Actually, that's an interesting idea. Is there a way to establish a network that would reveal if people are being "disappeared"?

maybe but it would probably disappear

A fair concern. But people knew people were disappearing in the USSR and China. The question is can it be detected before it gets so extreme.

Maybe some kind of collective deadman's switch?

Argentina had the missing generation thing too

And now Venezuela has a missing economy

lel

What's the consensus on Alex Jones being banned?

Seems to be that he creates a lot of shitty content that people don't like, but that if he were breaking the ToS of these websites then he should have been banned long ago, and the coordinated take down makes it seem like it wasn't because of rules violations, but most likely public pressure, and that's setting a bad precedent.

Also a lot of the press lied about him calling for violence with battle rifles when really the video was telling people to be prepared for the future with them, but that video was taken down which made it easier for them to lie

"which made it easier for them to lie" - basically sums up 2018

even Bill Maher stood up for Alex, that was surprising

I dont always agree with Maher but occasionally he makes good points

Private companies cant simply do as they please, thats why we have rules and regulations

In this case alex jones should be allowed to remain because as far as im aware hes done nothing illegal

Nothing that has a -phobic attached to the end of it should be grounds for dismissal from a public forum

Alex Jones is a nut. But he's no worse of a nut than the nuts who broadcast for several hours a night on Coast to Coast (must be listened to to be believed). Or make up the bulk of current cable network programs (think Ancient Aliens on "The History Channel"). Or populates the universities (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9SiRNibD14 if you want more campus madness, I can find other examples).

He should not have been banned. The degree to which he was attacked by basically everyone (including platforms from which he almost certainly had no interaction like LinkedIn) and the DDOS on InfoWars is a terrifying precedent. He won't be the last for the Tech companies to decide to dogpile and unperson. No matter where you stand on the left-right spectrum, seeing a massive coordinated takedown of a largely peaceful and nonthreatening person such as Alex Jones should leave you deeply concerned. Facebook removed Occupy London (a presumably left-win page) and they went after Dennis Prager (a very middle of the road, normal American conservative). The censorship is broadening. You could very likely be next. Discord has already removed a number of 'alt-right' discord servers.

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I personally am of the stance the **only** solution is the regulation of very large platforms (Google or Facebook scale) by declaring them public squares (or something stronger). When Tim Wu wrote The Master Switch (and coined the term Net Neutrality) he actually singled out Google as a point of potential population control and related the story of the Western Union Telegram monopoly abusing it's power to leak confidential telegrams to elect Rutherford B. Hayes (the obvious implication being that it could very well happen again).

The Right should be opposed as this is a direct attack on them and several key parts of their platform that will likely become more important going forward. The left should be opposed as the use of corporate power to manipulate and control public conversation is an obvious attack on democratic processes and represents the dominance of powerful private interests over the people (and the tech industry is really, really rich too).

ADDENDUM: I bring up Net Neutrality and Tim Wu because the NN repeal and NN imposed by Obama did not impact the tech giants (only the ISPs to my knowledge it didn't even impact the DNS services which have been de-listing people too). The majority of the left is very pro-NN (ironically, the right generally isn't).

Battleforthenet and most of the NN lobbying groups have ties to the tech giants (particularly and notably Google, Facebook, Netflix and particularly Reddit). You will notice when the NN advocates show up they make a bunch of excuses why the tech giants should be exempt. This is because they are cynically protecting themselves from regulation while using it as a sledgehammer to attack the ISPs. Google will sidestep NN as a product of it's physical investments to be close to the key infrastructure of the Internet (as will many other giants). NN as envisioned by Google et al. is more a way to prevent having to ever negotiate with the ISPs.

It's the height of hypocrisy to accuse the ISPs of throttling and censorship while Google, FB, twitter et al. *actually* engange in censorship.

I was pretty anti-NN (title II is far too broad and potentially dangerous). But a demonstrated tendency to censorship, undue favoritism or selectively leaking information are cases that demands regulations. Particularly when you operate as a de facto monopoly or cartel as the tech giants have proved themselves to be. The issue with NN is that it appears to be targeted at the wrong people. Amusingly, Ajit Pai called out the tech industry briefly during the height of the NN repeal.

Quick note on Coast to Coast: George Noory is nothing compared to Clyde Lewis. Coast to Coast approaches weird topics as open skeptics. Clyde Lewis seems to host his damn show with a tin foil hat on every day.
In short, Coast to Coast guests sound crazier than the host. 'Ground Zero' guests usually sound a little more sane than Clyde.

>I personally am of the stance the only solution is the regulation of very large platforms (Google or Facebook scale) by declaring them public squares

please no.
do you want the large platforms to cement their market dominance? they *want* to legally and eternally be defined as the "public square".
why do we want to save these platforms by forcing them to make their policies acceptable?
let them keep shoot themselves in the foot and let them die like myspace.
it's just like bailing out the banks because they are too big to fail.

and lets say they do bring in these politicians with their infinitive internet wisdom and infallible heroism to protect what you and me think is free speech, do you really think the government is ultimately going to define alex jones as free speech rather than hate speech?
if you ask me, alex jones would be universally and legally banned from every single platform by law, rather than randomly by arbitrary policy enforcement as it is now.
we have the better deal right now, imo, when i can still go to infowars.com and bitchute to watch alex jones.

we live in a world where governments consider milk and pepe white supremacy symbolism ffs.

That argument hinges on the idea that they would be permanent institutions. They would only be permanent institutions if made so. I don't see why that has to be the case when it could be done in different ways like 'as long as you have x amount of the population' or 'you are a public square for 5 years and reevaluated after'. I'm sure those ideas have many holes in them, but they're what I came up with in 15 seconds.
Maybe they would have some advantage over the competition with this designation, but they may also have extreme disadvantage with the limitations that would likely be placed on them, and either way if a better platform came along people would move just like they did with myspace.

Really it seems like you're only imagining a worst case scenario here.

it's because the worst case scenario is usually what happens when you try to force things to be what you want

What if we just... don't make them permanent institutions? Seems like a pretty simple solution to me.

i'm pretty sure the regulators are not going to solve it in the way we want them to. you're talking from a position of you having control of what the regulation says, and it wont be lobbied by the corporations to support their dominance

I'm not even in favor of this being done, that just seems like a bad argument. "If you do the bad but unnecesarry thing it will be bad"

Well if I can have no input on it none of this discussion matters either way and I'm just gonna tuck into my sweet race car bed

it's kind of my point, we dont really have any say
we wave our signs in protest saying "help, government, protect our free speech from evil corporations"
and then they write up regulation in a closed doors meeting with shady industry consultants, and then they propose a thousands of pages proposal and give people 5 minutes to read it, but nobody reads proposals anyway and then they pass one more regulatory capture problem for the history books, and people wonder why corporations keep amassing more power

and even if the regulation is good and well, you have another problem of increasing regulatory burden that the platforms have to navigate to be compliant, and that gives the dominant ones an advantage, because they can afford an entire legal division to navigate it, while smaller competitors can't, so you keep raising the barrier to entry.
even if the law doesn't apply to small companies, they still have to do work to find out that that is the case.

They'd have to do what would be basic research on the law before starting a business?

well the more regulations we add, the more we're turning basic research into advanced research

When you make a company highly regulated like that of a public utility, you now make the cost of entry astronomically high. This means the only people capable of now competing is other companies of already beyond a certain size. The only way to not have this happen would be to create legislation that specifically targeted just facebook twitter youtube by name.

Anti-trust laws would be a better alternative before making them utilities

when you make them utilities you declare defeat and seal the market.

more over, these are global platforms. If they like being utilities they stay, if they don't, they leave and don't do business here. China is a MUCH bigger market and google is already showing willingness to go there anyway.

The issue is that the alternatives just aren't appearing. They're being attacked and the major players already control enough mindshare that alternatives just don't gain traction.

Google is smart. They won't take themselves out without MS taking themselves out too. But Google and Bing blacklisting a website can and will kill it. Everyone goes on about Gab or whatever, but if you can't install it from the walled garden that is Android, does it matter? The major social networks, Google, Apple and MS in particular, have the ability to blacklist your app or de-rank it into irrelevance (yeah, sure, you might reach 100 people or so but you don't matter in that case).

If only one or two was being censorious, this wouldn't be an issue. But in effect the whole of the tech industry is acting as a large collective hivemind (see Alex Jones). More to the point, the alternatives that are actually being creating (like Bumble) are even more censorious than the major players. The reality is that Silicon Valley is a bubble that is acting as a cartel. Breaking upt he major players wouldn't really change too much in the end. WeChat and the major players from China would come over (and they would have alot more resources). The small players would be very SJW in orientation and we'd just be beholden to someone else (and it would be harder to tell if someone is being censored).

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As it is, the decision to regulate has already been decided in Europe. The GDPR is already cementing the market monopoly and it will be far from the last. The fact that GDPR could suppress the rise of alternatives has already been raised and dismissed. France is already pushing a fake news bill. Defeating the banning of memes was a close vote but it will not be the last.

Europe does not value free speech in the way the US does and if Europe regulates but the US doesn't, we will all be forced into a European level of censorship because it's cheaper and easier for all internet players (and don't say you're going to actually succeed in walling off your website to not reach Europe and still expect to grow to a size to challenge the current megacorps--it's simply not true). Even if you broke up all the players. Even if you created a viable alternative and managed to avoid getting harassed to your demise. You still have to deal with European regulations and censorious European attitudes. And Europe will not budge.

Addendum: We all have seen Stripe and Mastercard refusing to do business with people they don't like. If you think you can run a business without mainstream income sources, you're hopelessly naive. You *must* be able to take payment.

US-based Regulation forces the issue on essentially everyone. Want to know why parcel delivery services haven't gotten into the game? Why the telecoms haven't (to my knowledge) censored people or prevented people (even the hardest members of the alt-right) from using their phones? It's because they're common carriers and are basically not allowed to refuse service for non-economic reasons.