Our generation has seen entire sectors of the economy subsumed within monopolies. The consolidation is unprecedented in the modern era. These monopolies have a degree of political influence that makes them hard to distinguish from government in anything but a formal legal sense. We have seen what the financial sector has chosen to do with its political influence. Why would we expect anything different from new media companies like Facebook?
People need to stop and ask themselves if the core enlightenment principles of toleration, free expression, and free association are worth protecting. Once abandoned, they will not be easy to resurrect.
Facebook doesn't merely allow sharing information, it facilitates it -- worse, it selectively facilitates information whose availability is useful to Facebook, not to you. Facebook spends billions of dollars developing algorithms to control what you see on Facebook. Where in the "free expression" handbook does it mention that newsfeed posts which support the bottom line shall be seen more often than those that don't?
This idea, that anything that happens on Facebook has anything to do with "free expression" or open, unmediated communication between acquaintances, is the first thing that we need to get rid of. When people stop believing that, they might use Facebook much less -- which would be a good thing!
Blogs still exist. Newspapers exist (even very extremists ones). Telegram exists, forums exist, etc.
What Facebook and co. may have a monopoly on is channels of mass outreach. However, I don't think that there is or should be a right for your opinion to be widely disseminated by a third party.
Recall that the Green Dragon tavern was the unofficial headquarters of the American revolution.
Don't attack Cloudflare and Cloudflare won't terminate you. That's not censorship, it's self-defense.
Because if Google began deciding which blogs, newspapers, etc align with their version of truth, those entities and their audiences would disappear almost overnight.
I think it's easy to hold this opinion when the views silenced are not your own.
It's also really easy to be a "free speech" absolutist[1] when you're not personally being persecuted.
As others have already mentioned ITT, there is a legal argument to be made that most opinions can be expressed in some form, but there is neither a legal argument to be made that they can be expressed through a particular medium, nor is there a moral argument to be made that every opinion is equally worthy of defense.
It's not about the question whether Google censoring LGBT content would be technically illegal, or violate "freedom of speech" - I think neither of these are necessarily true - but it would be morally wrong[2] and thus worthy of outrage.
[1] By that I mean people who think that "freedom of speech" means that you should have a right to speak your mind in every context without any repercussions. Freedom of speech is important, but so is protection from persecution, or the trustworthiness of reputable sources etc.
[2] The only way in which it wouldn't be morally wrong is if they decided e.g. to ban all political content altogether or something similar.
Maybe not, but when it comes to politics, unequal access to wide dissemination can be harmful to the democratic process. For any given country, either all parties or no parties should be able to post to Facebook—but certainly not some parties but not others.
Unequal access to wide dissemination is already a given btw. It depends in part on how much money you have.
Note: I'm not talking about censorship of individual posts they make for the views expressed in those posts. That's what Facebook was doing here, and I fully support that. (I'm from Canada; the concept is enshrined in law here!)
I'm just talking about the idea that you probably don't want third parties like Facebook to be responsible for deciding whether to censor people, rather the much "safer" question of whether to censor individual posts. Especially when those people are current political candidates, and the people calling for their de-platforming are people opposed to their election, who are perfectly willing to libel them if it silences them at a time crucial for swinging an election.
Facebook, unlike a government, does not have a concept of due process, and so is not equipped to deal with complaints from people who have motivations (like swinging an election) strong enough to be willing to "take it in the chin" for libelling someone, as long as their libel causes the desired de-platforming effect at just the right time.
This is why we tend to want censorship to be a legal matter: courts have well-built, well-thought-out mechanisms to allow the recipient of a complaint against them to fight back. Meanwhile, what kind of arbitration system does Facebook have? Or, more abstractly, what kind of arbitration system are they required to have? Are there any requirements at all, for how Facebook and other networks should work with people, when others are asking for them to be de-platformed?
In the case of a whole party/movement, I would say it's a really fine line to walk. I wouldn't advocate for Facebook to ban parties like the AfD in Germany or FN in France, while they're often extremist, there is still some legitimate opposition within the bounds of the constitutions left in those parties. But I wouldn't be opposed to FB banning e.g. the KKK or some party that explicitly made reference to Mein Kampf or to killing all the Jews or similar.
Also beware of the slippery slope fallacy. Just because one believes that deplatforming some parties or movements is legitimate, it doesn't mean nor necessarily lead to deplatforming all opposition.
But to correct that, my preferred solution would be to eliminate corporations entirely. Eliminate the power structures that allow such massive accumulation of wealth and power and the legal protections that let people think they are not personally responsible. The legal framework would need to adjust, but I think society would find itself massively improved when personal responsibility and rights were restored.
> AT&T [insert any other carrier] is a corporation, it owns the platform, it decides what traffic is allowed on its property (subject to applicable laws, of course, but not confined to only those laws)
See the problem?
In the first case, I am in full agreement - of course GoDaddy decides, and ought to decide, what domains are allowed to be registered on its property.
In the second case, the correct solution is to change the applicable laws - enshrine net neutrality into law in a constitutionally valid manner, and Bob's your uncle.
Here are a couple of good explanations.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/11/hello-youve-been-referred...
If facebook tomorrow banned all LGBT content I have a feeling "it's a private company" would not be an acceptable defense for anyone currently using it.
In short you're using the most in vogue fallacy of 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
But if I don't feel there's a similar prohibition against corporations or individuals censoring things on their platform/property/whatever, then I have to think about whether or not I agree with the proposed censorship for other reasons. That's not a retreat to the motte - that's just an acknowledgement of the fact that anti-government-censorship arguments don't necessarily apply to private entities.
Once we're dealing with an entity for which I don't have a blanket objection to censorship, it makes perfect sense that I would accept some content bans but not others, based on my opinion of that content.
Not really. I've frequently seen the argument made that particular censorship is within the legitimate purview of a private actor, while still being disapproved by the speaker.
> If facebook tomorrow banned all LGBT content I have a feeling "it's a private company" would not be an acceptable defense for anyone currently using it.
Facebook absolutely has the right to censor all LGBT content, and them doing so is not a cause for government intervention.
Facebook also absolutely should not censor all LGBT content, and I would condemn them and cease use of the platform if they did.
It's impossible to refute your hypthetical because FB would never do such a thing because of the reputational and financial cost.
"Facebook is allowed to host or refuse to host any subset of legal speech so long as refusals doesn't target any protected classes or otherwise violate US laws."
I still think you can argue your position from here but there is a perfectly defensible argument for why banning LGBT content would be stopped while banning puppy videos would be allowed.
The thing is, "its not right" and "its not within Facebook's right to free speech and is instead a violation of someone else's free speech" are two different things.
The people arguing "its a private company" are generally not responding to arguments that Facebooks moderation decisions are merely wrong, but to arguments that they are violation of others' free speech rights rather than exercises of Facebook's free speech rights.
Which is why I linked to the moat and bailey argument. The first amendment is a non-issue. Freedom of speech is something completely different which has nothing to do with one law from 3 centuries ago that limited the power of the federal government to limit peoples rights to free speech in certain areas.
We know the opinions of the people who wrote the first amendment and they would have not been amused by the arguments we see today. These would have let the East India Company silence anyone who complained about their tea in the areas they owned a charter.
There are different understandings of the right to free speech, but a very common one (both now and at the time of the Founding and the First Amendment) is that it is the right of private parties to decide what ideas to expression, including deciding what ideas to use their resources to express and relay, free from government intervention, and that there is nothing outside of that freedom from government intervention included in the right. A private entity can, in that view, violate the right only when it acts as an, de facto or de jure, agent of the state.
It is not a bait-and-switch to hold a different view of “free speech” than your idiosyncratic one.
To put it in the melodramatic language of the 18th century: A corporation has no soul to save and no body to punish. It has no natural interests and no natural rights. It is a legal fiction whose only use is to protect its owners from ruin and whose only justification is the public good. To pretend otherwise is an affront to both common sense and god.
No, the above is the fallacy of equivocation. “Private” in “private party” unambiguously refers to the “non-government” sense of “private”, where the “party” may be a corporate entity or natural person. It does not refer to the “private(ly held)” vs. “public(ly traded)” distinction regarding how corporate stocks are traded.
HN loves this argument until it comes to bakeries that don't want to bake gay wedding cakes.
Please debate the actual argument instead of a tired straw man.
In what fucking world does political speech not deserve at least as much legal protection as being homosexual?
In any case, you're illustrating my point perfectly - it's all about "businesses have the right to exclude customers" until the customer happens to be someone HN likes, at which point the goalposts move wildly.
Marriage equality was about equal treatment under the law. It was debated and decided and passed. You can’t generalize that to your imagined right to troll Twitter.
The question is: do businesses have the right to reject customers?
If the context is political speech (which is critically important and deserves the most extreme legal protection), HN says “you’re fucked, Jack, business rules!”
If the context is gay marriage (which, saying this as a gay man, is not nearly as fundamentally important as free speech) HN says “fuck those businesses, they can’t kick you out!”
Outside of applicable laws, you have no "rights" on this private platform you're provisionally allowed access to, and any attempt to sugar-coat that fact is just corporate PR-speak to avoid needless user attrition.