Social media giants aren't monopolies.

in social •  2 years ago 

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Honestly, this screenshot to me didn't really make the case that there is no problem. What it does is highlight the way Twitter as a platform encourages pithy one liners/quick jabs rather than any kind of nuance.

Social media giants, they're more like a cartel, coordinating their actions, sometimes in collusion with government.

When Zuckerberg admitted to suppressing stories because the FBI reached out to him to suggest that action, it wasn't a problem because Facebook is a monopoly. It was a problem because government was actively trying to suppress information from gaining ground among the public by using a non-state actor with a large amount of power over what information is seen.

All the other major social media sites taking the exact same actions in the same timeframe, banning the same people or ideas starting on the exact same week, sometimes on the same day, with biased "fact checkers" uniformly labelling what we now know to be true things lies, I'm sure was just a series of coincidences. From Wuhan and vaccines not preventing transmission, to the laptop, the pattern seems clear, but I'm sure it couldn't possibly be the result of communication between social media giants or the result of communication between social media giants and government agencies that prefer specific narratives. (Sarc, obviously)

Hawley is wrong about his solutions to this problem, and he's wrong to call Facebook a monopoly. He's one of the worst Republicans in the Senate. But saying he's technically wrong about monopoly status or antitrust being a solution is a way of sidestepping a real thing that does deserve some attention.

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