I don't understand how anyone can see one of the tech monopolies as just another business from which one could simply move to another platform [0]. These places are de facto public commons at this point and are a significant factor in reaching a broad audience. Removal from the platforms does amount to censorship if the reason is a mere political disagreement.

[0] c.f. the fate of Parler which was assassinated overnight by a collaboration of the tech monopolies, but was celebrated by the public because of the bad reputation it accumulated.

They are not de facto public commons, they are privately controlled advertisement channels. It is _very dangerous_ to consider them as anything other than an effective means by which to drive advertisement sales.

I do agree with you. That is the financial basis of their existence and will drive their decisions, however in practice the public does use them as a defacto public forum. These two ideas coexist and are also irreconcilable.

Personally, I think nationalizing FB, removing their profit motive, and clearly placing them under 1A protections is a good idea.

If you're worried about the government shutting down dissenters, well guess what this thread is about? The government and FB are only able to achieve this due to the private property protections FB has and rhetorical spin that provides.

... You'd give control of part of the most invasive and pervasive surveillance apparatus' in history into the hands of the American Government? Between Facebook and Google there's no effective means escaping intrusive surveillance.

I'd rather see Facebook and Google dismantled, not nationalized.

Until we can get the global surveillance apparatus dismantled, the size of the company doesn't matter. Small companies are easily bullied, large companies gain favors from cooperating and are also bullied via the threat of anti-trust.

I don't think breaking them up solves anything.

EDIT: A better but even more unlikely idea than nationalization would be internationalization, i.e. placing global companies under the control of international committees. I'm not holding my breath at this point though and the global dominance of the US means that unless Russia, Iran, and China are given prominent positions of control it's essentially meaningless.

Yet another idea is to force them to provide freely accessible API and possibility to extract all data in a free format.

This helps somewhat from a competition perspective, but the overhead of downloading and uploading potentially GB or TB of data (messages, photos, videos, etc) is not something users are accustomed to and is a significant barrier.

While it can make switching costs somewhat lower (does uploading your posts from another platform always make sense in a new context with new people?), it doesn't do anything about the network effect.

> overhead of downloading and uploading potentially GB or TB of data (messages, photos, videos, etc) is not something users are accustomed to

Users don't have to do it. See Nitter (for Twitter) and teddit.net (for Reddit).

Break them up and regulate the collection and sharing of personal information. Invalidate the freemium model by finding ways to make it more expensive to retain personal data.

The public is one entity- and will aggregate elsewhere, repeating the process. Humans aggregate, to expect a change in human nature is - a flawed approach.

The world has voted with there feet that this advertisement sales channel is the public plaza. Its not nice. Its horrible in my opinion, but one cannot argue with the network effect. It just is. A fact. A snapshot on reality. And parent is right. This company is censoring the public plaza. Which it owns. Which is very strange.

It is dangerous, but the people have adopted them as the commons. Especially as it's now illegal to gather in most places, this company shapes the perception of reality for most citizens online.

Supreme court has found that first amendment rights extend to privately owned shopping malls. Don't think in the current atmosphere any court will rule this way, but I understand why people are frustrated that these principles are not applied to digital companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

What monopoly, exactly, does Facebook actually have here? Are you suggesting they control an overwhelming share of... online marketplaces?

Facebook owns mobile advertising space. Their ad targeting data is part of duopoly with google, which owns search targeting data.

Facebook and google both needs to be broken up with anti-trust rules.

How is that relevant here, though? Facebook's marketplace is hardly WikiLeaks' only viable option to sell its merchandise, and in fact is probably not even the wisest choice.

Am I now unable to purchase WikiLeaks merchandise?

HN: “No one is using Facebook, and no one needs it for anything”

Also HN: “Facebook is essential and any limits they put on anything is a censorship”

It's almost as if HN were a community made from people with different perspectives and opinions.

If we have a large forum and someone decides who gets to speak, that is censorship. That will allow whoever is in charge to shape peoples perception of reality.

This is literally every online forum. Every single one has moderation. You just can't have a reasonable experience without it.

I propose we reserve the word "censorship" for situations where an idea is effectively stopped from propagation as the result of the decisions of the people who would be negatively impacted by that idea.

Specific expressions getting removed shouldn't be considered "censorship", but an entire concept being purged systemically across a culture for the benefit of the group executing the purge would fall into my proposed definition.

Continuing to label specific content removal as "censorship" is unhelpful, because I want to be extremely alarmed when I hear the word, but I'm unable to behave that way currently, because things like this submission try to co-opt the term for something that clearly isn't even approaching the same degree of oppression.

It's about selectivity. If you're in a group conversation and you always interject when a certain person starts to speak, that seems like censorship. If a teacher requires one student to always raise his hand, but anyone else can shout out questions, that seems like censorship.

> If I have to log into a website in order to comment, is that "censorship"?

There are plenty of news outlets where I'm unable to leave a comment under a news article, because the only supported option is have a FB account which I don't have.

I don't feel censored but I'm definitely silenced.

And why don't you make a FB account?

Because he does not want to send Facebook every comment he makes on the internet? Specially your political ideas and opinions.

I don't have a FB either. For me it is like the Stasi, tracking everything you do, only way more detailed.

When I talk with friends, my exact opinions are forgotten over time, while FB will record your exact opinion on September 20th, at 8:12pm for your entire life.

So does HN, but here you are.

HN doesn't require my phone number to register nor does it track my web browsing habits.

Is this question an example of the “loaded question” logical fallacy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question

No.

> If everything is censorship, seems to me like nothing is.

I will give a definition that counters this.

Censorship is not a binary thing. It is a spectrum.

Specially, the definition of censorship that I would use, would be "Any action at all, that chills someone else's speech. But the more power and effective the action is, the more that it is a problem".

So, government censorship is a problem not because it is the government doing it specifically, but it is a problem because the government has a lot of power.

To give another example, if a very power criminal organization was threatening to kill anyone who said bad things about it, and these threats were real and worked to chill people speech, then I would consider this to be possibly as bad as the government doing it.

To address your other example, the main question that I would ask is how powerful is the action. You refusing to listen to someone doesn't very effectively chill speech.

But actions such as very large and powerful companies censoring things is much more effective than a teacher censoring things, and thus a larger problem, although not as big of a problem as if someone threatened people, en mass, with violence.

To address the Facebook example, the question that I would ask is "How powerful is facebook, and how effectively are they able to wield that power to chill any form of speech? Are they very effective at controlling speech or not very effective at it?"