With two Facebook accounts locked and his current one under a 30-day suspension, James Onen aka Fatboy has said that suspension of social media users and pulling down their accounts is unfair since the platforms have become part of user’s everyday life.
The host made the remarks during The Fatboy Show with co-host Lesham. It was after Lesham narrated a story in Texas where a federal judge blocked the law that would give a right to social media users to sue the platforms for deleting their accounts since they are private businesses.
According to Fatboy, the platforms may be private businesses but they have become so large that they are now considered a public utility.
“Social media is now a necessity. When you look at what Mark Zuckerburg is trying to do, he is planning to create a Metaverse, where people will be like virtual avatars working from the platform and won't need to physically go to their offices. So imagine if such a world is created, it means the physical world is going to be secondary and banning you from it will be equivalent to being exiled or shipped to a prison camp,” he said.
He mentioned how further decisions have to be made to regulate social media companies since the influence of Facebook itself has become more powerful than that of governments in some countries.
Fatboy proposed that social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter should make technical advancements that enable a user to reclaim all their content and followers such that they can transfer them to another platform of their choice when they are banned from the former ones.
“Every time they pull down your account, all your articles, quotes and pictures and time you spent goes to waste and you as a user have no control yet it was your content. The networks you build say 5000 or a million followers all disappear and you have to start from scratch again.”
He added, “So I'd prefer that private mechanisms could create the solutions that could counter a lot of the excesses of many of these private companies because fundamentally I believe in the principle of the free market.”
The Fatboy show is hosted by James Onen aka Fatboy, Olive, Sarah and Lesham every weekday from 6am to 10am on RX Radio.
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