> In that sense, most corporations of today are way more powerful than governments of the past. Thus, they ought to be treated the same way, and we ought to demand the same rights from them as the government.

This is one of the main reasons antitrust law was created. They ought not to be treated the same as government, they ought to be broken up and not allowed to be as powerful as government.

I agree. It's strange to me that a common reaction to the premise that Facebook is more powerful than government is to say, "welp, guess we need to codify our free speech rights within our new Facebook government" rather than "Facebook can't be allowed to be that powerful."

Because what many people making that argument want is for Facebook (et al.) to remain as powerful as they are, but be compelled by law to use that power to publish speech against their will.

I would prefer if Facebook and its properties withered away from disuse but regardless, if the new public squares are privately owned digital spaces, it is still important to maintain the principles of free speech. Disinformation as a weapon complicates things as well.

Saying "can't be allowed" is easy. Actually fixing it - without making the situation worse by making the government even more powerful and intrusive and not actually achieving any increase in freedom - is much harder, and nobody offered how to actually do that yet.

Well I agree with you, but considering the corporate state merger we are seeing today (we now know elected can officials directly instructed Facebook as to whose accounts to ban), we have to do some real politik.

I am 100% behind any attempt to break up Facebook and Google, but given that they are de facto the government (just see how many ex googlers have high bureaucratic office), this seems as likely as the feds voting to reduce their influence.

The power differential between govt and industry doesn’t seem to address the root issue, which is the power differential between individual humans and industry and/or govt.

If you imagine individuals at less power than government and industry today, then you take industry and cut their power in half, their power now sits closer to that of individuals than it did before.

That depends. What happens to the industry power? Does it go back to individuals or does it accrue to the government?

As far as I’m aware, Facebook and Apple do not have a standing army yet.

Neither does the Supreme Court, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful.

Framing FAANGs as entities contra governments as a whole doesn’t really capture the relationship, which has evolved something more akin to the checks and balances that exist between branches of government.

Because they don't need to?

The argument that social media companies are more powerful than governments is fundamentally undermined if social media companies don't actually have any of the powers traditionally ascribed to governments (such as a monopoly on violence) and are, themselves, subject to the authority of governments.

Twitter banning Donald Trump's account doesn't make them more powerful than the US government, for instance. MacDonald's serves billions every day, but no one calls them a superpower.

The power to censor speech and control the spread of information is one of these traditional government powers and these companies routinely use it. In a democracy, control of information is as good if not better than an army. Installing a new government by force would get the international community pissed at you - the UN might even wag a finger at you angrily. Winning a democratic election because the people's beliefs were groomed by an algorithm in full control of which information they see and which they don't is something nobody will even know happened. Your government is as legitimate as any other and your power isn't much less absolute than any military dictatorship.

I'm not saying this will happen - it surely won't. But it could.

What will and already does happen is that companies won't replace governments with their puppets, but use their power over information to extract more and more value from the people and to get existing governments to make it easier for them.

Violence is a crude tool used by empires of the past. Even governments are starting to abandon it. Access to and control of information is the name of the game now. Governments need to hack, deceive and threaten to get information, but we've already voluntarily put these tech companies in control of ours. Governments have already lost on that front.

They do... The united States of America's army. The federal government is slowly becoming an arm of big tech. Look at how many ex googlers and Facebook execs are taking government positions. Look at how califorinia officials are instructing Facebook what to do.

This is like claiming the epa has no army ... technically true but completely missing the larger context

> This 'argument' comes about because everyone's forgotten about why it is that we don't want government to infringe upon certain rights.

I think the argument comes about because it’s first amendment case law with plenty of Supreme Court opinions.

What’s ignored is the flip side, that even governments (meaning federal, state, county, city, etc…) can regulate speech.

But let’s pretend that the case law was different and it were somehow unconstitutional for businesses to make rules that restricted your speech. I have never heard a proposed legal framework for how that might work.

If you have a brick and mortar and ask me to wear a mask, then fuck you and your rules I’m entitled to go into your store without a mask? And yes, wearing a mask or not is speech. Or what if I want to come to your store with a bullhorn and preach, you can’t remove me? Are your store hours a violation of my speech because I want to appear and protest in your store in the middle of the night when you are closed? These are not extreme examples, there are cases with similar facts which SCOTUS has dealt with when it is government and not private business with similar rules. Is Joe Rogan violating my free speech because I can’t go on his podcast when I want? If you have a website, can I sue you for not hosting my content on your website when/where I want? It just becomes a exercise in saying “I know it when I see it” and Twitter can’t moderate user content on its own platform but the law will not be applied equally to all businesses. The aim of the law should be to remove those kinds of discretionary standards in favor of plain letter law with bright line rules.

I don’t know about all that, but clearly there is a difference between a business that sells clothes and a business that has imposed itself as a middleman in private social interactions between friends and family.

Families are free to choose to not use the middleman.

Did you hear about network effect?

No, mortenjorck had it right. There is a clear distinction between government and private enterprise--governments have the force of law to back them up. That's the critical threat. Yes, it's a problem if power is centralized in organizations, but you always have the option to walk away from Facebook, Twitter, etc., or even start a competitor. There's a huge difference between "Facebook jail" and actual jail.

There are similarly powerful industries and they are regulated strictly. Take banking, as an example: In theory, you can "choose" not to use a bank, but realistically, you won't be able to and still live a normal live in modern society. That's why we regulate them and disallow them to simply take your money for no reason, impose insane fees etc.. I don't see why Facebook should be given a cop-out given how essential many of their services are to a normal live.

What service by Facebook is essential? Is posting and commenting on Facebook essential? Because that's what most people complain about when it comes to censorship from Facebook.

My local politicians have closed their offices due to covid. The phones do not work because they go to the offices. The only official way to contact them is via email. The only way people seem to successfully get a response is via Facebook.

Facebook has willingly inserted itelf as the arbiter of all social and governmental actions in our brave new world. Stop pretending.

OK. So that's a case for forcing Facebook to allow people to contact politicians, not a case for forcing it to allow people to make posts or comments.

Ah, the famous "you can build your own twitter" (which is "you can build your own Internet" now, thanks Parler) argument. Turns out, it's not that easy to build your own internet. You can walk away from Facebook, but if Facebook can control who gets elected to control the jails, then the distance between Facebook jail and real jail is not as big as you might have thought.

Worse yet, almost nobody of the people who say "these are private companies, they can do anything they want" actually believes that. If Google said one day they are stopping hiring women in technical positions, because men are superior technically, they'd cry for government regulators to step in in a second. If any grocery store decided to refuse service to people of certain race, them being a private business wouldn't stop the regulators from coming in, and everybody from calling that to happen, and none of those people would stand in the way.

In fact, we already have a myriad of regulations restricting private companies in hiring, firing, conducting business, negotiating with workforce, managing working conditions, and pretty much any interactions with the public and other businesses. There's not a single company that is not bound by dozens if not hundreds of these regulations. Those companies being private companies never prevented it. You may welcome it or you may lament it, but it's undeniably how things are done in the US - private companies are subject to public regulation. It's not something we're just introducing, it's something that existed since forever.

There are true libertarians that consistently oppose any regulation of private business. About 2% of them, judging by election results, and about 0% represented in any legislative or executive body above the tiniest of city councils. The other 98% should lay the "private companies" argument aside because they're just embarrassing themselves with it. That argument has been dead for centuries, and if you want to resuscitate it, you have to deal with hundreds of years history of regulation first, before you can wield it again.

Exactly. Government and the State are not synonymous. Churches, states, and corporations all govern. We don't worry about churches as much, as their power has been curtailed by a lot compared to the past. But both States and Corporations having far too much power is a large and difficult problem. When they are in cahoots as much as they are now you know we're up the creek.

It's okay to go protest on the street.

It's not okay to clone yourself thousands of times and generate constant new protest speeches.

Misinformation works faster and different online vs the real world. I'm not against all opinions and viewpoints being taken away, that's obviously a scary route. But clear misinformation has dangerous impacts at the speed it's produced, shared, and consumed.

>clear misinformation

You say that like such a thing is clearly defined.

Does it depend on intent? If I say something that you consider to be incorrect but I understand it to be correct is that misinformation? Or do I need to know it's false? If the former we need an arbiter of what is true, which is not a trivial thing. If the latter we need an arbiter of what i believe which is basically a good chunk of what the legal system does.

Does it have to be demonstrably harmful? What is the threshold of harm? There are plenty of things that might be wrong and minimally harmful to say, but some that are more medium level harmful. If it doesn't have to be demonstrably harmful then what you've just done is literally just oppressing someone you disagree with for no real reason.

There is a reason that we tilt toward freedom of speech with governments. Doing otherwise doesn't scale and tends to devolve into people in power censoring opinions and topics they don't like.

Agreed.

Also "truth" isn't exactly static. Just look at the change in the "science" of mask best practices; or the Hunter laptop that has now been verified.

How do we handle that?

Do we compensate those that were punished prematurely (when they turned out to be right)?

Do we punish platforms that censored people? (when people turned out to be right)?

The issue right now is that the platforms do not have the same standards as the people using them. The incentive is just to censor content that isn't backed by power or money.

This is the problem for arguing for free speech. You get lumped in with loonies. I will gladly defend your right to be misinformed on the internet, though.

Misinformation does not imply any untruthful intent or knowledge of error. The word for that is disinformation or simply lieing.

If you consider the first amendment a mistake, you won't want to replicate it in the quasi-governmental institutions of the future

The first amendment applies to individuals not publicly traded half public-half private entities.

Facebook is the government. The white house under the current regie and state of California both admit that they have backdoors into Facebooks bureaucracy they use to ban content. Facebook is already merged with the Chinese state apparatus in china.

As such they ought to be regulated as a government agency. Those do not enjoy first amendment rights. Ones first amendment rights end the moment they accept being part of the government.

Yes, your best defence in a mobocracy is other mobs.