I can try to give some guidelines, I'd love to see improvements (and also like to know if anyone points out I'm wrong :-)
Legitimate de-platforming is
a) when an individual or organization is removed from the platform based on a request from law enforcement followed by a review by the platforms staff to verify that the request is genuine and that the reasons stated are valid.
The account should still not be deleted for a certain number of days, and if requested by the user or organization, relevant details should be made available to them to take fight it in court against the relevant law enforcement agency.
b) when an individual or organization is removed from the platform based on an written policy, known by the users of the platform in advance and verified by a second team. Upon request an explanation of why the account was deplatformed should be made available.
That alone would be great. They should have to justify exactly why they removed someone. And by making it explicit, they open a pathway for legal action.
But more importantly, these platforms need to be declared public utilities and forced to be transparent. This is not controversial and is usually welcomed by the public when it happens. Most public utilities that we enjoy today started out as being completely private.
The fire dept would let your house burn down if you were late with your bills. The telegraph company would ban you from their private network if you were a journalist that criticized them. The electric companies would make you agree to onerous terms to get electricity. And currently we have this mess with private medical insurance companies and tech platforms.
It is time for us to nationalize Facebook.
> But more importantly, these platforms need to be declared public utilities and forced to be transparent. This is not controversial and is usually welcomed by the public when it happens.
Even just a real threat that it might happen might, if it became visible enough, drive some introspection and push them in right direction.
> It is time for us to nationalize Facebook.
Assuming you are from US (but mostly valid anyway): Not sure if I'd want your president, now or in 6 years, to have more say over the biggest social media networks than they already have.
Note that even accepting your previous paragraphs, this doesn't follow. Most public utilities are already not nationalized afaik; I'm not american, but none of my electricity, gas, water, phone or internet are provided by government-owned or -operated companies, and I'd be surprised if it was much different over there. They're regulated, but not nationalized.
This is the nature of the 1st amendment in the US. The government cannot restrain speech.
A private company was another matter. They can do whatever they want, within the boundaries of law. 1st amendment doesn't apply in this case.
The concern I had was that this would become "easier", and more frequent.
It has. This was the nature of my concern, that the slope would be more slippery.
Justifications for banning are getting "easier". Groups celebrate this deplatforming as "victories."
No one seems to worry much about the long term consequences of this. Well, Cloudfare did for a while, but then it stopped.
Right now, its hard for me to tell if bans are for ToS violations, or political wrongthink. I am troubled by this. ToS violations are generally fine, as long as the ToS aren't onerous. Most aren't. Wrongthink violations ... think of when the political winds shift, and when current rightthink becomes wrongthink.
Niemöller's poem[1] becomes an apt metaphor in this case.
[1] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-nie...
Freedom of speech, as with other legal and civil rights, is an ideal, not an absolute. It has evolved tremendously within the US, arriving at a form we'd recognise currently only in the 1950s and 60s, about 60 years ago. The famous "shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre" objection was raised in a case (Schenck) in free speech was found not to apply to anti-draft advocates during WWI, barely over a century ago.
And the US Supreme Court's "marketplace of ideas" standard is similarly quite problematic, owing far more to free-market fundamentalist advocacy than some doctrine of prevailing truth.
Turns out it was always more a bit of pro-free-market-fundamentalism propaganda than a pro-truth notion.
See Jill Gordon, “John Stuart Mill and the ‘Marketplace of Ideas’"
https://philpapers.org/rec/GORJSM
Or Stanley Ingber, “The Marketplace of Ideas: A legitimizing myth”.
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article... (PDF).
Twitter has been interfering in elections by selectively deplatforming candidates that they don't like. It is so obvious that the biggest threat to the integrity of American elections is big tech. I can't believe that there are some that think that Russia buying a few thousand dollars worth of Facebook ads is a bigger threat than Google.
A little money can make a huge difference.
These 'platforms' perpetually dance around issues and present a different face dependent on who they talk to on what issue.
The big techs cannot differentiate between legitimate de-platforming vs a Denial of Service de-platforming. I think while the big techs have a legitimate concern for de-platforming things that are deemed hate speech, this same power can be utilized by individuals to target a de-platforming for people whose opinions they don't like.
I think big techs should consider a public-court like system - where in order to deplatform, a jury of peers should be used to make judgements.