It's almost like it's a country of 300 million people with a diverse set of views.
The group that outright wants social media banned in the US, talks down Zuckerberg, etc, by and large will be perfectly fine with other countries banning it if not celebrate it. You have built a strawman.
The "free speech" cohort is largely anti-banning. They want platforms like X, where anything goes, and are often quite militant about their views on this subject.
I for one think both "social media is bad" and "free speech is important" which puts me in a real bind. Turns out when you let bad faith actors accumulate billions, the outcomes of the systems they create aren't always great.
It's just people here deciding pretty blindly that the two are mutually exclusive, but they're not, any more than eg "Nestle is a bad company" and "I like Nescafe" would be mutually exclusive.
And there's always the question of who gets to be the arbiter of those things.
If the latter were consistent it'd be much more interesting. X banned most large leftist accounts after Musk took over, so like most "free speech" advocates they really mean they want to be able to say hateful rightwing speech.
Social media causes active harm to people, we know that. Social media has also been demonstrably used to help overthrow authoritarian governments. Thus you have a context-dependent dichotomy in how we view it, and if you eschew the context (and pretend it is purely nationalistic / ethnic), it feels a bit like you are intentionally trying to derail an otherwise productive conversation that could be had instead.
I was just thinking the same thing. This looks like a healthy dose of intervention. I am biased however in that I believe smaller groups of people should run their own forums and chat servers to slightly minimize the Corporatocracy social manipulation especially before AI gets a strong foothold. Most have a few geeks in their own social circle that can run a tiny forum and chat server. Less birds of a feather [1]
