Free Speech, Social Media, and Artificial Intelligence Generated Content

Let the danknessOne mans trash… begin.

I’m a fairly faithless person, so let’s be honest. Does the First Amendment protect your right for your voice to be heard? Or does it protect your voice to drown out the voices of others? Let’s review.

Free speech protections through the first amendment were written in a time where an absolute protection or an enshrined “right”, was unambiguous enough that the rule has lasted for hundreds of years. As we’ve seen in the corporate new era, these voices can have disproportionate effects on others. For example, MSNBC, the Fox News Corporation, and others major media channels such as DelawareOnline, have disproportionate effects on dominating the news media. These voices are backed by corporate and advertising supporters. Large amounts of money have historically been able to corrupt the speech of others, let alone in the amounts being used today to dominate websites and social media platforms where the money and influence have disproportionate effects on amplifying or minimizing the power of individuals’ free speech.

Corporate News Era

For a pre-modern history, I’d advise the reader to look at this Wikipedia article on the history of the newspaper/gazette.

The focus on this article is essentially a millenial’s spin on a brief history of the fairness doctrine, the false balance bias (might apply to left-wing news as well…), and other changes to the mandate of traditional radio and television news media to obtain appropriate licensure from the Federal Communications Commission.

Unlike most other media biases, false balance may result from an attempt to avoid bias; producers and editors may consider treating competing viewpoints fairly—i.e., in proportion to their actual merits and significance—as equivalent to treating them equally, giving them equal time to present their views, even though one of the viewpoints may be overwhelmingly dominant.

These laws and principles have made the news harder than ever to disentangle/deconvolve from the advertising sponsors, political agendas, and private and near-anonymous interests of private donors and tax-exempt political think tanks. Due to political polarization and the spread of meme culture, there is more disinformation than ever before, and the buzzword of the 2020’s seems to be “fact checking.” With decreased responsibilities for corporate news to maintain accurate and thoughtful news programming, the burden for verifying information has been pushed onto the reader/viewer. Thanks to these changes in mass media, partisan NGOs and billionaire interests are more effective than ever in swaying the conversation towards or away from information that will help the public remain informed of public policy decisions and the effects these interests have on public discourse.

Social media

In the 2010sKind of a wonderful time? Kind of like blargh, the rise of social mediaInsert_favorite_social_media_branding_here.webp networks created a third player in traditional news and information dissemination. In the 20^th century, the predominant channels were radio, television, and print media (newspapers, magazines). In the 21st century, the primary influencersInstagram influencers are almost as bad as YouTube influencers are social media channels/accounts that (re)circulate memes and secondary or tertiary reports/articles/blogs about current events and important trends in American and European culture. With these channels having hundreds of thousands to millions of followers, and impacts from sharing beyond that, the traditional media outlets are at a considerable disadvantage compared to modern digital counterpartsThe job interview is a different beast from our parents generation receiving revenue from sponsorships and platform ads in large social media operations such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and others.

These social media channels rely on young 20Indian tech YouTube best YouTube-40Getting old amirite year olds with internet savvyBut you have heard of me… and solidSOLID programming advice. Occams razor is best razor. to mediocreI kind of enjoy Linux ricing and productivity YouTube channels. There’s a zen to it. ideas about current eventsHalf decent channel, mostly for the memes, productsMilk chocolate product, and cultural shiftsEh.. For example, many predatory courses are sold on YouTubeRumor was in 2010s that Amazon and YouTube would start hijacking your camera to make sure that you watch their ads on topics from Real Estate to health products and neutraceuticals.

These channels remain very lucrative although genuine positive product news channelsSteve Burke (aka Tech Jesus) runs a high-quality PC technology benchmarking channel named "Gamers Nexus" and product reviewsGamers Nexus has taken on a variety of companies, YouTube channels, and marketing misinformation. remain complicatedSteve Burke produces some of the best hot-takes on disingenuous or low effort technical product reviews to obtainLinus Tech Tips was one of the most beloved YouTube channels for hardware reviews. RIP. useful informationGamers Nexus has frequently called out technical information and statistical faux pa related to the tech channel LinusTechTips (LTT) comparing product qualityIt’s 2025 and some bloggers are still yeeting their phones, technical specifications, and pricing trends. In some waysYep thats me alright., not much has changedTech YouTube is a mildly enjoable place for reviews of PC gaming hardware, including CPUs and GPUs from major multinationals such as AMD, Intel, NVidia, and others.. AdvertisingNVidia, Intel, AMD, and others have greatly exaggerated product performance regulations are very relaxedI mean… classic meme format. Not much else to say about low effort tech reviews and a sadly deteriorating image around Linus Sebastien., and producing pseudo-technicalMajor multinationals have been caught inflating technical specs in expensive CPU/GPU markets. informationMuh information _ than your informashuns. remains as mainstreamIf you know you know as it has ever been for expensive PC components.

Dead internet theory for programmers

If you’ve been paying attention to the news on the topic of technical careers, you may be under the impression of two opposing viewpoints.

• It is easier than everThis AI stuff really bugs me to become a technical professional

In support of this are many accountsNew AI launched - Your development job is going away! of the “10x engineerMajority of developers will become less effective over time. We’re sure of it.”, the “vibe coderPrimeagean on AI coding phenomena”, and the “AI developerPrimeagean on software dev employment saturation”. AllThe 10x engineer has unparalleled throughput on technically specificying the standard outputs of a Linux developer are variations on the wunderkind phenomena where a young person develops technical skills from a very young age, and becomes increasingly advantaged in producing high-quality technical content such as computer programs, web applications, iPhone apps, and other technical gibberjabber.

• It is becoming easier and easier to become a ill informated technical professional

In suppport of this is the rise of Artificial Intelligence and agent based tools such as Cursor, CoPilot, ChatGPT, Claude, Ollama3, and other Aritificial Intelligence tools for developers to learn how to produce buggy code faster. I don’t even feel the need to get into this topic much further. See the Primeagean links above for more details about the exciting developments in engineer productivity, along with the caveats about becoming too good for your own shoes too quickly. It has been said that the majority of programs have already been written, and AI tools are just regurgitating things that have already been written, but not necessarily vetted.

AI generated content

Along with this is the rise of Artificial Intelligence generated content. Digital platforms have been under scrutiny lately for a large number of copyright infringement incidents in the AI content space. Notable mentions include the Studio Ghibli generation following OpenAI’s GPT-4o release, Getty images vs Stability AI, Andersen vs Stability AI, and others.