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I don't understand why commenters in these threads keep noting that free speech only protects people from government censorship. This is a common, distracting,

I don't understand why commenters in these threads keep noting that free speech only protects people from government censorship. This is a common, distracting, and empty statement. Proponents of free speech are pro free speech as a general concept and principle, beyond what protections are afforded under American law today. The idea of free speech predates the existence of the United States. Free speech is hugely valuable to defend, because what society finds acceptable or unacceptable is very much subjective and changes with time/location/culture/setting/leadership/etc. Having an open exchange of ideas is good and necessary for the long-term health and stability of society, especially if we care about being a collectively truth-seeking society. There are also frequent comments on such articles saying that content creators can just seek another platform, which frankly seems like an obviously unhelpful suggestion. Twitter, Reddit, Patreon, and others are massive in scale and have a ubiquity and reach that isn't found elsewhere. Platforms that benefit from network effects don't face effective competition, and investors typically won't invest in new competitors in those arenas, because it is such a long shot to break through those barriers. We could argue that Patreon is not one of the platforms whose value is driven by network effects, but the underlying payment processors (e.g. Visa) definitely benefit from network effects. And of course, Visa has deplatformed many parties, including famously, Wikileaks back in 2010. There are also examples of folks who followed that advice and left Patreon for other platforms (e.g. SubscribeStar) and then got deplatformed (e.g. by Stripe or PayPal). There are examples of lower-level entities like Visa/Mastercard _forcing_ platforms built on top of them to censor someone or risk being banned by them. Clearly, these privately-owned platforms are monopolies or oligopolies in a sense, holding access to large segments of the population with no competitive forces acting on them. Alternatively, we can look at them as being the digital public square, and therefore they should be subject to regulation that prevents them from taking action beyond what the law in their jurisdiction requires. The big risk is this: when only a few entities funnel so much societal discourse or control our communication infrastructure or process payments, those entities making arbitrary decisions about who they serve has similar impacts/risks to the government imposing similar restrictions through the law. These companies should not act as a moral police and should not impose their own personal governance above what is minimally required by the law. Nor should they rely on the judgment of an angry mob to make decisions.

darawk 8y ago
It's an interesting problem. Speech has never truly been free, sometimes and in some places its been regulated by government, but in modern liberal democracies its been regulated by culture. Polite society regulates speech by rejecting people who engage in whatever that society views as harmful speech. Social media platforms and the internet generally, substantially weaken the power of culture to regulate speech in the way that it used to. I don't know what we do about this. We don't want government regulating speech, and it doesn't seem like allowing social media platforms to regulate it arbitrarily is particularly good either. But the gates that culture and localism placed on speech in the past did, seemingly, serve some useful purpose. Do we want to live in a world where speech is truly unregulated, even by shame or culture? Maybe. It's possible that the answer here is yes we do, that sunlight is always the best disinfectant, and that the truth always emerges victorious in the end. But it's also possible that those things aren't true. I don't have an answer, but I don't think one way or the other is the obviously correct path forward either.
- manfredo 8y ago
  > Social media platforms and the internet generally, substantially weaken the power of culture to regulate speech in the way that it used to. I fail to see how this is the case. It does absolutely grant the power to regulate speech. What Social media platforms have changes is that the people who are carrying out the informal regulation of speech have shifted to being a very narrow subset of the population, and one that is overwhelmingly made up of one category of culture. Tech, especially in the Bay Area, is effectively a political monoculture. Support for Republicans is often in the single digits[0]. The evidence really does indicate that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Despite the constant concern over Trump's comments on immigrants, for example, support for immigration in the US is at record levels.[1][2] Despite the concern over explicitly fascist rallies at Charlottesville and DC, these rallies actually cased a significant drop in support for far-right.[3] And lastly, while the Republican has become a party of Trump and has adopted much of his rhetoric the result has been largely bad for the party. They lost over a dozen seats in the midterm election - surprising given that the midterms are when the Republicans tend to do well. Yes, sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the data demonstrates it. Ironic, then, that some would want to shield these views that they despise from said disinfectant. 0. https://www.recode.net/2018/10/31/18039528/tech-employees-politics-liberal-employers-candidates https://www.recode.net/2018/10/31/18039528/tech-employees-po... 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/us/immigration-polls-donald-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/us/immigration-polls-dona... 2. https://news.gallup.com/poll/235793/record-high-americans-say-immigration-good-thing.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/235793/record-high-americans-sa... 3. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/09/alt-weakened-dead-charlottesville-170920081948414.html https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/09/alt-weake...

darawk 8y ago

It's an interesting problem. Speech has never truly been free, sometimes and in some places its been regulated by government, but in modern liberal democracies its been regulated by culture. Polite society regulates speech by rejecting people who engage in whatever that society views as harmful speech. Social media platforms and the internet generally, substantially weaken the power of culture to regulate speech in the way that it used to. I don't know what we do about this. We don't want government regulating speech, and it doesn't seem like allowing social media platforms to regulate it arbitrarily is particularly good either. But the gates that culture and localism placed on speech in the past did, seemingly, serve some useful purpose. Do we want to live in a world where speech is truly unregulated, even by shame or culture? Maybe. It's possible that the answer here is yes we do, that sunlight is always the best disinfectant, and that the truth always emerges victorious in the end. But it's also possible that those things aren't true. I don't have an answer, but I don't think one way or the other is the obviously correct path forward either.

manfredo 8y ago
> Social media platforms and the internet generally, substantially weaken the power of culture to regulate speech in the way that it used to. I fail to see how this is the case. It does absolutely grant the power to regulate speech. What Social media platforms have changes is that the people who are carrying out the informal regulation of speech have shifted to being a very narrow subset of the population, and one that is overwhelmingly made up of one category of culture. Tech, especially in the Bay Area, is effectively a political monoculture. Support for Republicans is often in the single digits[0]. The evidence really does indicate that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Despite the constant concern over Trump's comments on immigrants, for example, support for immigration in the US is at record levels.[1][2] Despite the concern over explicitly fascist rallies at Charlottesville and DC, these rallies actually cased a significant drop in support for far-right.[3] And lastly, while the Republican has become a party of Trump and has adopted much of his rhetoric the result has been largely bad for the party. They lost over a dozen seats in the midterm election - surprising given that the midterms are when the Republicans tend to do well. Yes, sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the data demonstrates it. Ironic, then, that some would want to shield these views that they despise from said disinfectant. 0. https://www.recode.net/2018/10/31/18039528/tech-employees-politics-liberal-employers-candidates https://www.recode.net/2018/10/31/18039528/tech-employees-po... 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/us/immigration-polls-donald-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/us/immigration-polls-dona... 2. https://news.gallup.com/poll/235793/record-high-americans-say-immigration-good-thing.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/235793/record-high-americans-sa... 3. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/09/alt-weakened-dead-charlottesville-170920081948414.html https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/09/alt-weake...