Aren't we tired of saying this by now? That's fine, everyone can express her own views on Facebook, unless one is a Kurd who would like to say something about Kemal Atatürk? Should the Kurds have to create their own Facebook? Who's next, Trump voters? Do we really want them to sink further into their filter bubble?
At some point a service offered to the public must actually serve the public. We don't allow bakeries to choose which weddings they will cater. If you'll bake a wedding cake for $200, then you have to get baking, even if the happy couple with $200 are two dudes or whatever.
I think it's incredibly entitled to want the government to punish private businesses for refusing to do a job. Not everyone has to agree with your ideas or provide you a service. Getting the state involved to literally force a small business to make a cake is an insane, authoritarian over-reaction. The fact that it seems OK to you because you have no problem with gay marriage (neither do I, btw) is really besides the point.
By all means - boycott the bakery. Call them stupid for the bad PR and lack of work they'll get for not making the cake. But coercing them under the threat of force to do a job they don't want to do? Absolutely insane, and I can't agree to it.
Still, yours is an salutary consistency. My original statement wasn't directed at you but rather at the sort of SV person who "boycotts" Indiana and North Carolina but still talks about the "rights" of a social media service.
Excellent point. It is very well worth noting that pragmatically speaking, current law treats diversity > free speech, as is illustrated in your example.
-----
But parent comment has a point anyway. Political censorship had (ab)used moderation systems in that way, at the very least in some countries. It's not unheard of cases of censorship slipping under disguise of "protecting from bad/unhealthy things". I can think of a few examples from Russia.
Facebook shouldn't be some kind of universal substrate on the internet anyway. Alternatives should be encouraged, and people can make their own choice about the kind of environment they want to spend their time in.
If you're saying that's impossible, and facebook is some sort of utility, or common carrier, then you can have rights which are enforced upon the space.
Ultimately, either it is a public space (which needs public rights analogous to what exists in the real world, enforced through constitutional or democratic means) or it is a private space, and the owners are free to regulate as they wish, and customers are free to make their own decisions, where to visit and where to spend their time.
Wholeheartedly agree that this is the ultimate resolution, but in order to actually get to that point we need a fundamentally different software architecture than the current centralized approach of "the web".
> Private people and organizations are well within their rights to set their own rules
Sure, but that does not imply that it isn't censorship. It's just within their rights to censor.
> If you're saying that's impossible, and facebook is some sort of utility, or common carrier, then you can have rights which are enforced upon the space.
It's not impossible, but it is Facebook's goal to have this level of necessity in people's lives. So, by their own framework, it does make sense to talk about rights on their service. The purpose of this isn't to incite government action of enforcing such rights, but to keep users' and devs' perspectives clear about the lack of freedom on centralized platforms.
But yeah, there's less in the way of censorship. The odd moderator with an agenda still sneaks in, but they seem to get outed.