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Make sure you have plenty of toilet paper.

Oh, it’s a total guarantee they won’t, ugh.

I’m not saying it is identical, there are some key differences, and yet social media platforms are much more like a publishing company than they are a town square. Just because they’re choosing to publish your tweets/posts for free and you’re choosing to create content without pay doesn’t mean it’s not a better analogy than saying their the equivalent of a public space. They’re very clearly not a public space. Using the street analogy, these are storefronts on the street, not the street itself. Again, the Internet itself is the street. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Mastodon, Lemmy, or whatever social media platform, are not the street or the town square. They are not and should not be considered to be public spaces any more than a mall or a Walmart is.

There is a key difference here. Social media companies have some liability with what gets shared on the platform. They also have a financial interest in what gets said and how it gets promoted by algorithms. The fact is, these are not public spaces. These are not streets. They’re more akin to newspapers, or really the people printing and publishing leaflets. The Internet itself is the street in your analogy.

Just remember as you read news, these are inherently biased sources. Basically all of them are. Look at who they are citing to understand how bias might affect the information being relayed to you. For example, if Hamas or Gaza Authorities are saying something, it is probably coming from a pro Hamas perspective, if IDF or Israeli authorities are saying something, probably comes with some bias too. This is true of all news, all the time. The spin is real. Anyone claiming a lack of spin are probably the biggest spinners of bullshit. It sucks that to be well informed you have to be able to be literate not only in the language but also how to read journalism itself. But that’s the reality.

They’re the propaganda arm of Doha, the same government that protects Hamas leadership. They’ve repeatedly printed Hamas lies without fact checking. Why would Israel not ban their propaganda outlet? Calling them journalists when they don’t adhere to basic journalistic standards is ludicrous. This isn’t new either. They’ve been acting this way forever. Lying about the hospital bombing was just the last straw.

For real, browsing all is mostly great. I just block the shit I don’t wanna see ever again.

You have a profound misunderstanding of the trans Saharan slave trade. Over centuries it resulted in millions of West African slaves being transported into and through the Arab world. This may not even have been the most significant source of slaves out of Africa during the pre-European colonial period. It is highly likely that more slaves came from Central and East Africa via Zanzibar. Millions upon millions of slaves being extracted from Africa before the Portuguese arrived. I’m not saying that what Europe did was even remotely reasonable. Just understand that we didn’t invent slavery, we didn’t start up slavery in Africa out of nowhere. It doesn’t excuse us. But we’re not uniquely evil either.

Simply not correct at all. Look up the trans Saharan slave trade. It was absolutely enormous business before the Portuguese sailed down the West Coast of Africa.

Definitely corrected the mistake, I went much dumber this time around.