Hi nettime,
In the years to come, the digital rights community will need to answer
for the conflation of free speech of a democratic society with the
formats and operations of the private platforms for which we interact on.
Indeed, the US-borne legal stance enshrined by Section 230 — that the
platform is (within reason) not broadly responsible for the content of
what its users post — is something that should be heeded by the wider
democratic world. But what continues to be missed is the interface as it
relates to speech: the editorialised algorithmic timeline, the scaffolds
that dictate and shape platform speech (be it short form video, 200
characters, or pictures with filters), or what one must give up in order
to participate.
Turns out, all of these properties are just as important in the context
of speech, and how they shape what is said, who gets to say it, and how
they say it. And yet, beyond meandering gestures towards
interoperability by the EU, or the endless protest by NGOs against
endless social-media accelerated genocides, we widely continue to equate
the platform with the speech. The two could not be further from each other.
Put simply, the democratic enshrinement of free speech is the cloak that
has successfully kept these controllers of discourse firmly in the seats
of power. That has been the mantra, to attack the platform is to attack
speech itself, what a convenient reality for these now-juggernaughts!
Forgive me, but in 2024 this kind of free speech discourse rings as
hollow as Musks' facile speech absolutism. A digitalised democracy must
evolve beyond the infantile technolibertariancore EFF understanding of
free speech, where the platform and its designed constraints and rules
are invisible to the demands of a free press. There is a very real
accelerationist attack underway that leverages this very flaw in the 30+
years of digital discourse, driven by a flaw we have all perpetuated to
varying degrees. Killing a platform for being run by a Epstein-adjacent
hyper-criminal who once flashed a woman on an aeroplane and then offered
to buy her a horse is not the same as kicking in the doors of citizens
who post on the platform owned by Epstein-adjacent hyper-criminal who
once flashed a woman on an aeroplane and then offered to buy her a
horse. Frankly I'm tired of the claims that these are one and the same.
I am not an authoritarian, I don't give a fuck about the Nazis on X.
What I care about is that, after 40 years of fighting for internet
freedoms, the Nazis are now freely flowing into the timelines of
everyone you care about. To continue to parrot this 20th century idea of
free speech without considering the infrastructure actor is to be in
denial as this information warfare submerges us. It is exactly the
belief here, cloaking the corpo platform in the dream of the democratic
voice, that has kept us from the nuance needed to navigate these
pathetic implementations of mass media we are still just beginning to
grapple with.
Thanks for reading.
Cade
~
Founder, New Design Congress
https://newdesigncongress.org/en/join
On 11.10.24 18:55, Harv Stanic Staalman via nettime-l wrote:
Oh, how democratic and advanced. Asking for a censorship in a 21st century,
after 40 years of fighting for internet freedoms certainly brings memories of
the
//Reichsministerium//// für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda//.
I wonder which EU funding scheme sponsors this?
Geert should know better.
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