforms. Every time they get close, there’s outrage when people realize what it means for them.
Age regulations are the best example. Every time the topic comes up there is a lot of support for government regulation of social media by age.
Then every time there comes an actual attempt at government regulation or even self-regulation by the companies, everyone goes ballistic when they realize what that regulation means.
This topic is awash in ideas that regulation will come in like a scalpel that only touches something that won’t affect anything we like, only hurt some companies in some specific way that doesn’t take anything away from us. This notion doesn’t survive contact with reality.
That’s how we get these short sighted comments inviting the government to come shut down parts of the internet. I bet the person who asked for that assumed it would be perfectly targeted at sites they don’t need or use, leaving their version of the internet untouched. They never imagined the government might scope creep it to start shutting down communications they didn’t like.