It's the inter-net. Sadly, the whole thing was built from the ground up as a means to control large numbers of people. It's built into the system. Losing ICANN was devastating. We aren't winning some of these fights, because we can't. They control the horizontal, they control the vertical. That's why public opinion is so important, but they also control the mass media. It needs to be fixed, but those were - probably - 2nd term goals.
Trumps biggest mistake. He needed to surround himself with frens, he surrounded himself with enemies. Maybe it's a decent business strategy, but in politics I think it didn't go well. You can't appease politicians to win them to your side and keep them there.
They don't want to decide an election. I get that, but in cases like these - someone has to, and they make the big bucks for a reason. Ultimate responsibility is supposed to fall on them. They're the supreme court. Not a lawyer here, I have absolutely no real knowledge of how it actually works, but if it doesn't work like that - then what's the point of having a SCOTUS at all?
There used to be hundreds of different search engines, all giving different results with different algorithms. Now? Everything just front ends the same one. There are a couple out there, like Bing, but for the most part even they follow the same rules.
Everything is so modded right now. People are, just, naturally curtailing what they say as a result of that. Overseers everywhere. For me, my favorite time, was the 4chan hayday. From, around, 2008 - 2012 for sure. Once Obama got reelected, the hammer came down. I miss it.
Right now there's a lot of focus on people with Right wing views being banned an persecuted, but the truth is that anyone's view on anything that doesn't fall within their narrow spectrum has been almost completely obliterated.
The BBS days were fun. I doubt I could even handle to be sitting on a BBS right now at 1200 baud like I used to. I was young then, so I didn't really understand much at the time. It would, really, depend on which board you connected to. But, that's the thing. Each board was autonomous, and had their own set of rules.
I can say that freedom can be messy. People being people doesn't result in an ordered and clean system. But, you learn to navigate it, and when you do - you can learn so many amazing things, and have so many amazing conversations.
As someone who has been online since the old BBS days, I'm not 100% thrilled with any of it. The best I see anymore is freedom of political views, rather than actual freedom of speech and expression. I still have hope, though. There's nothing wrong with having political freedom, I'd just like to see it expand a bit further than that.
An election isn't about winning, it's about finding out who won.