

What if the government tells a social media site they have to ban people from criticizing them or they’ll lose funding?
Open source sure, that’s fine. But someone’s gotta pay for running the servers and if the government can cut that funding they have influence over it. That’s a level of government control over the media that’s a little concerning.
Better to have the the government make regulations requiring companies to make it easy to switch to another company. Like changing to another phone company, you can keep the same number (because of regulations) so people can still call you without even knowing you changed companies even if they have a phone from a different manufacturer using a different phone company.
You can do the same with things like social media, just need to have regulations requiring protocols to allow people to change services easily and connect with other services so there’s not a network effect making people stay on shit services because it’s what all their friends use. People should own their data, own their contacts and companies should compete by providing better services rather than by making it difficult to leave the services they’re currently on.
Handing over your date to the government isn’t a better solution than handing it over to a private company. The real solution is to ensure people own their data.
In a monarchy you can criticize the Prime Minister or any other minister in government, but it’s treason to speak out against the King. If the King does something bad it’s because he got bad advice from the PM. Even the opposition party is called the Loyal Opposition, as you’re meant to maintain loyalty to the King even while expressing opposition to the government.
Nowadays most monarchies are constitutional and the King’s speeches are written by the Prime Minister so it’s actually correct to criticize the PM for the things the King says.
It’s interesting how the MAGAs are behaving in exactly the same way people behave in a monarchy. Unfortunately the President isn’t constitutionally limited so King Trump can do whatever he wants.
I really do think that a constitutional monarchy is better than a republic now. We have people in Canada that also believe that you prove your patriotism by being loyal to a guy that surrounds himself with gold. But they can bow to King Charles and it doesn’t matter because he has no political power. Gotta have a King so the subservient part of the population can feel happy without fucking things up by creating a King that has power.