Thursday, January 21, 2021

Samantha Bee, CNBC, and Vox examine tech companies suspending Trump from social media

While I didn't want to spoil my good mood yesterday by blogging about you know who on his way out the door, I'm ready to take a more serious look at Trump being banned from social media. I'm going to ease into it with Samantha Bee saying It Shouldn't Have Taken An Insurrection For Social Media To Block Trump.

After allowing the president four years to post hateful, inflammatory, and downright false information across the internet, social media companies are finally taking action! Thank God they were able to step in before he caused any real damage....
Heh. It shouldn't have taken an insurrection, but it did.

Bee's video came out the day before CNBC uploaded Experts On How Facebook And Twitter May Change After Trump Bans, which had to do more research to examine the issue through journalism, not comedy.

On January 6th, Rioters stormed the U.S. capitol building to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. These events were inspired by President Trump and organized and promoted on the platforms of publicly traded companies, most notably Facebook and Twitter. To avoid further violence, those companies, and then many more thereafter including YouTube, banned or blocked President Trump's access to the megaphone they provide. This exposed a major flaw in the business model of many social media platforms: share first, think later. Tech experts Chamath Palihapitiya, Roger McNamee, Chris Kelly and Dick Costolo all predict major changes coming in the social media landscape and Section 230. Watch the video to find out how big tech may be forced to change.
Yes, Section 230 will likely change as a result of the failed self-coup and more in the way Democrats want than what Trump and other conservatives say they want, although they would likely have been hurt worse than they expected if they had gotten their way.

The experts CNBC interviewed also pointed out issues with the business models of Twitter and Facebook and how they work to spread disinformation and misinformation. That's an issue Vox examined today when it asked Tech platforms banned Trump. Now what?

Deplatforming Trump won't stop the big lie.
...
Former US president Donald Trump has now been kicked off of social media platforms from Facebook and Twitter to Pinterest. His suspension followed a violent insurrection on the Capitol in his name, and came months after Twitter had begun flagging hundreds of his posts for false statements about the election that he lost. But, as Platformer's Casey Newton explains, banning Trump was actually the easy part. Now tech platforms have a new problem: How do you combat misinformation when it's become bigger than any single user?
People don't know the answer, which is why the big documentary about the issue is called "The Social Dilemma." On the one hand, it connects people and has become an efficient way to communicate. On the other, those connections can be used for ill just as easily, if not more so, than for good. I may return to examine "The Social Dilemma" as I promised in 'Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution' at the Critics' Choice Documentary Awards. Stay tuned.

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