Gaming social media bans

Gaming social media bans | Daily Tribune

Which was exactly why Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) officials were readily branded as incompetents, as outright idiots even, by users of social media platforms Discord and Reddit.

Infuriated users of the two platforms, especially Discord, schooled “idiotic” DICT officials over their failure to see that the platforms were primarily used for business, gig work, and schoolwork.

Nonetheless, such narrowly focused rush of angry complaints and sarcasm risks tunnel vision, of entirely missing the complex web of connections underlying the issue.

In other words, criticism against and analysis of the bans centered only on the immediate impact on a user’s time, money, comfort, and free speech rights rather than on the broader and more concerning health and social ills social media has inadvertently brought about.

Early on, however, haplessly dense DICT officials couldn’t fully explain why they had to do what they did.

It was only a few days ago that DICT Secretary Henry Aguda explained the bans were in line with government’s regulatory push; that it was necessary to bring platforms to the negotiating table and secure binding agreements on user safety and the removal of exploitative content, especially if it concerned children.

A regulatory push and negotiations are the key terms here as these signal that this government is joining the worldwide effort to hold owners and creators of social media platforms liable for the undue harm they are causing.

The worldwide effort is succeeding. “That’s why Meta has agreed to pay up to $18 billion as part of a settlement over predatory and deceptive practices, and why Anthropic is paying writers and publishers (admittedly, pennies) in a copyright settlement. If a Waymo vehicle runs you over, you can sue the company which, for these purposes, is a legal person; you can’t sue the car which is not,” as American journalist Jill Lepore recently reported.

This wasn’t so clear as late as a year or two ago when governments freely allowed Silicon Valley tech-bros to do what they wanted to do. In the case of the Americans, for instance, Lepore reports, “Congress… abdicated responsibility for overseeing the internet and social media.”

As for corporations owning and running these platforms, they were practically “ruling themselves, posing as states. Facebook formed its own ‘supreme court,’ Anthropic wrote a ‘constitution’ for Claude (the AI program).”

Given that social media platforms must now be treated as strictly juridical persons, how then can this government exercise regulatory powers if these businesses are beyond reach? Where and to whom can the government address these concerns locally?

The answer lay in the naked tactic of threatening to ban a social media platform’s presumed profitable business in the country. Stoical DICT officials didn’t admit this was the game plan, but that’s exactly what happened to Discord and Reddit.

Both Discord and Reddit have since been reinstated after both went to the negotiating table and reportedly signed on to binding agreements on user safety and to put up offices in the country, joining other major internet and social media platforms operating here like Facebook, YouTube, Google and TikTok.

Government seems to have gotten its way this time around.