As you say, they are fundamentally the same argument, except for one thing.
A water company that decided to cut off water to people that its CEO doesn't like would, in short order, have to face both political scrutiny and the proverbial torches and pitchforks, if you will; unlike speech, if the water goes away, people start dying or they are forced to leave.
Speech is necessary, but it's cheap as dirt, and most people don't have a lot to say in the first place. If the speech started going away, even in ways that are fundamentally unfair or flaunt the ideals of the country, not enough people would make a fuss about it. You won't die without speech. It can be comfortable to live without speech, or freedom of speech, anyway.
Otherwise, the argument is the same and, in either case, regulation and the pissed-offedness of the little guy could change the outcome. Such is less likely in the case of speech.
How do you really quantify that in a way that is objective and obvious
Look at the rise of tiktok. On one hand at least where I live they had almost no mindshare but in the past 2 months now they do, and they’re growing in user count. Should they meet the same threshold as YouTube now? Instagram?
This feels intractable to me, I don’t have a good answer to this problem. Not to mention it could easily become a gating mechanism to competition
Also, how do you determine what information is harmful? Some of it feels obvious, but some of it not so much
I don't actually know. At some point, we need to figure out how to address that question. I think it can be addressed... I just don't have a good idea, and I don't know that anyone does. But we've been kicking that can down the road for ages.
Work out the audience share of a service, then work out the audience share of its nearest competitor/competitors. If the former is twice/four times/whatever as high as the latter, then it's counted as a de facto monopoly and regulated.
So YouTube's got 74.08% of the market and Vimeo has 18.02%[1], and the former is definitely twice or four times more than the latter, so regulate the former.
[1]https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/online-video--12/youtu...
We set a number. Done.
These are corporations that only exist because we permit them to. Given enough political will, we can regulate them however we want.
We're now back to square one, because those companies hover below said number and advertisers control what content is allowed on said sites. All of those individual companies ban 5G conspiracy theories because it's bad for business. Next step?
Yet when a platform like YouTube deletes accounts and publicly announces the censoring of information that doesn't conform with the Ministry of Information(aka the World Health Organization), there's no mystery that they're violating people's rights.
I'll give you an analogy. In America, businesses can't pick and choose people on the basis of their skin color or their sex. Obviously, discrimination in hiring still exists to some degree, but because it's covert or the result of implicit biases, there's a limited number of things you can do to address that discrimination. On the other hand, if the PR for a fast food chain goes on TV and says that the company only hires white people, that's unambiguous and has no conflict with the rights of the corporation.
IMHO EU should work on disinformation harm reduction strategy. Similarly how some members deal with drug addicts - contact people infected with bullshit and try to set them straight. I guess that (public mental health) would sound too dystopian for HN crowd.
That would be impossible, since the First Amendment as written explicitly only applies to Congress, and it restricts Congress' ability to pass laws, which is something private institutions don't actually have the power to do anyway.
Big friendly looking corporations like Google shouldn't be used as proxies for the government to bypass the rights of Americans(or anyone for that matter). For whatever reason, people see corporations as being different from governments. What is a government but a corporation that owns land? What is a corporation but a form of government? They're quick to should about the importance of dissent, telling the government what it cannot do to our rights, yet corporations get a free pass when they are on the right side and hand out free goodies.
Beyond the likeness of corporations to governments, big corporate censorship should be opposed on the grounds of principle. America and other countries are founded on the principle of freedom of speech, among other things such as the concept that all "men" are created equal. We don't allow businesses to discriminate people by their race, color, sex, or religion because of that principle. Why then can we not apply the principle of freedom of speech to Silicon Valley and Big Media?
It's pretty frightening that the same people who told me how brilliant Nineteen Eighty-Four is(I found it the least convincing of dystopian warnings I've read), easily fall into the trap of believing that we desperately need a centralized Ministry of Truth. In the last year I've been realizing that Nineteen Eighty-Four is more realistic than I had believed.