"The Fact Checkers (TM)(R)"... what are they in this case? They are employees working at the behest of the owner of the property of which you are a guest.
Should a company the size of Facebook get Section 230 protection? Probably not. Should government officials be allowed to use social media sites for official business? I don't think so. Should campaign finance laws be strengthened and ad spends on social media sites subject to much more sunshine? Sure. And should meta be broken up? Yeah.
I'm not here to defend Facebook, and I think the interventions I would propose to deal with the Facebook Problem are probably far more damaging to Facebook the company than "no more moderation".
But compelling speech is also a violation of free speech. If you demanded that I post your article on my personal homepage, I'd politely tell you to bugger off. And if you insisted that I should have to do so, I'd consider you an enemy of free speech.
Apparently you don't feel the same way about FB.
But where does that line get drawn?
And what, exactly, is FB allowed/not allowed to censor (and don't be glib, the answer "nothing" is functionally equivalent to "make FB 4chan" and I think you'll find fewer than 1% of the population that is radical enough to think that would improve things)?
Who decides?
We don't have good answers to those questions. They're fundamentally questions about who gets enormous amounts of political/economic power. Power corrupts. But even if we did have good answers to these impossible zero-sum questions, we still wouldn't really have a decent solution to the underlying problem.
The problem with platforms like FB isn't primarily caused by the content of any particular speech and so can't be solved by censorship of FB users or of FB itself. The wariness about FB is reasonable, but the instinct to solve the problem by censoring FB itself is all wrong. It grounds out a massive political struggle and doesn't even solve the underlying problem.
There are other ways of pressuring them at different levels as well: demanding moderation transparency, regulating them as we do for utilities, supporting competitive alternatives which respect free expression, etc.
The Wikipedia article quotes someone in the Kennedy administration as saying: "Our massive strategy [in the early 1960s] was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue."
So it kinda seems that weaponization of complaints was part of the issue.
Do you happen to have any pointers or comments on Reagan administrations reasoning, and the efforts by liberals to restore the doctrine?
How would you feel if I told you that you must put a campaign placard in your front yard, and that if you don't like it you may always put a post-it note under the sign expressing your discontent?
Here:
>>> They should be allowed to post "this is false" all they want in the comment box, just like everyone else is. They just shouldn't get special powers, like blurring out your article and putting their comment directly over it, instead of in the comment section.
The ability to decide which pixels to serve from a server you own isn't a "special power". It's free speech.
Ignoring the extreme irony of people supposedly on the left arguing to protect corporate rights and personhood (of an absurdly wealthy megacorporation, no less), this is the same argument as "Telling a shop owner which $PROTECTED_CLASS they must serve is restricting freedom of association." once used by bigots. In both cases, yes, it is but both are public accommodations and it serves the greater good to require that they serve everyone equally.
To be blunt, your comment is presumptive, confrontational, and unpleasant for no reason. My point of view on this is obviously more nuanced than your lazy straw-man.
In fact, I address this whole set of issues very explicitly in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29726829
> to protect corporate rights and personhood
In the comment I posted, had you bothered to read the whole thread instead of jumping down my throat, I say:
>> Should a company the size of Facebook get Section 230 protection? Probably not. Should government officials be allowed to use social media sites for official business? I don't think so. Should campaign finance laws be strengthened and ad spends on social media sites subject to much more sunshine? Sure. And should meta be broken up? Yeah.
>> I'm not here to defend Facebook, and I think the interventions I would propose to deal with the Facebook Problem are probably far more damaging to Facebook the company than "no more moderation".
Far from advocating protecting corporate rights, I'm arguing for the dissolution of legal protections which are much more valuable to Facebook than its free speech protections.
Moving on to the rest of your comment, you say:
> this is the same argument as "Telling a shop owner which $PROTECTED_CLASS they must serve is restricting freedom of association
Yawn. Who cares? This is not an instructive or insightful comment. It's a meme that has been repeated on every thread on this topic for close to a decade at this point. It doesn't really tell us anything about the nature of the problem.
There are many ways to check corporate power. Compelling or restricting speech is not the right tool in the case of Facebook. Censoring Facebook as an intervention is too weak, too susceptible to abuse, and doesn't address the underlying problem.
Go look at actual attempts to implement something like what you suggest. E.g., Hawley's legislation which would allow Facebook moderation powers (which is, frankly, necessary for any community with higher utility than 4chan). But which would also have a panel of political appointees decide, based on Facebook's moderation behavior, whether it should keep Section 230. Surely you see how that is ripe for abuse, right?
Again. The problems with Facebook can't be solved by censorship, either of Facebook users or of Facebook itself. That is not a defense of Facebook. Quite the opposite.
Speaking of irony... I'm literally the only person in this thread advocating for a solution to the Facebook problem that doesn't involve censoring someone/something.
The inability to censor others in a public forum isn't censorship. They can still post as much as the next person.
The problem is that Facebook used fact checkers to censor others.