a reminder
When social media companies say they can’t do anything about filthy, racist abuse on their platforms, what they mean is: We can’t do anything about that abuse without changing our policies in ways that might inconvenience us. Right now the foulest abuse imaginable is being poured out on a 19-year-old English soccer player because Twitter and Instagram can’t be bothered to deal with it. Dealing with it would require money and resources, and might make people less likely to sign up to be surveilled (for financial purposes only, of course). And that’s why they won’t deal with it.
Around the world legislators are lazily considering laws that might force the social media companies to care. I doubt that many such laws will be passed, and I am sure that any that do get passed will first undergo a very thorough watering-down. But even the strongest proposals now being considered are not strong enough to suit me. It’s time for a Butlerian jihad against the social-media giants. Raze them to the ground and salt the foundations. It’s them or us.
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Maybe a bit of calm and considered social backlash will cool the hot-heads better than draconian controls. But that requires a calm and considerate society. Those on my Facebook feed who get cut off by the Facebook police seem proud of their accomplishment.
"We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds. We have become cunning and learned the art of obfuscation and equivocation. Experience has rendered us mistrustful of human beings, and often we have failed to speak to them a true and open word. Unbearable conflicts have worn us down or even made us cynical.' He said he had learned 'to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspect, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of suffering.'"(Dietrich Bonhoeffer quoted by Charles Marsh. Strange Glory. 340-341).
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