Which is true, but kinda misses the point: it amounts to a position that discrimination and censorship is ok as long as it doesn't run afoul of local laws. If local laws reflect the totality of ethical and moral positions, that would be fine, but I think we all know that laws tend to fall far short on that metric.
But I'm also sympathetic to the overall thrust of this. Let's say for a minute that hosting/distributing child porn wasn't illegal. Would you then call Zoom out as somehow evil for shutting down accounts that broadcast child porn live? I'll assume that people would be happy with Zoom shutting down something like that, and are also generally fine that there are laws banning child porn.
So then it's impossible to hold a "no censorship at all" position, at least not without being a hypocrite. It's really "I don't like censorship, but it's appropriate in some narrowly-defined cases". Once we agree on that -- which we kinda have to, because that's the reality of the situation -- then it just becomes a matter of agreeing on what those "narrowly-defined cases" are, and of course I'd expect there to be disagreement.
For example, I'm fine with a private company deciding they don't want to be used as a platform to distribute racist hate speech. But I'm not ok with a private company shutting down the account of someone organizing events around the Tiananmen massacre. But as long as people (including myself) are willing to say "well, none of the other videoconferencing solutions are good enough for my needs, so I'll look the other way", they can get away with whatever they want.
But seems now, if it is a Tech company, people judge them differently. Wether Facebook or Twitter or Zoom, 'oh I can vote with my feet'. But if that was the case 30-40-60 years ago, we wouldn't have the 'progress' we see now.
And while I am opposed to child porn, if it is legal, I am not in favour of having private companies doing the censorship, but I would ask for people to be active on changing that law. Since that is opening a door I am not comfortable opening. We had YouTube/Twitter banning/blocking content that went against WHO guidelines, but we also had WHO guidelines being retracted one day after they were published. We had for days/weeks recommendations from the WHO that were just flat wrong, and we shouldn't let private companies censor information based on 3rd parties that are not 'innocent'.
And as your point stands, you are ok with shutting and account based on child porn (Assuming in this context it was legal), but would you be also for someone being banned documenting Police brutality in the BLM protests? Both are(in hypothetical) sense legal, so the only thing we have here is your own morality doing that judgement. And different cultures/religions will have different views on all that, thus I believe as long as it is legal, private companies should never have the right to censor 3rd party speech if they provide a platform for that speech.
No, and that's exactly the point I'm trying to make. Perhaps I'm doing a bad job of it.
> Both are(in hypothetical) sense legal, so the only thing we have here is your own morality doing that judgement. And different cultures/religions will have different views on all that, thus I believe as long as it is legal, private companies should never have the right to censor 3rd party speech if they provide a platform for that speech.
And that's where I think you and I fundamentally differ in our beliefs. I think, absent a law either way, companies may -- and perhaps should -- feel free to exercise their own judgment about what they're comfortable broadcasting from their platform.
And again, why is "the law" so revered here? The law (at least in the US) is filled with racist and racist-enabling garbage. Why do we hold it as some final word on morality? I don't think we should. Changing the law takes time, effort, and money. Companies refusing to broadcast certain types of speech can be a part of activism and lobbying in order to change laws. And if ultimately the will of society is that this refusal is wrong, there are remedies (legal and economic) for that, too.
I believe I do understand your point of view; I just don't agree with it.
Yes? Obviously? They should report the account-holder to the police - or, if the police refuse to do their jobs, to armed vigilantees - for arrest and prosecution (repectively lynching); if such people want to broadcast video evidence of their crimes, lets make sure to deliver their Darwin award ASAP.
> So then it's impossible to hold a "no censorship at all" position, at least not without being a hypocrite.
I'm a hypocrite about plenty of things, but this isn't one of them.
Edit: to be a bit more explicit, laws against posession (rather than production) of child sexual abuse material are a mechanism to protect child molestors by making it dangerous to posess evidence of their crimes. (And also a mechanism to attack fine upstanding file-sharing websites by uploading such material and then reporting them to the FBI or equivalent.)
Your argument’s end point looks like your freedom to only use video conferencing tools that respect your ideals. Would I do that, I’d have to leave my job and stop talking to pretty much anyone.
There have recently been a whole lot of apologists saying "yes their founder is from China and their developers are in China but that doesn't make them a Chinese company". Fair enough, but when that company further starts intentionally enforcing Chinese law on US customers, I have no problem calling it a Chinese company. And I will not use a Chinese company's communication product unless forced to.
Two things are additional considerations that may change how this sort of action ends up for Zoom:
1. Zoom will be judged in the court of public opinion for their decision to align their moderation of access to their service with the CCP. This is likely a different degree of backlash than you'd see with, say, shutting down the accounts of US-based hate groups.
2. Zoom may come under scrutiny—without concrete evidence—for introspecting the content of communications through its platform that would otherwise be presumed to be private. This is different from Facebook/Twitter etc., for which much of the content that drives moderation decisions is public.
Zoom is not abridging anyone's constitutional right to free speech, nor would they be able to. How they are judged for their specific actions, though, is entirely at the discretion of their user base and public opinion.
The implication here is that they did it under pressure from the CCP, presumably because most (all?) of their programmers are from China. Blizzard got raked over the coals as well over a similar incident (search "blizzard blitzchung").
How do you know they are the same people?
Does the content of the event persist in a way that makes it easily sharable, with comments?
If the answer to both of these is “no,” I contend that the communications on these platforms is “private” and should be regulated by the US Government against censorship (though I have no hope that it will be). My reasoning is this:
(1) Zoom has no expectation that private communications will harm their business. In the same way Ma Bell never took responsibility for the zillions or drug deals and kidnappings that got coordinated over their system.
(2) Lack of viral potential means the possibility of inciting violence, cyber bullying, and other negative consequences of mass internet communication is diminished.
Both of these points have a correlating contention about censorship on Twitter, Facebook, etc: they (not the government) ought to censor content that has the potential for negative outcomes like those I mentioned. Is it difficult? Absolutely. Will there be disagreements? For sure. But, they can afford to figure it out, and our society can’t afford for them to not to.
NB: We need nuance and reasoning here. Falling back on first principles and calling it a day is not enough; those principles were articulated at a time where speech replication depended on industrial machines and were limited by how fast a pony could run. We’re talking the ability to beam information practically into every child’s brain 24/7 anywhere on the planet using psychological tricks to engage them.
Whatever ancient neckbeard decided it was a fallacy clearly didn't get out much.
im not aware of twitter et al banning any reasonable political activism.
Perhaps that applies, perhaps it doesn't. Did they remove the account due to pressure from the CCP?
This of course can become slippery and slope-y eventually, if a propaganda machine takes over as the tolerance authority, but I don't think that's a real problem compared to what the other problems the argument is trying to address.
Or if a government forces a private company to do it.
I don't agree with Zoom's censorship because I don't agree with China's laws. But I'm not in China, so I have the luxury of expressing my opinion about pretty much anything. Zoom, having operations in China, chose their path. Fine with me, it just means Zoom are lower down my list. That's precisely the scenario depicted in the comic.
But then again, Americans are always conflating the principe of free speech with your first amendment.
Exluding private companies from free speech discussions has no real use when they have monopolies or oligopolies, and your websites keep getting shit down because people are complaining to your ISP about content, or when payment services such as Visa and Mastercard refuse to do business with you.
They are the same. If you are for something, you're also against not something.
Internet platforms should never have been in the business of censorship. Unfortunately, liberals encouraged them to censor their political opponents for short term gain. The result is sad but predictable. Any speech that offends someone powerful is now subject to possible censorship.
I remember about a decade ago when certain parties were so concerned with voices being silenced and "erasure." The same people are now cheering when Facebook, Twitter, and the like shut down certain kinds of speech, with great discretion as to how the "rules" are implemented. These parties have been quiet, so much so, over China.
Down we slide along the slippery slope!