Your weekly mail is one of the best reads for me. Please consider this as a request, but is it possible to provide a list of books which one should read? Even books for different subjects such as Economics, Philosophy, and so on.
Thank you for running such a wonderful newsletter.
It is surprising to see the below (seems to be an offhand remark) in an otherwise excellent post:
"Suppression of free speech is an issue only when the state is involved. Private entities don’t have that monopoly on violence. If they suppress free speech on their platform, well, there are other platforms."
While private entities don't have "monopoly on violence" and "well, there are other platforms" are true in the strict, narrow sense of the phrases used, evidence has emerged worldwide that private entities like Twitter whose main product is dissemination of speech have great power, and therefore great responsibility. The power emerges from economic network effects. In fact, that reason is the very basis on which the intermediary guidelines (applying to "significant social media intermediaries") have been formed.
Whether it is deplatforming Trump or Kangana, or warning ManjulTOONS, Twitter and other social platforms have a monopoly on the reach they enable and other platforms simply do not replicate it. Case in point: the loss of fame and income suffered by thousands of TikTok creators in India after the government's TikTok bans, in spite of the wide availability of copycat apps.
Platforms have been policing user-generated content, whether it is through legal requirements (copyrighted content; content related to weapons, pornography, drugs, etc.) or through the platform's own rules (which are a tool to control the experience a user gets and thereby preserve its financial interests) - the "violence" ranges from extreme (deplatforming) to limited (withholding content) to warnings-only (tags of "manipulated media") and even as signals evaluated by feed curation algorithms, based on the offense.
Any inquiry should be truthful restricting itself to facts and evidence and the commitment shall be to accept whatever comes out of such inquiry as Truth, even if it is inconvenient!
Your weekly mail is one of the best reads for me. Please consider this as a request, but is it possible to provide a list of books which one should read? Even books for different subjects such as Economics, Philosophy, and so on.
Thank you for running such a wonderful newsletter.
It is surprising to see the below (seems to be an offhand remark) in an otherwise excellent post:
"Suppression of free speech is an issue only when the state is involved. Private entities don’t have that monopoly on violence. If they suppress free speech on their platform, well, there are other platforms."
While private entities don't have "monopoly on violence" and "well, there are other platforms" are true in the strict, narrow sense of the phrases used, evidence has emerged worldwide that private entities like Twitter whose main product is dissemination of speech have great power, and therefore great responsibility. The power emerges from economic network effects. In fact, that reason is the very basis on which the intermediary guidelines (applying to "significant social media intermediaries") have been formed.
Whether it is deplatforming Trump or Kangana, or warning ManjulTOONS, Twitter and other social platforms have a monopoly on the reach they enable and other platforms simply do not replicate it. Case in point: the loss of fame and income suffered by thousands of TikTok creators in India after the government's TikTok bans, in spite of the wide availability of copycat apps.
Platforms have been policing user-generated content, whether it is through legal requirements (copyrighted content; content related to weapons, pornography, drugs, etc.) or through the platform's own rules (which are a tool to control the experience a user gets and thereby preserve its financial interests) - the "violence" ranges from extreme (deplatforming) to limited (withholding content) to warnings-only (tags of "manipulated media") and even as signals evaluated by feed curation algorithms, based on the offense.
The offhand dismissal was therefore jarring.
Any inquiry should be truthful restricting itself to facts and evidence and the commitment shall be to accept whatever comes out of such inquiry as Truth, even if it is inconvenient!