OkCupid against Mozilla should probably be put in the same bucket with Google and Wikipedia on net neutrality.
Either way though, activism in one setting doesn't oblige anyone to the exact response in every other setting. It might even be a bad idea. An approach that works well once might backfire if used repeatedly.
It's still an open question as to how much we even want internet services to play in politics. I agree that gay rights is an easy issue to support, but where does this ultimately lead if we impose strong expectations for sites to weigh in on political questions? 527s paying our favorite sites to make us listen to arguments for the most funded propositions?
There was a troubling suggestion in a study on Facebook[0] where they found they might be able to shape voter turnout, they could target that technique towards selected political affiliations in specific geographic regions, I guess that's the dystopian option. (Or maybe utopian if you like the idea of tech companies picking elected officials through nudges... up for debate.)
Either way though, activism in one setting doesn't oblige anyone to the exact response in every other setting. It might even be a bad idea. An approach that works well once might backfire if used repeatedly.
It's still an open question as to how much we even want internet services to play in politics. I agree that gay rights is an easy issue to support, but where does this ultimately lead if we impose strong expectations for sites to weigh in on political questions? 527s paying our favorite sites to make us listen to arguments for the most funded propositions?
There was a troubling suggestion in a study on Facebook[0] where they found they might be able to shape voter turnout, they could target that technique towards selected political affiliations in specific geographic regions, I guess that's the dystopian option. (Or maybe utopian if you like the idea of tech companies picking elected officials through nudges... up for debate.)
[0] http://www.nature.com/news/facebook-experiment-boosts-us-vot...