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> Freedom of Speech !== Entitlement to a Platform As it happens I wrote an essay on this yesterday: https://pontifex.substack.com/p/google-censors-talkradio ht

> Freedom of Speech !== Entitlement to a Platform As it happens I wrote an essay on this yesterday: https://pontifex.substack.com/p/google-censors-talkradio https://pontifex.substack.com/p/google-censors-talkradio , in response to an other act of corporate censorship. My argument was that because of network effects there are only a few dominant platforms (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc) and that when these platforms take down content, they are in practise preventing that person's message from getting out, i.e. censoring people. This gives them a lot of power: power to decide which ideas can be disseminated, power to decide which politicians can get elected. So if you favour democracy, you have to be against the power of big tech platforms to shut down discussions they don't like. (My favoured solution would involve mandate interoperability using ActivityPub and similar protocols, which breaks the dominance of big platforms due to network effects).

klyrs 6y ago
What if, by way of uncritically publishing everything that everybody says, Twitter is accessory to treason? Do they have a right to demur? Or must they participate in every crime that their users engage in?
- PontifexMinimus 6y ago
  > What if, by way of uncritically publishing everything that everybody says, Twitter is accessory to treason? I'm not sure that a communications network passing on their users' communications would amount to treason. But let's run with that for instance, and assume it did, in law. > Do they have a right to demur? Clearly if a course of action is against the law, they have a legal obligation not to do it. True by definition. As to whether they have a moral obligation, that's another question entirely, and a rather complex one, as one would have to define what is moral. I would say that a company that wishes to continue operating in a country is going to have to obey the laws of that country. > Or must they participate in every crime that their users engage in? Well, that all depends on whether transmitting other people's messages constitutes a crime. Realistically, no company is going to do things that would get it shut down (and if they did, they wouldn't do so for long).

klyrs 6y ago

What if, by way of uncritically publishing everything that everybody says, Twitter is accessory to treason? Do they have a right to demur? Or must they participate in every crime that their users engage in?

PontifexMinimus 6y ago
> What if, by way of uncritically publishing everything that everybody says, Twitter is accessory to treason? I'm not sure that a communications network passing on their users' communications would amount to treason. But let's run with that for instance, and assume it did, in law. > Do they have a right to demur? Clearly if a course of action is against the law, they have a legal obligation not to do it. True by definition. As to whether they have a moral obligation, that's another question entirely, and a rather complex one, as one would have to define what is moral. I would say that a company that wishes to continue operating in a country is going to have to obey the laws of that country. > Or must they participate in every crime that their users engage in? Well, that all depends on whether transmitting other people's messages constitutes a crime. Realistically, no company is going to do things that would get it shut down (and if they did, they wouldn't do so for long).