Glenn Reynolds, a/k/a Mr. Instapundit, has a think-piece on
the Spectator; his subject is about
one of the Big Tech giants, in this case Twitter. Here’s a sample:
Twitter . . . is tightly coupled.
The ‘retweet’, ‘comment’, and ‘like’ buttons are immediate. A retweet sends a
posting, no matter how angry or misinformed, to all the retweeter’s followers,
who can then do the same to their followers, and so on, in a runaway chain
reaction. Unlike blogs, little to no thought is required, and in practice very
few people even follow the link (if there is one) to ‘read the whole thing’.
According to a study by
computer scientists at Columbia University and the French National Institute,
59 percent of people who share a link on social media don’t read the underlying
story. . . .
. . .
You can reject Twitter’s toxicity
by leaving the platform, as I did in the fall of 2018. But . . . this doesn’t
really solve the problem: ‘Absent large-scale collective action by the
political/media class to reject the platform, simply logging off Twitter is
merely a personal defensive mechanism — a sometimes necessary
mental-health break that all too often correlates with diminished influence in
the national political debate.’ With Twitter, you can participate and be driven
crazy – or you can stay sane, and lose influence. That’s a bad trade-off.
. . .
Rather than focusing on the content
of what individuals post on social media, regulators might better focus on
breaking up these behemoths, policing anticompetitive collusion among them, and
in general ensuring that their powers are not abused. This approach, rooted in
antitrust law, would raise no First Amendment or free speech problems, and
would address many of the most significant complaints about social media.
As Mr. Instapundit is wont to say, read the whole thing –
here.
# # #
