I guess that one way to phrase my views would be that I would seek out a happy synthesis between critical theory and the concept of freedom of speech.
In a way, critical theory can come across as authoritarian, but this is because the people attempting to explain it are not going through what I believe should be an initial step of correcting the assumptions of an authoritarian society. In the country that has the world's highest incarceration rate, attempting to explain that racism is wrong can lead to some people immediately turning to police and prisons to punish it and other people being angry for the same reason, which is why we now have a lot of panicky dipshits running around like Chicken Little crying, "white genocide!" because they do not understand that critical theory does not really propose a "crime and punishment" model for the kinds of problems it points out.
Therefore, let's add an additional discussion to critical theory and thereby to both queer theory and critical race theory. Let us take the approach of focusing on how both racism and queerphobia can result in making it harder for anybody, even straight white people, afraid to say what they really think. In the kind of hostile, tense, and paranoid environment that is caused by injustice, people tend to be less open-minded, and they tend to be more prone to taking a bad faith perspective on anything that you say. When some people in the room believe that the discussion is rigged against them, then that makes them distrustful, and that distrust tends to make them prone to shutting down any point-of-view that they were not already convinced of at the start of the discussion.
In other words, you end the conversation without really having said anything at all, and if you cannot really say what you think, even due to people being too defensive to listen, are you really free?
Well, if you can prove that you genuinely believe in fairness and that you have empathy for the injustices that make it harder for others to succeed, you establish trust right away, and if you establish that trust right off the bat, you end up really saying a lot more, in the sense that some people in your audience listened and understood and cared what you really had to say.
This kind of thinking could influence what types of social media we tended to prefer using. If our social media were not set up in a manner that corresponded with our accepted notions about what made someone free, such as by creating a tense and paranoid environment where people in echo-chambers were obsessed with shutting down anybody they did not agree with and acted like maniacs, we would tend to see those systems as binding. We would see remarks that were shutting people down, and we would see that as distasteful.
Better systems would thereby become more dominant simply as a consequence of the fact that those systems corresponded more closely with how we thought about the world. They would be more competitive because they would match with how we preferred to think.
And maybe some nice scientists could create a system of social media that was tailored to train young people to think in this way. I think we ought to think of this as a generational achievement, not just as something to do on an impulse. We ought to make this like sending a mission to Mars. We ought to rank it right up there. Instead of only wanting to send a mission to Mars, we should also want to create a competitive system of social media that genuinely induces international unity and creates the kind of social environment that can lead to us sticking together, as a species, as we expand throughout the solar system. If we are going to eventually settle Luna and Mars and Titan, we should be thinking very soberly about the possibility that interplanetary war, in our future, could reduce some or all of our habitable worlds to flinders in only a few hours if our society were to break down into barbarism and tyranny for too long.
It is going to be a very long time before we can escape from the orbit of little Sol, and I do not really think that escaping from its orbit is going to be a thing that happens within most people's lifetimes. As long as we are stuck here, it is imperative that we find a way to prevent ourselves from coming down with mass cabin fever, just in the name of the survival of our species, so perhaps we can finally reach out far enough into our galaxy to truly break Fermi's Paradox.
The issue with this that I see is that social media is a drug, and it is a toxic one.
Between the desire to be seen, the fact that everyone has this desire, and the fact that any person only has so much time and interest in seeing others...
The platform itself, as a private system, has two goals in curation of content: to make the user generate content by making them feel
unseen; to make the user engage with content and generate more by directing the user to the things others are posting which they apparently want to be seen.
This is only disrupted when you rip away the platform's filter bubble, allow people to see content without only being presented "the best, since your last click", and the indoctrination can only be prevented by allowing folks to be able to see stuff that is not being directed.
We need to outlaw black-box content filters, from black box ad models to black box sorting algorithms, and make all such processes opt-in only.
Does it throw a wrench into the ad model?
Lol, don't care.
If social media is a drug, then we should legalize other drugs and thereby provide competition.
Rather, I am arguing that... How do I put this...
Think about the difference between an apple and an apple flavored apple-sized lump of sugar.
One is clearly not as terrible for you as the other, generally.
Social media is like.. if the grocery store replaced all their apples with those confectionary monstrosities. Or all their fruits.
People would still want the taste, but now their only model for it is to take an addictive, fairly toxic drug to get it at all.
In some ways this ends up that the damage, the harm is in the refinement of all the negative qualities for the sake of generating addiction, at the expense of all the other complexities of social communications.
So instead of my family members on the cusp of adulthood seeing Facebook feed that discusses the realities of drug use, the complexities of the need to vote, or the realities of how to be safe online...
Instead they saw the occasional political meme, or more likely didn't see my content at all!
The reality here is that the content filtration and sorting model, being inescapable, is ubiquitously turning the platform into a propaganda engine.
And it is inescapable: there is no platform which allows users to simply exist among the raw feed of social messages... Other than places like this...