The name of this disease is difficult to express in one word, but you certainly have encountered it many times in your life. Surely you have met people who know exactly how others should live and what moral values should be observed? What should be said, who should be respected and who should be given a seat on public transport?
Now all this is more and more clearly observed in IT. Note that it all started as usual with pretty good beginnings - and let's moderate the content / applications so that there is no pornography and other indecency. However, the system has to be started only once and it is already difficult to stop it. Any Indian on Google or Apple could have banned applications on the basis of one principle that he knew without explaining the reason, because a "safe" Internet is a common good. Well, obviously, it all ended with the blocking of Trump's accounts and the Parler network. (It's also worth noting Apple and Epic Games, the story is similar, only the motivation is slightly different).
Holston for The New York Times
I would like to point out right away that I am not a supporter of Trump or conspiracy / flat earth theories. But what is happening is an ordinary dictatorship, albeit on the Internet. A group of people decides for another group what it should think and write and what not, before whom it should kneel, and who should be banned. Yes, all this is happening under the guise of violations of user rights, but the rules and laws are selective. On the one hand, they banned and advised to go to court, and on the other hand, they banned because of "public danger", which the court, after all, has not yet been established. Why should the Facebook management have the right to decide whether or not to ban a person for whom tens of millions of fellow citizens have voted? Yes, they have user agreements, but don't forget that they are also monopolists in the market.
The main goal of any media, and social networks in fact are, is to provide normal feedback between members of society and the state. Any attempt at censorship breaks this feedback. If there are many fans of the flat earth theory in the country, it means that the country has problems with education, and it means that money should be invested not in censorship, but in educational projects. If 70 million people vote for Trump in your country, then a deep split is ripe in society and something needs to be done to establish a dialogue between the camps, and not ban opinion leaders. Because if you ban it, you remove feedback, but not solve existing problems, and stagnant problems lead to bloodshed much more often than slogans on Twitter.
It is quite obvious that the mechanism for moderating the content of social networks is impossible and it will be selective or repressive. Probably, it is necessary to shift the responsibility for publications to the authors. Threats of murder are serious things, but banning a social network hosting is about the same as banning Red Square because protesters have gathered there. Probably, laws are needed to identify people's accounts on social networks, because freedom is also a responsibility. You write illegal things - be ready to be held accountable, but censorship is the very last option for solving problems.
And finally, I would like to touch upon the actual root causes of the current problems. It seems to me that in IT Co., the problem of survivor's mistake is especially acute. Unfortunately, people who have been completely accidentally shot by a project, unfortunately, very often begin to consider themselves gurus of development and entrepreneurship, begin to give advice and inevitably there comes a time when they take the liberty of dictating moral principles and ideals to society. The great danger is that a vicious circle is created. Having a platform of hundreds of millions of people, the conventional Zuckerberg believes that he has some kind of moral rights, and people without critical thinking, referring to hundreds of millions of people, begin to say "since Zuckerberg said, then he is right."
What to do and who is to blame? Unfortunately for the author, nowadays social networks and infrastructure companies have become an important part of society. Their owners did not show social maturity and began to pursue a policy of discrimination. Probably, had it not been for the incident with Trump, the question would not have arisen for a long time. I would like to hope that Trump will go to court and win it, and that the responsibility of the Internet monopoly companies will somehow be regulated by laws.
P.S.
I noticed that there was not enough context. Here's what we managed to get.
www.thetrumparchive.com
techcrunch.com/2021/01/08/reddit-donaldtrump-ban-capitol