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.
