Anti-speech pro-corporate-authority advocates always try to put these monopolistic, unescapable megacorporations in the same category as some local mom-and-pop operation. It's a massive intentional category error; megacorps are not little companies you can just walk awawy from. There is a point where a corporation's influence becomes so unescapable and so capable of greatly degrading your life that it must be treated in some ways like a government, for the same reasons we treat government differently from just another company or citizen.
The same reason that the phone company or a company that owns all the local roads or water mains can't decide to "stop serving" you because they don't like your religion.
Because it's hard to impossible to get alternate services for roads, water and electricity, i.e common carriers. But there are plenty of neo nazi forums, Gab, Truth Social, Parler, 4chan for racists to express and spread their views.
These are unmoderated, just spam filtered. Forums, social sites and video sharing sites are typically not one of these, and the distinction is important. The most important distinct piece is ownership. Shen you signed the Terms of Service with say YouTube, you granted them rights that vastly exceed ones a common carrier has.
It is analogous to creating your own postal service or phone company that only lets you send letters to users of the same postal service or phone company. The service is only useful due to network effects.
I've had SMTP servers which have extremely high deliverability rates hosted for <$100/mo for over a decade.
The capital expenditures are nowhere near comparable. The regulatory burdens are nowhere near comparable.
Email providers are not common carriers. Its very easy to just sign up for a different email provider. Its easy to buy a domain name and update MX records across literally hundreds of commercial providers eager to have your business. And even if every single host bans you (you really should then question what you're doing if nobody wants your business) its still technically possible to go it on your own. And once again, as long as you're not being generally abusive its possible to have good success.
Comparing getting banned from Gmail might as well be the same as comparing getting banned from McDonalds. McDonalds isn't a common carrier no matter how much you like Big Macs. There's plenty of other restaurants available.
You are omitting telephone service, which is also a common carrier despite being arguably more competitive than the Big 3 cloud providers.
That's where I personally would come down. This decision is ridiculous; social media companies are highly competitive. But I am much, much less comfortable with AWS kicking off Parler.
If Comcast owned practically the only ISP in my area then yes they should be considered a common carrier and shouldn't be able to discriminate traffic that isn't trying to break their stuff. In that case they would be the company that owns the roads or the water mains. Facebook isn't like that in the slightest.
Could you explain how these two things are identical?
They already have taken away your liberty to speak your mind in the common public square of our society - social media - because you know they'll ban you if you say any of a wide variety of things, leading to the consequences described above.
Trump doesn’t seem to have any issue getting his message out or getting people to come to his rallies.
Before the internet existed, the entire civil rights movement was organized by leaders going to churches - even though the locations were actively being bombed, leaders were being arrested, water hosed, lynched, bitten by police dogs, etc.
Cry me a river that some conservatives can’t post on Twitter.
If I can’t use Facebook, I can use Reddit. If I can’t use YouTube, I can use Vimeo. If I can’t use Instagram, I can use TikTok or Snapchat. If conservatives get banned from Twitter, there’s a bevy of conservative-leaning Twitter clones. Plus Mastodon, which you can’t get banned from because you can just set up your own instance.
> The Texas law forbids social media companies with at least 50 million monthly active users from acting to "censor" users based on "viewpoint," and allows either users or the Texas attorney general to sue to enforce the law.
From the law (https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/872/billtext/html/HB00020F...):
> This chapter applies only to a social media platform that functionally has more than 50 million active users in the United States in a calendar month.
Also, IIRC moderation rules are allowed, and if your rule is "no politics on the forum" and someone talks politics, they can be banned. Same with "no racism" or "no antisemitic comments."
No, only by a reading of a made up text that some people wish was in section 230. If you're bringing it up I'm sure you've had pointed out before that there is no publisher/platform distinction in it.
> Also, IIRC moderation rules are allowed, and if your rule is "no politics on the forum" and someone talks politics, they can be banned.
The first person you ban is going to argue with you about the definition of "politics". So many people have been through this idea before, and it always leads right back to "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone".
Do you think this is unclear?
> No provider or user of an interactive com- puter service shall be held liable on account of—
> (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, exces- sively violent, harassing, or otherwise objec- tionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected;
To be clear, I don't agree with those interpretations of section 230 - and neither do many judges.
To pretend that it is when it actually isn't is a lie.
So trim the conversation all you like, just don't pretend that you aren't doing it.
An "accounting of all trimming" might be appropriate here, right up front.
Or, alternatively, some kind of "untrimmed" certification.