I would say that Facebook is similar to a 18th century tavern. It's a place where people meet and talk. Fortunately for 18th century humans, there were many pub owners who exercised varying degrees of control over the activities of their patrons. Some banned radical politics, and some did not. In our present era of concentrated control, we have a small handful of pubs controlled by a similarly small number of wealthy oligarchs.

Recall that the Green Dragon tavern was the unofficial headquarters of the American revolution.

The "start a blog"-argument really falls short when CloudFlare began terminating hate, you know?

It's really, really easy to find blogs on the internet absolutely filled with hate speech and extremist views.

The one which became very (?) popular and widespread was shut down.

>The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.

Don't attack Cloudflare and Cloudflare won't terminate you. That's not censorship, it's self-defense.

That's just a fortunate excuse in that scenario.

Do you think this argument applies to Google Search as well?

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.

> 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.

> However, I don't think that there is or should be a right for your opinion to be widely disseminated by a third party.

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.

No. If the NSDAP still existed (let's leave aside the fact that this would be illegal in itself), they should not be allowed to post their drivel to FB.

Unequal access to wide dissemination is already a given btw. It depends in part on how much money you have.

I mean, I agree with the specific case, but I really don't see how entirely disenfranchising a political party for the views they usually espouse isn't a slippery slope that leads to non-democratic results (i.e. major parties being silenced; or one government being arbitrarily declared "legitimate" while another is declared "illegitimate.")

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?

I think it entirely depends. Twitter and Facebook have deplatformed some people already (e.g. Milo Yiannopoulos) and I think given the history of their conduct, that's fair.

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.

Equal access to amplifiers like Twitter and Facebook can also be harmful to the democratic process or even to individual lives.