If Facebook were a television station with limited air time for a single track, it would be perfectly valid for them to decide (reasonably) who gets air time. However, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have infinite tracks and time. I don't think the OPs argument is as strong, with that in mind.
Carrying white supremacist content has a cost to both Comcast and YouTube/Facebook. Nobody expects Comcast to carry the KKK channel and yet they have hundreds of channels and clearly space to carry it. So why aren’t they compelled to do so if Facebook is?
My point, however, is that this is neither a legal nor constitutional obligation, but a social and voluntary obligation to a free society.
A few content producers create the content that Comcast could potentially carry. Comcast selects what they want to provide to their many customers. Comcast has never marketed themselves as a place where anyone can have their content provided to subscribers. Facebook has, in fact that is the essence of what they do.
It's no longer _your_ free speech.
You can't cherry pick the advantages of both and hide under the guise of being an open platform.
Most of the problems that come from being a massive social media juggernaut like facebook/twitter/etc come from those services being free.
Being free is what makes them massive monopolies and gives them such broad reach. I think 99% of the problem cases AND the lack of competition in the market could be plugged by breaking the ad-supported/VC-supported model and forcing these companies to charge something to their customers.
Rather, it is important for society to support free speech, not just the government. While society is under no obligation to, it's unhealthy to censor speech.
It's even worse when society self censors free speech, and then pretends to still advocate it.
Deciding what I allow on my site is an exercise of my free speech. Why is hosting white nationalist free speech more important than my free speech to not host racist content?
Well get back to me when you've worked out exactly when a private entity shouldn't be able to decide what content they allow. This ambiguity is really too difficult to figure out.
Like I said, banning illegal content is the first step that anyone ought to take. Generally this is done via moderation staff of the site + user submitted reports. If you're providing a free platform and terrorists start using it as their communication channel, then you're only at legal risk if you do nothing to stop them. However, I'm imagining things like the NZ shooter's 8chan post, where a direct threat is made or a direct implication of violent acts to come. Posting a "terrorist cookbook" actually is a good example, as its sort of right on the line. It seems to be the sort of information that only has negative uses, on the other hand its just information, as opposed to an actual threat. I'm not really sure if such things should be allowed... it could be helpful to terrorists which is bad, but also censoring information is nearly impossible and almost always seems the wrong way to go.
>Does Zuckerberg have to come to their house and load the bullets into the gun for them so they can make a statement about how angry they are? Because he made an app for people to cheat? I fail to see the connection.
As do I...I really don't get what you're trying to say here, can you restate?
Please point out a single society that has upheld absolute Free Speech as a principle for any significant period of time.
The United States has even killed its own citizens when their free speech collided with national security: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/magazine/the-lessons-of-a...
That decision has since been overturned, thankfully. But it would be good if people who keep coming back to this phrase remembered where it came from, and what it was already used to justify.
Absolute freedom is a contradictory concept. How can you kick an unwanted visitor out of your house because you don't like what he's saying? Aren't you infringing on his rights? Someone needs to draw a line.
So what about a social media oligopoly? How dominant does Google need to be before you have to tell them to allow freedom of speech.
What about network neutrality?
Etc etc...
It's not so easy to answer this question.
Hobbes' famous phrase from Leviathan "bellum omnium contra omnus" (the war of all against all) describes absolute freedom as being problematic indeed. Rosseau provides an answer in The Social Contract to say you can't have a war of all against all, you instead need the state to be responsible for being able to imprison people and collect taxes on them and this alleviates (generally speaking, to a large degree) the problems absolute freedom present.
And there's no paradox of tolerance with speech - you can tolerate intolerant speech just fine, so long as you police the actions.
This is unrelated. If it is your home, you are free to protect it by any means.
There is some room for human judgment and give and take here, at this time there is absolutely no shortage of platforms that allow anyone to broadcast any awful thing they can dream up. Email, web sites, street corners, I believe there can be different standards for different places.
Free speech absolutism is naturally at odds with property rights absolutism. The question then becomes under which circumstances should one be given precedence over the other.
A big problem is oligarchic in nature: if you believe that ISPs should be classified as common carrier utilities that should not be permitted to limit or censor the data you receive within reason, then the oligarchic content hubs should similarly be common carriers of speech.
I don't have a rock solid argument on this, this is just an equivalence I'm asserting.
The lack of ability to switch providers is what makes it important to have regulations, not just the fact that it is labeled a common carrier.
No one is stopping you from making your own forum or website.
The fact that all your photos, content and friends are on one platform and not the others, obviously.
Speech is the process of communication ideas. Porn is the process of sexually arousing someone remotely. Criminalizing the latter is not criminalizing the former.
A HD-DVD master key is one thing, a huge binary file is another. HD-DVD master key requires specific "numberness" to work, while a binary file can still convey similar information yet be a completely different set of numbers. if I take two pictures in rapid succession of a still life, the two pictures' jpeg data and checksum hashes aren't going to be even close to matching.
However, that’s a very narrowly scoped restriction (and it’s also not clear that such distribution is a type of “speech”). A more appropriate question would be: would Chomsky support free speech for an advocacy group such as NAMBLA, or for creating mangas that depict drawings similar to CP? Those are exactly the type of speech/expression that are clearly vile, yet should still be protected from interference by state violence, from the civil-libertarian perspective.