Yeah, agreed. It's hard to draw the line between a normal political discourse and a dangerous one, and harder at scale, and even worse if your engagement metrics are at stake. So mostly they do nothing until it's too late.
AWS pulled the plug on Parler a few days after the Capitol riot, and then justified it with evidence of posts from before the riot. If the riot had not happened, then surely Parler would still be hosted on AWS today.
So the big players are not proactively censoring anything; it's all engagement metrics, then CYA when shit hits the fan. But take heart: that means that small platforms really can live under the radar.
Yes, this, in earnest. On Beyond Zebra! was a joy of mine growing up. EBay's 'witch burning' have surely breathed new life into these books. Go read it, it's great, its PDF can be found in a few seconds on google.
Market economies allow for stupid mistakes. It really is civilized when the blast radius of such mistakes is "people who get all their books from ebay" instead of "everyone in the country."
The big platforms desperately want to be anodyne. They don't want to censor, they just want you to see a funny cat photo, click Like, and come back in ten seconds for the next one.
Deplatforming is an extreme measure when they perceive an existential threat like "abetting an insurrection."
But there was no government action here. Dr Seuss's estate made a decision, and EBay reacted to it. A dictatorial government would either prohibit or demand publishing the books. The US government has rightly done nothing.
There's the modern news-cycle axis, where Google can and should devote full-time engineers.
But the long tail is important too. It's fixed now (yay) but for years you could search for "calories in corn" and Google would confidently present an answer 5x the true value, scraped from a site with profoundly wrong information. As Google moves to present more direct answers and fewer links, this risk increases.
It looks like they have backed off on the direct answers somewhat which is good news.
Google lends the weight of its authority to the answers it presents. It's one thing if Infowars says that Obama is planning a coup against Donald Trump, it's another if Google says so.
Here is an idea: make it a standard practice for hosts to publish the a "we do not discriminate" clause in their listing. Maybe even provide a checkbox that adds that boilerplate.
I'll bet most people prefer to rent from hosts that say they don't discriminate.
Of course this won't solve the problem, but for hosts like the one our blogger found, it will at least tug on their conscience.
AWS pulled the plug on Parler a few days after the Capitol riot, and then justified it with evidence of posts from before the riot. If the riot had not happened, then surely Parler would still be hosted on AWS today.
So the big players are not proactively censoring anything; it's all engagement metrics, then CYA when shit hits the fan. But take heart: that means that small platforms really can live under the radar.