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Don’t Let Zuckerberg Kill Free Speech

10 points by andrenth 7y ago

olliej 7y ago
This is basically the slippery slope argument, with a slap dash addition of "suppressing the conservatives" commentary at the end - noting that if your "conservative speech" is indistinguishable from hate speech, maybe you need to reconsider your life choices? Not sure I agree with the counter claim - FB should be required to reproduce all content and allow any person to join irrespective of their comments and/or behaviour - essentially it slippery slopes its way to "should the NYT be required to run an OpEd by [insert serial killer, or whatever here]"? On the other hand: it seems that requiring them not to censor would require saying that a corporation is not a person under the constitution, which would mean corporations would lose the ability to enforce their religious beliefs on their employees?
manfredo 7y ago
This is one of those problems where the sickness is uncomfortable but the readily available remedies probably do more harm than good. Facebook and internet platforms more broadly definitely seem to enforce double standards on what is and isn't allowed on their platforms. This is very likely due to the narrow set of viewpoints (or more importantly, voiced viewpoints) at these companies. I worked in 2-3,000 person tech company in San Francisco 2015-2019 and interned at other Bay Area companies, and I can attest that there's a pretty strong liberal monoculture going on there. That the hammer comes down on conservative speech is pretty clearly apparent to me, and I don't think this is good for society in a platform as big as Facebook et. al. On the other hand, this is entirely within their rights. These are private companies and they have no obligation to host content impartially. Any legislation on this would be a pretty flagrant violation of the First Amendment. Not to mention this requirement is just hopelessly hard to enforce, and is bound to be subjective and prone to abuse if some body is given authority to define this for all online companies. The only argument that can feasibly be made is to treat Facebook and other platforms like utilities - a power company can't just decide to not do business with people they don't like. But that's extremely far-fetched. I think good argument can be made to treat server hosting providers, payment processors, and domain name providers like utilities. It's not hard to create your own forum, but it is prohibitively hard to set up your own server farm, lay your own fiber cable, and somehow get users to connect to your site with just an IP. I could get behind treating the infra as a utility, splitting hairs over the platforms themselves is not a priority for me. As long as the infrastructure doesn't discriminate, the market will sort things out of the incumbents don't stay on top of things as far as providing a good public forum.

10 points by andrenth 7y ago

This is basically the slippery slope argument, with a slap dash addition of "suppressing the conservatives" commentary at the end - noting that if your "conservative speech" is indistinguishable from hate speech, maybe you need to reconsider your life choices? Not sure I agree with the counter claim - FB should be required to reproduce all content and allow any person to join irrespective of their comments and/or behaviour - essentially it slippery slopes its way to "should the NYT be required to run an OpEd by [insert serial killer, or whatever here]"? On the other hand: it seems that requiring them not to censor would require saying that a corporation is not a person under the constitution, which would mean corporations would lose the ability to enforce their religious beliefs on their employees?

manfredo 7y ago

This is one of those problems where the sickness is uncomfortable but the readily available remedies probably do more harm than good. Facebook and internet platforms more broadly definitely seem to enforce double standards on what is and isn't allowed on their platforms. This is very likely due to the narrow set of viewpoints (or more importantly, voiced viewpoints) at these companies. I worked in 2-3,000 person tech company in San Francisco 2015-2019 and interned at other Bay Area companies, and I can attest that there's a pretty strong liberal monoculture going on there. That the hammer comes down on conservative speech is pretty clearly apparent to me, and I don't think this is good for society in a platform as big as Facebook et. al. On the other hand, this is entirely within their rights. These are private companies and they have no obligation to host content impartially. Any legislation on this would be a pretty flagrant violation of the First Amendment. Not to mention this requirement is just hopelessly hard to enforce, and is bound to be subjective and prone to abuse if some body is given authority to define this for all online companies. The only argument that can feasibly be made is to treat Facebook and other platforms like utilities - a power company can't just decide to not do business with people they don't like. But that's extremely far-fetched. I think good argument can be made to treat server hosting providers, payment processors, and domain name providers like utilities. It's not hard to create your own forum, but it is prohibitively hard to set up your own server farm, lay your own fiber cable, and somehow get users to connect to your site with just an IP. I could get behind treating the infra as a utility, splitting hairs over the platforms themselves is not a priority for me. As long as the infrastructure doesn't discriminate, the market will sort things out of the incumbents don't stay on top of things as far as providing a good public forum.