Whose medium is the Internet?
What's the legal definition of what websites and social media are?
Ideally, everyone would know how to build a website from
scratch and not have to rely on prefabricated mediums. However, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and
other social media aren’t static; they are also modes of communication among
users.
Whether what I’m saying is negative or positive, my thought
since the beginning is that if I say it at my own account, I’m expressing my
opinion, but if I directly contact someone else’s account or post at someone
else’s account, that could be construed as harassment. If I’m really angry, and I post at someone
else’s account, that could be construed as threatening.
If you own and manage a newspaper or other media source, you
decide whom to hire and which stories to publish. Aren’t you within your legal rights to publish
what you want to publish and not what you don’t want to publish, as long as you
aren’t saying things that are factually inaccurate?
Then you have the question of what’s accurate and what’s inaccurate.
To print or otherwise report a story saying that the object
of your story has 100 widgets when he or she has 1,000 widgets is inaccurate. Is it accurate to say that the object of your
story likes widgets? That depends on why
he or she has them; does he or she manufacture them? Collect them?
Accrue them as part of a case that he or she is hoping to use to
prosecute someone else? Good reporting is
a lot of work.
What are the rights of Twitter and other social media
systems? Are they obligated to allow anyone
to say anything? Are they obligated to
shut down accounts? Are they obligated
to provide arbitration among users who are in conflict?
Since 2010, I have had to contend with having blogs and
other publications that are owned and managed by systems whose advertising bullies
me. So far, whoever is in charge of the
advertising for those systems hasn’t done the reasoning that would lead to the
conclusion that the bullying is inappropriate.
I have never won a dispute in which something I published was flagged
and I was given strikes against one of my blogs by a community administrator. I once published a video of a situation with
a guy who made a motion toward me as if he were about to hit me; YouTube removed
the video from my blog and issued a strike against the blog, saying that
additional strikes would cause the entire blog to be removed. The possibility an
entire blog being removed is why I start a new blog every several months or couple
of years. However, all of the
hateblogs that other people publish about me are never removed from the Internet.
Who runs the Internet?
Does anyone know the answer to that question without having to think
about it or do research for it?
Who owns the Internet?
Regardless to the answers to all of the above questions, countries
where people have the most human rights have the most interesting conversations. The fewer rights people have, the more
everything boils down to people taking and doing whatever they can, when they
can. It’s the intellectual equivalent of
the hierarchy of needs. At the very
bottom of a hierarchy of needs for thought and communication is a simple
exchange of information. Nearer to the
top are thinking and discussion about what constitutes free speech.
