This White House proposal to regulate social media moderation could be one of the bloated, mangy shitgibbon’s mock-charges (via MIT Technology Review):
The news: A draft executive order would give the FCC oversight over how social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter moderate their sites, according to CNN, which obtained a copy. Dubbed “Protecting Americans from Online Censorship,” the order calls for the FCC to develop new rules to define when the law protects tech firms’ decisions to take down content—and when it doesn’t. It also demands that the Federal Trade Commission take those new rules into account when investigating potential malpractice by companies.
The politics: This represents a major escalation in the Trump administration’s campaign against social- media firms, which he claims are biased against conservatives (despite a lack of evidence), and would be a vast expansion of the FCC’s responsibilities.
There’s a sound argument that Big Tech needs regulation to prevent bad things, such as social media being weaponized to subvert democracy or platforms chewing up user data to become marketing panopticons. But that’s not what this is about.
The proposed oversight is theater in response to made-up conservative grievances, like Trump-supporting clowns Diamond & Silk’s claim that Facebook was shadow-censoring them, which a Congressional hearing revealed was based on the sister-grifter duo’s ignorance about how user settings work. And Trump’s own periodic squealing about Twitter interfering with his follower count, which happened to coincide with Twitter’s occasional purges of bot accounts.
Anyhoo, let’s hope this is much ado about nothing. The last thing we need is that moron all up in the tubes. Speaking of moronic, Trump staged a taxpayer-funded MAGA rally in Pittsburgh a while ago and said an appallingly stupid thing about wind power:
“Some day the environmentalists are going to tell us what’s going on with that. And then all of the sudden it stops — the wind and the televisions go off.”
Jesus take the wheel.