Chris Engel
Sep 6, 2018 · 2 min read

I’ve posted this elsewhere. I oppose government attempts to regulate social media. That is a clear violation of both the spirit and the letter of the 1st Amendment. These are private platforms, they aren’t required to be content neutral.

I do think it’s rather obvious that many of these large Social Media service do have a rather strong Left Wing Bias…. and if you are Conservative and have been active at all on the internet for any length of time, you’ve probably encountered it yourself. I know I have. It is not a bias that generally exists in automated functions like search engines. Trump is wrong on that account and clearly doesn’t understand how such things work. However, you can encounter it quite frequently in areas that are human moderated. Basically in the interpretation of things that do or do not violate TOS, count as “offensive content” or “Hate Speech” , etc…. and you can see this manifest in things like bans, shadow bans, deletions, even site and content filters…. and it’s fairly obvious among certain large social media companies that such activities are not handled in a politically neutral, balanced or objective fashion, despite what such companies claim to the contrary.

The appropriate remedy to this is NOT government regulation. Rather for users such as myself to vote with our feet and our wallets to withdraw ourselves from the content providers that we feel are biased against us. If such content providers don’t want to cut themselves off from us as a market and audience then they’ll will self-reform. If not we’ll find alternative providers to fill the vacume of services that they are failing to provide.

In one sense I’d be rather sad if the user base for some of these services balkanized into platforms that had specific political orientations. I rather enjoy hearing from and engaging civilly with those who hold differing viewpoints. At the same time I refuse to engage or patronize a service that clearly places a thumb on the scale and will censor the arguments I try to make while leaving opposing viewpoints untouched.

    Chris Engel

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