Re:Facebook’s experimental hate-speech policy seems to be wo...
by konjin on Friday November 20, 2020 @08:35PM
(#25167178)
This is yet another bait and switch where a public corporation is presented as a private party.
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.
Re:Facebook’s experimental hate-speech policy seems to be wo...
by dragonwriter on Friday November 20, 2020 @09:30PM
(#25167463)
> This is yet another bait and switch where a public corporation is presented as a private party.
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.
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.