also <https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/08/27/640323347/the-school-shootings-that-werent>

Columbine was in 99

Don't underestimate the rise in awareness.

the number of incidents are being inflated to put people into a useful hysteria

That alone can drive the story.

How are they being inflated?

Everyone is afraid of child molestation rings. Child molestation was down since the media got into it in the 80s and has been down ever since.

`But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. `

But everyone seems deathly afraid to let their kids walk around alone outside anyway.

Never let a crisis go to waste, and if you don't have a crisis that's just a problem of messaging.

The tech tyranny is probably going to come to a head because with each rule being rolled out to ban certain topics. It becomes more and more apparent that these sites are becoming less and less fun and useful. "The Good Censor" even brought this up to Google. Condemning the lack of transparency, blaming it for a lot of the backlash and even suggesting to move forward with tools to curate one's own search results.

I don't really see it happening. The tech giants would have to start censoring really mainline stuff and there'd have to be enough support for people to keep fighting it and not get crushed.

If you silence *all* dissent, you win by default.

I don't think a single one of them has particular affection from anyone in its userbase, though

They are the only options.

Like, there was a time you wanted your friends on Facebook

And they just killed off another challenger today.

Because it was fun

I'm not sure many people feel that way anymore

I guess. But the fact is that social media and the internet is so interwoven it's also basically impossible for people to imagine a world *without* it.

And there's *a lot* of code in stuff like Android. You won't just replace it.

It's pretty possible

I mean we still have places like this.

A lot of people still keep in touch with friends via Text, for example

This place is already selling games, what else might they do?

I'm not saying it's impossible. But I am saying you'll have a hard time getting people *off*

It didn't take a lot to get people to move on from MySpace

And like, really *off* not simply on a new platform or something.

Back then there were lots of options.

All it takes the incumbent to get lazy, which they already are

And then for something fresh to emerge

Microsoft got lazy in the 90s. They're not the monolith they once were, but they still are very much a thing.

Few of the alternatives at the moment are fresh

And are still extremely powerful.

And as things go along they will continue to ex-communicate people that disagree and eventually those numbers could get into the millions.

I don't think it'll take large numbers of excommunicated

It'll be much more fickle

Why did the media choose now to lie about them?

Ok. What exactly would you need for a fresh alternative. There comes a point in every new technology where things just get stale and there's not much new and exciting you can do. No one expects radical new fun out of their FM radio.

Is it because they need to compete with the internet?

@Sharpwing it's a race. You have to factor in the rate at which they get new recruits and manage to fundamentally rework the society. That rate seems much higher than the burnout rate. And many of the burnouts aren't exactly taking up arms for the other side.