No Kings 账号被封事件为何说明不该从 Zuck 那里租用扩音器

Techdirt - [x]

Daily Deal: Nibble All-Around Knowledge App

Teen Sues CBS News Over Report That Referred To Him As A Reflecting Pool Vandalism Suspect

Accident Or Not, The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn’t Rent Your Megaphone From Zuck

from the no-kings-is-about-more-than-politicians dept

Tue, Oct 20th 2026 11:03am - Mike Masnick

This past weekend was the latest in an ongoing series of (massive) “No Kings” protests held around the country (and in some cases around the globe). The latest one was part of a “get out the (early) vote” campaign to make sure people are voting in the upcoming midterm elections. And, in the middle of it, suddenly it was reported that the No Kings Instagram account was suspended for about an hour, with admin access locked out for a few more hours. Many supporters of the protests immediately suspected foul play, highlighting that Mark Zuckerberg has gone in hard in supporting Trump over the past couple of years. So, the implication was that Zuck must be fiddling the dials to help the guy he supports in the White House. For a variety of reasons, this is unlikely to be true.

I’ll explain some of those reasons towards the end of this article just to be thorough, but the point of this article is to highlight the argument that Will Robinson and Tim Chambers recently made in response to this, which is that it doesn’t even matter if it was done on purpose or not. Even if you believe that Zuckerberg and Trump were laughing their heads off and jointly pressing the button to silence the No Kings account, the real problem was that this was possible in the first place.

Our response should be the same either way.

Robinson and Chambers focus on the very practical lessons for anyone engaged in digital organizing, which is how to prepare for the possibility that a centralized provider takes down your account. And their advice is good and practical (read the whole thing!): make sure you have communication channels that a third party can’t easily switch off, set up accounts on open platforms, and have a playbook on how to respond (mostly getting out the word) if your account gets shut down.

But it’s also a reminder of the larger point that I have been harping on for some time about the importance of decentralization and user control over their online experiences. Centralized systems create a natural gravity that leads to control over your speech. My friend Danny O’Brien (who also helped inspire Techdirt’s very existence) wrote a few years ago about how decentralization is not an end in and of itself, but rather part of the means to guarantee we have “cognitive liberty.”

When we hand over the control of our speech to a third party, with no ability to exit (with all of our content and connections intact) we have given up a fundamental element of our liberty. O’Brien describes it here:

Right now, if you wrote a note to yourself and put it on your personal computer’s hard drive, you could say whatever you want, draw whatever you want. If it’s in the cloud, you don’t have that guarantee: even if you kept it in your own Google Drive or DropBox, it could be found wanting, and deleted. I don’t know about you, but my notes are my memory, most of the time. My search engine searches are as much me talking to myself about my worries and interests, in a way that I would rarely disclose even to my closest companion.

[….]

Our own consciousness cannot be rented from others, or temporarily conceded to us, with built-in police or backdoors or hidden ad men. We need to seize the means of computation, and that means ejecting all of these interlopers, and relocating it back into the personal domain we control: whether that’s physically, or by using tools like encryption and zero-knowledge proofs to preserve our control when our data and processing power sits on others’ hardware.

That’s the pyramid of digital rights for me: a firm foundation of decentralized, user-controlled technology, giving us broader cognitive liberty, internal privacy, freedom of self-expression, and freedom of self-determination. On top of that solid ground, we can build a society that’s free and fair. And then we can have the ability and freedom to self-reflect, to talk, and to plot our better shared future together, free at last in our digital environment.

Achieving that kind of freedom for “cognitive liberty” requires us to recognize the threats of centralized systems. And Meta shutting down the “No Kings” Insta account is one such example no matter if it was on purpose or an accident. This was the very thinking behind my original Protocols, Not Platforms paper in the first place. If you hand control of your digital spaces to someone else, they get to decide whether those spaces exist at all.

And they might be bad at it, whether through incompetence or malice.

And sometimes that means your account gets shut down — whether for good reasons or bad. Many people seem to not want to grapple with this issue. They say “the people are there,” and that is true, but only because the “people” have agreed to give Mark Zuckerberg and whoever else that power.

Unfortunately, most of the “solutions” to this problem that people are suggesting are some form of “force Mark Zuckerberg to be better and not shut off the account we like.” But that’s no way to build a better world. It is, also, the exact same response that MAGA folks had when Donald Trump was banned from social media in the wake of the January 6th insurrection. Their response was to try to force platforms to host the content of people MAGA supported. That cannot be a workable solution, because as political fortunes shift, forcing platforms to host the worst people’s accounts is unworkable for basically everyone.

But there is a better solution: build tools that are open, decentralized, and user controlled. And then actually use them instead of just giving more power to Mark Zuckerberg to shut down a protest organization’s account in the middle of one of its big protests.

Is it bad that Meta pulled down that account? Sure. Do you fix it by demanding Zuck “be better”? No. That just gives him even more power, while reducing some of our own power. Whoever has the power over the systems — whether it’s a billionaire CEO or a government official — has the ability to cut you off (or to force others into your feed).

Even if it gets people you support back on the platform you want them on, you’re just setting yourself up to be angry the next time someone you don’t trust is in power. The answer is to make sure they don’t have that power in the first place.

When I discussed this on Bluesky, some people claimed that it was fine for Congress to “investigate” what happened with the No Kings account to find out if Zuckerberg was told by government officials to remove the account. Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy announced he intends to have Congress investigate Meta over this.

But the right way to look into that is for Congress to use its oversight powers over the executive branch to find out whether any administration officials contacted Meta about the account. This is also where something like the JAWBONE Act would be handy. But any approach that has elected officials (or any government officials) pressuring companies to moderate the way they prefer is only going to blow back on you the next time people you don’t like are in power. As far as I can tell, there is no one who supported Jim Jordan’s investigation into Meta & Twitter’s moderation practices in taking down Trump’s account who are equally excited about Murphy now investigating this.

And that should be a warning. When you choose if you agree with the policy based on which “team” is pushing for it, that’s not a principled take.

But we don’t have to live in that world where we pingpong between this or that government official and which billionaires they can bully (even when you agree with the bullying). This is why supporting decentralized tools like atproto or ActivityPub is more than a matter of taste. Those systems make this kind of takedown far harder and far less damaging, giving you the same kind of reach while you retain the “cognitive liberty” and the ability to truly own your own account.

As for this particular case, as far as I can tell, there’s very little likelihood that this was done deliberately. First, these kinds of mistakes happen all the time. Most people who haven’t worked in trust & safety at a large platform cannot fathom the sheer scale of what’s happening on any given day. Hundreds of millions of pieces of content show up every single day. If less than 1% are incorrectly moderated, that’s still a huge absolute number.

And, yes, people are pointing to other stories of bad Meta moderation in the past week to find some sort of pattern, but the key pattern is Meta will always be bad at this. It was bad at it before — back when MAGA folks insisted Zuck was “censoring conservatives” — and it’s bad at it now. Because getting this right at that scale is not something that is humanly possible.

And an account like No Kings probably saw a massive upswing in attention the day of its protest — the first No Kings protest in a little while — which is the sort of thing that often trips the automated sensors. Meta’s explanation is unsatisfying to many, who are quite sure there’s a conspiracy afoot, but it fits with the pattern. The company initially claimed increased activity by the account, and then later clarified that the real trigger had been a surprising jump in “reading” other posts from that account, which matched the pattern of “automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our system.”

That’s not surprising. Even as the No Kings organizers say they hadn’t posted that much, it’s not about the posting. Meta’s explanation for the jump was that they detected “a Claude tool” (which, yeah, is odd phrasing):

“Specifically, our network security systems detected the use of a Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags, the rate of which sharply increased (~4x volume) in intense bursts on October 17. “

That seems entirely reasonable. Someone with access to that account (and it may be multiple people) may have been using Claude to try to monitor posts and mentions, or looking for protest photos and videos from around the country to share and repost.

Or, it could just be that Meta’s automated systems suck.

Indeed, another complaint that people made is that “it shouldn’t have taken them that long to reinstate the account.” And, yes. That’s true. But the underlying assumption behind this is that the one hour response time to reinstate and the four-ish hours to return access is somehow out of the ordinary. Chances are it’s actually quicker than normal. And we have no idea how many other mistakes Meta’s crap automated systems were making at the same time, many of which probably also needed to be reviewed. Just because you only were aware of one in the one area you were paying attention to does not mean it is not happening to thousands of others as well.

On Bluesky, someone argued that Meta “should know” to keep an eye on “big political accounts” like this, which is nice in theory, but as I explained, Meta actually did that for years, in a program they called XCheck, which flagged high-profile accounts (i.e., “big political accounts”) for secondary human review before any action was taken against them — exactly what this commenter suggested. But.. when Frances Haugen leaked that to the WSJ, it was presented as Facebook having “a secret elite that is exempt” from its rules.

Image 4: WSJ headline: Facebook says its rules apply to all. Company documents reveal a secret elite that's exempt. There’s even a movie in the theaters right now, by Aaron Sorkin, with this as one of the subplots.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

But the biggest reason I don’t think this was deliberate is because… why would anyone think it would help in any way? Of all the accounts the Trump admin might want to ban, does anyone actually think they would suggest this one account on Instagram of a protest that was already happening across the country, with people involved who would immediately notice the account was taken down and use other means to get the word out?

If the Trump admin were actually telling Zuck to take down accounts, you’d expect it to be happening a lot more frequently, to much more meaningful accounts, in ways that wouldn’t so immediately draw way more attention to the original account. The story just doesn’t hang together in any sensible way.

Still, some will argue, perhaps it wasn’t the White House reaching out. Perhaps it was just Zuck or a Zuck minion thinking “gosh I hate all these protestors, and now that we’re all in for Trump, let’s show these libs a thing or two….” While possible this seems incredibly hamfisted and unlikely, and generally not at all how these systems work.

Either way, if you think I’m hopelessly naive, and that this was obviously government intervention, or even just Zuck deciding on his own to show the protestors who’s the boss… the outcome doesn’t change. And what we do it about it doesn’t change. The intent barely matters here at all.

In either scenario the problem is that Zuck has too much power, and the answer should be to make sure Zuck has less power by moving to systems no single billionaire, no single politician, no single entity anywhere can control. Yes, that will involve some form of collective action. But it starts with you. If you are continuing to rely on such platforms yourself, then don’t whine about how Zuck might not have your best interests in mind.

We already know that.

Any plan that involves demanding billionaires become better people to make your life easier is destined to fail. Instead, we now have the power to build our own tools on our own systems that we control — and we can make them billionaire resistant, which makes them enshittification resistant. And then we don’t even have to worry about Zuck or Trump or Musk or anyone putting their fingers on the scale in a way that goes against our own interests.

But it only happens if people agree to stop giving those billionaires the power over us.

Whether Zuck or Trump or anyone had anything to do with deliberately taking down the No Kings account should be the least of our concerns. The fact that anyone is relying on a system where there is a central provider who can do that — by accident or not — is the underlying problem. Because the fact that a single provider can do it, means that eventually someone will try to pressure them to do it, even if that didn’t happen in this case. Or it will go down by accident at exactly the wrong moment. Either way, you avoid that by moving to systems where no single provider gets to make that call.

No kings is a great slogan, but it should apply to the people who control our communications infrastructure as well.

Filed Under: content moderation, decentralization, mark zuckerberg, no kings
Companies: meta

22 Comments Leave a Comment

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Rate this comment as insightful

Rate this comment as funny

You have rated this comment as insightful

You have rated this comment as funny

Flag this comment as abusive/trolling/spam

You have flagged this comment

The first word has already been claimed

The last word has already been claimed

Comments on “Accident Or Not, The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn’t Rent Your Megaphone From Zuck”

Subscribe: RSS Leave a comment

Filter comments in by Time
Filter comments as Threaded
Filter only comments rated Insightful
Filter only comments rated funny LOL
Filter only comments that are Unread

22 Comments Collapse all replies

Anonymous Coward says:

October 20, 2026 at 11:29 am

The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn’t Rent Your Megaphone From Zuck

Well, it’s certainly one predictable result of an over-concentration of power, which I think is the root problem. Another reason to avoid doing business with them as that their commercial agreement will soon allow Meta to access all associated web sites to do arbitrary “product development” (formerly called “training” till people complained).

People online have been decrying that as an abusive clickwrap agreement, but that’s not a fair characterization. It’s a business-to-business agreement, so all parties will have access to legal counsel and be knowingly accepting (or negotiating or rejecting) the terms. What it is is textbook anti-competitive conduct: using their power in one market (online advertising) to gain power in another (chatbots they want people to think are intelligent and capable of replacing humans).

ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

Anonymous Coward says:

October 20, 2026 at 12:04 pm

That’s only okay when Steve Bannon does it.

ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

Pixelation says:

October 20, 2026 at 12:16 pm

Putin paying Trump back for killing the sanctions?

ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.

Bloof(profile)says:

October 20, 2026 at 12:32 pm

Can Bluesky be trusted given how they handle criticism of AI, their moderation decisions when it comes to high profile transphobes and mentions of JK Rowling? For a decentralised platform that supposedly doesn’t do censorship, there sure are a lot of bans.

Collapse replies (6)ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

Threaded [2]

Anonymous Coward says:

October 20, 2026 at 1:17 pm

Re:

No, Bluesky can’t be trusted. It operates as a centralized social media platform that has interoperability as a feature. In app view, all spinoff platforms are beholden to the centralized moderation whims of Bluesky; they can’t show content that Bluesky wants hidden.

I like to read Jamie Zawinski’s blog. On rare occasions, he talks about Bluesky (he spends most of his time on Mastodon, something that’s actually decentralized). Some posts talking about Bluesky’s lowlights:
– “Blockchain Rasputin over here is mad that moderation exists” (Jack Dorsey creating Bluesky to outsource content moderation to the users)
– “Bluesky now owned by crypto-grifters”
– “‘I prefer to meet people where they are’ says reasonable-sounding white dude holding court at a table in the back of a Nazi Bar.” (Jack Dorsey left the board, leaving Bluesky in the hands of TESCREAL/Effective Altruist weirdos)
– “‘I prefer to meet people where they are’ says reasonable-sounding white dude holding court at a table in the back of a Nazi Bar, redux.”
– “Toesucker In Chief” (Bluesky deleting AI protest video of Trump sucking Musk’s toes)
– “Worst Kirk” (Bluesky’s mishandling of the reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death)
– “Delusions of a Protocol” (Jay Graber’s centralized moderation double standard, also intentionally courting transphobic sex pests)

So much for decentralization!

Collapse replies (3)ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

Threaded [3]

Leah Abram(profile)says:

October 20, 2026 at 2:48 pm

Re: Re: Counterpoint.

Counterpoint to all your points: You don’t actually have to be on bsky.social, and other instances such as Blacksky and Northsky exist (I used to be on bsky.social but now I’m on northsky.social). Blacksky even has their own web portal. Northsky is just getting started and will soon get their web portal as well.

Also, Cory Doctorow is using the ATProtocol in addition to ActivityPub, and if he’s convinced that ATProtocol is decentralized, then I am too!

ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

Threaded [3]

Mike Masnick(profile)says:

October 20, 2026 at 3:40 pm

Re: Re:

In app view, all spinoff platforms are beholden to the centralized moderation whims of Bluesky; they can’t show content that Bluesky wants hidden.

You should update your long out of date atproto=hate talking points as this has not been true in quite some time.

It’s great the jwz is skeptical. Skepticism is useful. But he can also be extraordinarily wrong or his points can be very outdated. Almost none of the claimed points you quote above are accurate.

Collapse replies (1)ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

Threaded [4]

Hack Fraud says:

October 20, 2026 at 4:01 pm

Re: Re: Re:

jwz goes beyond scepticism and is well into axe-grinding, and he has no time for anyone who disagrees with him.

ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

Threaded [2]

Anonymous Coward says:

October 20, 2026 at 2:36 pm

Re:

Of course they can’t be trusted. They’ll do whatever is in the interest of their egos and their greed, and if that means bending the knee to Trump and/or the billionaire oligarchs and/or the psychopaths running AI companies, that’s exactly what they’ll do. Surely you can’t expect them to have principles and spines?

ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

Threaded [2]

Mike Masnick(profile)says:

October 20, 2026 at 3:01 pm

Re:

You are confusing bluesky with the wider atmosphere. If you don’t like how Bluesky handles moderation (which I think you are woefully misreading what they have done) you can move entirely off of Bluesky and not have to deal with any of their decisions. Blacksky now runs entirely independent hardware. EuroSky is almost entirely independent, as is NorthSky. And there are more and more independent setups being built today. Indeed, it’s getting easier and easier to spin up Atmosphere services without relying on Bluesky. Blacksky now has Acorn which will set you up your own entire service if you want.

Also last week HappyProto was launched which is another tool to make it ridiculously easy to set up your own atproto offering.

The one remaining piece that was an issue, the PLC, is now also independent of bluesky, spun off into a Swiss Association.

The only people who still claim that Bluesky controls the system are lying to you or completely out of date.

ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.

Anonymous Coward says:

October 20, 2026 at 2:11 pm

FB used to take down right-wing content ROUTINELY for “misinformation”, and you were fine with it then.

back when MAGA folks insisted Zuck was “censoring conservatives

Yeah. That happened, a lot.

Twitter took down the Hunter’s laptop story for TWO WEEKS and you thought that was GREAT.

Bluesky is still slowly dying, btw.

Collapse replies (4)ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

Threaded [2]

Anonymous Coward says:

October 20, 2026 at 3:20 pm

Re:

can you prove any of that or are we expected to trust you without cause

ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

Threaded [2]

Anonymous Coward says:

October 20, 2026 at 4:34 pm

Re:

Removing content that is false is wholly different from removing content you disagree with.

ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

Threaded [2]

Mike Masnick(profile)says:

October 20, 2026 at 5:12 pm

Re:

FB used to take down right-wing content ROUTINELY for “misinformation”, and you were fine with it then.

I made the same point then as I make now: no it is not good and that is why you should switch to decentralized systems. I wrote the protocols not platforms paper to make this same exact argument in 2019 when you and your friends were absolutely sure the problem was taking down rightwing voices.

My point is the same whether it’s leftwing or rightwing voices being taken down on centralized platforms. The owners of those platforms have the right to do so. If you don’t like it then switch to a platform you control. Same argument both times.

Twitter took down the Hunter’s laptop story for TWO WEEKS and you thought that was GREAT.

This is just laughably false on almost every level. Twitter blocked link to one story in the NYPost for less than 24 hours and we did not think it was great, we criticized them for it, saying that it was clearly the result of a bad and problematic policy that did not take into account newsworthiness.

They did not block it for two weeks. It was less than 24 hours and we criticized them for doing so and wrote about how it was good they changed their policy:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/16/twitter-fixes-bad-policy-blocking-hacked-documents/

I don’t know why you lie when we have the evidence that you’re a fucking liar in black and white.

The “two weeks” your claiming was something different. Twitter had a different (also stupid) policy that if it suspended an account for a tweet that violated the rules they would not reinstate that account until they deleted the tweet EVEN IF (as here) Twitter then changed its policy that caused the original suspension.

I agree that was a stupid policy as well and eventually Twitter did, in fact, change it, allowing the NY Post to tweet again.

But after that initial less than 24 hours anyone else was free to tweet that link, and none of the other reporting on the subject was ever blocked.

You’re not just a liar, you’re a very, very bad liar.

ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

Threaded [2]

Arianity(profile)says:

October 20, 2026 at 5:22 pm

Re:

FB used to take down right-wing content ROUTINELY for “misinformation”, and you were fine with it then.

This is a really, really, really dumb point when Mike is explicitly batting for FB’s editorial discretion against the tide. He still thinks they should have editorial discretion without harassment on their platform. That isn’t mutually exclusive with wanting that platform to be less powerful.

You could not have missed the point more.

ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

AC Unknown(profile)says:

October 20, 2026 at 4:02 pm

I highly doubt your assertions are true.

ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

Anonymous Coward says:

October 20, 2026 at 4:27 pm

That Meta is bad at Trust and Safety is an affirmative choice.

I’ve done moderation at a mid-sized entity. I would arrogantly say that even at the scale of millions of comments, the number of moderation mistakes was near zero. The secret? We were willing to ban people. Real humans were always available to review any decision that was protested at all. We used community activity and robots to triage.

Some people were certainly sent away with regret, people who had sometimes made contributions of value but who just could not play nicely with others. The community experience for those who remained was generally better for it.

The difference between an entity that thinks it should have every human (and bot) in the world as its customer and give them a megaphone, and an entity that cares about the quality of that speech and customer base, is everything.

(They don’t even have good automated tools! Like why is it that stolen accounts, using obviously different IP addresses, posting obviously scammy content, take months, years, to revoke and repair? They can’t see that the password and IP address changed at the same time that 100 contacts and the original owner complained?)

Meta, and others who claim “oh this problem is too hard” should not fool us: they’ve chosen to create the problem and to not care that they aren’t solving it, for the purpose of their enrichment, not ours. It’s also hard to keep your cars from catching fire when people rear-end them, or to keep your database of credit cards off the dark web, and that’s not a reason we let it keep happening.

Collapse replies (2)ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

Threaded [2]

Mike Masnick(profile)says:

October 20, 2026 at 5:14 pm

Re:

I mean, there are debates to be had about type I vs. type II errors, but there are tradeoffs to both approaches. But assuming Meta followed the path you lay out here, then it would be banning a lot more people (including No Kings) and people would be even angrier about it.

ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

Threaded [2]

This comment has been deemed insightful by the community.

Anonymous Coward says:

October 20, 2026 at 5:56 pm

Re:

I dunno, I’ve also done and overseen moderation work on that kind of scale, and I would be deeply hesitant to say we always get things correct. I’ve dealt with enough community blowback over the years — sometimes stuff I thought was justified; sometimes stuff I thought was exaggerated; sometimes stuff I thought was invented out of whole cloth — to know not only do errors happen but that people can have very different opinions over what those errors were and what ‘the right way’ to do things would have been.

Facebook is a titanic entity with enormous resources to throw at the problem, but the problem with moderation of any sort is that the need for it scales faster than the supply. The flood of output from slop engines is only making the issue worse, especially if you’re somebody like YT or FB, where there’s lots of perceived value in shouting over everyone else.

ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

Anonymous Coward says:

October 20, 2026 at 4:32 pm

Getting ActivityPub tools to be more user-friendly would be a huge help

As someone who has been trying to migrate ordinary folk from Meta to tools like Lemmy and Mastodon, the biggest obstacles are:
– setting up an account is awkward and frustrating
– the editors are a bit primitive
– sharing content, especially video or links, doesn’t embed or unfurl … for real privacy reasons but this is something people really really love. That video is a multistep process that still requires say Youtube is already a blocker.

Some of these are more fixable than others. The cold start problem is hard but the more our tools are comfortable for the non-savvy folk we’d like to talk to there, the more possible it is. Bluesky is working.

ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

Arianity(profile)says:

October 20, 2026 at 5:14 pm

I think there’s kind of two big issues people had with this

But there is a better solution: build tools that are open, decentralized, and user controlled. And then actually use them

As someone who has quit using Meta products, I am doing that. And people…. are still on Meta products. There is a chicken and egg problem here that you’re kind of missing. If you want to strip Zuckerberg of power, you need mass mobilization first. Doctorow’s been using this quote (originally from Zephyr Teachout) that addresses exactly this: As Zephyr Teachout writes in Break ’Em Up, don’t miss the protest march outside the Amazon warehouse because you spent two hours driving around looking for an independent stationery so you could buy the markers and cardboard to make your anti-Amazon sign without shopping on Amazon

And he’s right. You have to be effective first, if you want to implement change. There needs to be a way to actually get people off Meta products, and simply building open source ones is not that effective. It’s certainly not happening fast, on the scale we need right now. As of right now, it is functionally not a workable/better solution without assuming a magic wand. Right now no one has a method for getting people off of it at the scale and speed required.

Whoever has the power over the systems — whether it’s a billionaire CEO or a government official — has the ability to cut you off

That is a fundamentally unavoidable part of the power of the state. You cannot build a modern state without someone being in power, to some degree. It can be shaped (billionaire CEOs shouldn’t exist) to some degree, but government officials will have some power over the systems. That cannot be totally eliminated, you can only manage how that power gets used.

Second:

That cannot be a workable solution, because as political fortunes shift, forcing platforms to host the worst people’s accounts is unworkable for basically everyone.

I think the reason people had such a strong reaction is, in order to beat fascism, you will need to do things that aren’t ‘fair’. It’s similar to say, court packing- the argument is, it’s not viable because they will just do it back.

(That said, there’s some subtext here- One, even if going after Zuck like this was workable, you’d still opposite it on principle, on free speech/unconstitutional grounds. Two the thing you’re saying makes it unworkable is already happening. It would not open the floodgates. And three, even in a decentralized world you would need to wield power in this sort of way)

When you choose if you agree with the policy based on which “team” is pushing for it, that’s not a principled take.

Self-defense of liberalism is itself a principle. If you believe in liberalism, you need to be willing to defend it. It’s not one we’ve acknowledged because things has mostly been cozy post-WWII, and it tends to make people very uncomfortable. Fundamentally, the point of the power of the state is it’s a coercive ‘team’.

When we did things like fight WWII, policy was based on ‘teams’. The point was to win, not to be fair. And there are many other examples, such as Section3 of the 14th Amendment. That applies to Trump. It would not be ok if Trump wielded it. There are many other examples (mass pardons are likely to be another, for instance).

You tend to see this sort of thing as ‘partisan teams’. But equating it to rank partisanship is underselling it. Because it’s not actually the team that matters, whether a policy is good or bad fundamentally depends on the context around it.

ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

drew(profile)says:

October 21, 2026 at 3:24 am

Everything is a trade off

Sure you can go from Instagram to x, but then you reduce your potential audience by an order of magnitude, or you can go to Bluesky and reduce it by another order.
I can’t find numbers for BlackSky.

But it doesn’t matter if the glitches keep happening. A few of us had our BlueSky accounts suspended over the weekend, I assume because of a glitch, but it just shows that as a user you’re always at the risk of being kicked off someone else’s tool.

Sure, if you have the skills, you can spin up your own, and… talk to both of your followers?

It’s a bit like the security – convenience continuum, but this time it’s reach/use at one end and control at the other. And for most people, most of the time, the value still sits with the bigger platforms.

ReplyView in chronology

Make this comment the first word Make this comment the last word

× Techdirt community members with Techdirt Credits can spotlight a comment as either the "First Word" or "Last Word" on a particular comment thread.

Signing in brings you back to this comment.

says:

Add Your Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.Required fields are marked *

Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now. Want one? Register here

Name

Subscribe to the Techdirt Daily newsletter

URL

Subject

Comment *

Comment Options:

Use markdown. Use plain text.

Make this the First Word or Last Word. No thanks. (get credits or sign in to see balance)what's this?

What's this?

Techdirt community members with Techdirt Credits can spotlight a comment as either the "First Word" or "Last Word" on a particular comment thread. Credits can be purchased at the Techdirt Insider Shop »