A US government run social media site would be terrible. For one, our political parties are extremely polarized, so any subjective moderation would flip with regime changes. To avoid this, it'd just become linkedin. Vacuous virtue-signaling 'safe' garbage.
I disagree. Government run social media has no reason to promote engaging(antagonizing) content towards you. You log in, see a post or two from your local, state, and Federal representatives and departments that no longer have to post on a dozen different private social media to disseminate public info and some post from people you have specifically chosen to follow. A chronological feed too, the site doesn't need to keep you scrolling and engaged to view ads.
Open up the API and let people layer their own engagements on top of it.
I dont agree, but thats okay. You and I don't have the same level of trust that future government employees and leadership will be objective and reasonable with their interpretation of what we post to our friends and family, I guess. I hope you're the right one here, but I cant make myself believe it.
I'd love to see it (in a hypothetical sense slightly more than the real sense) just to see the "tyrannical moderation" case law that comes of it. If they wanted to add a bunch of "analytics" suddenly there's real government contention around online privacy.
In the long term, it seems like it has a lot of potential to be a Good Thing but it depends a lot on how it actually plays out.
Why can't this just be on their website? Not everything needs engagement from the masses.
Also building online communities is incredibly difficult and resource heavy, seeing that we can barely get enough funding for teachers to run their classrooms appropriately would this be the best use of taxpayers money?
Great idea I think we can fund teachers and provide a simple social media site for all.
Think about why this would be incredibly difficult and resource heavy? The US social media site doesn't have to try and serve video reliably while threading in ads to make a profit. Sure people can try to upload video in plain text and create their own clients to ingest it, like I said "Open up the API and let people layer their own engagements on top of it."
It's an infrastructure project, like national highway or the internet.
Whether it would suck or not, it’s really the only place where laws the rules would be what the law actually is —-Truly free speech and a platform where people can legitimately vote and be part of the rule making process.
Having a public competitor to private enterprise only improves things like a properly funded USPS over UPS/FedEx or even banking.
The context of that description is LinkedIn, and it's an accurate way to describe interactions on LinkedIn. I get the point you're making about politics, but it's not what GP was talking about (IMO).
I agree that it’s accurate to describe LinkedIn, but the larger context is subjective moderation on a government run social media platform, so I was trying to point out that what’s safe on LinkedIn is generally considered to be good by the Democratic party.
Both parties virtue signal with safe topics, but they disagree on what counts as safe (or virtuous).
Simple examples: every public Democratic figure will support pride month and every Republican will support the 2nd Amendment, regardless of what they actually think about the issues. If they don't, their own side will eat them.
I agree with your first point, but I’m unsure about the second.
I don’t think many Democrats secretly don’t support pride month or many Republicans secretly don’t support the 2nd amendment, but then go on to publicly show support so their side doesn’t attack them.
There's a certain baseline level of affirmation that's sometimes required for it not to be considered that one specifically disagrees with some hot button topic that was brought up. It's what's being spoken against with the sentiment, "Not everything has to be about X."
It's less that one secretly doesn't support X, just that they're talking about Y right now as a separate issue from X. X is important, and may even be related to Y, but Y is what's being discussed. Such an assertion is often met with, "Oh, so you don't support X!?" and that comes off as hostile, regardless of actual intentions.
