> Nobody sees a news-paper as a public space. The fact that anybody can make a social media account and instantly publish information that can be read by anybody, and the fact that people conceptually now see public profiles as public spaces, means that we need to treat them that way.
This just doesn’t make sense to me. Ever since the first anti-spam technology was deployed, online web forums and mailing lists have employed moderation. There’s law on this going back to the early 1990s when AOL and CompuServe had to moderate their platforms. Nothing has really changed except that there are more options and more ways to get the message out than ever before.
Want a public space? Simply get a server and throw up a phpBB or wordpress or mastodon or gab or GNUSocial instance and you’ve got your own space. As president, trump could easily get the word out via email to his millions of registered supporters and they would flock to the new space and post there.
These laws made sense in the pre-social media days.
The fact that 3 billion people (from a quick Google search) are now using social media means that the goal posts have changed. 3 billion people are using the services of private companies to make their voices publicly heard. They think that they are exercising their right to freedom of speech by using something so accessible and ubiquitous. As accessible as public squares used to be.
To turn around and say "sorry, social media might be really easy to use and might be the primary form of communication for most people in the first world, but private companies should be able to control that" is very disingenuous.
The reason this is so tricky is that there is simply no historical precedent for this level of hyperconnectivity. But I certainly reject the idea of using the old laws of public vs. private companies to dictate how we as a society use the publicly accessible and readable internet.
Anyone who uses the internet has a choice of millions of websites. Everyone using twitter and seeing the twitter notification on Trump’s tweets knows that twitter placed it there. If they were outraged, they can use Google and find alternative social media sites like Mastodon or Gab.
Trump could do the same.
There is simply no comparison to a “public square” since there are easy, accessible alternatives to get the messages out over the internet.
If you want to talk about “public square”, perhaps the easiest comparison would be internet access itself. If ISPs cut off Trump’s internet connection for posting wrong think, that could be seen as a free speech issue I think. But even banning him from any specific individual website is simply a matter for that website’s owner to decide.
They don't have a choice of millions of websites. Like I said in another comment in a thread with you, the network effect is real. People go where there are other people. Nobody goes to an empty street to protest. What would be the point in that? We have allowed the most populated spaces for people to express their opinions to be controlled by private companies.
Trump has an email and SMS list with millions of supporters. He can also post on facebook whenever he wishes, or address the nation in prime time speeches that will be carried on TV channels and live streams. He can also continue to post on twitter, as twitter didn’t delete any of his tweets, so he can use network effects on twitter and simply post Gab or Mastodon links and try to get his enormous base of followers to use another platform.
His speech is not being suppressed. In fact, he’s probably the person who has the least problem in the entire country of being heard or noticed.
Edit: by the way, ask MySpace, AOL, MSN, or other failed once-popular social networks how well the “network effects” worked out. People know how to use a different website if they actually care to do so.
This just doesn’t make sense to me. Ever since the first anti-spam technology was deployed, online web forums and mailing lists have employed moderation. There’s law on this going back to the early 1990s when AOL and CompuServe had to moderate their platforms. Nothing has really changed except that there are more options and more ways to get the message out than ever before.
Want a public space? Simply get a server and throw up a phpBB or wordpress or mastodon or gab or GNUSocial instance and you’ve got your own space. As president, trump could easily get the word out via email to his millions of registered supporters and they would flock to the new space and post there.