Facebook isn't determining "what is true"; it's just determining what it is okay with hosting.
I find it easy to see Facebook as one of the arms of the government. It's not the only arm of the government, and it's not the only thing Facebook does, but one could consider Facebook (and other social networks and tech giants) as an arm of the government.
It is a violation of free speech. Just a legal one. For example, parts of europe, russia, china, saudi arabia, etc there are legal violations of free speech. Doesn't make it right though.
But also rights and freedoms have limits. Unless you think private citizens should be allowed to own tanks and icbms, etc, then you agree.
Social media is, if not a nuclear weapon, certainly a machine gun of speech with its magnitude and velocity and certainly something unthinkable by the founding fathers and being weaponized by state actors against our institutions and ideals. Complaining about these restrictions without a viable other way to combat this ignorance and psyops -at the same scale and velocity- is just complaining.
YouTube modified their content model to make it harder to find trans-friendly content. We've already had this fight over YouTube. People complained and they adjusted the model.
But the complaints that were heard were that being anti-trans is bad, not that YouTube has no right to maintain a model.
The problem is that you can censor speech by adding more speech (i.e. noise).
That ship has already sailed IMHO.
Not to mention Facebook is a private company and it should be free to censor whatever it wants to censor; book burning is a real issue only when its state sponsored.
Strong disagree from me. These corporations are becoming an increasingly large part of how people communicate. Imagine if phone companies started deplatforming people the way social media sites do- it would become incredibly hard (perhaps impossible) to live a normal life in 21st century america.
Besides, with a disinterested moderator you don't automatically get pure free speech. Others step in to influence the system, to push their "truth" to their benefit.
(Turkey officially denies that such a genocide ever happened, so 'misinformation' could go either way depending on your geographic location)
Holocaust denial is a very bad thing, why would you smear someone with it just because they love free speech more than you do?
These spreading piles of human bile attract people who are peripherally socially connected on the social graph some of which grow the pile o poison until you reach a critical mass of poison and your society derails.
You advance the fallacy that if we censor anything we must censor everything that powerful parties desire. This isn't so. Facebook has actually been very reluctant to censor anything at all and even now and is only now choosing to censor things that are harmful uncontroversial falsehoods.
In the case of the holocaust denial they are hateful lies that have festered for decades. Nothing in particular forces us to slide down the slope and start covering for the powerful.
“But it’s ok, we’re the good guys and doing it for the right reasons”, says every tyrant ever.
Never let speech get censored no matter how good it makes you feel in the moment. It’s the worst precedent you can ever set.
I’ll try and give an example here that might be safe to give because it rips the Republican Wing of the Military Industrial Complex.
If Facebook was one of the world’s primary communication channel in say the early 1990s, the people who would have called BS on tearful made up testimony about Saddam unplugging babies from respirators that was used to sell the war to the public wouldn’t have even had an opportunity to challenge the official story. Facebook would have blocked their opinions as hateful content and if they persisted just conspired with the rest of Silicon Valley to completely remove them from the Internet. A chain of events that have cost arguably millions of lives and trillions of dollars can be tied to some of that testimonial propaganda and would have been unable to be talked about critically with Facebook’s current rule set.
Now we want Facebook in charge of determining truth? Be careful about what you wish for. You applaud today, but now the precedent is set. What’s next on the chopping block might not be something you’ll like.