How Thai authorities use online doxxing to suppress dissent

> The lack of oversight on social media platforms that allows this to happen is incompetence at best, and complicity at worst.

The social media platforms are supposed to what? Be a foil to the governments? Replace the government? Be a foil to the governments you don't like? It's unclear what you think the ideal here is.

Err.. be independent of governments.

The thinking of your post betrays an increasingly common totalitarian assumption behind the role of government -- perhaps covid has caused this.

In liberal democracies the government is always supposed to have only a minimal, enabling, role to civil society.

TFA mentions 4 recommendations that social media platforms can implement to prevent the abuse of their users. These aren't even political, but pertain to the practice of doxxing in general.

And like a sibling comment mentioned, companies should operate separately from governments. When that separation is blurred the checks and balances that are supposed to be in place in order to keep companies from abusing people, and from being an extension for governments to do the same, are just gone. At that point the country becomes a corporatocracy, serving the interests of companies rather than citizens.

The US has arguably functioned like this for decades, but when there are literal businessmen in power this is more evident than ever before. It's how you get scenarios of presidents manipulating the economy for their and their cronies' benefit. The next step is complete authoritarianism where companies are government puppets, where the spread of and access to information is tightly controlled and sprinkled with their own propaganda in order to keep megalomaniacs in power, and where any dissidence is squashed before it has the chance to spread. This is how you get China, Russia, and any government that aspires to that formula.

It's crazy that this needs explanation, or that it's a controversial line of thought.

Your "be independent" is what I was hinting at with my "replace". The GP suggests that social networks either need to have oversight or be the oversight. You assert that they should be the oversight, but how is that not the same totalitarianism?

To keep this on topic: the GP is suggesting that Meta/X put checks on what the Thai government is able to do on their platforms. This feels like a thin appeal to some higher authority that hopefully GP agrees with more, and definitely doesn't feel like a less totalitarian approach.

> the GP is suggesting that Meta/X put checks on what the Thai government is able to do on their platforms

No, that's not at all what I'm suggesting.[1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43749941

Those of us who want democracy want governments to regulate companies since a government at least has the potential of becoming democratic (companies don’t).

There are many others who want them to just “enable” society—perhaps because of their own financial incentives.

It’s not practical to think that companies can operate separately from governments and indeed I think they should not. We want companies to be subject to the law. That means if governments bring something like a subpoena or other court order to the company, the company should comply.

Well for jurisdictions where the government weaponizes the justice system that means the company either has to choose not to do business there or to bend the knee..

> And like a sibling comment mentioned, companies should operate separately from governments.

Unless you are making the claim that the Thai government is giving special privilege to Meta/X or vice versa, then it already is this way. Since the doxxing/bullying happened anyways, this is irrelevant.

I think we both agree that what is happening in this article is bad. You made some assertion that “lack of oversight…is incompetence at best, and complicity at worst“, so who is supposed to provide this oversight? You are clearly saying “not a government”, but I think that social networks doing this “oversight” of what governments are doing is equally dangerous.

You cannot be "independent" from the government on this planet.

>In liberal democracies the government is always supposed to have only a minimal, enabling, role to civil society.

Who actually believes this except for liberations who aren't just right wing hiding their true views.