Extrema 1: Social network with everyone on the planet addicted to it, it becomes impossible to avoid. Even if one doesn't want to use it, it will become a necessity to communicate to others. Twitter is an example where it is official source of information from Government agencies to local fire department, embassies, and many politicians, etc. Recently they're requiring an account (and phone number) to access what seems to be the official channels of information for many nations. With milions if not billions of users, it is a significant chunk of the entire world's population. Just like any other industry (big oil, big tobacco), big social media and big tech need to be regulated. There is a spectrum between a private forum of 10k users and a megacorp able to control election outcomes even. What's even more eggregious is that the algorithms that govern the engagement of 1B+ users is developed by people of Silicon Valley (probably 0.000001% of US population or around ~300 people give or take). In private. Closed doors. We oughta see how this is terrifying (even if I agree with their stance and moral principles).

Extrema 2: Big tech merges with Gov in the business of law enforcement. A small party where government has absolutely no business gets interrupted by cops who were alerted by the "thought algorithms". These thought algorithms were developed by Gov + Big Tech by fusing various channels of information and it was deemed that this party is too pick-your-fav-niche-topic and cannot be tolerated. It is my business, my party, my friends and my agenda. No one should have the right to interrupt unless I am violating laws and I am granted due process.

Obviously both extremes are encroaching civil rights of people to have privacy and access to information.

With great power comes great responsibility. You don't get to be "popular" for free.

And if you don't like it — you don't have to pay that game.

Sure I can. I’m doing it right now. Of course, analogies are imperfect, but they make good teaching and argumentative tools.

> You don't get to be "popular" for free.

Fortunately for society, the law disagrees with you. (Also, your way has been tried in the past, and was not especially popular - to the point of revolution in certain Eastern European countries in the 1960s-1980s.)

Free speech was so important is the first amendment. It’s valued even hire than protection.

Also your analogy is flawed. Facebook doesn’t do what you suggest today (“only allow in those who talk like me”). They allow almost all speech, with opposing viewpoints, different policy perspectives, different cultures, etc. Arguments happen there all the time.

Yes, thanks for the reminder. That’s why this isn’t the gov doing and instead is the left via their means of control. That’s why there’s pending FOIA requests for this very thing.

> Also your analogy is flawed. Facebook doesn’t do what you suggest today (“only allow in those who talk like me”).

Only if you take it quite literally. Otherwise are you saying they don’t censor anybody that doesn’t reiterate the same thing the left is saying?

Yes, and there are plenty of examples of it, too. Republican governors and politicians, and right-leaning people of all levels of fame, with very few exceptions, continue to have a presence on Facebook and communicate there with their followers. Pick any Republican governor or Senator: they will be there.

Facts don't have a well-known liberal bias, Colbert Report joking aside.

Occasionally, if it's a common piece of misinformation that's been widely-shared enough to justify manual intervention, a fact-check box may appear underneath. This happens to "facts" with a conservative political slant, as well as "facts" with a liberal political slant. If you run a page, your page can get "strikes" for this sort of thing that will cause you to down-rank in people's pages, but if anything, Facebook has been caught out for tipping towards the conservative side of that scale, suppressing that penalty on some popular conservative pages (https://www.engadget.com/facebook-overruled-fact-checkers-to...).

Rarely, you'll share "misinformation" that is also in violation of community standards (I'll leave that to the reader's imagination) and get a time-out proportional to how often that happens.

To understand Facebook's behavior, it's useful to remember that their goal is growth and retention. They want everybody using the service. I suspect, based on observation of their behavior, that they've discovered for themselves that without those measures, growth and retention are being harmed more than they'e harmed via time-outs and fact-checking (i.e. organized boycotts over Facebook being a place where falsehoods spread wildly, people encouraging their more vulnerable friends and relatives to stay off FB so the misinformation parade doesn't convince them to take horse-dewormer, etc.).

Yes, we've all seen this "fair" fact checking. Hint, if the left is OK with it, the right is furious about it. You cannot be fair to both in a way that is accepting to liberals.

> Facebook has been caught out for tipping towards the conservative side of that scale, suppressing that penalty on some popular conservative pages

As they should, for both sides. But interestingly this makes my point even more. That everybody is quite aware of what censorship was about and is taking place. Yet they put on this falsity and get shills to help defend them because?

> To understand Facebook's behavior, it's useful to remember that their goal is growth and retention.

Right. They are censoring and aligning everybody on FB to the same thought process, which happens to be a majority of Americans.

> I suspect, based on observation of their behavior, that they've discovered for themselves that without those measures, growth and retention are being harmed more than they'e harmed via time-outs and fact-checking

When censorship is the result, do you think we should have more that a suspicion? What about the people on the right leaving? They don't seem to care about retaining those? Interestingly the people left align with the CEO's own political beliefs.

Right, and usually they would. Growth and retention is the lifeblood of everything Facebook does; Zuck would rather cut off his own right foot than intentionally lose users.

Which is why the only rational conclusion I can find with the evidence I see is that Zuck is either afraid that continued inaction was eventually going to land him in jail (or put him through years of Congressional investigations) or they have hard numbers showing that for every X people on the right they retain, they are losing N*X other users, N > 1.