America's internet is splitting along party lines

https://www.axios.com/americas-internet-splitting-party-lines-54feaa02-7622-4f54-b3e0-ccebd4b393ca.html

33 94 4 years ago

h2odragon2• 4 years ago

First 8chan, then Parler. Tomorrow it might be you.

At some point the service providers have to be able to stand on a utility status and provide equal access to all comers.

tedajax• 4 years ago

Just conveniently ignoring the content of these sites/services that gets them banned in the first place...

k__• 4 years ago

I don't understand this.

There are well-known arguments for not tolerating intolerant people.

Do those who advocate for tolerating intolerant people act in good faith, or are they simply part of them?

h2odragon2• 4 years ago

If there's no 8chan to host the horse porn, who will?

ajsnigrutin8• 4 years ago

If it's illegal, the governments should take care to punish the reponsible ones via the court system.

If it's legal, the service provides should have no say.

This is like christan toll-bridge operator not allowing people to pass the bridge, if they drove in from the direction of a brothel.

prasadjoglekar• 4 years ago

The article is documenting reaction to the banning; which is to create a parallel set of products.

Personally, this is no different than people setting up a rival newspaper or magazine that caters to a different POV. Eventually, the dominant platforms on both sides will regress to the content/banning mean.

seneca2• 4 years ago

Twitter has just as vile content as anything you can find in the other cesspool. It just happens to overwhelmingly lean the right way politically, so is not only still around but treated as some legitimate source of news.

ajsnigrutin8• 4 years ago

Yep, but censors (on both sides) cheer for this, because it's not them... yet.. atleast not on 'that' platform.

A4ET8a8uTh05• 4 years ago

Sadly, even on HN we have people arguing for that. You are labeled 'absolutist' if you argue against censorship. It is fascinating really.

throwmeariver12• 4 years ago

Ok just stop with the one sided arguing gab, parler and all the "freedom of speech" titled social networks are worse in censoring than your primetime twitter or Facebook they at least pretend to be neutral.

JasonFruit2• 4 years ago

This article is confusing or confused. It conflates the people and companies that use the internet with the network itself, and then supports its argument that the internet is splitting by talking about what's going on with TV networks. There's a lot of division going on in America, but I think they've failed to see its shape.

wowokay• 4 years ago

Agreed. I think the premise is sound. I feel like the US needs to incorporate a new right, similar to the separation of church and state but instead focused on the separation of politics and companies. I have no idea how politics would be defined or how it would be enforced. However similar to the premise of this article I think the one thing both sides can agree on is all of this became worse and jaded when companies became self aware and brandished a political agenda.

I mean if we want free speech how can their be disinformation? Even if crazy earl wants to talk about the “good old days” where women stayed home and cooked all day why does a company need to take a stand on eliminating that post?

Why do people working at companies feel compelled to incorporate their beliefs into their work? Disney makes movies for kids. I understand that a small % of the population feels marginalized because they don’t have direct representation in media, but kids are inpressional, and if we want to be “Fair” we’d present ALL sides, from straight, to gay, from hero to terrorist. Or Disney could go back to making neutral kids movies about fictional talking animals struggling through life. Why do they need to take a stance on something.

beaconstudios4• 4 years ago

If disney made all their characters white, people would call that political; if they made their characters diverse, people would call that political too. Media doesn't exist outside the political sphere.

Many people call for apolitical media, but I'm not sure that's possible without avoiding any contentious issue whatsoever, and basically everything is contentious at the moment.

Steltek2• 4 years ago

At a government level, you can not banish politics without infringing on speech. Your proposal directly conflicts with the first amendment.

If Disinformation was simply promoting outdated chauvinism, it wouldn't be perceived as such a threat to society. But that's not what's happening. Disinformation campaigns are convincing people that the election was rigged and the current government is illegitimate.

Even your "present all sides" idea has flaws because it's a tactic used in propaganda. You ostensibly take two "experts" and hold a mock debate. One of those experts is going to take a dive, looking like a fool, and as a result, your chosen side appears to prevail.

bilbo0s• 4 years ago

Even if crazy earl wants to talk about the “good old days” where women stayed home and cooked all day why does a company need to take a stand on eliminating that post?

Um, because those women buy a crap-ton of product. Depending on your business, probably a lot more than men. If they boycott you, (which incidentally happens to be a right guaranteed to them by the 1st restricting the government from decreeing its denial), there goes your bottom line.

I'm always the big, bad, Halliburton capitalist in my social circle, but I'm actually not the jackhole people think I am when they see the suit coming. What happens is that liberals and conservatives have ideas that are detrimental to the efficient function of market capitalism and I point that fact out. Why should a business owner and his employees suffer to ensure the right of some beer gutted unemployed Bubba to offend women who probably worked their posteriors off to be able to afford your product?

If you want to keep politics out of business, then keep the politicians out of my businesses.

tablespoon4• 4 years ago

Your suggestion goes directly against freedom of association. Also there really isn't such a thing as being "neutral" like you describe, "neutral" is just when everyone agrees to the point where they don't release there's something to disagree about.

However your comment does seem to touch on one the major deficit/contradictions in small-l liberalism: you don't really solve disagreements by pushing them into the private sphere, you just avoid them, and eventually that avoidance can tear society apart.

rayiner• 4 years ago

At least we have an Internet. Imagine the bad old days of the 1980s when everyone had to get their news from CNN! For all the bellyaching conservatives do the fact is that information is freer today than it was in the past. Ultimately we all found out about Hunter Biden’s laptop notwithstanding the Facebook and Twitter blackout. (And when it turned out to be real, I’m sure the Facebook and Twitter censors felt shame, at least the ones who are capable of feeling shame.) That wouldn’t have been true 30 years ago.

chasd00• 4 years ago

so, yet again, the censors were wrong. I've said it before, if you're going to censor you better be right 100% of the time. The moment you get it wrong all credibility and benefit-of-the-doubt is gone and now you must censor by authority and not out of good will.

The first case i recall is the lab leak theory censoring and now the laptop thing. The platforms should stop censoring except for content defined as prohibited by law.

throwaway826524• 4 years ago

content defined as prohibited by law

They weren't wrong, deleting illegal content is exactly what they were doing. Revenge porn is illegal in almost all US states.

tbihl• 4 years ago

I don't mean for this to sound like a defense of the article, which it emphatically is not.

Imagine the bad old days of the 1980s when everyone had to get their news from CNN!

Important to remember in this that they would have had 1980s CNN, which I presume is significantly different from modern CNN. NPR, for example, was a mostly even-keeled news source as recently as 20 years ago; no one was surprised to find a dedicated NPR listener who was conservative in 1980, which is certainly not true today. Without having any personal experience of CNN, past or present, I imagine they have followed a similar trend.

mistrial9• 4 years ago

simple minds are attracted to simple "realizations" .. the Internet by definition has hundreds of dimensions of "splitting" .. someone call the Principal Component Analysis crew and give these journalists a time-out.

jandrewrogers• 4 years ago

Half of Americans do not identify with either major party. They are not nearly as "split" as the partisans that try to control the political discourse.

periphrasis6• 4 years ago

Yet most unaffiliated voters “lean”, often very strongly, towards one party or the other. Most estimates put true independent/swing voters at only 3-4% of the electorate.

scythe• 4 years ago

There's a big equivocation between your post and GP's: "American" => "voter". But people who are not well-represented by the two major parties are probably less likely to vote.

Overtonwindow• 4 years ago

Well, when the media and politicians work so hard to keep American’s disagreeing, and then hating one another, this is bound to happen. The media, the corporate owned cable television streaming media, is the enemy of the people.

netfortius• 4 years ago

The picture implies a segregation way below the app/social media tier, into the space where the right-oriented xSPs (x = M, I, etc.) and large network providers of such orientation will no longer advertise their IP space outside their own routing areas, with maybe some exceptions for common/shared services (financials, gov, transportation, logistics, supply chains, etc., etc.), and also blackhole the left ones, and the other way around. The right-oriented networks could expand to include the to-be-new Russian IP space, maybe bringing along North Korea, Belarus and the likes. Firewalls could also be built, between right and left, where some [tightly controlled] traffic will be necessary. Interesting times ahead ...

kebman2• 4 years ago

There was a time when most papers in Norway were party papers. And it was totally fine! The reason for it being totally fine was because you'd already know where the paper stood on a certain topic, and with whom. And so when you read an article from that sender, with that very clear affiliation, you could ironically also trust them more, because you would be weary of any attempts of manipulation beforehand, and perhaps you'd even know their "tribal language" as it were. And so it would be much easier to decide for yourself whether it was something you'd believe in, or concern yourself with, or react to. Those who were hardcore "tribalists" would of course only read "their" party's papers, but those who wanted a more balanced view, would simply buy papers from the other parties. For that reason most households would hold several papers from different, and often opposing parties in order to stay up to date. So if the USA's web pages are tribalizing, that isn't necessarily a bad thing, because you can always just peek at the competition to get a more even view on things. With that said, it still is a bad thing if our collective "town squares" are monopolized by just one side. That's why I remain positive to Elon Musk's majority buy-up of Twitter stocks, knowing that he's a free speech absolutist. Whether it'll be "good for Twitter" remains to be seen, however I remain hopeful.

caseysoftware• 4 years ago

There was a time when most papers in Norway were party papers. And it was totally fine!

And that's exactly how most newspapers started in the US too.

Then they realized that advertising only to their side left out half of the potential readership and therefore lowered the advertising rates they could charge.

Now that we have (re-)targeting advertising platforms based not only on the topic of this specific page but informed by the last 2000 sites and pages you visited and products you viewed, the advertising rates are better and targeting a niche becomes a viable option.. but even then, that's only if the financial aspects are the motivators. Sometimes it's a moral cause, not a financial.

TrispusAttucks• 4 years ago

This is where censorship and propaganda leads.

The split is as much of (or more) a reaction to Big Tech and Big Media collusion than it is political. If truth and discourse weren't censored there would be no need for this.

Customers should boycott products they disagree with or that are opposed to their beliefs. New companies springing up to meet the market demand is capitalism working as expected. A monopoly of companies controlling public free speech is not.

giaour• 4 years ago

The hand wringing and gnashing of teeth in this article is a bit much. Is America splitting by sexuality because different dating apps and media properties are popular with each group? Some balkanization is inevitable when systems with network effects and low initial switching costs serve a heterogenous population.

1970-01-013• 4 years ago

"America's internet"

The first two words of the headline are wrong. Applications are not the Internet. This must be some kind of record for HN headlines.

tablespoon4• 4 years ago

"America's internet"
The first two words of the headline are wrong. Applications are not the Internet. This must be some kind of record for HN headlines.

It's not actually wrong: you just have to realize that words have different meanings. The internet is simultaneously: a TCP/IP network and the collection of applications built on top of that network that people use. The first meaning is technical jargon, the second is a more colloquial meaning. Technical meanings are not more correct than other kinds of meanings.

1970-01-013• 4 years ago

OK fine, but going with this logic is how you get to "a series of tubes"

incomingpain• 4 years ago

I'm not that familiar with axios but by the looks of things they are left-wing. Left of center for sure.

This is important context because it's wonderful to see their point of view for what is going down.

They are focusing on dailywire vs disney and other symptoms of the problem.

Progressives are focused on making sure that the existing media and online platforms crack down on misinformation.

But who gets to define what is misinformation. Obviously progressives have taken this upon themselves to define.

Conservatives increasingly feel disenfranchised by media from mainstream news outlets to social platforms and have begun to invest in alternatives.

because of... oh wait we just discussed it. Progressives have taken it upon themselves to define what is misinformation and are censoring conservatives. The conservatives then look at their criticisms fairly. Lab Leak was misinformation and censored. Oh wait that's pretty much fact now. Hunter Biden's laptop suddenly found to be legit? Nope, misinformation and needs to be censored.

And they are investing in alternatives? No no. that was years ago. There's now a dozen that are self-sufficient and better yet, growing to the size they are unstoppable.

The progressives who were pretty happy to censor legitimate stories are now pissed off they suddenly have no power anymore. They can't get on parler and censor their 'misinformation' stories.

On the right, Donald Trump's new social network, which is struggling to launch

Shrug? It was years late. It's not even a big contender at all.

Conservative billionaire Rebekah Mercer co-founded and funded conservative Twitter alternative Parler.

Yes but oh look again those progressives tried to cancel parler as well. Parler going offline for awhile kind of killed it.

Media companies and online platforms in the past have thrived by serving as big an audience as possible without regard to political bent.

Who is creating this split? One side takes sole blame here.

Zoom out: Since the aftermath of the January 6th Capitol riot when most internet companies de-platformed former President Donald Trump, conservatives have been aggressively building out alternative communications infrastructure, including their own cloud storage and cryptocurrency companies.

You're starting to see the picture. You dont even see 1/4 of the picture year but you're starting to see it.

The bottom line: As this trend continues, companies that have long positioned themselves as apolitical will face overwhelming pressure to choose sides.

This doesn't make sense. You can be on twitter and parler at the same time. You dont have to pick sides. Companies that are apolitical can continue to do so.

In fact, what's more important is to see why they even say this. It's the same reason this article doesn't even name the actual replacements. They want to say Trump's new network is floundering. Attack, attack, attack.

The 'progressives' built their platforms on the backs of everyone and then ejected the right. Then are now angry that the conservatives didn't just roll over and die? What did you think would happen?

nunez• 4 years ago

idk I don't have data to back this, but I feel like the Internet was always split between "party lines". You can always find what you want to find on the Internet, regardless of whether it's "right" or "wrong."

Hell, Google Maps represents countries completely differently depending on where you're using the product. Hell, Google isn't even really a thing in China! That's a huge part of Western internet that is represented completely differently elsewhere.

America's internet is splitting along party lines

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