My point was that the free speech discourse around this is naive. The "speech" in question is providing ammunition for the owners of the algorithms, who are doing the most important expression through how those algorithms are tuned.
My point was that social media should be discussed more like nuclear weapons are discussed.
It makes strategically sense for US to not have Chinese nuclear weapons/social media deployed on its soil/in the heads of its citizens; regardless of whether US nuclear weapons/social media is morally superior.
Maybe. Or maybe the algorithmic nudges are small (because if they're any bigger they get noticed and become counterproductive), and most of the real signal gets through. Maybe the actual speech matters more.
> It makes strategically sense for US to not have Chinese nuclear weapons/social media deployed on its soil/in the heads of its citizens; regardless of whether US nuclear weapons/social media is morally superior.
At first-order yes. But I think the US has a lot more to lose from a worldwide atomisation of social media. If this kind of thing is normalised then the EU etc. practically have to kick out US social media and we'll end up with everyone having their own great firewall, and that will hurt the US more than it hurts China.