Chinese web giant Tencent predicts Beijing has more internet regulations coming – and welcomes them The President of Chinese web giant Tencent has predicted that Beijing has more regulations in store for the nation's internet companies, and welcomed whatever's coming. During the question-and-answer section of the company's Q2 2021 earnings call, Martin Lau was asked how regulation of internet companies is affecting Tencent …
As if he had the choice.
But yes, on this matter I agree. Social media needs regulation. That doesn't necessarily mean mandatory user identification, but it certainly means moderation. I think there is ample proof that unmoderated forums quickly descend into a morass of screaming and foulness, which is quite useless overall.
So, bring on the regulation !
That's really all there is to it, moderation. Same as facebook, all they need to do is make sure closed groups are fully moderated, open groups don't even need such a high level of scrutiny, closed groups do. We are in an information war and the only way to win it is to put all our effort into fighting misinformation.
I say bring back the days of PHPBB/vBulletin, newsgroups, RSS feeds, IRC, multi-protocol IM clients and Shoutcast. When running things required at least a modicum of IT knowledge, there were far fewer problems because the barrier to entry eliminated a lot of morons from both the client side and the server side.
All of this modern day 'aaS is causing folks to compete on influence/popularity/status rather than actual merit and as a result the meta has shifted from encouraging intelligent participation to a dark/evil version of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" if you catch my drift.
Actually, in China, that means user identification. Once users are identified, moderation is simple to implement in a country like China... Upset the CCP and go to a working camp for re-education.
Moderation in the rest of the world should be a bit more subtle than this.
... I'm currently listening to a back episode of "The Last Archive" and it was all about "Internet" regulation. The reason Internet is in quotations, is Congress set up formal committees to look into data collection and computers, before networks existed. They were warned that data collection needed regulation.
They did nothing.
Then along came ARPNET, and a couple of years later, another hearing. Again they were warned data collection needed regulation.
They did nothing.
Then there was the Facebook fiasco a few years back, y'know the famous "So how does Facebook make money if you don't charge?"
They did nothing.
And then we seem surprised China are doing SOMETHING.
Yes, but China's regulations have only one aim - to cement the Chinese Communist Party into power for all eternity. Hence, for example, the CCP's unrelenting "regulation" to expunge the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the couple of thousand deaths from history. (Even the official CCP announcements shortly after the event put the number killed at around 300.)
The Chinese Communist Party couldn't care less about the Chinese people.
Because it is no longer really communist any sense, it is basically a standard authoritarian government like we see in other countries that claim to be democracies, or military dictatorships.
China has what the people who stormed the US Capitol on 1/6 wanted, they would be happy if Trump was installed as dictator for life and Congress and the Supreme Court were disbanded, or kept around for optics so long as they had no power to overrule him.
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