I use it all as a tool, for sure. But there are many ways in which we’re increasingly defined by corporations with no Quakers and no interest in us except for whatever engagement numbers they can generate. Look at the nonsense at many of the open Quaker Facebook groups as an obvious example. People with limited experience or knowledge and relatively fringe ideas can easily dominate discussion just by posting with a frequency that involved or careful Friends couldn’t match. Facebook doesn’t care if it’s a zoo as long as people come back to read the latest outrageous comment thread. Just because the topic is Quaker doesn’t mean the discourse really holds well to our values, historical or modern.

Add to this that Google and Facebook could make any of our Quaker-owned websites nearly invisible with a tweak of algorithms (this is not hypothetical: Facebook has dinged most publisher Pages over the years).

The open web has a lot of pluses. I’m glad to see a Friend among its prominent champions and I’d like to see Quaker readers seeking it out more (most easily by straying of Facebook and subscribing to blogs’ email lists). From Hardie:

Of course, there is an alternative to Facebook and other walled gardens: the open web. The alternative is the version of the Internet where you own your content and activity, have minimal dependence on third party business models, can discover new things outside of what for-profit algorithms show you, and where tools and services interact to enhance each other’s offerings, instead of to stamp each other out of existence.

https://chrishardie.com/2018/04/rebuilding-open-web/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

Trump’s tweet came less than half an hour after the Chicago Tribune posted a few short quotes from the Boeing CEO saying they were concerned about the implications of trade with China under a Trump Administration. It was relatively tame stuff and of course a multinational with billions of dollars in China is going to be concerned. About a quarter of their aircrafts are built for the Chinese market.

But follow not the logic but the effect: if you criticize this president in public he will destroy your shareholder value. Boeing lost half a billion dollars in value following Trump’s 140 characters. Every CEO in America will now have to think twice before speaking to the press. It would be fiscally irresponsible to do otherwise. A few quotes in a paper isn’t worth that amount of shareholder value.

Free speech isn’t just court cases or a few lines in the Constitution. Even the CEOs of the largest corporations in America need to watch their tongues. Silencing has begun.