We're not talking about inalienable rights. That's implied in the title of the linked post.

If you don't care about "good"/"bad" decisions and just care about the legal bounds, just say so and dismiss the article out of hand. Your roundabout question just drags discussion down.

The thing is, people rightfully are pointing out an important issue ("corporate tech giants have monopolized the public speaking space and are holding unaccountable power") and but inexplicably ignore the obvious solution (break them up and/or emigrate to federated/decentralized platforms while actively promoting them) in favor of the worst possible one (force Twitter to unban nazis).

Yes, this is essentially my point, except stated in a much more concise way than I was able to. The author wants something we all want – less power for massive private companies to control our society. But he doesn't want to accept what that takes – greater government control. So his essay is little more than inane rhetoric, e.g. journalists are basically silenced if they can't be on Twitter.

How does breaking them up not kick the can down the road? Presumably the forces that led to the monopoly of users will be in play after they're broken up. Enforcing freedom of speech on platforms that have become de facto utilities or public spaces is the only permanent solution on offer.

The title and content of the post implies that we should regard private censorship with the same concern as we do government censorship, regardless of the current legal framework. Which I don't necessarily disagree with. In fact, I think most people here are on the same page of: it sucks big time when a company like Facebook can unilaterally decide that the famous Napalm Girl photo should not be displayed.

So where's the argument? Where's the discussion? Forgive me, but I don't find the above assertion interesting to discuss when virtually everyone agrees with it. The actual topic of interest is: how can we prevent Facebook from making such decisions over its own platform?

That's a pretty big question with a lot of angles. So I chose, for the sake of argument, to focus on what the parent commenter highlighted, because its specious premise raises issues with the author's overall premise:

> For instance, if you’re a journalist and you want to promote your work, there is simply no viable alternative to Twitter at the moment. No other microblogging platform comes even close to having the number of users Twitter does, and most of the alternatives are hotbeds of extremism, so that anyone who joins them is thereby disqualified in polite company.

In the history of our society there has never been free or equal channels of promotion, i.e. advertising or being featured in mainstream media. It has always been the case that if you didn't pay, or otherwise get noticed by mainstream media, you were unheard and/or considered to be part of a "hotbed of extremism".

So I ask of the author (and those who agree with him), if you want to argue that Facebook/Twitter should be compelled to not censor, then what sense does it make to assert people (journalists are not) have a right (legal or moral) to have their self-promotion be noticed, when that precedent does not exist? Moreover, it's just a flawed premise because I can think of journalists big (e.g. at the NYT) and small (e.g. former students of mine) who have paid careers in journalism without being active on Twitter. I contend that this is not just quibbling over minor facts, but an example of how the author's argument only makes sense by ignoring details of how the world actually works.

What does this one point have to do with the article's overall premise? He wants our society to change in a significant way, but he neither accepts the legal consequences that would follow, nor proposes an alternative framework that would be feasible. I don't disagree with that Big Tech Censorship is of huge concern. But I believe that if we want to change this status quo, we'd have to agree to give the government greater powers to regulate private industry and wealth individuals. The author doesn't want to grant this, rendering this entire discussion to be an inane impotent exercise.

Ostensibly that's the argument. But the real argument is that platforms are wising up to being used for extremist positions and that the extremists don't like it and so they twist everything to associated themselves with content that should get a pass.

it's a combination of the right to free expression and free association, not just for journalists, but for everyone. I should not be prevented from hearing things i might be interested to hear, or from hearing things from people i 've chosen to associate with because someone 3rd party thinks they re not nice.

If I run a website, why doesn't my free association right extend to kicking people off it?

you are absolutely free to - but in that case you should be held to the same legal standards as newspapers who edit their content.

No, that's patently ridiculous. The internet is a new medium; things scale so vastly differently here. Your proposal is literally impossible to enforce at the scale of major platforms. To force everyone to choose between "hands off, no moderation" and "you are responsible for all content" is a thinly veiled attempt to force the big players to not moderate, and therefore host extremist content - because they literally can't review everything.

I actually tend to agree that it s a bad solution (its discussed in a subthread here) but i like to entertain all options. The real cause is the lack of competition for the few major platforms. I wish G+ had taken off.

So the choice is between "host ISIS decapitation videos" and "be charged with a crime when a user makes a true threat using your service."

You're proposing something that will kill the literal forum that you're posting it on.

What legal standards are you referring to? Newspapers and media are not held to additional obligations than what a normal person has – e.g. it's illegal for anyone to commit slander, or violate obscenity laws. The fact that a publisher can be held liable for publishing illegal content is not what gives them the "right" to edit and censor their own publication.

Why? A newspaper is composed almost entirely of content that the paper is paying journalists and writers to produce whereas a social media site is almost entirely composed of content posted by individuals, how does it make any sense that a platform becomes a newspaper because they ban some content from being posted on their platform?

Newspapers aren't held responsible for the stuff people post on their comment sections either. Otherwise they'd have long since been sued into the ground, considering the sheer amount of bile exercised in said comment sections.

None, until we concede that — because the world in which we want to live includes quality writing from a free press engaged in investigative journalism — it is required that journalists be able to promote themselves somehow.

I don't disagree, and I think that's an ideal virtually everyone agrees with. But an ideal alone cannot be the premise for asserting an enforceable change to the status quo.

The reason why the Founders – and subsequently, the courts – enshrined freedom of speech from government censorship, is because that is the most the government can enforce without violating other limitations and stipulations of the Constitution. It's not as if the Founders completely forgot to consider "Hey wouldn't it be nice if everyone had a right to be heard in our society?"

If the author wants this ideal to become reality, then he needs to accept giving greater power to the government (or propose a completely different paradigm). The fact that he apparently can't – possibly because he recognizes that increased powers would end up undermining freedom of speech – is the reason why things are as they are right now.