Social Media vs. the American Right

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/social-media-vs-the-american-right/

by rayiner • 6 years ago

6 1 6 years ago

djsumdog• 6 years ago

Libertarians will tell conservatives that this doesn’t matter. “Build your own Facebook! Build your own Twitter!” But Facebook and Twitter are the most powerful media companies on earth, and most other media companies have become dependent on them. And this is not going to stop with social networks. The next frontier is payment processors. Good luck launching your next direct-to-consumer subscription product when your most passionate fans can’t promote it on Facebook and Twitter and you can’t accept PayPal, Visa, or Mastercard.

There are alternatives to big centralized tech. I run a Mastodon and Pleroma server. They are federated and distributed. There are also more walled-silos trying to enter this place like Parlor and Gab (Gab briefly was federated, which turned into its own controversial mess).

We can and spin up more/alternative platforms. The problem is multi-fold: the Internet allows us to run alternative platforms, but the vast majority of people are so sick of social media, they are reluctant to try anything else.

The new platforms are always pulling in a diaspora of a particular type of users whose voice is not heard anywhere else. That makes the new platforms one-directional, like Voat:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/voat-what-went-wrong/

There is a lot of complexity here. Those who want power have always tried to control the media. It happened with Radio. It happened with Newspapers. It's been happening with the Internet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwTCO4qa-RQ

Social Media vs. the American Right

Related Stories