GLENN REYNOLDS’ SOCIAL MEDIA UPHEAVAL
Makes The Case For Trust-Busting Big Tech Companies
In Glenn Reynolds’ new book, ‘The Social Media Upheaval,’ the popular blogger and law professor persuasively fleshes out his argument for breaking up the Silicon Valley giants.
Reynolds has a deceptively simple prose style that he’s perfected at Instapundit. There, he’s the master of the understated quip used to accompany his links to the news and opinion of the day (mostly from a conservative-libertarian slant). At first glance, a Reynolds’s remark often seems merely to display a firm grasp of the obvious. In fact, on first read, these can seem like bromides of prosaic pabulum.
But in every case, there’s an underlying irony or twist of meaning that cuts deeper. Sometimes Reynolds can be quite profound while masquerading as the village simpleton, like a blogging Diogenes in a barrel. And you ignore a longer Reynolds homily at your peril. He employs the same style for The Social Media Upheaval:
The ‘marketplace of ideas’ approach to free political speech has always relied on a wide variety of different views from a wide variety of different speakers, many of which will inevitably be wrong or even dishonest. The presumption is that, overall, truth will win out most of the time. The danger of monopoly organs like Facebook or Twitter is that they will selectively silence some of those voices and amplify others. Encouraging these tech behemoths to police ‘bad’ content only makes that more likely.
To allow the free market and a resurgent American educational establishment to one day ride to the rescue, what we need at present is a president or attorney general in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt, argues Reynolds. This should be someone who will go after the monopolies in the same spirit the monopolies are going after the rest of us: mercilessly.
Related: What Is To Be Done About Facebook?
h/t ED