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It directly contradicts your use of the statement as justification for the platforms' behavior.

• joshuamorton 6y ago
  I haven't used the word "justification" so i'm not clear what you're talking about. My statement was > So France and Germany could be seen as asking the US government to take a stronger stance on hate speech. Which was, and continues to be, supported by Merkel's statement.
  • chrchang523 6y ago
    The primary message from all of these governments is that the platforms are out of line. Your original comment was in support of/elaborating on "It would be governmental overreach [to set the rules]." That original comment had an overly permissive rule in place of what I've bracketed, but that's beside the point since all of these governments are specifically objecting that the recent actions are problematically restrictive.
    • joshuamorton 6y ago
      > The primary message from all of these governments is that the platforms are out of line. Yes, and one reason for that, as stated by Merkel, is that the US doesn't have a democratic framework for managing hate speech. Because such a framework is illegal under the first amendment. And her statement suggests that the US adopt a more German framework for adjudicating such speech, so that corporations don't need to make their own rules. Your claim is that Twitter is "effectively" acting as the government. That's not true under a significant amount of law and precedent. (There are cases where private entities are acting as a government, and importantly, trying to use government force to suppress speech, Marsh v. Alabama). In fact, one could argue that by censoring speech, Twitter is explicitly not acting like the government, because Twitter is taking action the government cannot.