 Hey everybody welcome back to the channel. Take number three of doing this video because this video is kind of hard for me because I don't want to get entrenched in politics. I don't want to come out and say, hey, oh, I don't like Donald Trump. I like Donald Trump. I just like what Twitter did. I'm taking him off Twitter. I don't I do like what they did. I don't want to get into that. For the most part, I think if you want my videos on politics, I think both sides are morons and filled with morons. The ones in charge. I mean, they should all get fired and we'll just start over. That's my take on politics. So I don't want to get entrenched in politics. I don't think anybody wants to get entrenched in politics on a Linux YouTube channel. I think that's one of the reasons why it always makes me quite angry when something like politics pops up on DisturTube's channel or Brodie Robinson or Luke's channel. Luke does way more politics stuff than, you know, whatever. That's their prerogative. That's their channel. On this channel, I want to stay away from the politics. That being said, let's talk some politics because recently there's been this push to they're calling it de-platforming. It started off with them with Twitter taking Trump off from Twitter. But Firefox has kind of stirred the pot in the false community by coming out with a blog post basically saying that the Twitter thing didn't go far enough. I'll show you that here. Oops, wrong one. Here we go. So this is the article that they released. This was written apparently by the CEO of Mozilla. And basically what they're saying here is that social media played a role in the siege that took over the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Here are the things that they think we should do about it. Additional precise and specific actions must also be taken. Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they're paying, and who is being targeted. I mean, maybe on a news site that would make sense where you're getting information, but on just every, I mean, I don't care where Spotify gets their ad dollars from. That doesn't bother me at all. And I mean, what impact does it have? So even like a tech news site, I don't care where they're getting their money at Terry dollars as long as, you know, they're giving me the news. Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms. That's a good idea. We all want to know what Google's algorithm does. We'd love to know what the YouTube algorithm is because that would make being a YouTuber so much easier. I'm not quite sure what that has to do with the whole political thing that's going on right now or how that would help. And I think that's just something that Mozilla wants. And I think that's something that a lot of us want. But I don't know that it has anything to do with deep platforming conservative voices or whatever. Turn on by default tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation. This is the most troubling part of this entire article. Who gets to decide what's factual or not? I know, and you know that there's fake news on the internet. I know, and you know that both the Republicans and Democrats love to spew fake news. We all know that at certain points in the last two or four years, the parties have switched back and forth between being the biggest proponents of fake news or whatever. You know, sometimes it's Donald Trump, sometimes it's Nancy Pelosi. They like that kind of stuff because they can spin it into their favor. It's a big problem. It's a bigger problem than what Mozilla could ever fix on their own because no one uses Firefox. And even if everybody used Firefox, I don't know how they would go about changing it. Because I don't know about you, but I don't trust Mozilla to go through and be the arbiters of truth. I don't think anybody does. I don't trust anybody to be the arbiters of truth. It's hard to believe anything. So you choose what to believe. It's one of the downsides of the internet is that anybody can post literally anything on the internet and you have to use your common sense and your ability to differentiate and think your ability to think really on what to believe. So that is the biggest. I mean, I think that's the part that like Barry Robinson and DT really got into a snit over because that is a big, big deal. Firefox, you don't get to choose who's telling the truth and you don't get to kick off people off the internet just because you don't think they're telling the truth. The last one here is work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms impact on people in our societies. Sounds like a waste of money to me. Studies almost notoriously are bad. Case in point over the last 10 years, coffee has been good for you. It's also been bad for you. And then it was good for you again. Eggs have also been good for you and then bad for you. Red wine has been good for pregnant women. It's also in bed for pregnant women. So studies are notoriously not great. So it sounds like a waste of money. So the question becomes if we can all agree that Mozilla stands on this is not good. And I think we can all agree on that because even if you're a liberal and I consider myself more liberal than I do conservative, I guess, I think I'm more in the middle. You know, you know, no matter what side you're on, I think we can all agree that one company, be it Twitter or Mozilla or Apple or Amazon, they should not have the power to just boot off people from the internet because they don't like them. Now if they have a legitimate reason, so that one of the big things that's happened over the last couple of days is Parler got kicked off of pretty much everywhere. And Parler is majorly dominated by conservative users. And you know, that's fine because you want Twitter's predominantly dominated by liberal users, right? So, you know, they can have their place. The problem came in that they allowed users on there to promote violence. And that is true. We have pictures of them actually doing it. There's one picture of a tweet or whatever they call it. I don't know what they call it on Parler. I was never there. Of them saying that they're going to blow up AWS's server farms or whatever. I mean, you can't do that. And it's the platform's responsibility to take those kind of things away. And that's the reason why Parler is in trouble. But moderation is a is a is a dicey thing, because there's a line there, you want people to be able to say whatever they want to say, without going past that line, which is usually saying, hey, we're going to shoot you or something, you know, or we're going to blow something up. And that's that's just not, you can't allow that kind of stuff on the internet. And the problem comes, who gets to draw that line? You know, what is it? You know, Parler? Is it Amazon? Is it Google? Do we trust those companies to be the moderators of the internet? No, we don't really do we trust do we trust Firefox to be the arbiters of that line? You know, you know, where some people get to be on the internet, some people don't get to be on the internet, because they're violent people. I don't really trust Mozilla to do that either, even though they run opens or software. So all of this kind of just boils down to the internet screwed. I think that this is a huge problem. And I'm not sure that there's one size fits all solution. If you were asked me personally what I think people should do, I think that more open source softwares and more open source solutions are the best thing. So something like mastodon, which is a federated version of like Twitter. Now, that could be very easily become silos of communities that allow really spooky shit. Very easily, that kind of stuff could be allowed on there. But I think if the communities themselves themselves are open source and have there's a baseline of like rules that they have to agree to, and then everybody else, everybody in the community polices that to those rules, that's what makes the most sense on the internet, I think, is that the community itself should be able to, these are the rules, maybe they're voted on by the community. And these are the rules that every community like on mastodon or whatever have to follow. And then it's the community themselves that do the moderating that way there's not some big, huge conglomeration that's in control of it's the community that does the moderation. So if somebody has to get banned, maybe there's community board that, you know, bans that person or whatever, you know, and then that community board could be elected by, you know, the community. I think that's what makes sense. Now, is that ever going to happen? No, of course it's not going to happen. I think it probably should happen, but or something similar to that. I think that's why federated social networks make a whole lot more sense. I think that's why open source software makes a whole lot more sense. And that's why open source social social media sites would make a lot of sense, because everything in social media is, or in open source is at least theoretically commute controlled by the community. Now, it's not completely true because obviously we have our big corporations in the open source world too. And you know, so we want canonical being the arbiters of that line that we're talking about. We want the community to be the moderators of the internet. And I think that'd be the best way of solving it. So that is it for this video. I don't get into these kind of things all that often. And I don't plan to get into these things very often at all. I just kind of wanted to put in my two cents on what the hell is going on with Firefox because you know, I don't think anybody really I don't think anybody really agrees with what Firefox has said. But I also don't think that it's wrong for them to have come out and said it because it has stimulated conversation. And that is probably the best thing that could come out of is we need to talk more and more about how do we get to the point where the internet is allowed to be open and free while also being able to prevent things on the internet from getting out of hand. Because we have to have some rules, we just have to figure out who gets to set the rules and who gets to moderate or school the people into following those rules. So the last thing I want to talk about should you abandon Firefox? Am I going to abandon Firefox? That's a different question. I think I'm going to try to look for different browsers for me personally, not necessarily because I want I'm going to delete Firefox off my computer in a fit of rage. No, I think I'll probably keep Firefox on my computer. But I'm just going to use this opportunity to see what else is out there. Because I like to know what other open source browsers actual open source browsers are out there. Do I want something that's based on chromium? Maybe do I want something that's, you know, a fork of Firefox, maybe water fox or something? I don't know. Maybe I think that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to use this as opportunity to look at something else. chances are, I'll probably just come back to Firefox. But, you know, we'll see. And I might do a video on the video, the browsers that I find. So if you enjoyed this video, give it a thumbs up. If you didn't give it a thumbs down. If you would like to support the channel, you can do so in any number of ways. The easiest way to do so is by subscribing. That's literally takes all you got to do is use your hand and your mouse and hit the big boxy red button that says subscribe in it. It starts with an S ends with the that wasn't kind of sending it all. If you'd like to support us in other ways, you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, you can support us on Patreon at patreon.com slash the links cast. I don't know why there's a space in the links cast. I'll have to fix that link up there eventually. Anyways, that is it for this video. We'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.