Comments by "Trazyn" (@Trazynn) on "Facebook’s Oversight Board Was Right to Ban Trump" video.

@solveigvan808 A judge ordered Trump not to ban anyone on Twitter because the comment section on each tweet he posts is considered a public forum. By extension no other politicians are alloweded to block people either. Here we see which side the government takes on social media infrastructure, and unlike you, it's taking the side of free speech.
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@solveigvan808 Does your firm belief in individual liberty extend to that of the people running water and energy utilities? Are they allowed to cut people and businesses whom's views they disagree with off their water and electricity?
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@solveigvan808 Which would be a bad thing if they could, yes?
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@solveigvan808 The government considered energy and water too important to let the private sector decide who gets to access it for the sake of individual liberty, all of this at the cost of the individual liberty of the handful of people who would otherwise be privately controlling these utilities.
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@solveigvan808 Did we just luck out that the government did have the prescience to understand the importance of water and energy and not that of social media? Would you be defending private water infrastructure if the government didn't get involved quick enough before it could result in similar problems we see on social media today?
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@solveigvan808 When (not if) cash is entirely replaced by digital payment a cartel of payment processors will be able to say who can have access to their digital transactions and gatekeep an entire economy with even greater leverage than a water provider.
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@solveigvan808 sure. But alt-currency will still leave you starving if you can't check out at the grocery store because you said something Mastercard didn't appreciate.
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@solveigvan808 You are skirting away from the point that payment processing is an infrastructure that can be consolidated and leveraged by a few players. You don't get to hope that it won't.
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@solveigvan808 Visa controls 52% of the debit card transactions, mastercard controls 22% of them (and about 95% in Europe). Both companies have no qualms about making politically driven decisions. Visa has halted all political donations since January 12th and Mastercard gladly deplatforms anyone using their platform for 'hate speech'. The losses in profit is a drop in the bucket to them if that means they can put their thumb on the scale of public discourse.
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@solveigvan808 A company can't function if it can't accept cards. It goes bankrupt.
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@solveigvan808 You're not addressing the challenge, you're merely shifting the problem. Google, Facebook, Twitter and Apple coordinate their deplatforming. Nobody is competing to facilitate the fringe so they gladly push that out of society.
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@solveigvan808 These shifts always move towards more consolidation of power. You already attested that a single actor, or cartel of actors controlling a single form of infrastructure, water, would be undesirable. But people have gotten by without water infrastructure before it got implemented. This is why currently you're sounding like someone in the 18th century defending private control of the water infrastructure by saying "total control is an illusion! they can always pump water from the well by hand!".
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@solveigvan808 You can repeat it as many times as you want but the categorical difference you keep hammering on is entirely arbitrary. The government, IE the consensus of the public, decides what is, and is not an utility based on how destabilising pure private control would be on society. Phone land lines weren't important at the start of the 20th century. They became vitally important throughout the 20th century and now they're barely important in the context of the internet. There is nothing inherent about the phone land line technology that makes it an utility. It's merely its role it plays in contemporary society. The same goes for social media. Nobody needed social media or digital payments even a decade ago, but now that we're starting to conduct an enormous share of not just our economy but also our public discourse on it, its leverage on society becomes too strong to have private actors become the gatekeepers of it. Maybe one day social media becomes irrelevant and undeserving of the status of utility, but that's not today nor for the foreseeable future.
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@solveigvan808 And yet the time where the person on a soapbox in the public street was able to draw any meaningful audience at all will never come back no matter what will happen to Twitter.
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