I think I should have the legal right to access private messages addressed to me by family members via the service explicitly designed to facilitate private communication between friends and family members. I don't think I should be forced to see advertisements and be subjected to historically-unprecedented surveillance to read those couple hundred bytes of text from a family member.
When a platform's primary purpose is communication, certain legal rights should be invoked immediately. In my opinion, one of those rights should be the ability to access those communications by any 3rd party client that doesn't intentionally function maliciously. How "proper 3rd-party client behaviour" is evaluated can be a problem for the industry to solve. They have the $trillions to figure something out. I think they'll survive.
The argument "don't like it, don't use it" isn't a very reasonable argument when, socially speaking, you "have" to use a given service (usually the regionally-omnipresent service) to be included in society. Communication is the foundation of society and of human existence. I miss out on a shocking and honestly depressing amount of social activity because of my boycotting of FB, IG, WhatsApp and other similar services.
I expect that our ability to communicate is carefully protected and treated as something crucially important. There's a reason there are SO MANY commercial services around communication and they are largely the most lucrative, because everyone NEEDS to communicate. People will subject themselves to extremely disadvantageous conditions to enable communication with others. Think about it. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, the internet, cellular phone service. These things are fundamental to communication in global society, and a TON of laws are written to govern their employment/usage. Internet communication just happens to still be pretty early in the stages of its effect on humanity, and as usual the legal world is well behind what those effects are. The effects are finally being felt. I believe my feelings on this subject will become more widespread as people realize how deeply they have been exploited by industry (once again).
I disagree. No one has the right to use facebook/twitter/etc as they wish, or even at all. They're not necessary for modern western society. SMS and phone calls are always an option. We aren't like China where if you don't have WeChat you can't do anything.
On the flip side, then, no government organizations should use Twitter as their primary form of disseminating information. I should be able to get this information without creating an account on these platforms (looking at you, MBTA).
Yeah, I totally believe this -- no government organization should be allowed to post public announcements/information to a proprietary platform gated behind a ToS without also posting that information on publicly-accessible unencumbered locations like a basic, low-resource-usage website.
The forces at play when it comes to communication platforms are not so black and white. I didn't say that I expect to have the inalienable right to use the service. I just expect to have the right to use the service without especially onerous "cost" to me (such as being subjected to privacy-invading surveillance/tracking technology and advertising). If someone goes on there and spouts walls of swearing and racist memes or whatever, yeah, banned.
And, actually, have you tried just not using Facebook for a year? Don't even log in whatsoever? Try it, seriously. I have missed parties, concerts, family gatherings (seriously), news of births, marriages, new homes, major life events (including deaths). I found out my cousin had a kid like 6 months later. I found out a friend died months after it happened. I miss out on the opportunity to partake in things that would have greatly enriched my life. This is the cost to me, personally, by opting out of THE platform that EVERYONE uses. I can't just constantly SMS and call everyone I know asking them every detail of their life, because they exclusively share it all on Facebook. You simply cannot invalidate this very real cost as "yeah well, just use something else".
These huge costs of exclusion are exactly why I believe that I should have the right to access de-facto-standard communication services with software that respects my psychological stability, privacy, accessibility needs (including cognitive), of my choice -- again, as long as that software conforms with proper API usage behaviour. Right now, I'm in a pretty coercive position where I either subject to the objectively-harmful design of the Facebook platform, or face pretty adverse effects to my socialization. That's one reason case where governments enact laws, to protect individuals from these sort of extremely skewed power imbalances.
BTW, I get what you're saying. All these services are tecnically optional. I kinda used to feel that way, until I actually started not using the services that I felt were manipulating and coercing me. Then I realized just how much power these services have over us. I realized these services are optional in just the same way as the telephone and the automobile used to be. Totally still optional. Just mail a letter instead. To me it's like, at this point, as a society, we need to decide whether we care if someone can be seriously cut off from modern society because they don't agree to have advertising shoved in their face, manipulative "algorithmic feeds" selectively shown to them to "drive engagement", and unprecedented surveillance cataloguing their every action 24/7/365.
When a platform's primary purpose is communication, certain legal rights should be invoked immediately. In my opinion, one of those rights should be the ability to access those communications by any 3rd party client that doesn't intentionally function maliciously. How "proper 3rd-party client behaviour" is evaluated can be a problem for the industry to solve. They have the $trillions to figure something out. I think they'll survive.
The argument "don't like it, don't use it" isn't a very reasonable argument when, socially speaking, you "have" to use a given service (usually the regionally-omnipresent service) to be included in society. Communication is the foundation of society and of human existence. I miss out on a shocking and honestly depressing amount of social activity because of my boycotting of FB, IG, WhatsApp and other similar services.
I expect that our ability to communicate is carefully protected and treated as something crucially important. There's a reason there are SO MANY commercial services around communication and they are largely the most lucrative, because everyone NEEDS to communicate. People will subject themselves to extremely disadvantageous conditions to enable communication with others. Think about it. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, the internet, cellular phone service. These things are fundamental to communication in global society, and a TON of laws are written to govern their employment/usage. Internet communication just happens to still be pretty early in the stages of its effect on humanity, and as usual the legal world is well behind what those effects are. The effects are finally being felt. I believe my feelings on this subject will become more widespread as people realize how deeply they have been exploited by industry (once again).