Social media vs capitalism

Early this week, Google rolled out its new privacy policy, translating across almost all Google platforms, being forced, and having no opt-out clause. You have to quit your Google account or else accept things.

Then, later in the week, Twitter announced changes to its platform that would, upon a government’s request, allowed Tweets to be blocked on a country-by-country basis rather than globally.

Twitter tried to spin it as better, not worse, for tweeting. Fat chance.

With the FBI announcing it was rolling out new social media tracking … how soon before the U.S. of A. and our current constitutional law scholar president make such requests? Or, ask Twitter to reverse-engineer itself with its American tweets to make FBI tracking easier?

Bottom line is that, when for-profit social media companies bump up against making more money, or at least not losing more money due to government censorship, “do no evil” or any other PR motto is going out the window.

Hence, I repeat my call for Mozilla, the nonprofit creator of the Firefox browser, to step to the plate with a nonprofit equivalent of Facebook.

That said, it would be nice to call for yet more regulation of the Internet as a quasi-utility public good … but … that would be the same government that wants to spy on social media more.