SBF took money from rich people and nearly lost it.

Zuck made money for rich people.

Criminal culpability must always filter through this lens.

I think what social media companies are doing is both immoral and criminal. In a just world this behavior would count as a crime against humanity and the people responsible would be tried in a court of law accordingly. In a just world we would have strong consumer protection laws which would protect users against the behavior your parent described. And consumer protection agencies would shut these companies down before they were able to cause this much harm, The worst offenders like Zuckerberg would be criminally charged and go to prison.

You are worrying about domestic nation state actors, and you are calling social media to be banned by whom? Some mysterious administrative entity that is surely not a part of the domestic nation state doing the very propaganda you are railing against?

Surely the people with the power to ban the lot of social media don't have their own propaganda to shove down your throat. Surely they will only ban the bad ones where foreign agents spread dangerous ideas and keep the good ones where only upright citizens of their own country can talk about how great everything is.

>Just ban the lot of them and move on.

How do you define social network, though? Is Facebook a social network, even though it includes a marketplace? Is HN a social network? Is Newgrounds a social network....? Seems difficult to stomp out effectively

> now you’ve got a big juicy target maintained by hobbyists.

You'd have a much larger number of targets which makes things somewhat more difficult for those looking to exploit them since they'd have to track down the various platforms and navigate a variety of systems each with their own rules and culture. Fewer of them would allow ads at all and none of them would match facebook in terms of being as easy to weaponize. "Pay us to attack this platform's userbase" is a core part of facebook's business model.

You'd also be much better off when the people maintaining the system are hobbyists because they actually care about the platform and moderation. That's a massive improvement over facebook which does as little as they possibly can, only enough to be able to claim that they do "something" at the next congressional hearing, while still making sure that they can actively censor what they want. Moderation on major social media platforms seem to frustrate the efforts of legitimate users more than spammers and scammers.

I'd put my money on "Randall, the over-worked sys admin" over the half-assed AI moderator bots employed by Musk and Zuckerberg

Randall’s eagle eye friend and fellow US-based sysadmin notices attacks on his own server, reports it to his congressperson, and the fed stands up protection for the whole fediverse in short order.

The government in the US will prevent others from immediately physically infringing on your rights, say to brew beer. So they’d help us online too even at the expense of corporate platforms right?

What exactly would you like banned and how would you define what should be banned and what shouldn’t?

I assume you want FB and Insta banned. What about Reddit? YouTube? Hacker news? Discord? X? Dating apps? Snapchat? WhatsApp? iMessage? Gmail? Just curious where exactly you draw the line, and how you’d implement the ban.

> Social networks are cancer. Just ban the lot of them and move on

I've been pushing for the under-14 ban, which is popular in almost every country with polling, and holy shit is it a pigpen to wade through.

The idea that they would ban their propaganda networks, but not their alternatives, is really baffling...

Not opposite, a different problem.

If you remove one viewpoint because of government mandate, while still carrying the other, your platform is creating a biased viewpoint to influence people, that’s on the platform.

Strong disagree on this one! The problem is the company will do anything to stay operational in these repressive countries, including helping them hide human rights abuses (among other things).

The logic that if the local government was more open about their repressive policies then Meta would happily help spread that information is probably true but I don't think anyone has ever disagreed with that.

The transnational private sector is neither morally consistent nor geopolitically neutral.

The transnational private sector is neither morally consistent nor geopolitically neutral.

The transnational private sector is neither morally consistent nor geopolitically neutral.

> The private company would gladly connect everyone.

They'll gladly connect everyone except those people/places they personally don't like, or anyone their friends/business partners don't like, or anyone they are paid/bribed to leave disconnected, or anyone who it isn't profitable to connect, or anyone who is profitable to connect but not profitable enough to be worth the bother, etc.

One could (naively) hope that goliath corporations used their massive lobbying power for good. There was a time, long, long, ago, Google refused to operate in China because it refused to censor itself.

Since no matter how much power they have they won't behave good let's go ahead and regulate the shit out of them and tear them into tiny mangable pieces.

If we had a thousand different smaller federated platforms it would be harder for governments to impose rules on them anyways.

Connecting more than none is an admirable goal, but if a company is not objecting this policy in covert and overt ways, they're being just complicit for monies.

Being complicit is something, but being complicit while trying to sugarcoat or hide it is something else.

>The private company would gladly connect everyone.

they do plenty of completely arbitrary censorship voluntarily. no government had mandated the frenzied erasure of certain viewpoints during certain events of 2020-2023, for example.

> The problem is the governments in those places, and not the private company.

Do you think Meta will comply if North Korea or Iran requests same censorship?

If your answer is "No, they will not comply", then problem is the company

Public companies want only one thing, and it’s disgusting.

But seriously, they would gladly connect three people and leave everyone else out if it were most profitable. The fact freedom, such as it still is, is unevenly distributed is no excuse and we are not obligated to shrug and go, “Eh, what do you want this super valuable corporation to do?” We make it valuable as human beings. It should have a responsibility toward us. The fact it does not is a flaw in the system, not a fact of life.

> taxed for their contribution to obesity

It's always amazing how fatties can shift responsibility onto others. The calorie count for Cola is listed right on the bottle. Just don't drink it if you're to fat. And spend a few hours teaching your fat kids to read.

I hear you, there are countless problems to solve. My "..in a just world.." was doing a lot of heavy lifting.

> I mean at least they are giving you a free service and you essentially take part in a transaction.

Yes, it is akin to a transaction, but we cannot ignore the power imbalance between the user and the corporation. They actively engineer their platforms to keep you glued to the screen. It is far from free. You pay with time, money spent on whatever is advertised to you and a lot of other things.

My proposal was analogous to say tobacco tax or carbon tax and the like. We somehow made it essential to be on social media, it is proven to be harmful, policy action to shift priorities.

> Wouldn't it normatively be more in keeping with a proper distinction between public and private to say lobby your congressman to stop the ceaseless funding and weapon deployments to countries in the ME that don't share our values?

If an individual lobbying the government wouldn't be overpowered by monied corporate interest in the government, maybe. Sadly that's not the case, at least in the US.

> The NSA has all your data anyway.

Yes, and this is incredibly unpopular and if we had a real representative democracy we'd be able to do something about it.

> In some jurisdictions you can even claim a right to be forgotten.

This too is popular and would be codified more broadly if, again, it wasn't for corporate lobbyists.

> Do you really think such public entities are more trustworthy than their private bedfellows merely because they fall on opposite lines of the public/private divide?

To beat a dead horse...

> the fact that a majority of your fellow citizens (in the USA at least) don't actually care about their (and by extension - your) privacy or human rights in the Middle East

Factually untrue.

The Iran war is incredibly unpopular, beating Iraq and Vietnam in unpopularity this quickly into the operation [1]

Most Americans want us to stop funding Israel [2]

Most Americans are against spying on fellow Americans (esp democrats/the left; tho republicans love a good ole police state)[3].

I'd argue strongly the reason these numbers aren't more in favor of anti-intervention and privacy is decades and decades of propaganda and fear mongering (about socialism/communism during the Cold War and before, about the Middle East/muslims since the oil crisis and before) because of, you guessed it, corporations lobbying for military engagement, oil contracts etc.

There is a thoroughly documented history of American corporations lobbying the government to, here is a brief list:

- Hawaiian overthrow (1893): sugar (dole, spreckles) - Spanish-American war (Cuba, Philippines, Puerto Rico) (1898): sugar, tobacco, shipping - Columbia/Panama (1903): canal rights - Nicaragua (1909-1933): United Fruit, banking - Honduras (1903, 1907, 1911, 1924): United Fruit and others - Dominican Republic (1916–1924, 1965): sugar again - Iran (1953): oil - Guatemala (1954): United Fruit! - Congo (1960-61): copper/cobalt - Brazil (1964): mining - Indonesia (1965–66): mining, oil - Chile (1970-73): copper - Iraq (2003): oil, war contractors - Iran (2025-26): oil, war contractors

There are many more - some more contested than others - but the above list have clear historical documentation linking them to corporate interests.

Socialism, communism, "terrorism", the war on drugs, "democracy", and Iran getting nukes have all been helpful tools for US corporations to curry influence with bought politicians to have the US colonize or dismantle other countries for their benefit.

Your analysis puts all the blame directly on citizens vs looking at root causes and the obvious successes of corporate and government propaganda on the opinions of Americans.

Let's instead look at who benefits most from these wars and try and dismantle their ability to influence opinion and government and work towards a more representational and fair government we have a say in.

[1]: https://www.natesilver.net/p/iran-war-polls-popularity-appro... [2]: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260519-poll-shows-majori... [3]: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/52425-what-americans-think...

Buddy... Are you a doctor? Are you a scientist? Why do you think that you have an inalienable right to proselytize your "health practices" on a public forum?

My experience was that there wasn't nearly enough moderation on social media about Covid. The absurd amount of misinformation was the final straw that finally got me to leave Facebook and Instagram.