> The difference is that the internet has discontinuously more scalable network effects, so technology companies often find themselves in a winner-takes-all dynamic. If some publisher, newspaper, or literary magazine refused to publish Walt Whitman, he could always try and find another publisher. But if Twitter bans Titania McGrath, there is no other Twitter for her to join because the next best alternative has 1/10000th the number of users.
> This effect is new. These platforms are private entities, but effectively they operate as public commons. So culturally we must treat them similar to public commons where it isn't acceptable to kick out quirky characters because some of us don't like what they have to say.
"If you are only able to speak freely when no one is forced to listen to you - are you then allowed freedom of speech?"
This isn't some guy shouting in the street or some other public place (who, funnily enough, everyone usually agrees with their removal), but someone shouting on what is effectively private property.
You also need to remember that the places we're talking about are de facto public spaces due to their practical monopolies on speech. They are private spaces legally and the companies who own them can be as discriminatory as they want in regards to who they allow to speak from a legal standpoint, but they shouldn't abuse their power to do so.
If they do discriminate too much, they should be regulated to be neutral places for speech, considering their excessive clout. A future where a select group of companies control what people hear, discuss and think is scary.
The analogy is appropriate in the sense that its not the "shouting" that is offensive, but rather that the message is considered offensive in the private place where it is expressed against the wishes of the owner of that private place.
Indeed. I take the same stance with regard to Facebook and others. If you don't want them to sell your data, stop willingly giving them your data.
> nobody owes you one, but these companies accrue the astronomical benefits of massive network effects and are changing the ecology of our society
I don't dispute the massive impact of social media on society, but ultimately that is the collective responsibility of society, not private platforms that arbitrarily become targets based on their popularity. Why aren't we trying to regulate myspace or livejournal? What is the arbitrary DAU metric that demands someone's website must be regulated? If the site suffers from PR or technical issues that drop the DAU numbers, do they automatically regain the ability to operate their site however they like? Society needs to grapple with the reality that these websites have no real power over us. The next big platform that people will complain is censoring them doesn't even exist yet.
Facebook is abusively invasive, and no amount of appeals to user choice changes that. Victim-blaming is a real thing and a real problem.
They don't understand the full depth, but they know enough to understand that Facebook is violating their privacy in ways that they don't understand. They know that Facebook is unhealthy and insecure. Anyone with any political leaning has a lot to say about the ills of Facebook. People pretty much get the idea that Facebook is a bad actor.
> Facebook is abusively invasive, and no amount of appeals to user choice changes that
It's not an appeal to user choice, it's an appeal to basic property rights. If I buy a bunch of servers and throw them up on the internet I can do whatever I want with them, it's not my fault if you choose to access my servers, at my expense, and litter it with your own personal data. Of course Facebook is abusive, but there's literally zero reason you are obligated to use Facebook. ...it's an app, just uninstall it.
Are people supposed to all become individual experts about the problems and learn the best ways to opt out of each and every aspect of unhealthy parts of our culture? Why people do what they do and how things work overall are much more complex than simple quips you're making. No comment the size of what we're typing can get at much of the complexity here.
Your whole "no obligation" argument is just so simplistic and dismissive. Facebook actively pushes people to use it using every method they can think of from subsidizing access fees in much of the world that is late to the internet to using every addictive psychological trick anyone has discovered.
This has nothing to do with property rights. That's just non sequitur. That argument is as reasonable as saying that Facebook is just a bunch of math, since that's all programs are, and then arguing something about how math can't hurt anyone or some similar nonsense.
Why exactly? The New York Times and the wire services were once the primary venue for most newspaper publication. There was never a requirement that anyone be able to write articles for them.
The thing is allowing garbage views into "record of note" publications seriously empowers them. As an earlier article points out, youtube's algorithm is weight towards feeding people polarized extremist rants because these get responses (just the other day, my suggested "next videos" included a client change denier and Jordan Peterson for zero reason). We're looking at the result of extreme ideological polarization and these don't look pretty. A good portion of what could be called "hate speech" is pseudo-science presenting itself as science and this to someone who's (probably foolishly) expecting a bit of vetting on a large website, this pseudo-science sell is especially effective.
Moreover, a large portion of those who uses a social network know that the "open web" exists and are quite capable of cruising it. Again, by letting into a venue the naive person imagines is vetted, you have increased its momentum considerably.
The average person isn't necessary super competent at sorting modern issues. A good portion of heinous content leverages this by appearing respectable and being the web site of
People could rightly have complained from a "free speech" position if the NYT published only left-wing letters-to-the-editor. They could also rightly complain if the NYT explicitly refused to publish a totally reasonable opinion piece (or more extreme: refuse a paid ad that was totally reasonable) because of tangential critiques of the author's statements in other contexts.
Does that mean the NYT would have to do whatever the complainers say? No. But such complaints fairly relate to the ideas of "free speech norms" regardless of the NYT being an independent business.
No one? Hyperbole like this only serves to muddy the waters.
Furthermore, I'm curious if those who believe that having access to social media needs to be considered a fundamental right really have the courage of their convictions: If this is the case, then we've got bigger problems than whether or not Milo Yiannopoulos can use it to act like a tool in public. There are whole classes of people who don't have easy access to the hardware and constant Internet connections required to take part, and their freedom of speech has clearly been curtailed. Perhaps there's a need to set up a social fund to ensure that their basic human rights are being preserved by buying them smartphones with data plans, and forcing the nation's cellular providers to extend coverage to every nook and cranny of the country.
Yes. Of course you are being allowed freedom of speech.
We're not discussing what IS, we are discussing what SHOULD BE. The fact that twitter is way more popular than Mastodon absolutely DOES change something... it changes the number of people who can hear the message. One might argue that this SHOULD not make a person's right to be heard on Twitter any different than their right to be heard in a small-town newspaper; another might argue that it SHOULD alter those rights. Any sensible discussion needs to be rooted in the question of what our values are.
I cannot lay out your values for you, but at least I can explain my own. For me, freedom of speech is an important value primarily because it protects those with correct but controversial or unpopular opinions from being silenced. Also to some extent "freedom of speech" is a terminal value for me: people being allowed to express themselves is a thing I value for its own sake.
So how do I run this analysis? Well, the claim is that there are incredibly strong network effects on a system like Twitter, Facebook, and their ilk. In other words, the existence of Twitter nearly guarantees that Mastodon cannot grow very large. And this is different from what happened with newspapers. It is closer to what happened with the telephone system. Although not 100% true, I think there is a great deal of truth to this claim.
So what do we do? One possibility is to say that the network effects shouldn't make any difference, and that we should regulate Twitter (and Facebook, and other similarly situated platforms) like we do newspapers (give them free rein to control what appears on their platforms). This is the position that our legal system is taking at the moment.
Another possibility is to consider this to be closer to the telephone system. Remember that for years there was a single phone system throughout the US, run by a single company (AT&T, "Ma Bell"). Until automated switching systems became fully capable the phone company even had operators who connected calls and were capable of listening in. But they never put in place a policy of kicking people off of the phone system if they talked about topics that AT&T didn't like.
If AT&T had used such a policy it could have drastically altered the history of things like the civil rights movement. Would AT&T have chosen to ban those who supported the KKK and lynchings, or would they have chosen to ban the Black Panthers and those who violated the law in their quest to push for change? I'm not sure which side they would have been on, and I wouldn't want the outcome of the civil rights struggle to have been decided by executives at one company rather than through the collective struggles of the citizens of the country.
So historically, we regulated publishers of newspapers and books one way and the telephone company another way, and looking back at history I am confident that we made the right choice both times. I am not so sure about the way we regulate Twitter and Facebook. Their network effects are less strong than were those of the telephone system, but are still massive. I find this a difficult call to make.
Patreon, on the other hand, seems more clear. There are other payment systems and the network effects are less powerful. If Patreon wants to restrict who can get paid through their platform then other platforms can arise and so long as Patreon isn't leveraging their market dominance to crush these upstarts, that should be fine by me.
Alas it's not left xor right wing ideas that get censored, but really the anti-authoritarian ideas and attitude. Don't you know that all those radio stations were just nobly deciding to not broadcast Imagine?
Plus ça change.
Also, we probably would kick people out of public commons for yelling vile opinions on the grounds of disturbing the peace. if you simply must shout such things, you can apply to do a formal protest- a thing anyone on the web can effectively accomplish by making their own web page.
Honestly though, I have another theory. There is no sense of entitlement or hypocrisy, no confusion about what is or isn’t censorship. What we’re seeing is almost purely calculated, and just about trying to get a bigger audience. Twenty years ago if you wanted to publish your ideas about the queen of England being a lizard, you had to either self-publish, rant to a crowd, print fliers, or get lucky. Not that long ago blogs and forums were a huge improvement for those people, and it’s still very effective, but less effective than Facebook or Twitter or YouTube.
So do they really think that having the ability to self publish to the planet through blogs and modern self-publishing doesn’t count as speech? Or... do they just want more, and realize that position of “I want more” is less appealing than “I fight censorship!” It’s not that they don’t get it, it’s that it’s inconvenient to admit it?
And also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word and then notice how HN is positively gushing with super-couched "arguments", in any thread. "I'm not entirely sure it would be impossible to theorize that"... it's like the only subjects many people are comfortable with talking about with any level of attention or intellectuality are those that are purely technical, i.e. where person doesn't need to have position.
With anything that can't be decided by reading specs or benchmarks, wishy-washy stuff comes out, and doesn't get defended either. It just keeps getting posted, and calling it out may get downvoted -- as if showing something to mean nothing is worse than writing something that means nothing [0] -- but no actual defense, at most one half-assed attempt and when that is refuted, no conceding of a point either.. rinse, repeat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ2AH7u_9Xo&t=1m10s
> the ways in which we were turning politics into economics, and allowing our faculty of reason to be denigrated into a faculty of calculation
... which might lead a person to think that being in the majority makes them right, or that an imaginary Venn diagram describes all sorts of real people, or that truth is decided by votes, or that the wisdom with which someone votes makes a quantum leap when they reach 500 karma. Among other things.
https://wannabewonk.com/gab-and-free-speech-on-the-internet/
Summary: I agree, largely. Socially, we should be able to debate people with diverse opinions without turning the world into one big safe space. As far as the rights of hosting platforms: There has to be a line somewhere. I draw the line at CAs, ISPs and registrars. They should have to serve ANYONE unless the government mandates otherwise. Maybe Twitter and AWS shouldn't have to support abhorrent speech, but my home ISP can't pick and choose if I reach the larger world.
Social media companies, in the other hand, are more like the modern version of newspapers and magazines. And you don't have the right to be published been the most popular magazine simply because there's where the most readers are.
However, I would put cloud companies like AWS in the bucket of utilities and not media. Gab shouldn't have to worry about being cut off for lack of a hosting company. We can't say, "go find another social media home" to people we disagree with, only to watch in glee as the social media companies that will have them are shut down for lack of a hosting company or data center.
And yes, I realize how massively outdated that example was.
I definitely remember the 80s and 90s with controversy over Walmart not carrying “obscene” records. Or nc-17 movies not being played by movie theaters. Or books being banned from libraries (public and private).
It wasn’t Facebook, but it was definitely a similar theme of cultural norms not being upheld and corporate powers suppressing free speech. Just like now.
To map the space of possible compromises it is useful to think (1)"what would i do if the roles were reversed", (2)"does the opposing idea leave any space for compromise or should it be forcefully eliminated", (3)"is the opposing party weak enough to cheat and not give the treatment you wouldn't want to get in its place".
I think most of us would agree that (2) should be rulled out unless the opposing idea is itself violent, (3) is unfair and also dangerous if the opposing party is stronger than it seems.
If we agree on the above then from (1) a reasonable compromise is to allow reprehencible people to say their non-violent reprehencible things in exchange of us saying things that are reprehencible to them.
Coming back to the Freedom of association for platforms, we should consider that the value of these platforms is largely in the people using them, so in a way they belong to their users, and don't have much choice.
Many people think that the platform they use should be reliable and therefore not be able to randomly decide with whom it wants to be associated.
But many people also think that some reprehencible speach should be banned.
If platform decides to not be neutral and take the side of the second group, it makes a bet that the first group and the banned group are not powerful enough to compare with the second group, and moves stakes away from compromise towards play on elimination. It may succeed but a pushback from the banned group and large part of the first group is entirely natural.
I hope that i managed to convince you that the position taken by the first group is more rational, as it leads to a more stable state.
And if a platform absolutely has to take sides because second group of their users is too large/vocal, it may be better to do that by means that leave some space for a compromise. E.g. display a red badge near the name of disassociated users or display green for good users.
Twitter is the most straightforward regarding freedom of association: they are literally providing you with a platform to say things, and to broadcast saying things. They're a private company. If they decide they hate everyone born on May 4th or something, fuggit, they've (legally and philosophically) got that right.
Patreon and PayPal, on the next hand, are payment processors. They're not the only payment processors. Patreon also provides you with more publicity for yourself as a payee than PayPal does. Still, these digital payment processors are the cash of the internet. Before we had them, or just when we were teenagers, the best you could do was ask for Mom and Dad's credit-card number, or maybe send a money-order (remember those) by mail to some dude for stuff. It was a damned shady way to do business and we all ditched it the first thing we could.
Next comes CloudFlare. They literally just provide mirroring and maintenance for your web-servers. You supply the software and the content, yes? They don't even publicize you; in fact, they try to avoid publicizing you by keeping your site visible and their service invisible.
At what point does any of these things become, ethically speaking, a common carrier, providing something like unto a public utility, requiring some degree of common carrier protections to make sense as a business?
Are we really going to insist that once you're selling nasty porn or passing out Nazi pamphlets over the Internet there should be no equivalent of payment in cash or a private copy machine that lets you operate a deeply unpopular, even immoral, enterprise without asking the permission of a major advertising firm? In the physical world we have public spaces and legal tender that guarantee us real spaces in which to carry out our legal rights to do things everyone else despises. We should have some equivalent of that over the web, too.
20 years ago, before social media, there was no assumption that everyone has a fundamental right to be able to broadcast their ideas using others' platforms. Since publication was more resource-intensive, the default for most media was to not publish things, and deciding that someone's ideas didn't merit publication wasn't seen as a violation of any great moral code. They were always free to self-publish. At their own expense, of course.
Fast forward, and, since most these sites default to letting anyone publish on their platform, with no questions asked beforehand, we've apparently come to think that using these platforms is a human right. It is not. It is a privilege. One with which they have been quite liberal with sharing, yes, but one that they are still free to revoke at any time.
There's another important right to consider, in this siuation: Freedom of association. It is also fundamental, and it goes hand-in-hand with freedom of speech. It encompasses, among other things, the right to not associate with people you don't want to be associated with. If Patreon, a private entity, does not want to be associated with sexism and racism, they should not be required to do so.