Arguments like that in the comic revel in enforcing groupthink because the author thinks it will be used in a way he finds favorable. If you take a step back, it’s obvious that every censorious organization has very strong reasons for silencing badthinkers, and they use the same type of self-righteous language when justifying it. Just look at how The Chinese government talks about Hong Kong.
edit: Point being, either you uphold the principle of free speech, as argued in the linked article, or you end up with those who control the platforms dictating their own worldview. They will always come up with some smug justification for why society will fall apart if they don’t, and anyone who’s silenced deserves it anyway.
On the one hand, Twitter, Facebook, et al. are "basically" town/public squares - they are also private companies. So we either regulate and minimize private companies ability to silence speech as they see fit, which is their right - or we allow them to exercise their own rights, thus bending to the masses and appealing to the lowest common denominator through censorship.
I would say we have a lot of choices of platforms. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn aren’t the end of all social networks and social platforms, they’re just parts of a larger ecosystem.
So maybe we can have it both ways. Maybe social platforms can regulate themselves into being the places they want to be, and we can move on when they don’t serve us anymore. Free markets are actually pretty wonderful in that way insofar as they provide us choices and we can take them or leave them.
He still has his radio show. He still has his website. He still has a Wikipedia page. I’m not going to go trolling through a bunch of social networks I don’t use to see if I can find the guy, but presumably he has a means of asserting an online presence somewhere besides his website.
I think his podcast was removed from the Apple Podcasts Directory, but if there’s a valid feed URL, then there isn’t anything stopping you from pasting the URL in to any podcast app.
That’s just online. Again, I don’t know the guy’s life, but there isn’t anything stopping him from having an active social life or a prolific writing career. I don’t like the guy, but are you going to tell me the guy has no options just because Facebook and Twitter kicked him out of their gardens?
The problem I have with these discussions is that we aren’t talking about it in a more nuanced manner. The problem with Facebook and Twitter and their kind isn’t their size, magnitude or shape on the public discourse. If it weren’t them, it would be partisan newspapers and newsletters and cable networks pretending they have integrity and objectivity that they don’t. I’m sure they have some measure of integrity, I’m sure they strive to be objective, but I vastly prefer when people And networks fess up to where their biases lay.
Well Facebook and Twitter destroyed what was status quo, fine, I have no problem with that. Have they contributed to negative polarization? That’s much less clear, but I’m leaning towards no. Negative polarization is near as I can tell, an old English tradition and near as I can tell, runs through Catholics, Protestants, Barkers, Quakers, Whigs, Jacobites, Revolutionaries, Loyalists, Federalists, Anti-Federalists, Federalists 1.5, Democratic-Republicans, Democrats, Whigs, Republicans, Unionists, Confederates, Progressives, just to name a few off the top of my head.
If there is a problem Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. it’s that they collect enormous amounts of data, not just directly but they buy and sell with data brokers and use that to confirm or reconfirm identities. This by itself wouldn’t even be an issue except that they are bad stewards of our personal data. That’s a problem, and one worth focusing on, but let’s not pretend they are anymore powerful than they are, or that they are a cause of our society’s rifts.
The splits in our society are real, but they are older than Silicon Valley. Technology will not fix them. Social media will not fix them. The only thing that will do anything about them, and only then, very slowly, is actual factual dialog between people like you and I, and the fact that you and I are even having this discussion is because we have a choice in how, when, where and with whom we would like to talk. This isn’t Facebook, and this isn’t the Post Office or the Forum in Rome and somehow we’re able to talk anyway.
I’d say that’s at least one point in favor of the free market.
Corporations obviously dominate corporate space, which is a large sphere of life in the USA, and not at all “public space”.
So what’s left?
It's I'd venture a symptom of a culture dominated by capitalism and corporatism, such that the former two things become so dominate that their presence is invisible. Malls and Facebook pages become "public spaces" in the minds of citizens even though they are spaces, public regulation notwithstanding, controlled by the rich and existing in the main to profit them.
Public/private can refer to government vs commercial, or it can refer to “out in the open for all to see” vs “the privacy of your own home.” “Public space” is a common phrase that uses the latter definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_space
The idea that the mainstream media is somehow overwhelmingly progressive is something conservatives like to parrot, but I've never found it to have any basis in truth. The "leftist" big media outlets are really centrist, at best.
I'm going to have to ask for a citation for that. Unless you are suggesting that supporting the interests of the rich elite is an essentially conservative position (a claim which both the rich elite and conservatives would deny).
If you look at the politics of all the people (executives and rank-and-file) working in the institutions of media, entertainment, and academia, you'll find that a significant majority are left of center given the generally accepted notions of left and right as they are used in contemporary American politics.
Where is the evidence of this? I know of no surveying so broad as to include the executives and 'rank-and-file' in media and entertainment.
Even if your claim is supported, we have 2 problems. The first is basically the "vegan waiters at steak restaurants" retort, which is to suggest that below the top executive level of the hierarchy employees have increasingly little power over their organisation, such that those at the bottom are like vegan waiters at steak restaurants who have no power to change the menu despite their politics.
The 2nd problem is basically that "left of center" != "progressive". The majority of the ostensibly left-leaning medial is still broadly pro things that progressives are against. Some examples would include single-payer healthcare, animal rights, public higher education, the Green New Deal, and anti-imperialism.
All of the major media outlets (which is what I am talking about, not academia or entertainment) are owned by big backers of the Republican party. It's publicly available information, look it up yourself.
It's a good term though...
Absolutism: no speech is off-limits.
Maximalism: the range of ideas expressed must be maximized.
Those two ideals of free speech are incompatible. Variety of expressed views suffers immensely when people show up to attack all groups other than themselves.
And somehow, those people always show up.
Almost every internet forum I've been on that allowed politics has in the last ywo decades gone from a lively mix of people of diverse political views debating each other to political monocultures that spend their time talking about how evil and stupid their political opponents are. This results in the inhabitants having basically no understanding of the beliefs, world views and motivations of people outside their bubble and near complete ignorance of any facts that might be evidence for said views.
These are always the “I’m on the right side of history” people: they all change their tune as soon as they find themselves on the receiving end of an unjust cancel campaign.
I often wonder: Would people feel differently if platforms were honest and direct about being a private club of some specific kind? If Twitter came out and said they wanted to be a private club for people with progressive views to discuss politics and sundry, would that dampen the criticism of censorship?
* The fact that that's what these sites bill themselves as (a place to connect everyone).
* Their user base cross-cuts most demographics (even if the samplings are always representative).
> Would people feel differently if platforms were honest and direct about being a private club of some specific kind?
Yes. You don't hear much about the government wanting to regulate Reddit, do you? It has roughly comparable number of monthly active users in the US as Twitter (26.4 million vs. 68 million) but it's built around the idea of independently moderated virtual clubs.
> If Twitter came out and said they wanted to be a private club for people with progressive views to discuss politics and sundry, would that dampen the criticism of censorship?
I think people (and advertising revenue) would move to a different platform.
That may be, but that's not what I'm asking, I'm asking whether they would still be criticized for censorship. I think probably so?
Your point about reddit is an interesting one. You're right that they don't get much grief from lawmakers on the censorship question, but I suspect that has a lot to do with unfamiliarity. They have certainly gotten lots of grief from denizens of the internet for their moderation policies over time.
Companies never lie or have false advertising.
In terms of Facebook: they rake it in because millions of us chose their platform, over many others, for posting our cat photos. Accordingly, Facebook must pay something back to society. (Though perhaps the “pay something back” merely needs to be covered by corporation tax, rather than anything more special.)
If the local pub becomes the de facto meeting room for the village club, and makes a killing selling them beer as a result, maybe it should be obliged to provide free parking?
Here is my analogy: I don't mind mods on r/thedonald kicking out anyone who isn't fully on board with the agenda, just like I agree with mods on r/latestagecapitalism or r/communism getting rid of those with dissenting opinions. But I do have issues with r/politics positioning themselves as a "neutral" sub to discuss politics, while essentially being an off-shoot of r/communism and r/DNC.
I mean, it's certainly true that discussion forums benefit from moderation to remove trolls. However, Munroe myopically assumes that the only people being de-platformed are trolls.
Even if some of the people being de-platformed are provocateurs, the fact is that there's still a difference between excluding people from what is essentially a private club (as most online discussion forums are) and excluding people from the public square (which Facebook and Twitter have essentially become). In the broader social sphere, the differences between troll and Socratic "gadfly" are difficult if not impossible to discern.