Once More Into This Fray
Let's not mince words here, folks- this Facebook 'whistleblower' woman didn't tell us anything we weren't already broadly aware of, thanks to previous insider reports and statements. And let us not forget that just a couple of years ago, not even that long if I recall correctly, Netflix released an incredibly well put together documentary entitled "The Social Dilemma", which in and of itself involved social media industry insiders talking at length about the ways in which algorithms have pushed rage-bait and anger fuel in order to maintain engagement and interaction with their products.
In other words, if her story seems all too familiar, it's because a ton of us already saw it. Even her detail-free 'reveal' of how a long-time friend became radicalized by a certain element of Facebook carries the scent of the poorly-executed narrative portions of that documentary, with the young man becoming intrigued by and eventually engaging with a socio-political group on the platform. Her tale smacks of disingenuousness thanks to this 'Plug and Play' element of her narrative.
Even if we assume that what she has to say is on the up-and-up, way too many people have been burned by the lies, cover-ups, reveals and previous failures of both the platforms themselves and government to do 'the right thing' to give this situation anything less than what Bryan Callen would call 'the old skeptical hippo eyes'. After all, doesn't the whole 'Facebook radicalized my friend' story kind of work against the earlier notion that it was all Parler's fault, resulting in Amazon's AWS nuking that alternative social media platform from orbit? If Instgram and Facebook and YouTube are harboring 'bad actors', then why have their alternatives always been the ones coming under constant fire?
Where was all of this concern over Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act when conservatives and libertarians were, for months, calling for a closer examination of its application since it was suggested that it was being used to allow non-liberal, non-mainstream voices to be down-ranked, shadowbanned and silenced? Oh, right, those concerns were being dismissed as 'conspiracy-theory claptrap'.
Funny how so many bits of such 'claptrap' keep making their way towards being seen as 'perhaps right on the mark' within a couple of years.
If there are any legal minds at work reading this, would this much-ballyhooed 'whistleblower's' revelations pretty much allow Parler to go to court and clearly demonstrate that they did, in fact, suffer damages when Amazon incorrectly and unfairly put the weight of online radicalization on their heads alone, pulling their support via termination of access to AWS servers?
Why am I not seeing these questions brought up more broadly? Did all of that get 'Memory Holed' by pretty much everybody?
This kind of blatant hypocrisy keeps coming to light, and it leads a lot of us, ostensibly trying for a long time to stay 'middle of the road' or search for and represent a third option, to have to say that this is clearly not a bug in the system, but a feature.
Furthermore, it's exactly the kind of thing that gives rise to alternative platforms, that causes some of us to seem to clam up or disappear for long stretches. I have a new job role at my employer's to learn as a line cook, my children to enjoy and raise, a wife to spend time with (what precious little we get together), and my fiction work to tend to; I don't want to waste my efforts diving into this sort of material more often than I do.
This is especially true when, given the track record of being largely dismissed out of hand, none of my pieces in this arena pick up any sort of steam. I don't have a solution to offer at this time, just observations to make and questions to ask. The trouble for me is this- why am I the one making those observations and asking those questions?