>Unfortunately, most of the “solutions” to this problem that people are suggesting are some form of “force Mark Zuckerberg to be better and not shut off the account we like.” But that’s no way to build a better world. It is, also, the exact same response that MAGA folks had when Donald Trump was banned from social media in the wake of the January 6th insurrection. Their response was to try to force platforms to host the content of people MAGA supported. That cannot be a workable solution, because as political fortunes shift, forcing platforms to host the worst people’s accounts is unworkable for basically everyone.

The bit about "the worst people's accounts" just sounds like a refutation of everything else in the article. The problem was always that it was up to interpretation who "the worst people" are.

IDK why so many people want to die on this hill of not forcing social media companies to extend free-speech rights to their userbase. Facebook didn't accidentally wind up in this position where their TOS can effectively censor entire political movements on the Zuck's whim. They spent decades purposefully angling for this by acquiring competitors and encouraging people to use their platform for any and all communication. They own the audience.

>But there is a better solution: build tools that are open, decentralized, and user controlled. And then actually use them instead of just giving more power to Mark Zuckerberg to shut down a protest organization’s account in the middle of one of its big protests.

Not happening LOL. The decentralized platforms have been there for 10-20 years, hardly anybody uses them.

Back when the shoe was on the other foot, the right tried to make *several* alternative platforms and there was widespread collusion amongst all levels of infrastructure providers to push them off the internet. The same will happen to any platform which seeks to effect political change and attains enough critical mass that it could plausibly do so.

> Back when the shoe was on the other foot, the right tried to make several alternative platforms and there was widespread collusion amongst all levels of infrastructure providers to push them off the internet.

Wow, what spin.

There was no collusion. If we look at Gab, Stripe and PayPal had had numerous issues for a long time leading up to them not accepting payments. I love how you ignore -why- providers cut ties with them: The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter planned and coordinated his efforts on Gab, and when Gab was repeatedly warned about it, refused to do anything. Similarly, though this administration made a lot of it moot, many of the Jan 6 riots were coordinated actively there, same thing (and yes, riots - it was shown in evidence that these were the people who were planning to hurt politicians, staff, law enforcement, and see if they could "capture" Mike Pence to stop his role in certification).

And they were offline for less than a week.

Parler? AWS said that they'd reported over 100 posts to Parler that were active and specific plans for violence and incitement, and been ignored. Following the FBI investigating Parler for its role in coordinating violence on Jan 6, AWS pulled the plug.

It's on the App Store, on Play, now.

But categorizing that as some kind of disagreement on ideology is a hilariously bad take that ignores active coordination of crimes and violence on those platforms.