Friday, October 11, 2019
Social club
Today we learned about about social club the negative effects of it. A guy who goes by the rapper name Berner has about 1.2 million subscribers on instagram and wanted to promote his weed company, but due to instagram restrictions he wasn't able to. Instead he decided to create his own social media where he announced that there would have a "zero-censorship community". Although this might have had some good intentions for there it be a community not afraid to talk about what they want, this served as a platform for the most disgusting things that would emerge from the dark web like child pornography, racist comments/manifestos, and even murder and/or disturbing pictures. Berner didn't account for this at all because he just wanted a platform to promote weed, but he did say that there would be no restrictions and censorship so it can be inferred that there will be things that are really disturbing. I think that instances like these show that censorship of some form is required in order to keep things like that off the net. The dark net is something that many people are not uncomfortable with, but many people use social media platforms and are comfortable with it. This also speaks about the importance of social media in free speech. Media provides a way to share ones opinions which may or may not want to hear. Thats why Berner decided to work with his developers and implement a way to regulate some of the things that people post. This is why the first amendment is such a serious issue because if you allow people to have complete free speech, things can run amok, however, have too much restriction and people will feel like their rights are being violated.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I think that free speech when involved in cases of social media can get really sticky. Like you said, on one hand, social media platforms should allow their participants to have no regulations with what they post, but on the other hand, some people take free posting to the extremes (as seen in the case of the Social Club). This article outlines some interesting thinking points about how private social media entities can regulate their sites (https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/the-ongoing-challenge-to-define-free-speech/in-the-age-of-socia-media-first-amendment/).
ReplyDeleteI agree with your points in the post. Censorship is something that is necessary on social media in order to keep highly illegal things off of the internet. While Berner obviously did not see his site becoming a hotbed for hateful and terrible content, he should have realized what no censorship actually means.
ReplyDeleteI do agree that social media is a comfortable platform for most people to use and that is the reason why Berner decided to use this method to promote his weed. Instead of creating just a "weed app" like an online store, it would have been more suspicious and uncomfortable for people to use.
ReplyDelete