That has proven not to be the case. Bringing extremist views into the mainstream by way of social media (and politics) has only strengthened their influence.
I don't know the answer to this problem, but it seems our education system needs dramatic improvement.
Imagine tut-tutting if the Rwandan government had cracked down on radio broadcasts calling Tutsi people cockroaches and encouraging Hutus to chop them down.
If anything they would have cracked down on opposing broadcasts by claiming that, since Tutsis are the historically privileged beneficiaries of colonialism who were collectively responsible for the violent oppression of Hutus, any pro-Tutsi or anti-anti-Tutsi sentiment was unconscionable hate speech while any pro-Hutu or anti-Tutsi bigotry was not technically racism. The power to ban “hate speech” is the power to define “hate speech” and hateful people will use against you the very same weapons you propose to fight them with.
Interesting that you picked Rwanda. The go-to example for the dangers of free speech is normally the Nazis. For instance I'm thinking of a study that attempted to correlate growth in support for Hitler with availability of his speechs on radio or via rallies. It found IIRC no correlation at all.
In fact Hitler was regularly censored, deplatformed and so on yet it didn't stop him, only perhaps slow him down a bit. On the other hand he spent vast efforts on suppressing, censoring, vote stuffing and de-platforming in various nasty ways anyone who spoke out against him - all managed entirely privately via his various organisations, whilst the weak Weimar Republic were unable to stop him.
Dictators are invariably big fans of suppressing free speech, because they know censorship works in favour of whoever is in power. The reason democracy and free speech are so tightly connected is because in a democracy the people in power aren't meant to be able to do anything to stay in power beyond winning the approval of their citizens.
Also what that poster did say--and I agree--is that people lack critical thinking skills and have not developed immunity to flat-out bullshit. There's a huge education pipeline problem and our society is at risk because its normal resistance would be to have voters that can think for themselves. Things like flat earth and moon landing conspiracy theories don't need to be "not allowed", they just wouldn't take hold if people could think through basic logic.
There's literally no way you can read the 1st amendment and think it should apply to non government entities. It specifically mentions congress only.
>and amend accordingly.
The chances of getting such amendment passed is approximately zero.
It already applies to non government entities. Telephone companies can't deny you service because they don't like you or what you say. Your power and gas company can't deny you service because they don't like you or what you say.
Trump can't even block people on twitter ( a private company ).
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/07/09/fede...
This has nothing to do with the Constitution and everything to do with their licenses for public airwaves.
Public airwaves? This applied during the landline days and it had more to do with the idea of monopolies/utilites/trusts.
Either way, it debunks your point that non-government entities are all allowed to censor...
It's not they can't censor, it's that if they do then their legal status changes in a way they do not wish it too.
In other words, they can't censor as they are. A private company cannot censor.
Yes
>A private company cannot censor
No. They are common carriers. Twitter and the vast majority of other companies are not.
But you said "Yes" two lines above.
> They are common carriers.
These common carriers are private companies, not public companies. They aren't owned by the government. They are owned by private shareholders. AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, etc are private companies or non government entities.
> Twitter and the vast majority of other companies are not.
I never claimed twitter and the vast majority of companies are. I only responded to the assertion that all "non government entities" can censor. I was providing proof that some non government entities cannot censor.
If AT&T wants to censor, they have to go find other business. They can't be in the telephone business and censor. It's a lawsuit and possible jail for the execs involved.
People are so desperate to justify censorship that they'll make up nonsense. I can't believe anyone is dumb enough to believe all the pro-censorship nonsense in my thread. The only explanation is bias once again forcing people to make up and accept nonsense.
There is an argument to be had there.
That's not quite accurate. There is precedence for regulating speech in private media for example, as in the case of broadcast networks. Broadcast TV networks are still restricted on speech/expression to this day, as are radio stations.
There's nothing to say that social networks can't also be brought under the regulation of the FCC and have their speech and terms of service dictated to them. This turns social media platforms into something more like a utility. All users must be treated equally or the platforms get massive fines. If I were attempting to get this through, I'd argue the major social media platforms are natural monopolies due to reinforcing network effects and the finite nature of user time (there can only reasonably be so many large social networks, and the market has already strongly demonstrated globally that that is a very small number). You can replace a natural monopoly with another (an independent Instagram, allowed to evolve as a threat, possibly could have killed Facebook for example and become the new monopoly), but you can't have 100 Facebooks that will all perfectly compete with eachother (some people will argue that in theory you could, but that would never happen in reality). For whatever niche / category / concept they target, social networks inherently trend toward either consolidation of users or death; it's why the Twitter clones were all killed off in the early days when people were still experimenting with that social concept. It's why there are not dozens of large scale YouTube or Reddit or even Stackoverflow clones (the rather brutal combination of network effects and finite user time wins in all cases and you end up with consolidation of users to just a few viable platforms). The market, largely left to sort things out on its own in the social media sphere, has provided a lot of proof that large social media platforms are natural monopolies.
Also, the FCC no longer regulates broadcast content. It publicly stated a number of years ago that it does not have the desire to do so. The stations police themselves in order to stay within their perceived community standards to prevent external regulation.
Today, unless a station does something really egregious and congresscritters get involved, there is effectively no content regulation.
In the mid-90's, I was part of a morning radio show that was #2 in a medium-sized East coast market. One day we said "shit" on the air three times to see if this was true. Nothing happened. We didn't hear word one from any listener, manager, or government agency.
It's explicitly not the job of Congress. That's the point of the First Amendment.
Regulating free speech is up to private enterprise, using private enforcement methods like de-platforming (old school: you can't spew your drivel inside my bar) and shaming.