Essay--Terms of Service

We have to have a heart to heart about ToS. While I don’t blame any of the social media platforms for their recent actions, and in truth, those actions came far too late, they weren’t enforcing the rules that already existed.

Their decision to suddenly find sanity was most likely driven by not just the horror of the monster they helped create and profited from, but the massive liability coming their way. In short, if 45 wins, they’re fucked. If The Republic wins, they’re fucked. Basically, they’re fucked.

They’re betting on The Republic instead of 45, thankfully, but don’t forget who helped put us in this position in the first place. They did. And we let them.

The real question is this: how are we going to prevent FACTUAL speech and articles from getting de-platformed in the future if a new regime takes over and demands the ToS stipulate that science is against their deity’s dogma, or maybe monster stories like mine, and therefore must go away? Where do we get our news? Where do we communicate? WHERE DO WE POST OUR CAT PICS?

Back in the bad old days, before the atrocious monstrosity that is social media, in other words back in the days when only the geeks and nerds were using computers, BBS’ and posting boards were about all you had and you had to use a modem to connect them. And a phone line. Yes. A line. Trust me—downloading a piece of ASCII porn at 2 am on a 150 baud modem ain’t no way to live.

If the BBS was busy, in other words another visitor was currently using said system, you had to call back—most of the smaller BBS’ had only a single phone line. There was also thing called “the busy signal” that let you know this was the case and that the BBS hadn’t crashed.

Once logged in, you would read posts, find wonderful tomes like certain claimed CIA dirty track manuals and whatnot, ASCII porn, and completely ridiculous conversations including everything from sex to why OST uniforms were the colors they were.

If you weren’t a lurker, you posted a message in reply, and when you logged off, someone else would come along. Some of these BBS’ even had turn based games (wish I could remember their names). Many also had a phone verification system so they knew your number. I imagine that was for both liability protection or perhaps to know who was on the other end—like the telco company or the Feds.

The folks who ran the BBS moderated the messages and the shit posted there. Each BBS modded differently, and depending how old or how educated they were, the results could be simple to understand or woefully complicated to the point that my 11-12 year old mind simply decided it was complete chaos. You posted. You hoped it would stick around, but there was no way to know.

If you crossed whatever bounds the SYSOP Had established, you were banned. Pure and simple. Account deleted, no rhyme or reason given. Just. Gone. There was no one to cry to, no one to explain what had happened, and in that day and age, at least for me, there was no email. So you were careful what you posted—you read the room.

In college, I ran my own BBS for a couple of years. It focused on, shock, writing and I invited folks to put their stories up there for others to read, critique, and etc. I had to learn OS/2 back then because windoze couldn’t chew bubble gum and walk at the same time. In other words, if someone called into the BBS while I was writing a paper, the machine froze and the BBS crashed. OS/2 was my savior back then. That’s when my hatred for Microsoft’s operating systems first began. Yeah, I’m an old time loather.

Regardless, I was the SYSOP. God of the realm. If someone pissed me off, I could nuke their account. If someone put something up there I didn’t think was appropriate, I could nuke it out of existence. I had that power. I also had that right—it was my fucking platform.

Fast forward all these years later, and I see social media as little more than a BBS run with trillions of phone lines and the same number of conversations and threads. But we who post here do not own this space. Not at all. It is owned by the folks who bring it to you For varying quantities of “free” (like personal data being sold to companies of all sorts). You have no rights here. You have no rights on any of the platforms that YOU DON’T OWN. You never will, either.

The original intent of the internet was information sharing, communication, collaboration, and education. It has radically morphed into something completely different, as most monsters do, and not all of it has been bad, not all of it good. Just as back in the BBS days, the Lunatic fringe posted their insanity, some bought it, some debunked, some just laughed, and others were so horrified they never visited again. Like me when I found a trove of burning Jew gifs.

As long as the platform wasn’t breaking “the law” by hosting something the feds deemed illegal (like credit card numbers for ways to make long distance calls for free), there was no real policing. No real TOS either. The Feds called into the BBS’, they’d look around, maybe They’d bust someone, maybe not. Most of us didn’t worry about it because we weren’t planning revolutions, murders, or criminal enterprises apart from how the cheat code worked on Rescue Raiders. We were fucking 12.

Moderation is there to protect the platform owners from liability, but it also exists to keep the platform from descending into adolescent hate filled toxicity (as most usenet boards of old seemed to be). If an asshole on your platform invites another asshole and they invite an asshole, pretty soon all you have are assholes on the boards. So mods also exist to protect the platform and keep it growing into whatever they want it to be. Or maybe whatever it wants to be.

I’m mentioning these old technologies to make a point. What’s happened to folks getting their accounts canceled is simple—you broke the rules and the SYSOPS booted your ass from the server.

You don’t pay any of the social networks for a membership or their service, and if you did, you really would have a ToS to deal with, a very legally binding one.

I hate censorship. I’m a writer and I’ve been fighting that battle since I was 13 and someone complained my poetry (er, adolescent scribblings) was too dark to be read aloud in class.

Censorship is a sinister slope, not a slippery one. The moment it rears its ugly head, a lot of unwanted, unforeseen shit gets dragged along with it. Always will no matter if the left or the right is in charge. News for you n00bs— it’s always been that way. Politicians and corporations saw social media as economic bonanza, a way to speak to their constituents, consumers, enemies, and rubes en masse. Fuck sending mailers—this shit was real time!

And they feasted. And we fed them. And we’re still feeding them. And your precious content, your freedom as you might see it, is always just a key away from being wiped out.

Legislation isn’t really going to fix this, folks. It won’t. Lawyers will fuck it up so badly at this point that we might as well not have a damned social network of any kind. But guess what? You can have a website, until the provider shuts you down. You can blog post on some service until that provider shuts you down. You can move providers until you find one that will host you, but you’ll always be in the same boat. And some of those folks are probably not ones you want to be associated with.

The alternative I’m desperately trying to use at this point runs a bit of gamut. I blog. I podcast. I tweet. And I do this crazy thing where I run a discord server to bring together folks that read my work and want to interact. Discord has actually been a joy of sorts. If anyone gets toxic for any reason, i can boot them. I am the SYSOP again. I can rule certain content off limits and those rules are explained very specifically at the front of the channel. And if you don’t like it, fuck off. You’re not welcome in my house.

Yes, Discord still controls whether or not I have a channel. I have to abide by their ToS just as i have to adhere to YouTube’s, Apple’s, Libsyn’s, Podhoster’s, Google’s, Spotify, etc for the podcasts I post. The alternatives are to lease server space and disk space (yup, still bound by ToS and contract), run fiber to your house (um, another ToS or contract) and host your own content. Pure and simple. But you will never be out from under the gate keepers. Ever.

Unless you want to go back to point to point style communication. Small hubs, small servers, small data. Those are petty much your options and the idea that any platform the size of Twitter, Gab, FBook or whatnot, is secure is a fucking joke. Also? Most of your content is never really deleted until it’s been processed and categorized and analyzed. Scared yet?

You sort of should be.

If you don’t want to be de-platformed, find a different communication method. Or a variety. If you want to incite insurrection and threaten assassination attempts and violence, go for it. It’s your right to be a moron and break the law. But sooner or later, you’re going to lose your rights to the system and possibly your freedom IRL. Because it’s the fucking law and because of a lot of anti-terror legislation, you’re going to have a target on your back. Always. Also, just in case you’re not clear where I stand on that sort of thing, I think you’re a piece of shit if you engage in that behavior. That goes for trolls too.

So maybe, um, maybe there’s a reason the service providers have these rules. Maybe there’s something you should change about how you express yourself on public systems. Or perhaps not hit that return key until you’ve walked away (Twitter has a draft feature for a reason) and come back to make sure it’s something you want to sign your name to. Anything you wouldn’t scream in a crowd of people is not something you want to say online.

In short, don’t treat another human being, or talk to them, in a manner you wouldn’t talk to them if they were standing in front of you and in range of punching your dumb ass for being an asshole. It’s that simple, folks. Not fucking difficult.

The only alternative to being de-platformed is to NOT have a service provider. To become the service provider. Even then, you will be bound by whatever laws your service provider must abide. There’s just no way around it.

The more I think about secure communications, the more I want to throw my cell phone in the garbage and never login to the internet again. But that’s not really an option. Everything about my many jobs requires access to the beast and that means I have to have a damned service provider, because I ain’t rich.

So if you’re that concerned about your 1st Amendment rights being trampled upon, do something about it. Learn to do what you need to do to make it happen, but don’t think it’s going to be easy and without risk. A lot of things are against the law and just because you’re ignorant of them doesn’t mean you won’t be held accountable. If you signed the ToS, you’re bound by it. To complain about it after you’ve agreed to it is moronity in and of itself.

Also, if people could fucking behave themselves, we wouldn’t need ToS, federal regulations, and the like. But some of y’all out there just didn’t learn nuthin’ about how a society works, much less our government, or the Constitution. Pity. You should actually learn now instead of screaming how unfair it is. Research. Don’t listen to the talking heads. Go. Research. You’ve got trillions and trillions of bytes out there to explore. Your willful ignorance has no excuse. Log off, or be a Netizen.

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