Free speech is about the government, not whatever private social platform on the internet. Thank god we are allowed to moderate content, every "free speech" absolutist platform is 1. a lie (they regularly censor opinions against theirs) 2. instantly become a cesspool full of edgy people who find it extrimely funny and worth their time to pollute the whole plateform with slurs.
You're talking about free speech in the narrow sense it is defined by the US first amendment to the constitution is. This is a pretty narrow definition, and people also use it in broader senses of the word. The UN Declaration on human rights[^1] writes the following for instance (making no limitation to governments):
>Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
If you want to go this way, then the article 4,5 and 10 of the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen is much more interesting.
But even by the U.N definition, the only part that could be of concern here is "receive and impart information and ideas through any media", but how exactly would that be put in place ? It is not like you can go to your local radio station and ask them to give you the mic since this is your right to impart information and ideas through any media.
Radio is the media. It just means you ought to be able to broadcast pirate radio without a permission slip from the government to use the airwaves in a constrained range of speech. Not that you ought to be able to take over someone else's pirate radio. Unless of course they say the F word, then you can rat them out and the FCC can send their skull crackers or whatever they do to stop it.
Similarly with internet. You can make your own web server. You can't just hijack someone else's web server or send government goons to make them say what you want.
I would argue the spectra of human vocal speech is more constrained than the far wider spectra of radio waves. What most places do is just limit sound beyond a certain level rather than requiring a license to play electronic sounds or talk. In the end most forms of communication are constrained -- you can only cut down so many trees or tree alternatives for newspaper, so I don't think this argument about licensing holds as presented.
By centralizing communication like Facebook has, they’ve placed themselves in the funky place of being the arbiter for communication through their social graph. You don’t own your audience, they do. You don’t have direct to audience communication (even if your audience is just your friends and family!) - they do.
Facebook owns the content delivery channel. And so they control what is permitted to flow through that channel.
I honestly don’t think there is a role government has to play in this [1]. This isn’t a regulation thing IMO, it’s an architecture thing. I think the solution is to agree with you on your points and build platforms that allow people to communicate directly with their audience without having to go through any centralized gate keeper.
[1] other than stopping the laundering of 1st amendment violations they’ve committed through the loophole of separating censorship “requests” from enforcement.
Well there is one legal avenue we could have which is around interoperability. We could pass regulations that force social media companies to provide interoperable access to data there by making the platforms independent
> By centralizing human communication like Facebook has, they’ve placed themselves in the funky place of being the arbiter for communication through their social graph. You don’t own your audience, they do. You don’t have direct to audience communication (even if your audience is just your friends and family!) - they do.
Respectfully mate, how is that any different than radio, TV and newspaper before ?
If anything, it is far better now, you have at least many platform to choose from and you can host your own.
We understood the danger of centralization with radio and newspapers, that's why there was a limitation on how many stations one individual/company could own.
The current state of jurisprudence on this is nearer than you think to the side of Youtube must not violate your first amendment rights. I think the original reasoning mostly holds, despite youtube not being an actual town.
I don't understand this position. Why do people want private companies to decide what's allowed and what isn't? Shouldn't lawmakers, and by extension the people (at least in democratic countries) decide what speech is allowed and what isn't?
The number of people using social media makes it the town square of the present. We should treat it as such.
Because it works, and is a requirement to have a functional platform at all.
First, commercial speech is certainly speech. If you don't restrict anything at all, your platform will drown in a constant deluge of spam. So on that basis alone there's something you must remove if you want to have any kind of conversations happening, and therefore can't be an actual absolutist.
Second, there's illegal and just icky content. Posting pictures of poo isn't illegal. It can be "speech" after a fashion. That will also quickly result in people leaving.
Third, a free-for-all is only tolerable to a small segment of the population. HN for instance only works because it's moderated and curated. You can have something like r/worldpolitics which embodies the "no moderation" ideal. It's a subreddit where the moderators do the absolute minimum Reddit requires. Meaning it's mostly porn. And what's the point in having more than one of those? They're all more or less the same.
The problem is the algorithms that surface people's posts to those not friends with or following them. That's what turns a basic and true "social media" into a hyper-competitive arena which encourages a race to the bottom, to make the cheapest content possible to grab eyeballs.
"Social media" should not be a hyper-concentrated collection of advertising targets. That single aspect has probably caused 99% of "social medial ills.
Quippy, but off the cuff:
- I don’t go to my present town square(s) socially because it is full of a-social behavior. Same reason to avoid certain bars or clubs, prefer certain parks, or why some are wary of public transit.
- I don’t feel a right to decide the vibe of how a business curates its space. My bakery, coffee shop, local library, etc. all curate a space with an opinion. I don’t feel I have standing to assert that my preferences should dominate their choices.
As an aside, businesses are also an extension of the people, the best ones tend to just not be mode collapsed
In case you haven't noticed, the people running the government now shouldn't be trusted to run a McDonald's franchise, much less decide what speech is allowed and what isn't. Ditto for the voters who elected said government.
> The number of people using social media makes it the town square of the present. We should treat it as such.
Then try yelling racial slurs in your local town square and see how that goes for ya.
> I don't understand this position. Why do people want private companies to decide what's allowed and what isn't? Shouldn't lawmakers, and by extension the people (at least in democratic countries) decide what speech is allowed and what isn't?
Why shouldn't I be allowed to police what can be said on my private property ? If you are in my home yelling racist stuff, I will ask you to leave, and make you leave if you refuse. I don't see why I shouldn't be able to do the same on my plateform. If you want to yell racial slurs, you can go to truth social or whatever.
i believe there is a general understanding that public spaces should allow free expression up to a point, but definitely not silence for political reasons. Facebook can be considered broadly a public space because it is so widely popular and monopolistic in a way that previous media have never been. There is a limit to calling something private when it is being used by so many , and it is separate from its private company ownership. If it were a niche site nobody cares. BTW "we" don't moderate anything, the people who run those websites do
Facebook is not a public space. You can make your own website and platform if you want to say thing that they don't want you saying over there. You cannot make your own government on the other hand, hence why it is important to point out the difference.
Free speech is a about whether a society values and protects free speech or not.
If a society values and protects free speech, we would observe institutions, businesses, and individuals being very permissive and polite to speech they find objectionable.
If it doesn't, we would observe that its government doesn't care much about free speech either.
Free speech involves making sometimes uncomfortable sacrifices for a principle. Why would anyone support a government making such sacrifices if they don't believe in making such sacrifices at an individual level?
> Free speech is a about whether a society values and protects free speech or not.
That is a recursive and meaningless definition. Free speech is widely understood, and codified, as being able to say stuff without having the government send you to jail for it.
That is a pretty basic requirement for a functional democracy. Altough, depending on where you live, even free speech does not mean fully free. In the U.S it is mostly limited by libel/defamation, but in a lot of country hate speech is not allowed. Whether you think it is a good thing or not that is up to you, but this is actual free speech.
Freedom of speech, in the other hand, is part of a moral code that believes in inalienable rights, that humans implicitly have the right to express themselves. The government does not grant the right to freedom of speech, because we already have it. The first amendment says that the government must respect that right, but creating the right.
Perhaps but it's because you two are talking past each other. The free speech some people refer to are that devised under the concept of classical liberalism which spawned the bill of rights, under which the right to free speech is a right to not have your speech interfered with by government. Not a right to compel others to display your speech, as under that system you would be violating their right to free speech by making them say that was actually what was just your speech.
I dont know why anyone wouldnt be. Why would people, at this point, not approach the things Zuck, or Musk, say without extreme caution? They want to be rich god kings, they dont care about free speech. They say stuff they think will move the needle that direction.
I think there's another explanation that works just as well to explain the observed behavior:
A large percentage of people genuinely buy into the "just world" fallacy, regardless of whether they consciously recognize this. They believe that if someone is in a position of power, they deserve to have that power.
Of course, many of them also believe that, variously, the world is inherently just, people are inherently good, or the world's structure is ordained by a loving God. Therefore, these people deserving power isn't just Fated, it's also because they're better people. Smarter, better leaders, possessed of the qualities that fit one to rule.
Therefore, "the people in power are smart, have the best interests of the many at heart, and are worth listening to" is effectively axiomatic for a great many people in our society.
I took religious studies in college and one consistent thing across most stories in religion is that the kings, emperors, and other people in powerful positions are almost always evil and commit heinous atrocities so people not being to draw the parallel to people living today is disappointing to say the least.
Not too difficult to realize what they mean is "please feel comfortable posting your most radical opinions and we'll signal boost the ones that help our agenda"
You should really only get one pass for human rights violations before skepticism is the default response. Facebook already used theirs on genocide. After something like that, why should the public give them any benefit of the doubt?
Zuckerberg is committed to Zuckerberg. If it makes Meta profitable and raises the value of his estate, he’ll do that. If that’s allowing alternative health nuts sell their ancient cancer healing remedies on Facebook, he’ll do that. If that’s selling user profile data to DOGE for a big juicy contract, he’ll do it.
Regulation and enforcement has to come from somewhere and it won’t be Meta.
Considering the big donors and membership[0] of this organization its definitely not an unbiased take and is trying to frame any discussion over regulating hate speech as a radical anti-first amendment stance and makes an unsubstantiated claim that one Republican house member using their chairman position to "investigate" Lina Khan[1] as if the Republican house committee had no ulterior motive seeing as their donor class was very critical of FTC regulations under her leadership, never mind that nothing the committee claimed was substantiated.
It's still very easy to get a moderation strike because your post or comment contained a word that maybe in certain contexts (not necessarily one in your post) could maybe probably offend a group of people. It's almost as if Facebook had remote villages that didn't get the memo from their overlord.
Facebook put itself in a monopoly position by buying out the competition and tried to push an 'internet' where only their products were accessible. They did everything possible to attempt to monopolize but now don't want to be treated as a monopoly.
The problem is not whether Zuck allows free speech on his platforms. The problem is that his platforms are so powerful that it matters whether he does or not.
We are approaching Marky Mark and the Zucky bunch completely wrong. The rhetoric we use is as if he was running a government department (freedom of speech) and not the largest publisher in human history. On some level, I feel like our regulatory or philosophical model for how to approach Facebook is based on cable TV news, where people often argue for a return to the fairness doctrine.
Facebook is completely different from cable news. Nothing in history has encompassed marshall mcluhan's idea of the global village quite like modern social media has. The grip that Facebook has on our central nervous system is unparalleled and we talk about it in terms of "fairness" and "representing viewpoints" and not "biologically, neurologically, how is this technology fundamentally changing what it means to be a human being".
I don't know how to pass legislation to do so, but I believe it's in our best interests, as a society, if the maximum natural size of a website is like, 100k users, MAX. With the diversity of communities available, fairness of moderation will no longer be as important because you have more alternatives than the billionaire consensus factory
That's an interesting take, AND it is enforceable.
It's very difficult to serve immense numbers of people with social media. Scaling takes resources and technical expertise and lots of energy. You could treat it like trying to catch pot growers by watching their electric bills. I don't think there's a way around that, technically: to do the monoculture (and control it) absolutely requires intention, resources and concentration of effort in an obvious way.
Yeah, you can secretly administer multiple internet social communities and pretend it's not you, but that already happens too, and it's less effective than the monoculture, plus if you're doing that it smells funny, makes people ask 'why are we being governed to think this way through secret avenues' which is something people strangely don't ask about the monoculture.
Whether you can get society to sign on to this 'central control can get this big and no bigger' is much like asserting 'rich men can get this rich and no richer'.
You are of course correct, as far as scale, but I can't help feeling skeptical about how equivalent its effects are when compared to old media. On VJ day, practically every American read the headline in one of a handful of the nation's biggest newspapers. Today, we'd find this news from a post by our favorite influencer, with a built-in twist to boost engagement. There's no doubt social media has blanketed our society in its influence. but the signal has been completely scattered, lost in the sea of noise. In terms of simply learning new things, it's in one ear and out the other. You can learn all kinds of things through social media, but it requires a great deal of effort to weed out the torrent of irrelevant, useless junk data.
We shouldn't need any new laws since it's so fundamentally and blatantly explained in the first amendment that no government official shall tell anyone what they can or can't say. SCOTUS has carved out certain language about credible threats of incitement of violence and the like and I'm ok with that.
Where it gets muddy though is during COVID+Social Media, we found a new threat against speech, e.g. the suppression of "reach" which accomplishes the exact same goal as suppressing speech, but it's legality is clouded by semantics.
So we desperately need new laws clarifying that government officials may not suppress 'reach' just because they don't like what a person or persons are saying, and most importantly we need it crystal clear that this applies even in the face of a pandemic, so that the government's embedded rent seekers can't once again force a lying narrative on the people that nobody can find their way out of, save for those who engage in 'conspiracy theories' and listen to 'conspiracy theorists'.
Government officials are permitted to issue recommendations to private entities. Private entities are permitted to follow or disregard those recommendations. For an example presumably compatible with your world view, a government official recommending a private company remove their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) program; a company may choose to follow or disregard this advice.
If there is evidence of improper coersion by government employees, for example threatening to withhold public funding or permitting based on political views, that would likely be illegal and indeed should be handled by the judicial branch.
I think public health officials should be able to make content moderation recommendations to publishers. In fact, I think they have a responsibility to do so. If someone is knowingly publishing false information which could harm people, public health officials have a responsibility to at least offer counter-guidance to the publisher and make objections clear. They obviously don't have the right to silence them, but they don't do that already.
To me, we should be less concerned with how a platform is moderated and more concerned with the fact that the most successful, influential, and devious publishing empire in human history is essentially the personal property of one man.
The problem with this is that if you allow people to spread big enough lies you end up with things like the Rohingya massacre, or the resurgence of measles. You will of course reply "I don't care, my free speech is worth any number of lives of other humans", but other humans may take a different view.
History repeatedly shows the collective intelligence of the masses is superior to government bureaucrats. Every, single, time. I specifically mentioned COVID because everything we take for granted now as basic truths were revealed very early on in the pandemic, but got suppressed by bureaucrats who thought they knew better (or were paid not to know better).
The wisdom of the crowds has some domains where it's good, and others where it's bad.
Bandwagons, groupthink, whatever you want to call it, that effect is also real. If I pick a random person and ask them what they think the "basic truths" of COVID are, 20-40% of the stuff they will say will still be false today — it just doesn't matter any more that they're wrong.
I feel this should be easy to spot by having two large populations that hold mutually incompatible beliefs, such as the way Americans love the 2nd amendment while the UK bans not only guns but also knives in pubic without good reason.
> We shouldn't need any new laws since it's so fundamentally and blatantly explained in the first amendment that no government official shall tell anyone what they can or can't say.
That's neither what the First Amendment says explicitly nor how it is applied by the courts (though the way each of those differs from your description is quite distinct.)
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