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The Federalism Debate in Social Media [1]

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Date: 2023-05-13  

Franklin the Federalist on his Tablet

From the recent Atlantic article - "It’s a disagreement that continues to this day, but the debate over centralization has spread beyond politics into a disagreement over the management of our public sphere. Should we stick with an easy system like the ones we know on Twitter and Facebook, where a few media kings rule us all? Or embrace the ambiguity of decentralization in the name of freedom? Or perhaps, in the tradition of Publius, there is a middle way, where a federalist public sphere develops centralized norms and standards, which support decentralized meeting halls on thousands of servers."…..” Federalist government and decentralized social-media platforms are by no means the same thing. Instead, I would suggest, a platform such as Mastodon sits on the other end of the spectrum from Twitter: It’s a decentralized ideal versus a centralized one. Most of us would probably prefer to live somewhere in the middle, and so did many 18th-century Americans who were puzzling out the federalist system.”

My Comment - The only way that " fractious factions" - in the terms of the Founders - can work together in a Federalist system is to have a couple basic value agreements that then allows the broadest allowable free expression WHILE still NOT sabotaging republicanism - the very values that allows Liberty.

In terms government, its the four civic principles of republicanism:

1) Free, fair elections , majority rule, minorities protected for peaceful transitions of power. 2) The checking and balancing of all organized selfish powers for inclusive compromise governance 3) The equal application of fair law and equitable economic policy for justice 4) The use of self-correcting, evidence-based science, journalism and education in driving public policy and reporting corruption.

In terms of technology infrastructure its the coded non-algorithmic communication protocol that does not control content.

Now, in terms of a social media site moderation that would translate to:

1) Online direct democracy polling and election of moderators who vow to protect the object/subject of the site, while allowing some valid contrarian views to be a devil’s advocate. 2) The allowance of participant moderation of posts with official moderators and flagging that insures inclusivity 3) The equal application of rules of warning and banishment in case inclusivity rules are neglected. 4) The use of honest debate rules that avoid all the documented fallacies and biases inherent in communication and the identification of credible news sources in debate.

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