The departure of major newspapers from the social network X, accusing the platform of spreading disinformation, is a symptom of the failure of democracies to regulate internet platforms, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) told AFP

7 comments

1. “Journalists” calling for censorship!

   If these scumbags had not sold out and tarnished the integrity of their own profession, the public would have more trust in them. Rebuilt the trust instead of cosying up to your favourite politician to give them more power of censorship.

   And “journalists” working for The Guardian should be the last people to point fingers about disinformation and biased reporting.

2. New stage in the struggle for the centralization-decentralization of media & social-media networks. You can see the creep to centralization over the past 2 decades. US traditional media is a centralized monolith, who across the whole spectrum toes the exact same narratives. Social media has been slowly centralized from the end of the Obama Administration to now, with US Gov actors planted within corporate censorship bureaus. Twitter showed how this worked, with FBI & CIA advisors holding weekly meetings to advise them on which topics to censor for the week.

   It doesn’t really mean much that state-backed, traditional media outfits move away from social media. If you look at their engagement over social media, it’s usually terrible.

   The push to create Twitter alternatives is a struggled attempt to break centralization, and ultimately won’t gain much traction because Twitter holds marketshare in the form of their users and the content they produce. Any site trying to compete with this will always have a dearth of content, and therefore a dearth of users. Examples: Gab, Truth Social, etc. Same thing happened to Reddit alternatives when political censorship here ramped up in 2016. All Reddit alternatives failed to gain traction for the reasons above, but also due to political-corporate chicanery that ultimately suppressed them.

3. What a load of shit, these newspapers didn’t leave X to begin with (the Guardian said they were, but said they’d still post to their account and journalists would keep using it, which is like saying I’ll leave reddit except for my half dozen accounts I’ll keep open and using).

   The public electing someone the elites don’t like is actually a sign of a healthy democracy – that they’re responding by wanting to censor anything that an arm of the establishment show that these elite are perfectly happy doing away with democracy if it doesn’t favour them. The attacks on Trump destroying democracy were always projection.

4. Imagine begging, nay demanding a central agency to decide what ppl can say to each other and what they cannot say to each other. These ppl dont realize what kind of world theyre building for their children.

5. Somehow I don’t see X dying off no matter how many people quite

   New people will join and many people will return

   I never used it even before Musk bought it but the platform is just a daily website for many

6. Let me see if I get this right:

   Internet platforms should be regulated, because otherwise major newspapers will leave it?

   Also: They claim Musk is sympathetic to Trump and used X to help elect Donald Trump. Now they claim for regulation.

   **Guess who will have the power to decide how to regulate media during Trump’s government?**

7. >the failure of democracies to regulate internet platforms

   There’s plenty of misinformation on Reddit, too – it’s just a different party. Is it supposed to be subject to “regulation of internet platforms” as well, or does it only apply strictly to “non-democratic” platforms?

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