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The First Amendment doesn't guarantee a successful platform. Not if you use someone else's. Not if you build your own. Nor does the First Amendment guarantee t

The First Amendment doesn't guarantee a successful platform. Not if you use someone else's. Not if you build your own. Nor does the First Amendment guarantee that exercising your freedom of speech will work out well for you. Circulation, reaction, lack of an overbearing editor---none of these are entitlements under our laws.

zaroth 6y ago
Who said anything about the First Amendment? To be a bit glib, we’re not talking about illegal government censorship, we’re talking about evil corporate censorship. It’s 100% perfectly legal for Apple to choose which apps it will sell on its store. Hey, sometimes I even like the decisions they make! But no longer can anyone legitimately respond to “XYZ got kicked off this platform” with “then XYZ should build their own platform” because obviously we’ve seen many times over now that doesn’t actually work. They just come after the new platform too. So we are left with either admitting we’re ok with corporations censoring political speech, even though it’s illegal for governments to do that, or trying to figure out what the limits should be of corporate censorship of political speech that we can live with. For what it’s worth, I think the key metric here to consider is the level of competition in the specific market where the censorship is occurring. The problem is most of these markets are more like duopolies if not monopolies, and the limits on corporate censorship of political speech probably should be higher the closer you get to a monopoly. Some censorship is of course essential. But back to the point, when we see censorship that is objectionable to a reasonable number of people... “just build your own” isn’t a valid response.
- kemitchell 6y ago
  When the subject is censorship in the United States, the First Amendment is going to come up! It's what underlies private parties' ability to control what they publish, rather than follow dictates from the government. Great-grandparent mentions laws. As for other networks, I've used several that aren't big household names. They work fine. Some actually do "social" better, in my opinion. Some boast self-hosting and censorship-resistant features. None of them are popular. But many are cheap enough to run more or less indefinitely, given their small size. I think "just build your own" is a perfectly valid response, since nobody's entitled to any of what a platform represents. If you send a newspaper an editorial and they refuse it, "start your own publication" or "print it up as a pamphlet" are just fine. So is just "no", without any free tips on next steps or alternatives. Nothing is owed. Nothing's delivered. Back to the laws, there are others to keep in mind here. Not just as they sit on the books, but how they play out in practice. Nobody wants to be dealing with subpoenas, court orders, and lawsuits, even lawsuits they can probably get dismissed early on under 230, all the time. Nobody wants to be dealing with media scandals. That's what happens when crime starts happening on your servers. The costs are so high, and involvement so unpleasant, that most experienced operators tune their terms, policies, and algorithms to sweep very broadly, accepting a lot of false positives to avoid false negatives that eat up all their money and time. From a certain point of view, I'm sure it seems Facebook and especially Twitter are seizing on illegality as a pretense for political ends. Taking that was a factor as a given, there's almost certainly some additional element of simple self-defense and cost-saving at work here. Even if you start a new platform that doesn't share their presumed political bias, the other factors will stay in play. Unwillingness to face that explains many of the woes of specifically right-allied platforms in the last ten years. If you set yourself as "the alternative" for people the major platforms are happy to be rid of, you can end up with a user base with a really high percentage of people creating problems that are problems no matter what your politics happen to be.

zaroth 6y ago

Who said anything about the First Amendment? To be a bit glib, we’re not talking about illegal government censorship, we’re talking about evil corporate censorship. It’s 100% perfectly legal for Apple to choose which apps it will sell on its store. Hey, sometimes I even like the decisions they make! But no longer can anyone legitimately respond to “XYZ got kicked off this platform” with “then XYZ should build their own platform” because obviously we’ve seen many times over now that doesn’t actually work. They just come after the new platform too. So we are left with either admitting we’re ok with corporations censoring political speech, even though it’s illegal for governments to do that, or trying to figure out what the limits should be of corporate censorship of political speech that we can live with. For what it’s worth, I think the key metric here to consider is the level of competition in the specific market where the censorship is occurring. The problem is most of these markets are more like duopolies if not monopolies, and the limits on corporate censorship of political speech probably should be higher the closer you get to a monopoly. Some censorship is of course essential. But back to the point, when we see censorship that is objectionable to a reasonable number of people... “just build your own” isn’t a valid response.

kemitchell 6y ago
When the subject is censorship in the United States, the First Amendment is going to come up! It's what underlies private parties' ability to control what they publish, rather than follow dictates from the government. Great-grandparent mentions laws. As for other networks, I've used several that aren't big household names. They work fine. Some actually do "social" better, in my opinion. Some boast self-hosting and censorship-resistant features. None of them are popular. But many are cheap enough to run more or less indefinitely, given their small size. I think "just build your own" is a perfectly valid response, since nobody's entitled to any of what a platform represents. If you send a newspaper an editorial and they refuse it, "start your own publication" or "print it up as a pamphlet" are just fine. So is just "no", without any free tips on next steps or alternatives. Nothing is owed. Nothing's delivered. Back to the laws, there are others to keep in mind here. Not just as they sit on the books, but how they play out in practice. Nobody wants to be dealing with subpoenas, court orders, and lawsuits, even lawsuits they can probably get dismissed early on under 230, all the time. Nobody wants to be dealing with media scandals. That's what happens when crime starts happening on your servers. The costs are so high, and involvement so unpleasant, that most experienced operators tune their terms, policies, and algorithms to sweep very broadly, accepting a lot of false positives to avoid false negatives that eat up all their money and time. From a certain point of view, I'm sure it seems Facebook and especially Twitter are seizing on illegality as a pretense for political ends. Taking that was a factor as a given, there's almost certainly some additional element of simple self-defense and cost-saving at work here. Even if you start a new platform that doesn't share their presumed political bias, the other factors will stay in play. Unwillingness to face that explains many of the woes of specifically right-allied platforms in the last ten years. If you set yourself as "the alternative" for people the major platforms are happy to be rid of, you can end up with a user base with a really high percentage of people creating problems that are problems no matter what your politics happen to be.