As a free-speech absolutist, I got no problem with this. Unless the speech is threatening the direct physical harm of someone, or violating a law, it should be allowed.
At the same time, everyone else should have the tools to filter, block, and mute speech they do not like. If a tweet or a social media post has a certain word or phrase in it that I don’t like, I should be able to mute that and never see it.
Social media really has become something of a scourge on society.
So as a free-speech absolutist, would you let anyone walk into a Starbucks and start shouting about anything they wanted? Would it be okay for them to write a manifesto on the chalkboard next to the barista?
Starbucks is a privately owned location and has the right to enforce behavioral standards or kick people out. Social Media is the same. Privately owned and can set their own standards.
The internet has plenty of space for people to post their opinions on their own servers. They are annoyed because if you take away social media, you make it harder for them to get an audience.
Does Starbucks let random people come in and shout about some things, but not other things? Do they let anyone write on their blackboard at all? No. These are not things you can do in a Starbucks, because there are rules and they apply to everyone the same regardless of the content of their message or the thought they are wanting to express: sometimes you don't get to talk to other people in the way you want, and that's fine.
However, if I come to a Starbucks and I start having a conversation about something in a quiet voice similar to what is allowed of any other person at Starbucks--maybe because I am on a date with another guy--I certainly do not believe that the people who run the Starbucks should decide they will refuse to serve me or allow me to talk about our date with each other because they disagree with us being homosexual.
You are correct that the right to freedom of speech is not the same thing as a right to be heard by the people you want to talk at, regardless of whether they want to hear you or not... but that isn't what is in question here: people are being entirely banned from platforms such that even their explicit followers can't access their content, and messages with certain forms of content that are merely being sent between small groups of people are being "moderated" out of existence.
The court and statute in question specifically mention that censorship can happen for a variety of legal reason.
This ruling only denies the right to censor based on viewpoint, something which I believe Starbucks is also bound by. You can throw a customer out for being obnoxious and threatening. But probably not for sitting at a table and calmly discussing the pros and cons of various abortion laws, sharing opinions Starbucks disagree with.
> This ruling only denies the right to censor based on viewpoint, something which I believe Starbucks is also bound by.
In California this might be true, I believe political affiliation is a protected class in California. But political affiliation is not a protected class federally, so it should generally be legal for corporations to discriminate against people on the basis of political belief, as long as they don't do that in a way that could be construed as discriminating on the basis of something that is a protected class, like race.
> So as a free-speech absolutist, would you let anyone walk into a Starbucks and start shouting about anything they wanted?
Starbucks is on private property.
> Would it be okay for them to write a manifesto on the chalkboard next to the barista?
The Starbucks chalkboard is privately owned.
>Social Media is the same. Privately owned and can set their own standards.
No it isn't. Anyone can log into Twitter and Facebook and see tweets and posts. They're public squares that are closely related to a mall rather than a private Starbucks location.
> The internet has plenty of space for people to post their opinions on their own servers.
Up until other big tech companies like CloudFlare decide they don't want to be associated with you and stop offering you ddos protection.
> They are annoyed because if you take away social media, you make it harder for them to get an audience.
Exactly! And that's why Twitter, Facebook, and Google should be treated as public squares. It's not fair that one group can access a public resource that others cannot.
Yup. This is the exact problem that we’re (as a society/world) wrestling with.
The reason it is (not just seems) different is because of the scope. A message on a chalkboard cannot reach millions of people (without the internet), but it can on a website.
That by itself distorts the public/private argument, but we as a society aren’t sure how or to what extent yet.
These lawsuits are the second step (the first step was arguing about it in public) of figuring that out.
So, because any website can potentially reach millions of people, all websites must be considered public spaces and must be coerced to allow all legal speech?
I honestly don't think it distorts the public/private argument, any more than MacDonald's serving billions of customers distorts the question of whether it's a private corporation or whether its scale transforms it into a public service.
But the inevitable endgame of this is going to be the government regulating all speech on the internet, and most of the internet no longer allowing any kind of user content, and I don't think the free speech absolutists so willing to throw the baby of free speech out with the bathwater of consequence are going to like it.
Yes and no, because we’ve seen society wide effects from this over the last 15-20 years.
But all websites? To my knowledge, the only websites people agree on this are Facebook and Twitter. So probably probably not all websites, but that's one of the things that need to be worked out. When does a site reach a scale where it can no longer be treated solely as a private entity? What should happen then? How should we identify those sites? Then what?
There are tons of people who agree with you, tons who don't, and tons in between. But the majority seem to be on the side that things can't stay the way they’ve been. The effects on society over the last 20 years are not good. I haven't seen much disagreement on that. No one can agree on what to do about it though.
McDonald's is an interesting example because there are debates happening there too, but making people fat doesn't have cause the same visceral reaction as interfering with elections.
Which government? This is a global issue. It's going to be a long painful process of screwing up then trying to fix it.
>McDonald's is an interesting example because there are debates happening there too, but making people fat doesn't have cause the same visceral reaction as interfering with elections.
But no one is saying that, because of their scale and cultural influence, they have to be privatized and considered infrastructure.
>Which government?
I mean this is obviously an attempt by the US government to control speech on US web platforms, based on US politics since the election of the last President. The rest of the world seems to have settled the question of whether websites are allowed to moderate content, and it was a settled question in the US until a bit after 2016.
I’m not even saying that. My point was that when a company gets that large it has an undue amount of influence on public/private things and we as a society don’t know how to deal with that. I’m talking about things like banning trans fats from fast food or calories on menus. There are many levers you can pull beside the public/private switch.
Yes this is US specific, but they’re far from the only ones planning to do something about it. I disagree that this is settled anywhere. We’re still trying to understand what’s been happening.
> So, because any website can potentially reach millions of people, all websites must be considered public spaces and must be coerced to allow all legal speech?
Yes. When a few corporations dominate anything, they cannot be considered 'private' entities that can do whatever they want anymore. They are infrastructure, and they have to oblige by the democratic rules and regulations like how any large infrastructure company does.
Free speech is no different. After consolidating a majority of the social space and literally gaining the power to set the public discourse, no company can be let to do whatever they want with that power. That would invalidate any concept of free press. Not that current 'free' press is any different and that it does not need a major regulatory crackdown. But it has to start somewhere, and starting from the companies who literally ousted the traditional press from the helm of public discourse should be a good place to start.
>After consolidating a majority of the social space and literally gaining the power to set the public discourse, no company can be let to do whatever they want with that power.
>Not that current 'free' press is any different and that it does not need a major regulatory crackdown. But it has to start somewhere (...)
And so the mask slips and the agenda reveals itself. This is not about freedom, it's about control, and this is only the beginning. I wonder where it will end?
> This is not about freedom, it's about control, and this is only the beginning. I wonder where it will end?
Yeah, its not about freedom. Who told you that it was. Society exists only because there is a commonly accepted framework for making a society and keeping it. You cant just do anything you want. Try sh*tting on the road in front of your neighbor's house tomorrow. Try doing it naked. Look how freedom is limited.
That you internalized existing rules and restrictions does not make you any more 'free'.
>So, because any website can potentially reach millions of people, all websites must be considered public spaces and must be coerced to allow all legal speech?
The difference is that your site has some small non-zero chance of reaching millions in the future, while Twitter, Facebook etc are reaching millions or billions right now. The law doesn't have to work on your potential to reach millions of views, just like how taxes don't work by assuming you might become a trillionaire overnight.
Could you wake up tomorrow to your social media platform having grown to millions of users, yes. Is it a realistic situation that should roadblock regulation? no.
Your website isn't a public square because you're the one publishing content to it. We're discussing the public platforms that Facebook, Twitter and Google run, and I don't consider those three companies as publishing the content they host.
They are not public platforms, though. Not anymore public than a Starbucks. Just because "the public" can walk through a store's unlocked doors doesn't make the place public property. Same with social media. Just because "the public" can log into the platform's system doesn't make the place public.
Social media does, in my view, publish the content they host. It's not like the telephone, where you establish a direct connection to your audience and the mediator gets out of the way. When you post something to social media, there are three separate steps that happen:
1. You send the content to the SM company.
2. The SM company does some kind of processing on the content.
3. The SM company publishes that content (or not) somewhere on their site.
These things happen pretty much instantaneously, but they are still happening. Posting to Social Media is more like writing a Letter to the Editor of the newspaper. They receive the letter, decide whether to include it in the paper, then include it in the paper.
I’m personally not a fan of 230. I think if you exercise editorial control over the content of your site (and most web sites do) then you should be considered the publisher and endorser of that content. Can’t stomach that responsibility? Then don’t publish user-generated content.
>We're discussing the public platforms that Facebook, Twitter and Google run, and I don't consider those three companies as publishing the content they host.
Don't you consider it publishing when they express editorial control over what topics are allowed on their platform, without transparency or accountability of what the forbidden topics are at any given point of time? They also modify the user generated content and add labels and "fact checks" which are prominently displayed.
Every starbucks is a different place. If there was a single building 50 million people freely walked into every day, I'd say that should be considered a public place.
> Anyone can log into Twitter and Facebook and see tweets and posts. They're public squares that are closely related to a mall rather than a private Starbucks location.
Okay, so the mall is a better analogy. But it still doesn't mean I can do anything I want at a mall. If I run in there and start shouting slogans at passers-by, I am going to be removed by mall security "for my viewpoint" because it's bad for business. And no, there isn't a list at the mall saying precisely what kinds of crazy behavior you're not allowed to bring in.
It's hard for me to see how Twitter isn't the same.
> No it isn't. Anyone can log into Twitter and Facebook and see tweets and posts. They're public squares that are closely related to a mall rather than a private Starbucks location.
Fine. Nationalize them, remove all advertising, open up all the source code and infrastructure, and let open cyberwarfare commence.
Yet Facebook and Twitter literally base their business model on sorting out what you get to read. These companies manipulate access to speech when their algorithms decide what you like — and yes, this includes ads.
Why does it have to be either or? By your logic, we can bring back Kiwifarms, 8chan, and Stormfront. They are privately owned and have the right NOT "to enforce behavioral standards," but I think you're being disingenuous.
As someone who opposes free speech, would you be ok with Facebook allowing you to mute speech you do not like? The argument against "free speech absolutism" has more to do with one person wanting to exert power to silence another, and they are depending on social media to do that.
You can ban speech based on non-content criteria such as the volume of sound, but when you ban speech based on the content, it is a violation of the principle of free speech.
Whether private companies should not be able to discriminate speech based on content is still up to debate, but don’t compare this to shouting.
> when you ban speech based on the content, it is a violation of the principle of free speech
This is the sealion's argument, that you have to be willing to engage with them at all times in all contexts. It implicitly denies freedom of association. For example, if I am running doomermetalchats.com do I have to tolerate K-pop fanatics with their relentless positivity and sunny optimism?
Run a decentralized system akin to a modernized mailing list with a nice UI, where every person accessing the list gets to pick how their view of the list is filtered, choosing from competing filters or creating their own. Filters could be machine-based, competing human-moderator based, whatever.
The doomers and the stans can be talking right alongside each other and never see each other; effectively, the doomer 'site' only exists virtually, as a mutually visible consensus among a subset of the network.
This has been tried repeatedly, and it turns out nobody likes it. People either self-segregate into echo chambers following very simple patterns of assortativity, or complain about being 'shadowbanned' if they can't reach the audience they want to.
There are a few different motivations for social communication, both cooperative and antagonistic. People often want to be able to communicate freely with their peers and exclude non-members of their peer group (socially, algorithmically, or by fiat), but sometimes also to be able to push into and perhaps take over network territory of rival groups or that they consider should be common.
poor examples. a disruptive patron on private physical property can be removed on numerous other grounds such as trespassing, just as damaging private property has its own legal stipulations.
as it is now, virtual private property doesn't have parity with laws governing physical private property.
As a free-speech absolutist, the basic problem you should have with this is that as precedent, it would lead right into the legislature being able to force the press to publish certain things because not doing so would be 'censorship'.
In the hypothetical world, where press is a natural monopoly, we would be far less likely to allow the press to refuse to publish viewpoints they don't like. Or we would outright nationalize the press and lead to a different sort of problem.
I think this is a case where "free speech absolutism" is not perfectly aligned with "first amendment absolutism", but either is a logically consistent framework.
I've been wondering about a technical solution to this problem for a while now. It seems like a properly distributed social media network would still need moderation... but who is to say everyone has to use the same moderators? What if we distributed the task of content moderation and allowed users to subscribe to a moderation team the same way they subscribe to a friend's updates? In this way, users could tune their own bubble rather than being strictly required to adhere to a centralized set of guidelines.
I believe you are describing federated networks such as mastodon [1] and matrix [2] Individual servers/clusters can be moderated by their operators. I've not run either of those, but I have run IRC servers that can work in a similar model.
"When you vote in favour of a person, you are making that person a moderator for yourself, regardless of whether they win the vote or not.
In other words, you cannot vote yes for that person in public, and have them disabled as a mod in private. Your vote for a person is you making that person a mod for you. The reverse also applies, if you disable a person from being a mod, that is an impeachment vote.
Election makes it so that the people who come into a community, who have not chosen or disabled that particular mod by themselves, will use the mod list shaped by the elections. If a user has explicitly chosen a particular person to be a mod in that community, that takes precedence. Likewise, if a user has disabled a mod, that person will never be a mod for that user, regardless of the results.
If a mod you voted against (a mod you disabled / impeached / voted against) takes a mod action, that is ignored by your client, and has no effect. If a mod that you have taken no action on takes a mod action, it is accepted, but only so long as there is no action in reverse from a mod that you have explicitly voted for. If you don’t like actions of a mod you haven’t voted for is bothering you, you can easily disable that mod, and render them ineffectual."
Publish all content to blockchain and let the users create their own interfaces as they choose. But first make all content equally and indisputably available?
I'm unclear that this isn't a self referential attempt to redefine the centre rather than a genuinely held view.
> threatening the direct physical harm of someone, or violating a law
The laws already prevent the first by the way, it's called true threat
> At the same time, everyone else should have the tools to filter, block, and mute speech they do not like. If a tweet or a social media post has a certain word or phrase in it that I don’t like, I should be able to mute that and never see it.
Should a coffee shop owner be forced to hear words they don't like? Should the New York Times owner be forced to publish opinions they don't like? Why is Facebook's owner and employees different to a coffee shop owner?
> Should the New York Times owner be forced to publish opinions they don't like?
Yes, if they or their majority shareholders dominate a noticeable part of the press. Otherwise you end up how things are - a minority of the rich consolidating the press, setting the public agenda as they want to.
> Should a coffee shop owner be forced to hear words they don't like?
How does forcing Twitter to allow Donald Trump to post translate to forcing you to hear words you don't like? You're free to block him and not read anything he posts.
> Should the New York Times owner be forced to publish opinions they don't like?
No, NYT is a publisher and has always had full control over what they publish.
> Why is Facebook's owner and employees different to a coffee shop owner?
Because Facebook's owner decided to offer a platform that anyone can sign up to for free which allows them to share their content with friends and the world. Starbucks sells coffee.
Controlling what content is rendered on a site is speech itself. Government making rules infringes on my right what my software can and can’t display. It would be like the government telling Wikipedia can’t edit their articles.
No, it means that Wikipedia admins can't ban someone's account just because they disagree with that person's opinions. Wikipedia articles aren't supposed to contain (their user's) opinions anyway, so the admins should have no reason to base a moderation decision on such a criterion.
No, because the topic at hand literally includes Nazis. The speech being censored, which is being discussed, includes Nazis and the like being free to spout their shit on Twitter/Facebook or not.
(And they should not, I don't know how that's even a debate)
This isn’t a legal requirement to host spam, illegal, hateful or any other content. It says that if your site has more than 50 million visitors AND if you allow red team content, you must also allow blue team content
At the same time, everyone else should have the tools to filter, block, and mute speech they do not like. If a tweet or a social media post has a certain word or phrase in it that I don’t like, I should be able to mute that and never see it.
Social media really has become something of a scourge on society.