Facebook has over 3 billion users.
Gmail has over 2 billion active users. All their products combined probably have more than 3 billion.
US has 350 million people.
By those numbers alone, aren't tech companies more powerful arbitrators?
But that's a bad metric. We should talk about enforcement rather than raw numbers. Government's interest and design won't allow it to censor expressions in the same way that private companies [0] do. Private companies can filter anything and since tech companies are digital, the enforcement itself can scale a lot more than government. Government maintains some sort of appeal system while tech companies don't have to.
Algorithms responsible for gmail filter billions of mails daily probably. Obviously, not all of it can be called censorship as majority of it is spam but anything wrongfully filtered is censorship, no? That's going to be a huge number that can't scale offline in enforcement.
0] https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...
[1]https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2019/05...
You don’t have to tell 1 billion people in China not to say F%%% China”. You just punish a few and the rest fall in line.
Once you punish a few, the rest self censor.
"Oh, you're friends with someone who says X? Welp, you must be a Bad User and your posts will receive a lot less visibility and the validation that you desire. But if you were to stop interacting with your Bad Friend, you could become a Good User again."
And oops, "Bad Friend" no longer gets invited to real-life parties because most people still consider FB the most convenient way to organize them and people only rarely remember to forward the invites.
The enforcement works better when you aren’t aware of it. Being covert means you don’t protest so loudly.
It's less severe, sure.
Bam, your reach has just expanded to 3+ billion people, most of whom aren't even your citizens.
If a link can’t be shared on Facebook, Google, or Twitter, it may as well not exist in most of the world.
Heck when you can literally close off entire markets, private corporations censor themselves.
Tell that to people who live in China, N. Korea, or any country controlled by a theocracy.
Even in the US some states ban doctors from talking about abortion and/or force doctors to give women seeking an abortion false information.