Re:Things from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg and his emplo...
by atq2119 on Thursday June 04, 2020 @04:13AM
(#23414000)
This is a very good point.
Ultimately, the comparison between government censorship and social networks' decision to spread somebody's message falls flat because of the different baseline:
If governments do nothing, there is no censorship. Governments have to decide to take action for there to be censorship.
If social networks do nothing, nobody gets to spread their message through them. Social networks have to take action (write software, run servers) for messages to be spread.
This difference changes the calculus of moral and ethical responsibility.
* Is the way that people view large public figures on social media all that different than how they did with newspapers?
I'm not sure if these questions imply anything about how social media sites should deal with regular small-audience / low-influence users, but I think any platform sharing influential posts to a large audience has similar responsibilities to a newspaper.