My Momma used to say…

“We can’t do that anymore, because too many people abused the privilege.”

It’s with this in mind, that I’ve been wondering about making services like Twitter and Facebook simply illegal.

I know this flies in the face of freedom, it says that these businesses would be shut down and their employees would be unemployed. That is antithetical to most core American values.

Bear with me here.

Twitter has become a cesspool of hate speech, most everyone agrees that is a true statement. After all, Twitter itself has seen fit to invest in all manner of protections against hate speech, from algorithms to manual reviewers.

Twitter has been forced to endure lawsuits and congressional hearings regarding censorship. Twitter now employs a cadre of high powered attorneys and law firms at great expense just to protect itself from legal action from people who are offended by what they read on Twitter, and those who sue because their opinions are deemed to be hate speech or misinformation.

Facebook is in the same boat.

The simplest solution is to shut down these corporations.

Too many people misuse these services, in some cases these services are being misused to the point that illegal activities are being coordinated through them. Congressional investigations have stated this was true in the Jan 6th event.

This means that both corporations have become inadvertent accomplices to criminality. Not just locally, but on a worldwide level.

Twitter and Facebook were good ideas. Their founders were naive about the nature of humanity. It’s not their fault that people say things that other people do not like. I’d suggest that both corporations accept that as experiments in connecting and unifying people, they’ve essentially failed.

This failed experiment is also not their fault. They’ve proved that too much information exchange between people tends to amplify the worst aspects of social interaction.

Shutting down these kinds of services would tend to limit the negative and deleterious effects of all kinds of misinformation.

Think about it. There wouldn’t be anymore vaccine misinformation.

Local problems would remain local.

Politicians would have to focus on getting votes by traveling to communities and interacting with the residents of the community.

Unqualified or poorly educated journalists wouldn’t be unable to spread unvetted information.

Opinions would no longer be taken as facts without any proof.

Juries in court cases would be easier to impanel because there would be less likelihood of bias or prejudiced information tainting the jury pool.

I think the benefits of shutting down these kinds of services would greatly outweigh the negative consequences.

There would be a period of adjustment of course.

People would have to learn how to live with privacy again. A lot of people would have to deal with addiction issues related to endless scrolling. Neighborhood and Community events could help to address these addiction issues, and at the same time could more effectively address local problems.

Local print media would possibly see a resurgence thereby creating more jobs.

Our government would find it much easier to make sure that their messaging was clear and understood. They could focus on the mainstream news outlets and make sure their statements were read precisely.

Surely, the elimination of all this free exchange of hate speech would be in the best interests of public safety and security.

Just a thought…