Why too powerful online media needs to be held accountable to law to a higher degree

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Crackmonster wrote:

The problem is, you can't really make a law saying that you can't have an opinion on who to hire - that you just have to hire anyone. Following that, it's basically impossible to suss out the difference and if you could it would be based on nazi principles of everyone watching each other plus the system engineered to watch you.

Simple.

If there's evidence that a hirer's HR department accessed your social media accounts prior to deciding whether to offer you a job or not, or if it becomes obvious that you were rejected for a position because of reasons that could only be known to those who check your social media feeds, that's a litigation case.

People should be allowed to use social media - or not use social media - as they see fit. Employers being given cart blanche to flip people the bird finger over shit they have no fucking business even knowing, let alone judging you on, is garbage. Especially if you're not looking for a public or high-profile position - if all you're looking for is a regular-schmoe job in the office or on the factory floor, what the utter fuck does it matter what your social media looks like, or that you don't use it at all?

Ideally, of course, social media would just vanish completely. It's a massive blight on society with no positive impact or offsetting Good whatsoever; this planet is a worse place with Facebook, Twitter and the like on it. But that genie's long since fled the bottle, so we may as well try to limit the damage now.

Don't get me wrong, i don't think i would mind such a law. The problem is just that it wouldn't work for the majority of cases - but honestly maybe it is also needed without all the details from below just for a handful of cases it could catch.

Why wouldn't it work for all cases? Because no one can force them to reveal their sources. To do it you are talking about several nasty things one of them being connecting all the media to all governments around the world such that it was constantly checking each time you applied for a job whoeever was in charge should have his media and yours connected in some checking algorithm to see if he connected to your media. You also needed full registration of roles. Bureaucracy big time, what a mess. And it would also require law that entirely prohibited you from accessing them at all because without that you still can't prove that even if they checked yours, that it is what you based your opinion on unless the employer is downright foolish enough to state it while being recorded.

It would create black markets also even if all above was taken into account of people selling access to unconnected media accounts with which to investigate whoever you wanted free of the system.

Finally to make it effective you would additionally require a law that states access to internet requiring some personal id key in order to track your actions.

I believe far more along the lines of access to "public" media should be a personal right and only have the right to be taken away should you break the law. For lesser offenses fines are in order rather than exclusion(prison).

The issue you are addressing about employers abusing is i believe better solved by society evolving and teaching each other not to share everything with everyone such that random persons don't have access to the most personal things about you.

You might even need to create an entire new branch of the police for dealing with cyber crimes. The ones who had to deal with reports just like regular police have to deal with regular reports now.

I'm aware that any effort to try and curb "does your Facebook profile match our unreasonably high standards for complete corporate-bitchboy milquetoastism required for employment?" behaviors would be extremely difficult to enforce.

I believe there would be some value in such laws even if they were rarely enforced or difficult to enforce, simply as a statement of "This Shit Isn't Okay". Right now it's held to be perfectly normal, encouraged even, to pry invasively into the private lives of potential employees of any given company for any sign, any hint, any slim shred of a chance that they might Publicly Embarrass You later, and if those hints exist you not only refuse to hire them but blacklist them with other hirers, as well.

Corporations, these days, essentially have the freedom to punish you for living your life as you see fit. They already have more of that power than they ever should have gotten; I'm all for curbing that power as much as humanly possible. Laws stating it's illegal to judge an applicant for a position by off-hours actions that applicant took (which they did not themselves submit in their resumes, i.e. relevant volunteer work and such) would at least put the megacorps on notice that blatant public misuse of social media will get them in trouble.

Better than nothing, at least.

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1453R wrote:
Simple.

If there's evidence that a hirer's HR department accessed your social media accounts prior to deciding whether to offer you a job or not, or if it becomes obvious that you were rejected for a position because of reasons that could only be known to those who check your social media feeds, that's a litigation case.

Spoken like someone who has obviously never been involved in a litigation case against a large employer in their fucking life.

There is nothing SIMPLE about it. You will firstly spend about 20 hrs shopping for an atty that has any interest in the case at all, answering the same damned questions over and over. You will take days off to meet with the atty you do find (if you find one), you will pay a fee for discovery; it goes on.

The only cases attys will take with no fee are really basic, simple cases usually involving something that you have undeniable proof, which is rare af.

The average person (especially if you are talking unemployed) does not have the approximate 1.5K it costs to get started.

As an aside: my wife and I have recently been down this road regarding a discrimination case (her). Even the EEOC is a pain and you must also file with your state. Depending on where you live this can be ridiculous.

IF you ever got to court, the corp. will have 5 to 10 attys versus your 1. They will then (I don't know if it is through old fashioned connections or out and out bribery) move the case out of town and procure a judge who is famous for hating workers and siding with corps no matter how retarded their excuse.

In your silly story, a person out looking for a job that probably is not wealthy, finds an atty that is willing to sue someone for checking social media? Where in fuck do they get the 2k or so for discovery, letters demanding docs, etc?

Can I have some of what you are stoned on? It must be good!

What's the alternative then, Kolby?

Simply continue to allow megacorporations to continue to invasively probe your personal life and judge you unworthy of continued living based on criteria that doesn't affect them for shit?

Corporations taking personal social media accounts into consideration and (negatively) judging your personal, off-hours, completely-unrelated-to-your-work life when hiring someone is fucking bullshit. It needs to be stopped, one way or another.

Got a better way? I'm all ears.

1) "What does it mean liberty and justice for all?"

2) There is no reason to be somewhere, where man is not welcomed

1 - there are ways to bypass the ads on youtube -- I didn't realize they had added adds till watching youtube on someone else's device.


2 - You're right that mistakes are made - agencies looking for copyright infringement often report cases that aren't violations at all. Not that I've bothered to watch movies on youtube but my mother somehow maanged to stumble upon full movies that go under the radar simply by avoiding putting any descripter in the file description.

Facebook, Youtube, twitter etc all provide a service. It's up to a user to abide by their terms. Is it possible for them to make a mistake? Of course. But they are also reluctant to punish given how long people like Alex Jones were allowed to speak freely without consequence.

I mean pizzagate was pretty far out there and still lead to death threats and even some guy firing a rifle in a restaurant he suspected of human trafficking....

People can be really stupid and really gullible. It's really not social media's fault that people aren't smart enough to realize they're potentially being manipulated - you can blame government for every cut to education funding maybe....

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DurianMcgregor wrote:

This is clearly an undesirable situation, but how do you consider this legally? Should accounts to these websites be considered a fundamental right? Should there be regulations on how accounts can be terminated? Also is this a local or federal issue?

You treat these virtual monopolies, like twitter, Facebook... as public space. They are privately owned companies, but the service they provide is a public good and they should not be able to ban or censor you for reasons that are not criminal.

These corporations are not your local florist shop and should not be treated the same way as small business (where competition exists). They have a way too big impact on society and politics to be treated as part of the "free market". The infrastructure they benefit from (the internet) was developed and is maintained with public money, so their service should be treated as a public space / public good.

Imagine the water company denying you service because they don't like you for whatever reason. Companies like Google hold too much power in the information age, they can literally censor things out of existence. And that's just legal power, not counting bribes & corruption. These corporations are already too cosy with our politicians and should probably be broken up too.

Demanding from these services to not ban people for non-criminal reasons also does not add any "overhead" or "regulations" that would impede competition. But contrary, trying to force all employers to not look at people's social media and make decisions based on that, would add a ton of bureocracy & problems.

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morbo wrote:

Imagine the water company denying you service because they don't like you for whatever reason.

Water companies are mostly public, but those that are private are heavily regulated.

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Crackmonster wrote:

...What i am getting at, is that mistakes can unjustly shut you out of real aspects of the life that everyone in the west gets to enjoy. I don't really use these, but some people do, and for example if an entire school was using facebook, some kid could be missing out if they could not access.

I just want to make this clear, first: Youtube is not "real life." Youtube is also owned by a commercial entity and may make whatever rules it wishes.

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My point is that the old society is constructed...

"the old society"

That's the one that brought us the internet, Moon landings, cures for diseases, falling poverty levels, increased health and longevity, decreased infant mortality... You mean that "old society?"

Social media is not "real life." Participating in social media is not "living real life." If the entire internet collapsed after you read this post, then what? Would that mean that you have been denied some "Right" due to some natural disaster?

The companies and organizations online that are not specifically administrated by their home governments are, usually, simply required to obey laws that specifically address those sorts of organizations. Your participation on their websites is a matter of often commercial concerns and not one of "Human Rights."

Log out, shut down, go outside and watch something grow for a bit or take a walk and see what real people look like. If you construct your life around "teh interwebz" and "social media" and end up putting too much personal meaning into it, you become enslaved, held by someone else's will, and your own definition of your life becomes dependent upon what some commercial entity says it must be dependent upon.