4 ms·

No, it's definitely not okay for a government to threaten a private company (through which most public discourse flows) into censoring its political opponents.

No, it's definitely not okay for a government to threaten a private company (through which most public discourse flows) into censoring its political opponents. It is no different in practice to a 1A violation. The extent to which this happens at all can be debated. But the principle of the matter should be clear, if it is shown to be happening, it is certainly morally wrong, it's anti-democracy and (although it's difficult to prove in court) perhaps unconstitutional. Here's an example of the grey area I'm taking about in my previous post. The executive branch is flagging posts for "COVID misinformation" to Facebook. We don't know who is doing the flagging or what criteria they're employing, and Facebook has an incentive to comply with the take-down requests so as to avoid potential costly regulation. The sum total of this is the government censoring speech (well, there's one layer of indirection, which is a compliant and scared Facebook) in a way that's completely unaccountable and not auditable.

varelse 5y ago
That's funny, I didn't hear any of this righteous self indignation during the last administration over its bogus antitrust threats. Were those okay with you or did it take you this long to work up a really good lather? https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/05/trump-looking-into-antitrust-violations-against-amazon-other-tech-giants.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/05/trump-looking-into-antitrust...
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  This is presumptive whataboutism with fairly incendiary language. You don't know my views on this question and have lumped me in with am amorphous blob you've labelled "conservative". You might be surprised to learn that I am not against social media censoring hate speech, for example. For the record, what Trump was doing was clearly authoritarian and had the intention of controlling moderation decisions on these platforms. It was anti-democratic and awful due to its underlying intentions. Ron DeSantis is trying a similar thing to Ben and Jerry's now. However, I was and remain less concerned by this than I am with the influence of the Democratic Party on tech firms, mainly because the Republicans have so little influence despite the threats. You can see the power asymmetry (and revolving door) on display through a single example, the censorship of the Hunter Biden story on the eve of the election.
  - varelse 5y ago
    They didn't censor it, for nothing really significant has come of it since other than he was exploiting existing law for his own personal gain. So they decided to mostly ignore Giuliani's fantastical tales of the stolen laptop. Seems like a good call to me. Imagine a congress willing to work together to change the laws to make what he did illegal in the future though. That's how things used to mostly work IMO. We seem to be in a quarterly pandemic wave cycle right now and it's overwhelming our healthcare system and it's killing Americans and ultimately depressing the economy. Given all the changes and adaptations we made as a society post 9/11, attempting to control the flow of covid disinfo seems minimal to me. And it's easy to criticize our leaders. But just like a true first amendment zealot should build their own social media site centered around the first amendment to find out why that's impractical, try leading this country when it's on a course to be an indefinite pandemic purgatory. But you raise a valid point. I'm very concerned with YouTube's slut shaming through demonetization of Naomi Wu's YouTube channel. It's not a good look for them but then very little is these days.
    - fighterpilot 5y ago
      They did censor the original New York Post story. The media chose to ignore it, but the social media companies were censoring any links to the story, actively encouraged by Democratic Party operatives such as Schiff who were falsely labelling it as Russian disinformation and encouraging a blackout. This has potentially election moving consequences, so coercive Democratic influence over social media is absolutely a real threat to democracy. Regarding your comment about a 1A-friendly platform, I don't advocate for a censorship-less social media platform. It's stupid on its face. But moderation should either be voluntary with no coercive influence of government (whether that influence is achieved by carrot or stick), or it should be defined by the legislative body (hate speech laws) instead of implied threat of regulation or via the executive branch. Regarding the flagging of COVID misinformation, that's fairly lower on my list of worries, and it's not that I don't favor removing that toxic information, it's that the executive branch is the one coordinating it. The encouragement of political censorship (the Hunter Biden case above) is much higher on my list of concerns and much more directly anti-democratic.

varelse 5y ago

That's funny, I didn't hear any of this righteous self indignation during the last administration over its bogus antitrust threats. Were those okay with you or did it take you this long to work up a really good lather? https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/05/trump-looking-into-antitrust-violations-against-amazon-other-tech-giants.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/05/trump-looking-into-antitrust...

fighterpilot 5y ago
This is presumptive whataboutism with fairly incendiary language. You don't know my views on this question and have lumped me in with am amorphous blob you've labelled "conservative". You might be surprised to learn that I am not against social media censoring hate speech, for example. For the record, what Trump was doing was clearly authoritarian and had the intention of controlling moderation decisions on these platforms. It was anti-democratic and awful due to its underlying intentions. Ron DeSantis is trying a similar thing to Ben and Jerry's now. However, I was and remain less concerned by this than I am with the influence of the Democratic Party on tech firms, mainly because the Republicans have so little influence despite the threats. You can see the power asymmetry (and revolving door) on display through a single example, the censorship of the Hunter Biden story on the eve of the election.
- varelse 5y ago
  They didn't censor it, for nothing really significant has come of it since other than he was exploiting existing law for his own personal gain. So they decided to mostly ignore Giuliani's fantastical tales of the stolen laptop. Seems like a good call to me. Imagine a congress willing to work together to change the laws to make what he did illegal in the future though. That's how things used to mostly work IMO. We seem to be in a quarterly pandemic wave cycle right now and it's overwhelming our healthcare system and it's killing Americans and ultimately depressing the economy. Given all the changes and adaptations we made as a society post 9/11, attempting to control the flow of covid disinfo seems minimal to me. And it's easy to criticize our leaders. But just like a true first amendment zealot should build their own social media site centered around the first amendment to find out why that's impractical, try leading this country when it's on a course to be an indefinite pandemic purgatory. But you raise a valid point. I'm very concerned with YouTube's slut shaming through demonetization of Naomi Wu's YouTube channel. It's not a good look for them but then very little is these days.
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    They did censor the original New York Post story. The media chose to ignore it, but the social media companies were censoring any links to the story, actively encouraged by Democratic Party operatives such as Schiff who were falsely labelling it as Russian disinformation and encouraging a blackout. This has potentially election moving consequences, so coercive Democratic influence over social media is absolutely a real threat to democracy. Regarding your comment about a 1A-friendly platform, I don't advocate for a censorship-less social media platform. It's stupid on its face. But moderation should either be voluntary with no coercive influence of government (whether that influence is achieved by carrot or stick), or it should be defined by the legislative body (hate speech laws) instead of implied threat of regulation or via the executive branch. Regarding the flagging of COVID misinformation, that's fairly lower on my list of worries, and it's not that I don't favor removing that toxic information, it's that the executive branch is the one coordinating it. The encouragement of political censorship (the Hunter Biden case above) is much higher on my list of concerns and much more directly anti-democratic.