Time, on the need to regulate social media. I keep coming back to this topic because along with elections,…

Time, on the need to regulate social media. I keep coming back to this topic because along with elections, it’s the way vested interests have hijacked democracies. Have highlighted also what I say a lot, how the idea the platforms represent ‘free speech’ now is incorrect. /1 https://t.co/fDiA9JsSpn

Time URL is: https://t.co/FLEv64RUJX Free speech is the spin vested interests use to undermine democracy. They use these platforms to replace our existing institutional structures with one of their own making. Nobody is more free, in fact everybody is much less free. /2

Every day I watch as smart, sensible people try to help repair a damaged society here, and face constant harassment, bullying and sometimes borderline assault. The platform does little to nothing to prevent it, it encourages it because it drives business. /3

We’ll wake up eventually that we’ve allowed the most fundamental act of the flow of information and beliefs in a society to be surrendered to platforms who weaponise its destruction for profit. And I love social media, but its sins far outweigh its usefulness right now. /4

Every social issue is poisoned by a set of rubbish libertarian framings that often aren’t even seen. Free speech a critical one, but also ‘free and fair elections’, when in fact in most democracies voting is actively suppressed and the same libertarians claim ‘mandates’ with…/5

…well under half the vote, and with half or even less of the country not voting at all. Political donations poison what’s left, giving the same interests easy inroads to the institutional heart of government, where they use populist libertarian rhetoric to unwind centuries…/6

…of regulation designed to make societies fairer and more peaceful and more prosperous. Even something as noble-sounding as freedom of information requests is a libertarian weapon, where government institutions are tied in knots providing documents to libertarian conspiracy…/7

…fruit cakes, who never let up in their campaigns to bring down what they see as corrupt and oppressive governments. (Which for libertarians, is all government.) Nothing makes libertarians angrier than regulation, legislation - laws. Which tells us the way out of this mess. /8

Whether it’s Covid or social media, or political donations or elections, or energy prices, or climate change, or education and health care. All of it needs regulating. We’ve had more than 50 years of libertarian de-regulation, which has unsurprisingly corresponded with the…/9

…strip-mining of the common wealth of all people and its concentration in the hands of a tiny few. Mostly the libertarians themselves. (Many of them don’t even believe the libertarian rubbish, they just use it cynically to benefit themselves.) To focus on Covid, to end, the…/10

…fastest, cheapest, fairest and most effective way to end the pandemic is not vaccines. Though we need those. It’s regulation. The very thing the libertarians launched an assault on in Australian in late-2021, and much earlier in the UK and US. /11

Legislating or regulating makes the problem one for all Australians to bear the burden of fixing. Libertarian ‘personal responsibility’ alternatives dump everything on those least able to do anything. That’s why humans invented parliaments and laws. /12

To balance the scales back towards all people. The constant assault from libertarians on these basic acts of democracy, on regulation, the making of laws (not elections, which they game easily for personal gain) has to be stared down. In all areas of our lives. /13

The ‘rule of law’, which they cynically invoke when it involves suppressing resistance to libertarian agendas. Let’s put it at the centre of democracies again. Law. /ends