Internet companies are becoming more and more powerful, who will protect our rights and interests?

Twitter and YouTube have removed the images and videos of James Flies's decapitation by ISIS, in the sense of civic responsibility and at the request of James Foley's family James Flies. They have a right to do it, and I think they did the right thing.

Then why am I so uncomfortable? I'm not feeling well because we don't have a clear standard to measure what should be deleted, but also because a small group of giant companies, including Twitter and YouTube, have more power to decide that we can read online, What to listen to and watch, but their sense of responsibility is getting worse.

Who gave them such power? It's us. If we do not take back what we have given and what we have been deprived of, then we deserve to lose control of our own content under the damage of the combined power of all kinds of media.

At present, we can disregard the allegation that they have been removed from the James Flies of pictures and videos of the beheading of ISIS. But Twitter's partnership with the Turkish Government to delete certain accounts does violate its terms of service, even if it is an indirect act at the request of the Government. But when Twitter and YouTube take the video of murder as a promotional theme, it's only editorial.

Edit？ Yes, just a little bit big. In addition, the question of the outside world is completely understandable. What precedent would that be? What's the basis? Have we always followed these bases? If it is appropriate to delete pictures and videos of James Flies being beheaded by ISIS, why not delete any photos of others who have been mutilated by ISIS and other criminals?

These are important issues that are so important because they are too powerful in the information market. When the video web site, which often pops up, liveleak the idea of not helping a murderer do PR work, vowing never to store pictures and videos of James Flies's beheading, it caused a stir.

Similarly, the problem that so many people worry about is not that they instinctively protect the human nature of the public, nor do they refuse to help the Barbarians do propaganda. What worries people is the growing ability of Facebook, Google and Twitter to control the media we are in touch with.

Their ability to control is so powerful not because they gain power or because of other bad reasons, but because we cede power to them. These services are very practical and convenient. But since we don't pay for the services we use, as people say, our users are just products that companies sell to advertisers. The rights we have are limited to those rights stated in the terms of service of these companies, when Facebook decides what to display in your information flow, you have no bargaining power because you "agree" with the terms of service that are one-sided and not bound by the bill of Rights.

I am a heavy user of Twitter and one of the reasons I use Twitter is that the company has been trying to protect the independence of its users. But now I'm also starting to worry about whether it's safe for me to keep so much information in a private service because it's increasingly clear that Twitter controls all the users ' experiences. Twitter is also unilaterally expanding its power to adjust the content of its users ' timelines, such as inserting content not requested by users into the user's timeline, a major violation of Twitter's earlier agreements with users. I rarely use Facebook because I don't believe it at all, as with search engines, I occasionally use Google but more often use DuckDuckGo that don't record user data.

Journalists have a particularly short-sighted look, eager to use social networks and provide a lot of content to third-party services. You know, you guys from the news company? In the future, Facebook will be your biggest competitor, but Twitter is also a media company. Google eats away at your lunch every day.

What else should we do besides face the things that have happened? What we need to do is to Berners the Internet, like Tim Berners, the inventor of the Internet, to restore the nature of the media so that our communication and innovation practices no longer require permission.

The first thing we can do as users of Internet services is to create their own online identities. From a practical point of view, we can buy a domain name, at least to build a blog site, and in this way to establish their own online identity. Your personal pages on LinkedIn, Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook, and all other central services, you think it's your own, but obviously those pages don't really belong to you, they belong to each of the companies they belong to.

You can also focus on the development campaigns that some software developers have launched, albeit small, but growing in a variety of important tools that help us gain independence. I adore developers who develop "standalone network" services that allow us to sync what we write on our blogs to Twitter and automatically sync other users ' replies on Twitter back to my blog as a comment on the article.

In short, we should not give up freedom for convenience.

Compiled from (with deletions): theatlantic

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)