I'm always very unimpressed by this kind of argumentation. There's a clear difference in kind between Hackernews, Reddit, Instagram, and TikTok. Sure, they all feature user-submitted content, but to pretend that there is any meaningful similarity beyond that seems silly.
I'm always very unimpressed by people who believe that politicians have the intellectual capacity to differentiate between HN and Reddit.
They don't, especially when they're throwing their weight around after screaming about internet boogeymen for years.
Go watch the Tiktok hearings. They were losing their minds because filters could track your eyes and your cell phone could use the internal wifi network in order to access the internet.
Is there? Is there to your 80 year old senator and their constituents that think the internet is a series of tubes. You know, the constituents that actually vote?
Does it matter how well you explain it anyway? Modern political language lacks definition by design. Do street interviews and ask Americans what socialism is. Then ask them what they'd call the government giving banks money. Then ask them how many times in the last 20 years the government has given banks money.
My argument is that we should just not let the governments pass these kinds of laws because it opens the door to using these laws to arbitrarily block whatever website they can vaguely hand wave as "social media" or whatever they pick.
