Twitter Competitor: Dueling Forums

    It has been often suggested that what the internet needs is a proper competitive environment for such industry giants as “Google”, “YouTube”, “Facebook”, and “Twitter”.  And there have been many attempts to build the newest and latest competitor to those forum/publishers.

    I do combine the forum and publisher designations because I think it an important distinction in the relative accountability of the behavior of certain companies on the internet and their various rolls.  Many of the rules which govern computer and internet companies were established long before the advent of computers or even mass public airwaves and have not necessarily kept up with the dynamics of the rapidly changing communication industries of the modern era.

    However, it might be helpful in our understanding to compare such companies to less high tech analogies to understand their roles in society and a better perspective on not only how we ought to view and treat them but a means to approach their true value and function in society together with how that could be used or abused.

    To view Google, or AOL, or similar company you are looking at not merely one program or function but the internet equivalent of a major media conglomerate.  Google not only owns a prominent search engine, using it to build a huge user marketing database. but has bought up other companies like Youtube, Android, AdSense, DoubleClick and others.  https://www.investopedia.com/investing/companies-owned-by-google/

    YouTube, can be though of as something like a cable or television network, which became huge inviting people to create their own channel and their own content with the promise of becoming essentially an independent business making money on advertisements.  Who would not want their own television show or even their own channel?

    Of course, this came up against the imposition of political censorship through the control of the money strings.  He who controls the media advertising dollars, controls the media content.  Which explains why Google has vertically integrated the marketing information functions through their search engine with the advertisement selling and again linked with their advertisement placements on YouTube.

    So if YouTube is a computerized version of a cable network, Google a computerized marketing conglomerate, what is FaceBook?  I mean aside from just a replacement for MySpace, as these serve essentially the same function.  Effectively, Facebook is little more than a combination of a personalized newsletter and mailbox with graphic features.

    Facebook allows people to essentially advertise their own personal lives, combined with the ability to send and receive messages from those interested in your personal advertisements.  As a personalized newsletter for yourself, or you company, a person can post more in-depth explanations and pictures of their lives, their work, and their social groups.

    As a cheap newsletter it adds an interactive feature of the messenger and allows people other than the owner of the newsletter to add content, which comes with its own advantages, problems, and potential for abuse.

    We can skip over things like Tik-Tok, which is like an internet MTv to YouTube’s media network, or Instagram which is effectively a personalized internet fashion magazine, and get to the real point of this post which is a discussion of Twitter as an internet forum.

    And that is essentially what Twitter is, an internet forum, a public square where anybody can stand on a soapbox and say whatever pops into their head upon the topics of the day, to be cheered or heckled from the crowd, or to have those who disagree insult, debate, or walk away.

    It is this nature of Twitter as a public forum, as opposed to an internet mini-media network, which poses certain problems and advantages.  As a public forum it lacks the financial incentive for the production of content, even though Twitchy managed to create a workable financial model as a Twitter aggregation/news site.

    As a result, it is difficult to cowl the Twitter users in their free expression of ideas by threatening non-existent income sources by eliminating their advertising dollars.  There is no direct leverage against the Twitter user through the business model itself.

    Naturally, this has lead to attempts to control expression first through the elevation and idolizing of ideologically leftist users by means of a “verification” symbol pretending to denote that these special people are “influential”, as well as a biased “follow” recommendations and “trending” topic advertising.

    Additionally, as those tactics failed to have the desired effect, other means such as bans and suspensions, which have clearly been one sided ideologically speaking, were employed as a means of shaping the debate to the favored side.  (It is this bias and filtering which blurs the line between a public forum and a publishing website with its associated liabilities.)

    All of which has had a lot of users seeking and hoping for a viable alternative to Twitter.  Gab, Minds, and others have made their attempts to dethrone Twitter as the public forum of choice, with varying results.  That is the real topic: what would be necessary for a viable alternative to Twitter?

    The easy example of Gab comes first as their trademark promotion of not banning and limiting content which others might deem “hateful” coming on the heels of Twitter banning anything with even a slight racial, racialist, or racist perspective, without getting into the distinctions thereof.  Naturally, many people went to a site which promised unfiltered perspectives, but the site became most attractive to people focused upon the topic of race.

    It became real easy for Twitter and their fellow leftists to paint Gab as a site catering to racists, because an open door policy with a policy of not policing content had a natural effect of attracting a disproportionate number of those people being specifically targeted by Twitter.

    Along came Minds, another cite which promised competition to Twitter by not having a comment length limit just as Gab did but targeting an international audience, including a large number of east Asian users, and a lot of conservatives flocked to Minds in hopes of an alternative to Twitter which was not going exhibit open bias against them.  Ignore that the site was insecure and the customer service deplorable, it never seemed to garner enough users consistently to generate a breakthrough level of content.

    So why do these competitors have such a hard time?  Because it is a forum.

    The nature of a forum is to permit interactions with people on the other side of the issues which attract people’s attention, angst, and outrage.  What real point is there in standing on a soapbox if everyone in the audience agrees with you?

    The problem is that those people on one particular side, on the left, like having their echo chamber, because they already believe that anyone worth heeding is on their side and the other side has nothing to offer.

    Imagine if Twitter were to display as overt and obvious a bias for conservatives as they have so consistently demonstrated in favor of leftist points of view.  Because leftist prefer their own views, and eschew opposing opinions the leftist would have no problem creating their own alternative forum, flocking to it and abandoning Twitter for a leftist Twitter.

    What you would then have is a leftist forum and a rightist forum.  One could imagine a balkanization into many separate mini-Twitters of like minded groups.  Imagine having a public forum where everyone on the site by and large agrees with your viewpoint.  If you are a leftist, this is ideal, a beautiful echo-chamber of “learned” and “educated” people.  If you are a conservative, this sounds dystopian and horrific at worst, lame and boring at best, that your thoughts and ideas go unchallenged, undeveloped, and unrefined through a marketplace of ideas.

    But then that would be a Facebook, and that function of a like-minded bulletin board is already occupied.

    However the very purpose of a forum is to have a public discussion on public issues, and unlike leftist, people on the right do not like having an echo chamber because they want to change minds, they want to influence others, and are thus open to having their own views change, for the most part.  (There are always a few exceptions to the general rule on both sides.)

    So where would a conservative go to be able to engage in a discussion with people of different views?  They would migrate to the leftist Twitter, to engage the other side.

    This leads to only two possibilities for a “Twitter”, for an internet public forum.  Either such a public forum is going to exhibit a clear and distinct left-leaning bias, or it would maintain a content neutral objective perspective appropriate for a public forum.  The difficulty is that it is a public forum created and maintained not by the public but by a private company, which has the authority to control the content upon its site.

    Which bring up the legal conflict of a forum versus a publisher and the liability of policing content which proves false.  I leave that to be discussed elsewhere, this is just to present the problems naturally endemic to such an internet forum venue.