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Corporate censorship should have never happened. It is a huge corruption of public discourse and the political process. These platforms have hundreds of million

Corporate censorship should have never happened. It is a huge corruption of public discourse and the political process. These platforms have hundreds of millions of users, or more, and are as influential as governments. They should be regulated like public utilities so they cannot ban users or censor content, especially political speech. Personally I don’t trust Zuck and his sudden shift on this and other topics. It doesn’t come with a strong enough rejection of Meta/Facebook’s past, and how they acted in the previous election cycle, during COVID, during BLM, etc. But I guess some change is still good.

jhedwards 2y ago
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there's any reasonable political discourse that is ever* censored by social media companies. During COVID, there were people spreading lies about the vaccine, which many people believed, and many people died as a result of believing those lies. Even Louis Brandeis, one of the fiercest advocates of free speech, made an exception for emergency situations[0], which is arguably what a pandemic is. But again, lies about a vaccine do not constitute reasonable public discourse, it is more akin to screaming fire in a crowded theater. If you have counter examples of regular public discourse that has been censored by a social media company, please share it. * I realize "ever" is a stretch, I'm sure there are instances, but my understanding is that they are the exception rather than the rule. [0] "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom." - Louis Brandeis, Whitney vs. California
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  It's hard to talk about, because when a discussion is successfully censored you usually don't hear about it and presume any discourse on it would have been unreasonable. I would point towards immigration as a topic where meaningful discourse is missing from social media. On most social media sites, the discussion will be dominated by people who think immigration should rarely if ever be restricted; Twitter has been colonized by some people who take the opposite extreme, often for overtly racist reasons, although this is tempered a bit by Elon Musk's personal support of high skill visas. The "normie" immigration restrictionist position, that immigrants are great but only so long as they enter the country lawfully, is something I very often see expressed in news interviews or supported by older relatives and rarely if ever see expressed on a social media platform. I don't know how I'd go about proving this is downstream of fact checking, but there's a lot of orgs who argue that it's factually false to characterize, for example, someone who crosses the border without authorization and then applies for asylum as an illegal immigrant.
astrange 2y ago
You can't use a social media platform that can't ban users, because it'll be full of spammers and people who only communicate in death threats.
oliviergg 2y ago
But being at the head of a social network is political. Every choice is political. Allowing extreme speech to circulate is political, not authorizing it is political too. It is not corporate censorship, it's regulation. without regulation, it will be the voice of the loudest / strongest. And I think we need some rationality, not polarisation.

jhedwards 2y ago

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there's any reasonable political discourse that is ever* censored by social media companies. During COVID, there were people spreading lies about the vaccine, which many people believed, and many people died as a result of believing those lies. Even Louis Brandeis, one of the fiercest advocates of free speech, made an exception for emergency situations[0], which is arguably what a pandemic is. But again, lies about a vaccine do not constitute reasonable public discourse, it is more akin to screaming fire in a crowded theater. If you have counter examples of regular public discourse that has been censored by a social media company, please share it. * I realize "ever" is a stretch, I'm sure there are instances, but my understanding is that they are the exception rather than the rule. [0] "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom." - Louis Brandeis, Whitney vs. California

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
It's hard to talk about, because when a discussion is successfully censored you usually don't hear about it and presume any discourse on it would have been unreasonable. I would point towards immigration as a topic where meaningful discourse is missing from social media. On most social media sites, the discussion will be dominated by people who think immigration should rarely if ever be restricted; Twitter has been colonized by some people who take the opposite extreme, often for overtly racist reasons, although this is tempered a bit by Elon Musk's personal support of high skill visas. The "normie" immigration restrictionist position, that immigrants are great but only so long as they enter the country lawfully, is something I very often see expressed in news interviews or supported by older relatives and rarely if ever see expressed on a social media platform. I don't know how I'd go about proving this is downstream of fact checking, but there's a lot of orgs who argue that it's factually false to characterize, for example, someone who crosses the border without authorization and then applies for asylum as an illegal immigrant.

astrange 2y ago

You can't use a social media platform that can't ban users, because it'll be full of spammers and people who only communicate in death threats.

oliviergg 2y ago

But being at the head of a social network is political. Every choice is political. Allowing extreme speech to circulate is political, not authorizing it is political too. It is not corporate censorship, it's regulation. without regulation, it will be the voice of the loudest / strongest. And I think we need some rationality, not polarisation.