Surely freedom of speech is different to freedom from consequence.
If I want I can legally (in the US) go about spreading hateful lies, but I better be prepared for the consequences of my actions. I can say what I want, but it doesn’t mean what I say is acceptable or that others have to like it.
If platform owners decide they don’t want me using their systems to promote my particular brand of racist demagoguery, well, fair enough.
There must be some sort of social responsibility. The Internet gives anyone with a bit of determination the reach and influence previously only available to large organisations, but with great power etc...
Yes it’s legal to say anything, but surely for those who do say things, especially to a large (and largely uncritical) audience there is an obligation to do so responsibly. By poisoning our shared information well with their vicious lies, Mr Jones and his ilk are being highly irresponsible and should be held to account.
Would you like this thesis as much as it was framed in the other direction? Assume that all platform owners are just fine with that 'particular brand of racist demagoguery' but really can not stand the utterings of the last Nobel peace prize winner (just to give an example) and decide to kick him to the curb. Would that be 'fair enough' or would it cause an outcry? Other than a shift in political bias there is no difference so it should be the former but I expect it to cause the latter.
Those platform owners would come with the same ratification: 'There must be some sort of social responsibility. The Internet gives anyone with a bit of determination the reach and influence previously only available to large organisations'.
Yes. Freedom of speech and freedom of association exist.
That's a feature, not a bug.
Sure, perhaps people have forgotten about a particular march especially if they do not consider it relevant to their lives, or a wider movement but at the time people heard about what was going on.
(In contrast, consider the infamous Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, which was smaller.)
And where do you suppose ISPs get internet from?
Not looking to good for the rest of us, though.
Most of the users that Twitter and Facebook deletes are actually people (or spambots, but even Gab blocks those) who ought to be deleted, so any service that's primarily filled with expats from them gets filled with slightly-oblique calls to violence and general quackery.
So when a poor user who isn't a skinhead gets banned because someone who happens to have the admin bit has a personal beef with them, they're supposed to switch to Gab? That's not an okay alternative.
Also, according to Wikipedia over a few days the site had its domain registration revoked by several providers, its Youtube channel, Discord, and Twitter accounts were banned, its links were censored on Facebook, and it was DDOSed by Anonymous.[1] If you look at the Wikipedia link it's actually nuts how much effort was put into silencing the site.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer#Site_hosting...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer#Site_hosting...
Societies have used shunning as a way to regulate themselves for thousands of years. There's no reason why we can't do the same thing on the Internet.
The only problem is that the power to shun is being concentrated into too few hands. A group that blames the Jews for literally everything[1] should be shunned, but it shouldn't just be up to one guy to decide that.
The Daily Stormer deserves everything they got. The fact that they've bounced from provider to provider means that the free market is operating correctly; they're being shunned. But as CDN's buy each other out, that gets to be less of a solution.
[1]: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4325810/Writers.p... [subhead Morals and Dogma]
> Since being a Nazi is not a legally protected category they’re free to not help Nazis.
What currently is legal is obviously irrelevant when the question is what should be legal.
> and it doesn’t involve a legally protected class.
All your saying is that the CEOs' censorship is legal because it's legal.
"Nazi" is closely associated to the Holocaust, but you don't have to have killed someone to be a Nazi.
From Wikipedia:
Nazism is a form of fascism and showed that ideology's disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system, but also incorporated fervent antisemitism, scientific racism, and eugenics into its creed.
From that definition, Daily Stormer certainly was home to Nazi's, perhaps more appropriately "Neo-Nazi"
That discrimination is not based on intrinsic qualities, though. You can't discriminate on skin color, sexual orientation, etc. because society-at-large has decided those are qualities that you're born with.
But it's perfectly within everyone's right to discriminate against assholes, if that's what they judge you to be.
You can try to change their minds, but there is no right or law that forces them to listen.
Furthermore, a person can't change their genetics. But they can change their attitude, personality, etc. so those are not intrinsic qualities.
No, you can't because society has decided you can't. Being something you are born with may or may not be part of the reason some in society support that designation, but its mostly beside the point. Religious or politocal affiliation is not widely viewed an immutable condition of birth and one is protected in the US and the other in at least some US jurisdictions.
All of your social media accounts get deleted so you move to your own website. Until the hosting company decides they don't want to do business with you so you start hosting it yourself. Until the domain registrar you used decides they don't like you so now you have to give people an IP address to reach your site. Until your ISP terminates your contract because they don't like people hosting websites on their network.
So many services controlled by private companies that can choose to not do business with someone.