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In 2020, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Cloudflare are bigger gatekeepers of free speech than any government.

scarface74 6y ago
any government? Tell that to people who live in China, N. Korea, or any country controlled by a theocracy. Even in the US some states ban doctors from talking about abortion and/or force doctors to give women seeking an abortion false information.
- spacebear 6y ago
  Yes, any government when you account for overall reach. Just because some governments have censored more content to date, doesn’t mean they’re more powerful than the US tech monopolies. If a link can’t be shared on Facebook, Google, or Twitter, it may as well not exist in most of the world.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Well those governments are “more powerful” because they can jail their citizens and kill them. The threat of death has an amazing ability to keep people quiet. Heck when you can literally close off entire markets, private corporations censor themselves.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  China has 1.4 billion people. Facebook has over 3 billion users. Gmail has over 2 billion active users. All their products combined probably have more than 3 billion. US has 350 million people. By those numbers alone, aren't tech companies more powerful arbitrators? But that's a bad metric. We should talk about enforcement rather than raw numbers. Government's interest and design won't allow it to censor expressions in the same way that private companies [0] do. Private companies can filter anything and since tech companies are digital, the enforcement itself can scale a lot more than government. Government maintains some sort of appeal system while tech companies don't have to. Algorithms responsible for gmail filter billions of mails daily probably. Obviously, not all of it can be called censorship as majority of it is spam but anything wrongfully filtered is censorship, no? That's going to be a huge number that can't scale offline in enforcement. 0] https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-users-discrimination/ https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us... [1]https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2019/05/shocking-truth-about-how-many-emails-sent https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2019/05...
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Enforcement offline is hard to scale and limited even for china. You don’t have to tell 1 billion people in China not to say F%%% China”. You just punish a few and the rest fall in line. Once you punish a few, the rest self censor.
    - searchableguy 6y ago
      Isn't that the same online but with greater enforcement? It's less severe, sure.
    - tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
      Imagine if Facebook or Google started doing this. "Oh, you're friends with someone who says X? Welp, you must be a Bad User and your posts will receive a lot less visibility and the validation that you desire. But if you were to stop interacting with your Bad Friend, you could become a Good User again." And oops, "Bad Friend" no longer gets invited to real-life parties because most people still consider FB the most convenient way to organize them and people only rarely remember to forward the invites.
      - manicdee 6y ago
        It already does work like this with Facebook and Twitter controlling which posts are displayed for you. The enforcement works better when you aren’t aware of it. Being covert means you don’t protest so loudly.
  - myself248 6y ago
    Or, if you're China, you force companies to censor their users as a condition of operating in your country. Bam, your reach has just expanded to 3+ billion people, most of whom aren't even your citizens.
- emiliovesprini 6y ago
  Okay but replace that with most governments and the point still stands.
zajd 6y ago
There are better ways of fixing that than allowing nazism on Facebook
catalogia 6y ago
Don't you know that serfs living in digital fiefdoms don't have rights? They're living on the lord's property and the lord's property rights must be respected above all else.
kilo_bravo_3 6y ago
Please stop this. It cheapens speech and denigrates those ACTUALLY living without freedoms. Facebook, Google, Twitter, or any other online service for that matter controlling what is and is not said on their platform is not "gatekeeping" anything. Posting something on Facebook is not now, has never been, and will never be "free speech". No matter how much you want it to be.
- lostmyoldone 6y ago
  While hyperbolic regarding the biggest, certainly not the most serious and acknowledging the important distinction caused by the censor being a government, or some other actor as per how severe consequences the censorship are likely to be, the retort that what is published on Facebook can never be free speech can only be true if you redefine what free speech is, and seems to me to be hyperbolic that it diminishes an otherwise reasonable objection regarding severity. Facebook has almost certainly already removed what would be considered free speech according to the UN declaration of human rights, it's unlikely that none of the thousands of government critical posts it removed in India alone at the behest of the government could be considered free speech in the human rights sense. If you're referring to free speech in the US, while generally agreed that companies acting on their own volition can not be seen as suppressing free speech, it is not impossible they could be considered a state actor through several means, including their censorship rules considered as influenced by government policy. Since it's not impossible to rule out that some speech on Facebook might at some point be free speech in the US legal sense, and that much of it is free speech in the human rights sense, it is not entirely incorrect to talk about free speech on Facebook, but entirely incorrect as far as I can tell to claim it can never be. Personally I think it's ethically problematic to require companies to give voice to everyone equally, but it's also somewhat problematic to allow complete freedom of what or who to reject when companies and their services become large enough to be an integral part of society's fabric, and perhaps the political debate. In some way companies like Facebook has a similar function as asphalt, it simplifies communication greatly, but it's not really whether or not a piece of land is covered in asphalt made by a private or government entity that determines what is public or private. It's not who made the asphalt, and in several countries it's not even who owns then area under the asphalt, but rather how the covered place is used as determined by interpretation of law. Twitter is probably more similar to a public place as it is, but Facebook's marketplaces, events, and groups nevertheless implies character in a direction that can be interpreted similarly.

any government? Tell that to people who live in China, N. Korea, or any country controlled by a theocracy. Even in the US some states ban doctors from talking about abortion and/or force doctors to give women seeking an abortion false information.

spacebear 6y ago
Yes, any government when you account for overall reach. Just because some governments have censored more content to date, doesn’t mean they’re more powerful than the US tech monopolies. If a link can’t be shared on Facebook, Google, or Twitter, it may as well not exist in most of the world.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Well those governments are “more powerful” because they can jail their citizens and kill them. The threat of death has an amazing ability to keep people quiet. Heck when you can literally close off entire markets, private corporations censor themselves.
searchableguy 6y ago
China has 1.4 billion people. Facebook has over 3 billion users. Gmail has over 2 billion active users. All their products combined probably have more than 3 billion. US has 350 million people. By those numbers alone, aren't tech companies more powerful arbitrators? But that's a bad metric. We should talk about enforcement rather than raw numbers. Government's interest and design won't allow it to censor expressions in the same way that private companies [0] do. Private companies can filter anything and since tech companies are digital, the enforcement itself can scale a lot more than government. Government maintains some sort of appeal system while tech companies don't have to. Algorithms responsible for gmail filter billions of mails daily probably. Obviously, not all of it can be called censorship as majority of it is spam but anything wrongfully filtered is censorship, no? That's going to be a huge number that can't scale offline in enforcement. 0] https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-users-discrimination/ https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us... [1]https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2019/05/shocking-truth-about-how-many-emails-sent https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2019/05...
- scarface74 6y ago
  Enforcement offline is hard to scale and limited even for china. You don’t have to tell 1 billion people in China not to say F%%% China”. You just punish a few and the rest fall in line. Once you punish a few, the rest self censor.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    Isn't that the same online but with greater enforcement? It's less severe, sure.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
    Imagine if Facebook or Google started doing this. "Oh, you're friends with someone who says X? Welp, you must be a Bad User and your posts will receive a lot less visibility and the validation that you desire. But if you were to stop interacting with your Bad Friend, you could become a Good User again." And oops, "Bad Friend" no longer gets invited to real-life parties because most people still consider FB the most convenient way to organize them and people only rarely remember to forward the invites.
    - manicdee 6y ago
      It already does work like this with Facebook and Twitter controlling which posts are displayed for you. The enforcement works better when you aren’t aware of it. Being covert means you don’t protest so loudly.
- myself248 6y ago
  Or, if you're China, you force companies to censor their users as a condition of operating in your country. Bam, your reach has just expanded to 3+ billion people, most of whom aren't even your citizens.
emiliovesprini 6y ago
Okay but replace that with most governments and the point still stands.

zajd 6y ago

There are better ways of fixing that than allowing nazism on Facebook

catalogia 6y ago

Don't you know that serfs living in digital fiefdoms don't have rights? They're living on the lord's property and the lord's property rights must be respected above all else.

kilo_bravo_3 6y ago

Please stop this. It cheapens speech and denigrates those ACTUALLY living without freedoms. Facebook, Google, Twitter, or any other online service for that matter controlling what is and is not said on their platform is not "gatekeeping" anything. Posting something on Facebook is not now, has never been, and will never be "free speech". No matter how much you want it to be.

lostmyoldone 6y ago
While hyperbolic regarding the biggest, certainly not the most serious and acknowledging the important distinction caused by the censor being a government, or some other actor as per how severe consequences the censorship are likely to be, the retort that what is published on Facebook can never be free speech can only be true if you redefine what free speech is, and seems to me to be hyperbolic that it diminishes an otherwise reasonable objection regarding severity. Facebook has almost certainly already removed what would be considered free speech according to the UN declaration of human rights, it's unlikely that none of the thousands of government critical posts it removed in India alone at the behest of the government could be considered free speech in the human rights sense. If you're referring to free speech in the US, while generally agreed that companies acting on their own volition can not be seen as suppressing free speech, it is not impossible they could be considered a state actor through several means, including their censorship rules considered as influenced by government policy. Since it's not impossible to rule out that some speech on Facebook might at some point be free speech in the US legal sense, and that much of it is free speech in the human rights sense, it is not entirely incorrect to talk about free speech on Facebook, but entirely incorrect as far as I can tell to claim it can never be. Personally I think it's ethically problematic to require companies to give voice to everyone equally, but it's also somewhat problematic to allow complete freedom of what or who to reject when companies and their services become large enough to be an integral part of society's fabric, and perhaps the political debate. In some way companies like Facebook has a similar function as asphalt, it simplifies communication greatly, but it's not really whether or not a piece of land is covered in asphalt made by a private or government entity that determines what is public or private. It's not who made the asphalt, and in several countries it's not even who owns then area under the asphalt, but rather how the covered place is used as determined by interpretation of law. Twitter is probably more similar to a public place as it is, but Facebook's marketplaces, events, and groups nevertheless implies character in a direction that can be interpreted similarly.