If the government says vaccine misinformation is killing thousands of people on air on the evening news and Facebook agrees and starts banning people posting it and those folks have to share their misinformation on their own sites rather than Facebook how has your freedom been infringed?

Likewise if the communique takes place via a memo.

You have a right to communicate what you please you don't have a right to have your thoughts carried by a particular site any more than you have a right to have them posted in the New York Times or relayed on Fox News.

The government has no authority to decide for me whether something is misinformation. They can share their opinions and I'll be the judge of what I trust. If Facebook reaches the same conclusion independently, without being coerced by the government, I'd react according to how I feel about the specific issue. Maybe I'd stop using the platform. I'm not claiming NYT or FB needs to publish my views, I don't expect that at all. What I don't want is the government telling them what they can and can't publish.

Yeah that works great up until the people who distribute memos act like Facebook, and then the people who sell you ink, and then the phone companies, and then ....

Really why is this so hard to understand. There's nothing special about tech firms in this story except the naivety of their executives, who have ended up looking like utter tools in this whole sorry charade. These idiots systematically suppressed discussion of the lab leak hypothesis for over a year and then once the Biden admin started taking it seriously decided, whoops, maybe it wasn't misinformation after all and stopped banning it. Twitter was systematically banning stuff even whilst expressing serious reservations internally because they knew the claims were true. Yet these firms are nonetheless still doing better than Google, at least Facebook and Twitter realized they were wrong in the end.

This thread seems to be full of FAANG employees desperately trying to come up with some reason why their employers are not in fact easily duped rubes who would sew the mouths of their own mothers shut if a 100% conflicted mid-level nobody at the CDC suggested it.

I think it’s very, very generous to excuse this behavior as that of naive rubes. These people are simply currying favor with those in power hoping for something in return.

You must be right that there's an element of that, but I still think most of it especially at the lower levels of the orgs is that these people genuinely have adopted the "if a civil servant says it, it must be true" way of thinking.

I agree for the most part, but the only thing that keeps me wholesale from this is the idea that all social media posts are US citizens.

What if, and I'm not suggesting it is, 100% of the posts in question where from foreign actors looking to disrupt the US? Is the government in no way allowed to step in? Is that even censorship?

In my view that's to be expected and I'd want no intervention from the government at all. I would view that as censorship. Gov. is not there to decide for me which ideas are disruptive, I don't want them or anyone in that role. To those in power, any dissent could be spun as disruption to their agenda.

So your fine with a foreign power using bullying tactics to silence your fellow citizens, undermining thier right to free speech?

Because that's what you're actually arguing for.... And if you still support that position despite being informed of this fact, then I have to question exactly who You are working for....

Goal posts moved. I don't know anything about bullying - if that’s going on, prosecute that for what it is. Sounds like a possible law enforcement issue that needs to be investigated. I’ve worked at enough tech companies to know I don't want them trying to handle it. Freedom of speech is about protecting ideas you may hate and find utterly horrible.

And a big middle finger to you for that last dig there. My family fought in the American Revolution - worked for ourselves then and still do now.

Russian and Chinese troll farms...

Do I really need to say more?

They are engaged in active disinformation and harrassment campaigns funded directly by government.

Or are you being willfully daft?

And I then there's the Israeli and Iranian efforts, let alone the hundred other government funded agencies with thousands of agents whose sole purpose is to bully and intimidate.

There are plenty of authoritarian nanny states that agree with you that government censorship is the answer to these problems. For now, in the US, that's still illegal and we'll continue to oppose you on this til the end.

... did you really not even take a moment to try to comprehend what was being raised, or did you actively choose to ignore it?

The issue is the need to silence those bad actors, not citizens of one's own nation. There needs to be mechanisms in place.

We can dither on the particulars, with my belief the same as yours regarding domestic censorship of good faith actors, but there definitely should be action taken to minimize the harms externally funded or situated bad actors cause.

Do you really not agree with that? Because then you may as well start waving one of the foreign flags now...

By foreign actors do you just mean foreign people in general or something more specific. Because using the word "actors" give what you say an ominous overtone, but I can't figure out how it's not that you believe in some generic but wide ranging conspiracy of non-Americans to disrupt America with .... opinions. Those things that Americans are famously lacking and reluctant to espouse.

No. I don't trust a government trying to prevent me from seeing information outside our borders for my "safety". Banning receiving foreign broadcasts is a staple of authoritarian governments (I'm not saying it's a sufficient condition, but a non-authoritarian government would have no need or desire to)