Tony L
Administrator
My maxim for all the above is "Don't trust - verify!" i.e. transparency and scrutiny to enable accountability. I certainly don't trust the big net company owners any more than I do politicians. The record shows they'd sell data to pretty much anyone who pays enough - *including* politicians you or I would loath.
And come the next election we can vote out politicians who've been caught out - unless, of course, the targetted and out-of-our-sight propaganda fouls up democractic accountability... now why does that sound familiar these days?... We can't vote to change who runs FarceBook.
Yes, I've been on the net since 'pine' etc. I recall when a 56k modem was 'wow'. And 'Janet' was the big UK network. Now it's '60MB is OK'...
For clarity I do agree with much of what you say. The point I’m trying to make is I’m a firm believer in social media and the internet in general existing far above any nation state level, i.e. I really don’t want local government meddling in it in any context. I don’t really care whether what floats to the top is open source (Wikipedia etc) or corporate (Facebook, Twitter etc), the end-users can decide that and make their choice what to use. The internet is a fluid and dynamic thing, attempts to force it in any direction are wrong IMO. If Vuk or whoever hates Facebook, Amazon, Google or whatever he shouldn’t use them, or if he is bright enough, he should create an alternative. I just don’t get the whinging and whining.
I also believe censorship should come from within the platforms, e.g. if enough Facebook users complain about data-mining or their platforming political and religious extremists then as a service provider they should respond to that market pressure. FWIW I think they are, though rather more slowly than is ideal. I’ve always had a very clear mindset as to what I am prepared to publish here and have deleted hundreds of user accounts over the years (tens of thousands if you include spammers, ad-bots etc!). I would like to see Facebook and Twitter take a more forceful approach, but I understand only too well the considerable time moderating even a small, relatively quiet and upmarket area of social media actually takes. Something the size of Facebook is simply incomprehensible, though again I don’t hate them for their success!
PS IIRC my first modem was a 9.6 Amstrad ISA job that I plugged into my second hand IBM PS/2 Model 30 DOS PC and attempted to access Compuserve very, very slowly! I later spent a lot of time on Janet, using Archie, Gophers, Newsnet etc before the www arrived, and when it did I stuck the first static pfm site up on my Demon account, that would have been 1993. Technically pfm is older than all of these corporate giants like Google, Facebook, eBay, Amazon etc!