Ask HN: are Facebook and Twitter still private companies?

4 points by markhollis 5 years ago | 8 comments

A commonly held opinion among the reactions to the social media censorship, is the following "Facebook and Twitter are private companies, they do want they want."

An interesting question to ask is whether Facebook, Twitter (and consorts) are really private companies.

In many areas, they have grown into branches of government. They are being used to do the 'dirty work'. They enforce hate speech legislation, made by government organisations. They sell information to intelligence services. They communicate together about 'streamlined approaches'.

A private company is led by profit motives. Is that really the case nowadays with Facebook and Twitter? If profit was the most important thing, would they ban all those people?

What do you think?

sigmaprimus 5 years ago |

Assuming that they are in fact private companies would that make it easier to accept their censoring and banning of users?

I think the more important question should be, how much public money is being spent on servicing accounts on these "Private" companies and is there a fair bidding process involved in deciding which of these companies governments spend their reasorces on?

Every time I hear about governments offering a service such as providing more information and said info is available through one of these "private" companies such as a Twitter address or worse a Facebook page in which questions, comments or any other means of communication of it's citizens to the government agencies is set up in such a way that requires their citizens have an unbanned account to use one of these "private" company's services, It makes me wonder how many government dollars are being spent through employee salaries and advertising dollars without a fair and open tender process.

If the reason there is no tender process is due to there being no other "private" company providing the services that they are, then anti-trust legislation should restrict governments from supporting them, including hiring social media staffers that specifically work on these monopolistic platforms.

sigmaprimus 5 years ago |

One more thought regarding the censorship and banning of social media users I have, concerns the rules and laws surrounding private companies running sweepstakes contests on these platforms.

At one time it was required that any contest run by private corporations that offered prizes was also required to offer entry to the draw through a "No purchase nessisary" scheme, otherwise it is just gambling.

It now seems it is perfectly fine to require the public to have an account and in turn enter a contract with another private for profit entity in the form of a social media platform user account.

Have the laws changed to facilitate this? Maybe section 230 provides the loophole?

solus_factor 5 years ago |

https://solus.substack.com/p/moral-basis-for-regulating-soci...

sigmaprimus 5 years ago | |

The bakery argument is kind of a right wing "red herring", the problem with it is "Mr. Baker" would have a reasonable argument if the customers were preforming the morally or religiously objectable behavior accoring to Mr. Bakers personal beliefs within the walls of his bakery but that is not the case.

The argument of users of social media platforms having an ownership stake in them because they supported their growth through the sharing of privately owned media might be a bit better but still smells of socialism to me. The users being banned and censored are preforming their actions within the walls albeit virual walls of said social media company.

The best argument the post makes is that there are no other options for the social media user to effectively share their media and therfore they are being discriminated against, but that needs to be tied with the fact goverments are also supporting the social media company by sharing publicly funded media or services on said platform.

solus_factor 5 years ago | | |

If you attack somebody, then yes, it's an action within virtual walls. But if you simply share a thought with your followers that the platform owner doesn't agree with - your argument falls apart.

PaulHoule 5 years ago |

if one extremist chases away 100 normal users or 100 advertisers then the calculation is clear.

For instance, a normal brand like Target or Budweiser doesnt want to serve ads next to hateful content -- it has too much to lose.