Furthermore speech as the forefathers probably meant was people physically going to town squares and talking there.
There is free press, which is what social media is more like, and the owner of a press has the right to decide what he/she will print--the Constitution prevents government interference, not private interference.
Plus i m not sure the principle of Free speech is that limited, speech doesnt count as speech if it cant reach anyone. And giving to a handful of employees the power to shape the messaging of millions is directly affecting democracy itself.
This means 25Mbps uncapped IPv6 (no NAT) symmetric bandwidth for everyone and safe harbor laws for individuals and not just corporations. I think at that point centralized services for Internet-based communication become unnecessary, though centralized storage for things like long video posts may still be needed.
Facebook and other such platforms have become a town square of sorts.
This idea that the principles that founding fathers championed, especially the Bill of Rights, should somehow be restricted only to what was possible with the technology of their time is pretty preposterous.
This is true, but also, the town squares were public places. Are you suggesting to nationalize Facebook?
Adding to this, maybe the best thing to do is to just fund a public social media site, where constitutional protections apply, and treat that as a virtual town square.
I would rather suggest something along the lines of this.
At a certain scale (user count), sufficient implicit selection of users and their content revokes section 230 rights. If you start implicitly removing specific viewpoints and topics it's no longer "user-generated content" and is now your content. Of course there have to be provisions for explicit content scope and spam, but that's roughly where I would start.
Can you explicitly tell me how you would codify that scale in law? And whatever you make the cap, what then is the incentive for a website to allow more users over the cap?
> Of course there have to be provisions for explicit content scope and spam
"Of course" they can moderate spam. Can you tell me how to objectively identify spam?
If I have a religious forum, and it passes the user cap, suddenly we have ourselves a public town square. Then someone comes in and starts saying "God isn't real!" several times in literally every thread. Is that spam? Because to me, it looks like an exercise of free speech, so you can't erase those messages. Certainly if someone was repeating that in a public space, we wouldn't silence them. By exceeding the user cap, that site would become a worse experience because you've severely limited moderation abilities by your proposed law.
If someone was repeating that in a public space, we probably wouldn't, but if he had a series of megaphones screaming that at everyone, ala spammimg everyone's convos, many societies have laws against just that. Much of law is already using a "reasonable man". Standard, so why not this one?
But a big reason behind all of this censorship on private platforms is that companies are trying to appease advertisers and customers downstream. It's already about money, because we're talking about private enterprise. Coca-cola doesn't want an ad appearing next to a comment promoting Nazism on your all-speech-must-be-allowed platform. It seems to me that forcing sites to have any and all content once they reach a certain size would do the opposite of generating revenue.
> If someone was repeating that in a public space, we probably wouldn't, but if he had a series of megaphones screaming that at everyone, ala spammimg everyone's convos, many societies have laws against just that.
This may or may not be legal in the US. But even if it is, I have a hard time imagining how we would define spam on the internet in a way that won't get subjectively abused and bring us halfway back to where we are now anyway.
How about this approach: force companies at the level of ISPs, domain name registrars, payment processors, and maybe cloud providers, to allow any legal content and not censor. That seems like infrastructure that's too hard to build from the ground up. Anything built on top of that, like a website, is free to act how it acts today.
Somewhere in between, communication is far too critical for private monopolies to have a stranglehold over.
Remember, this announcement is about speech that occurs outside of Twitch entirely. So what you'd really need to argue is that anyone who ever wants to be able to speak freely on their own time shouldn't depend on income from big companies... including, at the rate things are going, even income from minimum wage retail jobs.
If we really want free speech platforms, lobby government to craft spaces for it in the digital age. Instead of muddying public rights in private property, let's just fund more public property (i.e. nationalized social media platform).
“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take everything away.”
I disagree this is a job for government directly. No, I don’t want government socialized Facebook!
I want the government to enforce the spirit of antitrust law. They are ignoring that a competitor to Facebook CAN NOT exist because Facebook will smother or absorb them. I would like government to compel Facebook to use open data standards I can use to take my data to a service that isn’t actively trying to psychologically bleed me daily.
If Google trying hard couldn’t dent Facebook, there is no chance an organic startup will do it. And double extra certain a state run expensive and uninspired clone would do it - not to mention you’d be more wise to trust Facebook with your data than the government directly.
The smart move is to hit them with the hammer of regulation here. They can either be the small exclusive club with tight control over their members and their behavior, or the mass market app with minimal control over their userbase.
The alternative is to have the full cyberpunk future, where "I like <wrongthink>" means being cut off from everything. Banks, search, email. We're already seeing the slope, and it's pretty damn slippery.
Nope. You can have a smaller, simpler substitute if you have comparative advantage in some other niche.
DuckDuckGo is making a decent showing against Google, despite arriving on the scene almost 2 decades later. A handful of righty / unPC social media properties (Gab, Parler, whatever Lindell’s app is called this week, etc) are slowly eating into Facebook/Twitter market share because they promise less moderation.
Moreover, this is only something that's fine if you accept ceding control of the vast majority of communication to private control. I. E, we now get cyberpunk thoughtcrime dystopia.
When our lifetimes has it not always been this case? Newspapers, television, internet have always been this way (owned by an organization and provided with contractual limitations). Talking face to face in your own home is the only unabridged communication method, even in the USA. I have always found this issue strange that people demand that App Stores, cloud platforms, web hosting, etc must allow any content despite the companies’ freedom of association (and disassociation). We aren’t talking about companies which are covered by Common Carrier laws.
And “existential” doesn’t mean what you think it means. They are rebuilding on different platforms and other substitutes are coming online.
Instead of a centralised government backed platform, how about a decentralised platform.
Maybe something like Signal-with-Blog-Posts, with "public" posts hosted on IPFS?
Even this latest Delta, Coca-Cola, etc. seems to be just bullying: https://twitter.com/AmyBeePhoenix/status/1379295393301868546
It's just an upheaval of the elite.
Protected classes are narrowly defined. You may or may not have an issue with what those protected classes are, but that's a separate argument. The main argument is that businesses must follow the law to stay in business.
Who won that case again?
Edit: someone built that town square. Someone founded those forums. At the end of the day, someone is always in control of something.
You can make an argument about whether or not people should have thicker skin, but you can't make an argument that people should not be allowed to react to speech without forfeiting the moral concept of freedom of speech.
Someone did build the town square, and if that someone was a private entity, that someone can kick everyone right the heck out of the town square, because it's theirs. If the people of the town want to make that reality different, they should probably band together and purchase the town square and own it collectively, as a government.
If you think Twitch, Twitter, HN or Reddit are such critical infrastructure, then you should lobby your government to purchase them.
Homeless, poor, young and oddities get removed from malls for being themselves. We're seeing the same online.
Governments don't buy malls. Malls are designed to get you to spend. These sites want you to spend and if you do or don't they will send all of the info they collected about you and sell it to someone else.
We need more hobbiest sites. Government should provide free spaces.
Public and media speech was always moderated. In the past it was simply harder to notice since there were fewer un-moderated channels.
Beyond the hardened strawmen of actual written law, we have a shifting sense of what is publicly acceptable. Given that most people do what everyone else around them is doing, or at least what they believe others are doing, there exists a powerful tool in that to control the public discourse. We've gone from "I disagree with what you say, but I will die to protect your ability to say it," to "I think someone will find this offensive, so I will also find this offensive, despite my not knowing anyone who'd actually be offended by it."
The laws are a harder target, so those who would wish to stifle inconvenient discourse likely would find it easier to convince a mostly pliable, trusting public to not say the things they don't want said. That there still are a small number of companies controlling what a majority of people consume might be convenient to this.
All conjecture, of course. More of the Paul Harvey "If I Were The Devil" kind of thing.
Can you help make sense of your comment, because it seems to be closer to a cult chant than a connected chain of thoughts.
However, if you admit this, then you must also admit that Twitch is fully within their rights.
Personally, I believe that the positive right to free speech (subject to exceptions, of course) is much more important, and not up to FAANG to decide.
At this point, there's a credible argument to be made that the Facebook empire is a sort of natural monopoly, like our public utilities. They need to be heavily regulated, split up into regional operators, and/or legislated out of existence.
You want the ability to communicate with everyone (tweeting is a message to the world) or if you aren't allowed to do that, for nobody to have that ability.
I'm talking about how you cannot effectively stay in touch with your neighbors and local community without using Facebook's platforms. People who you see every day, but who may not share all of your views; keeping up with those people is important if we want to heal our society's deep divides.
I've tried, but very few shared interest/volunteer/neighborhood groups will go out of their way to contact the one or two people who don't join their Facebook groups about scheduling or events.
It has nothing to do with racist or misogynist strawmen, but since you mention them, Facebook has done a lot to inflate those groups' ranks.
Also, you don't have to have good morals or even be intelligent to be good at your job. Some people are fantastic at their job, but are pretty damn "stupid" as you put it.
I guess I reject the idea that policy (a well considered and debated, long lasting decision) would actually fall for something like a slippery slope.
The proverbial boiled frog just jumps out of the pot when the water gets too hot, in reality.
Interesting that you feel that way. It's certainly not something I'm worried about.
No one owes you free hosting or access to their audience platform. If you take free shit from someone, expect to be at their mercy. It's really not that complicated or dystopian.
If you know anything about history, you know that attacks on free speech do not have to start or stop with official government sanction. In Soviet Union it wasn't uncommon for dissidents and their families to be nominally "free", while being unable to find employment, housing or otherwise get basics for operating in the society. It worked through a backstage "reputation" system that begins to look eerily familiar.
And BTW, the driving force behind a lot of free speech suppression in the past wasn't "the government" per se but "the party" that happened to control the government.
A system that was government driven. Don't try to pretend that decentralized consequences are authoritarian.
Yes, under threat of government sanction, in violation of their first amendment rights, companies were coerced by the government to blacklist people. It was absolutely government driven. I never said it needed to be official.
Official or not, that's not what we're experiencing today, where republican lawmakers are threatening companies for not doing what they want, and the companies are mostly ignoring them.
>Legal penalties are, however, in the modern world, the least of the obstacles to freedom of thoughts. The two great obstacles are economic penalties and distortion of evidence. It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living.
Mind you, that quote has no qualifiers, so by "earn a living," the implication is earn any living, anywhere. Please give an example of someone has been banned from Twitch for opinions which have made it impossible for them to earn any living, anywhere.
If you want that to change talk to Congress.
You’re free to say whatever you want, and I’m free to take actions based on that. You cannot give free speech benefits only to one side of the argument.
This is a pretty big distraction that is often used in these types of discussions. It's a distortion of what people actually want. The "consequences" being advocated are often just the whims of today's favored group. Giving free speech benefits to only one side of the argument is exactly what people are asking for when they ask for "consequences" -- freedom for A, consequences for B.