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On January 15th, 2018, World Socialist Web Site reported that users are unable to share a promotional video for a January 16th online meeting, "Organizing Resistance to Internet Censorship."
Facebook has blocked users from sharing a social media video promoting the January 16 online meeting "Organizing resistance to Internet censorship," featuring World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board Chairman David North and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges. The initial post of the video, uploaded Friday, cannot be shared by any user. Those who attempt to do so receive an error message that seems to imply a technical failure.
Users reported, however, that upon clicking "If you think you're seeing this message by mistake, please let us know," they were presented with a notice that clearly indicates the content had been blocked in the name of keeping Facebook "safe."
WSWS published an open letter about internet censorship and net neutrality on November 25. The FCC repealed net neutrality rules on December 14, 2017.
In this AC's opinion, Facebook is certainly within their rights to refuse to host any content for any reasons they choose. However, for many people, Facebook is the internet.
Should we worry about entrenched services such as Facebook and Google using their positions to suppress information? Does the presence or absence of net neutrality change one's analysis of the situation?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday January 17 2018, @08:23PM (1 child)
You've made the observation of Dunbar's Number, a.k.a. The Monkeysphere.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday January 18 2018, @06:16AM
Pretty much, yes. Democracy can work a bit beyond Dunbar's number, but after that it has a tendency to decay.
The other respondent commented about Switzerland being a counter-example, but I believe that it's a "representative democracy" rather than a democracy. Athens was able to make actual democracy work with numbers slightly higher than 500, but as it got larger it started splitting into factions, and they basically lost it even before the war with Sparta. Actually, they lost it more than once. The laws of Solon are from one of the earlier times that they lost it.
I don't know much about the Swiss system, but it seems likely the cantons are small enough that the candidates are actually known by the people who vote for them. If so, then the cantons could have a democracy even though the country didn't.
OTOH, don't make the equivalence between democracy and good. Democracies are often less tolerant of deviant individuals than are monarchies. Some intolerant bigot wielding the "will of the people" may be telling the truth (though perhaps he shaped the "will of the people"), but that doesn't make him good. He's still an intolerant bigot.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.