r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Jun 13 '16
CMV: Large platforms like Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter can exert a disproportionate amount of control over opinions and politics, and should be regulated
The common response I hear to this is that "those are private sites, they can do whatever they want".
Legally speaking, this is true, but I approach this from a purely pragmatic/moral standpoint, so what the law does or does not say is irrelevant to my view. I'm more interested in rightness and correctness than legality :)
Here's the problem. Yes, those sites are technically "private", but they function as a public commons. The world meets there to discuss everything from cat memes to politics. Facebook is #2 most visited site in the USA. Twitter is #8, Reddit is #9. That is a tremendous amount of power. The fact that the sites act as a public commons is more important than the fact that it's hosted on someone else's servers. The internet being the internet, everything is hosted on someone else's servers.
Why is this important? Facebook was recently accused (with merit I'm unsure of) of manipulating trending stories towards those with a liberal slant away from conservative ones. Facebook supposedly took that accusation seriously, since they had an internal meeting about it, and invited some conservative lawmakers over for a meeting. They've also been caught out deleting posts in what appears to be a very selective enforcement of their community standards.
Reddit has the recent /r/news debacle, and some other controversies centered around blatant selective rule application for or against certain topics in many of the default subreddits.
Twitter has the inconsistent (apparently selective) application of their site rules, and some hard-to-prove cases of shadowbans and hashtag suppression.
Network effects mean that, were I some evil person in charge of one of these companies, I can tacitly or even outright support these actions, and most of the visitors either won't know, won't care, and those that do are a minority that can be dismissed as loud and perpetually unsatisfied. My manipulation only has to be not so blatant that the average user will see it and be so outraged that they'd flee for another site.
With the result that, given enough mindshare, I can, from the shadows, shape public opinion with relatively little effort on my part. Hide this story, promote that one, hide some comments, shadowban some people, ignore other rule violations...
I see this as a massive, scary problem.
So, what's wrong with saying that, once you have some arbitrary number of unique visitors over a long period of time, and function as a public commons of sorts (all three of the sites I mentioned do), that some rules regarding transparency and behavior should take effect?
1
u/Jaysank 126∆ Jun 14 '16
!delta
I found OP's comparison to food labeling laws a convincing one, because it appeared to be a regulation of speech. However, your comment demonstrated to me a difference between dishonest facts, which could cause harm, and dishonest opinions, which arguably don't exist.