Platforms that are monopolies or close to it are essentially the modern day town square, except instead of police and government enforcing rules, it's tech companies.

The courts have made it quite clear that they’re unwilling to consider companies to be similar to the “town square” unless if they’re doing literally what governments have traditionally done. There is no clear way to argue that YT is doing something that governments traditionally did, so you’re out of luck there.

If you believe YT is a monopoly, then it would be far less harmful to everyone if it was just broken up, rather than basically banning moderation on the internet.

You're commenting about "the courts" in a thread that started with "I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech."

What’s your point? That we should ignore how the courts and first amendment law actually works?

In a discussion about morality and the health of our society it is perfectly reasonable for decent people who are exploring the question of 'what ought to be' to set aside the decisions of the courts and the letter of the law.

It's good work to ask how things could be better than they are, but setting aside the law may not be great way of approaching the issue because:

* a good portion of the law as it exists is actually a result of people thinking, in legal contexts, about what ought to be, at least insofar as any portion of the law represents values and ideals.

* any new "what ought to be" that turns out to be at some point in the future will need the force of law in one sense or another, which means it must be nested within a legal context, probably one enough like the present legal context that some if not all present constraints will matter.

Did you post this comment in reply to my comment in isolation, or as a reply to my comment in the context of the previous comments in the exchange, starting with

"I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech."

and ending with

"What’s your point? That we should ignore how the courts and first amendment law actually works?" ?

That’s an interesting thing to do, but sans a means of enforcement it seems kind of pointless to me.

This argument could have been used to discourage people from discussing the need to make any ethical improvements in our society, including, for example, ending slavery.

The power of enforcement follows from policy, in a democracy policy is influenced by public opinion, public opinion is shaped by discussion. We ought to discuss moral issues for which there is currently no enforcement.

Yes.

The First Amendment is one specific protection of freedom of speech. It does not equal freedom speech, which is a general concept that private companies can also uphold (but I think everyone here acknowledges they are not legally obligated to)

I think that the government coming in and telling companies what they can and cannot do with their private platforms is entirely contrary to freedom of speech. What would be better is a wider array of communication platforms, for which there is a entirely different set of regulatory tools available.

Not only are they not legally obligated to uphold free speech, very few (almost zero) companies allow anyone to say whatever they wish whenever they wish.

Im still wondering why anyone expects this of youtube but would never ever expect it of the bar down the street.

> Im still wondering why anyone expects this of youtube but would never ever expect it of the bar down the street.

I haven't been in a bar where the patrons were told they couldn't discuss quack medicine.

> I haven't been in a bar where the patrons were told they couldn't discuss quack medicine.

That's over specific.

All bars (even the worst ones I could find) usually have unspoken rules about what can be discussed, until you start to talk about those subjects (eg drug dealing, weapons dealing, planned violence, etc) openly. Of course you can't effectively restrict communication between individuals, but that's also not the issue.

Maybe. I was in a Bait and Tackle shop yesterday that had a sign on the door warning of a $100 fine for speaking the word "coronavirus" inside.

Monopolies are hard to break if the product is free for consumers.

The problem with YT tends to be less the price, and more the fact that Google controls search, most ads, and YT. Compare this to FB which mostly controls ads on its own site, Google as a whole is more problematic.

Of course “more problematic” is not the bar for anti-trust regulation; I leave that to the lawyers.

The degree of a corporation's control over the flow of information matters because the harm done to our society is different.

The problem I always have with this argument is that everyone is undervaluing the unintended consequences of holding companies like YT to the first amendment only. Most people like to image that what they’ll get is more free wheeling discussions on the topic, but in reality all you’ll get is porn.

See, YT bans all kinds of stuff that the first amendment protects, including pornography, violence, and a lot of other nasty stuff that they don’t want on their platform for entirely clear reasons. Eliminate YT’s right to clear those off their site, and it’ll be filled with the lowest common denominator very quickly, as regular users flee from the torrent of unwanted offensive material.

Of course, it’s easy to imagine that we can give YT the right to ban some “offensive” material, but who defines what “offensive” is? The Government? Giving the government the right to control what can and cannot be moderated on YT is kind of contrary to the entire point of this exercise.

If you believe that YT controls too much of the information in our society, then anti-trust or anti-monopoly law is a much richer area for fostering free speech.

You seem to be rather fixated on the "first amendment" lens, while others have their own ideas of the value of the ethical principal of free speech as a means of preventing control over 'that which we are permitted to debate'.

The first amendment is a legal principle with clear implications, limits, and enforcement mechanisms. This makes it much easier to discuss rather than the more nebulous “free speech” which allows everyone to just make up their own definition in-situ, leaving the conversation unmoored from any common definitions.

Aside from that, removing the first amendment from my argument changes very little. You’d still be obliged to create a definition of what is and is not free speech and a mechanism for enforcement, which would be subject to the pitfalls listed above.

>This makes it much easier to discuss

Yes, that's part of my point. That's an incentive to shoehorn, over-simplify, and strawman the ideas and arguments of others.

Because Youtube presents itself as being agnostic to the content and letting anyone upload anything (excluding porn and dark stuff that any reasonable person would deem inappropriate like ISIS propaganda or child abuse).

If Youtube presented itself as being a video platform for <insert political affiliation> from the getgo, then I wouldn't see a legal problem with moderating videos containing opposing views.

How and where does YouTube present itself as being "agnostic" to content?

And if you think it's only natural that YouTube disallows "propaganda" that "reasonable people" would object to, why are you surprised that they would remove other varieties of propaganda? Of course, different people will have different definitions of reasonableness.

You’re implying that there is a legal difference between being a publisher and a platform, which is not actually a thing under US law.

Then why was this legislation introduced ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...

Section 230 does not require that YT or any other service be neutral. It is extremely common for people to represent 230 as if it requires neutrality, but it absolutely does not.

Here’s the entire text of 230, it doesn’t have a “unless they’re biased” clause.

> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

I don't believe that was the point GP was trying to make.

You're correct that section 230 doesn't require neutrality, but that was part of the point of the legislation. The case law prior to section 230 did result in such a distinction, though not necessarily in those terms.

The cases in question are:

- Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe Inc., in which CompuServe was held not liable for content hosted on its systems as it was merely a distributor and did not have knowledge of the content, and

- Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co., in which Prodigy was held liable for defamatory content posted on its systems as it performed moderation and was therefore considered to have editorial control over the content

Section 230 introduced a carve-out for internet service companies to avoid liability for user-generated content, but given the case law it does seem like this is otherwise a distinction made in US law.

It was a distinction made in US case law, until Section 230 rendered it moot. Section 230 was in fact written partially in response to Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co., because the ruling was considered such a threat to the growing internet.

Youtube also presents itself as an international platform, so what you say about ISIS might have very different perceptions e.g. in comparison to a US Navy ad in the US than in the Middle East. Or do only US standards of what is reasonable free speech apply? Why is porn obviously not free speech less than lizard people conspiracies (that's what Dike is propagating).

No they don't. YouTube is very clear that they will remove many types of videos, and even ban accounts.