That is an incredibly dangerous mindset and one that seems to be becoming more pervasive in respectable circles.
Well, there is such a place. The U.S.
However, in Germany, German rules of speech apply. As a German, I consider this a good thing. And remember, the German constitution was written at the pleasure of the allies -- the US were apparently quite happy with the way our constitution balances freedom and responsibility.
And, corner cases aside, so am I. I prefer "responsible speech" to the US "wild west speech". This is largely cultural I'm sure.
Of course once we accept that Germany can insist on their own model of speech, so can China. Or Syria. Or Thailand. Which I find hardly ideal, given that I'd like to propagate liberal (and, dare I say it, "western") values. But I don't have a decent solution to this conundrum.
That is sort of the point. Once all speech transits corporate networks and those corporations are empowered to censor that speech then the public square protected by the U.S. Constitution no longer exists.
That's not necessarily the case. They may have accepted it as a best compromise, as they did the division of Germany into East and West.
I have. The German model is wrong for the reasons you allured to. If states can't be trusted to be arbiter of acceptable speech then they shouldn't have that job.
> And remember, the German constitution was written at the pleasure of the allies
That would be an appeal to authority and we all know US made few mistakes in the past so I'm not sure why you'd want to use that fallacy.
> This is largely cultural I'm sure.
Must be. Thinking that the state is always right and bossing people that disagree is historically very German.
Social media services have neither a moral nor legal obligation to publish hate speech.
Facebook has more customers than any country has citizens so this question is of great importance to how their service continues to grow and impact the world.
Liberal Democracy can also be authoritarian. The words you're thinking of are libertarian and authoritarian. Liberty as in free, authority as in ruled.
"William Safire points out that liberalism is attacked by both the Right and the Left: by the Right for defending such practices as abortion, homosexuality, and atheism, by the Left for defending free enterprise and the rights of the individual over the collective."
> The Constitutional guarantee of free speech mandates the behavior of the government to not interfere with the rights of private actors
Free speech is an ethical concept that is (imo) fundamental to open societies. The US Constitution enshrines this ethical ideal by creating a prohibition against government interference in free speech. GP is lamenting that major corporations do not seem interested in the ethical ideal, not claiming that the codification of the ethical ideal found in the US Constitution requires major corporations to permit certain types of speech on their platform.
Does anybody seriously think that any responsibility we demand from a actor like a government would go away if we'd write "limited liability company" on the door of the white house or congress?
The de-facto power relations are what matters.
I’m not happy about the amplification of speech that social networks offer, but l’m even more unhappy about the attitude of “smart” techies who shrug their shoulders and say “free speech - cant do anything about that”.
We can do something about that, but that would mean solving hard problems and not creating another way to type a few hundred words into a text box.
im not asking you to give a full implementation, but i am genuinely curious what your vision for the internet would look like for a day to day user.
This group of decision-makers would like the public to think they operate on behalf of the interest of the state and act on the basis of "scientific principles".
Arguing that this is essentialy social control and that this constitutes the basis of the "tyranny of the elite" may not be flawed.
There's always the need of a balance between extreme tendencies. The liberal premise that the political elite has the right and obligation to make fundamental decisions on behalf of the mass of citizens has its limits.
He talks about how falsehoods and doctored photos are being spread on Facebook, and that government officials are posted them on their pages. In the absence of Facebook, _only_ those government officials would have a platform. Why on earth would that be better?
He even pays lip service to the fact that this communications platform has enabled positive forms of communication as well (ie human rights organizing), and then quickly switches back to a complaint that Facebook didn't remain optimal for the specific workflow that Cambodian human rights workers employed.
His argument is fundamentally "don't give the unwashed masses a platform", but he doesn't have the courage/intellectual honesty/self-awareness to say so. I can imagine a contemporary counterpart of this idiot writing the same article about the printing press or the telephone.
I've got a very low opinion of Facebook as a company, but these complaints literally boil down to "allowing people to communicate more effectively". Newsflash! People are shitty. They do shitty things with whatever technology they get their hands on. The idea that the pre-Facebook world would be more or less likely to have the norms you like only makes sense inasmuch as the norms you like are oriented around limited communication options for the masses.
The author is also female. Not that that is relevant to any point except your use of pronoun.
Yea, at some level I don't expect honesty out of journalists: there's no sainthood exam to become a journalist; they're people, and people aren't generally honest. It's just bizarre to see how credulous HN is when it comes to swallowing stuff like this (relatively) uncritically.
> The author is also female. Not that that is relevant to any point except your use of pronoun.
Thanks for pointing this out. I commented on a separate post about Facebook which was written by a "Jim Davies" and I think there was a crossed wire in there.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/world/asia/rohingya-myanm... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/world/asia/myanmar-govern...
We need to start reclaiming power from facebook, not abdicating more to it.
The CFR's main concern is that Facebook allows non-traditional actors, mainly not them or organizations which they do not have control over, to have some influence on the narrative that explains world events to the public at large in each particular country. They consider this an undesirable state of affairs. Thus, Facebook should, in their opinion, work to alter its policies to maintain and even amplify the dominance with regards to narrative setting that the traditional media has given to the traditional narrative authors, which are composed of CFR members and their proxies.
You're thinking of "Foreign Affairs".
That sentence doesn't make sense. Do something about what? How those things collide? It's very unclear what the author thinks Facebook is supposed to do, or what he thinks Facebook is actually responsible for. Is this a call to regulate posts so there's no fake news, or more, to prevent all speech that can incite bad actions? In perilous regions of the world, sometimes people are arrested for their posts, and can be seen to be connected with others on Facebook, so that they also fall under suspicion. Is Facebook supposed to keep those users safe somehow? I mean, what's the author's gripe?
A better article would have mentioned that free speech, a "good thing," albeit sometimes dangerous, is powerfully fostered by Facebook. Give it some credit. It would also have been fairer if it had mentioned how difficult it is to detect and thwart bad actors who find ways to abuse any platform. (Removing trolls from small forums is hard enough.) Instead, it insinuates that Facebook is willfully indifferent. At least it isn't accused of colluding with the bad actors, as sometimes happens when US companies do business overseas.