In a just world all companies would be taxed on their overall impact and not just revenue. Coca Cola would be taxed for their contribution to obesity and plastic waste. Exxon would be taxed for their emissions. Meta would be taxed for its harmful impacts on society and childhood development.

I’m taking it as a given that any sufficiently large social network is a gigantic propaganda machine of interest to domestic and foreign nation-state actors.

Entertaining the thought experiment where all the normies join the fediverse: now you’ve got a big juicy target maintained by hobbyists.

When it’s Lazarus Group vs Randall, the over-worked sys admin who stood up a node in his spare time, who do you think wins?

Social networks are cancer. Just ban the lot of them and move on.

This is the exact opposite of what you think. The problem is the governments in those places, and not the private company. The private company would gladly connect everyone.

Broadly, I think an ad tax that hits both ad platforms and ad purchases would do a lot to focus businesses.

In a just world, would social media platforms be taxed higher on corporate revenue and how would that pan out? Maybe we'll be left with small federated platforms without algorithms and ads.

Make them put big block ads across ⅓ of the screen with rotating warnings of the harms of the web site people are using, like with cigarette packs.

People hate friction online.

I would like someone to come up with a way to block tracking and complicate their data collection processes, with consumers able to remove those features selectively in return for cash payments from Meta et al. The problem is that consumers don't have control of their data and are grossly under-compensated for it (primarily with access to broken, predatory services that are mostly designed to extract even more money from their pockets). There needs to be a rebalancing; tech ads should be stupidly low-margin because data sales are actually compensated correctly.

The problem with this summation is the government is complicit in their actions. Thus it undermines this simple private gain, public pain argument.

A lot of the times when Meta does something like this the fact the governments in question essentially demand that action seems to be ignored. Would you have a better view of corporate power if corporations could unilaterally ignore the laws of sovereign countries in which they operate?

Wouldn't it normatively be more in keeping with a proper distinction between public and private to say lobby your congressman to stop the ceaseless funding and weapon deployments to countries in the ME that don't share our values? I have the same feeling when people complain about Meta and privacy. I mean at least they are giving you a "free" service and you essentially take part in a transaction. The NSA has all your data anyway. Does anyone remember their congressional rep trying to convince them this is a good idea? You can log off from Facebook at any time. In some jurisdictions you can even claim a right to be forgotten. Try sending such a request to the NSA or your local police department. Do you really think such public entities are more trustworthy than their private bedfellows merely because they fall on opposite lines of the public/private divide?

If you want a new public culture you should probably identify the real target is not private companies which really don't care about these questions and just want to do whatever moves margins. Your real problem is a lot less easy to propagandize about - the fact that a majority of your fellow citizens (in the USA at least) don't actually care about their (and by extension - your) privacy or human rights in the Middle East. They want cheap oil and cheap products.

Not sure how many election cycles American liberals need to live through to get this through their heads.

Is this not a Straw Man, as I'm hearing you say "they do the bare minimum in terms of content moderation and bots" whereas if as the title of the article claims, meta is instead "blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences" then the problem is that the content moderation itself is the problem, not "not doing enough" in content moderation.

It's their content moderation and perhaps bot policies causing damage.

I have first hand experience with how harmful their policies were during the SARS-COV-2 era, where I and peers who shared about health practices we were following with decades of experience to help improve our health were moderated and censored due to Facebook policies.

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Sadly I dare not say anything rude against Facebook and its policies, as it gets immediately devoted for presumably harsh language or incitement of hatred. Well I really hate everything there is about FB in 2026 and have avoided it by all means possible ever since 2017. My actual FB is now called HN, but... I guess 1) HN has its own limits; 2) everything is fine, look the other way and it will go.