people arguing that social media platforms must legally host them, are arguing that a private company owes them a duty to allow them to use their product..

just because the product is "expression" as you put it doesn't make a difference from another product.

it's mostly the same people that argue that the baker or the photographer DOESN'T have a duty to you to allow you to use their product if they dont want you to, that are arguing that social media DOES have a duty to them. its illogical, imo.

Obviously if someone argues that "social media platforms must legally host them" then they are wrong. That's a legal claim and the legal claim is incorrect. But I don't think that's what was being suggested here?

To me it's kind of like arguments about gun control. If I argue that the law should be changed it's not a counter-argument to point out the 2nd amendment, but it's very common for people to do that and think that settles everything. If someone argues that the laws on free speech ought to be changed then you (or I) might disagree with the argument for doing so but it's not a counter-argument to point out the current bounds of the law, because the argument is about whether the law ought to be changed.

Slighted,

If we had the social dynamics of 1950s with the technology of today, tech companies would most likely be under enormous pressure internally and externally to censor a lot of left leaning speech, under auspices that it was communist propaganda.

In that case, would you be making the same argument?

This is the thing- there absolutely is, and it's a conversation the left was (correctly) *all over* and almost completely united against corporate censorship. Very recently. Remember that whole net neutrality thing and how it intentionally prevented private-company censorship? I member.

It's not ok for the government to censor speech. It's not ok for the USPS to refuse mail service based on speech. It's not ok for private phone companies to refuse phone service based on speech. It's not ok for ISPs to refuse to transmit packets based on speech. But it's totally 100% ok for private companies whose function is communication among users and who have much bigger space-monopolies than any phone company or ISP to censor speech because they happen to be mostly censoring your opponents more right now (but an absolute abomination when speech you like gets censored the same way elsewhere). GMAFB. It's nakedly transparent resulting.

It's obvious to anybody trying to design a reasonable system that any major mode of communication should function as a common carrier like the phone company. It's also obvious that people should have the tools to avoid things/people they want to avoid. The simple solution is third-party OPT-IN blocking. If I dont want to see anti-vax nonsense, I subscribe to their list that filters anti-vax content before it ever gets to me.

Garbage speech is effectively shadowbanned outside its echo chamber, but it's not done by any centralized force-it's done by people who've collectively decided that they arent worth listening to anymore, and nothing is stopping people who want to interact with it from interacting, so it's not actually banned. This is how it should be IMO.

Common carrier without blocking technology would be a total disaster, but the combination is far better than corporate censorship.

if the argument is that the first amendment needs to be changed to include private companies, then those arguments may be worth talking about, but in my experience that's never what's being talked about..

private companies should not be included under the first amendment in any point of time. is that an answer to your question?

also companies banning hate/racism/bigotry is a business decision that actual conservatives would be championing if it wasn't their hate speech that was getting censored.

I don't think the government should force them to host Farrakhan, Milo, InfoWars, etc. However, I do think we should have a conversation about what standards FB should use when deciding which media companies or figures are allowed on their site.

Who cares? Dunking on conservatives for being inconsistent about free speech is easy and quickly gets boring. You're saying there isn't a conversation to be had about this at all. I disagree. Even if we don't think the government should force tech companies to host x on their sites, we can still as private citizens condemn or praise tech companies or media outlets for how much they stifle or encourage the free expression of ideas. Presumably at least part of the reason FB decided to ban these people was because of pressure campaigns by private citizens for them to do so.

Let me ask the same question another other way. You would still stand by this sentence if that is the way the social winds were blowing today?

This is pretty much my thoughts on the subject, only likely presented significantly better than I could manage.

if you want to regulate them as public utilities then that is a different conversation to have. first you have to prove they are public utilities, which should be possible but again not a free speech issue as being discussed here.

i would argue that net neutrality is significantly different than the argument we are having because that was largely about regulating the gateway to the public internet, people that get banned off of facebook are free to start their own website to spout whatever they want to spout, and that is still accessible to all the people that want to access it.

also i'm pro censoring hate/racism/bigotry by private companies on "any" side it's on. it just happens to come almost exclusively from one side for some surely coincidental reason..

if they were preaching racism, hate and bigotry, sure.. you keep strawmanning in political philosophies like facebook/twitter etc are censoring them now..

is racism and bigotry the political philosophy of the right? it isn't mitch mcconnell getting censored, its alex jones, milo, mcinnes, loomer, and other hatemongerers..

So your entire argument seems contingent on people doing the censoring following the same moral code as you. Which is fine I guess until someone with a different moral code starts doing the censoring.

wat. yeah i guess, if racism and hate speech is just a moral code issue, sure. a private company doing the censorship is fine.. i'm sure stormfront, and breitbart delete non racist stuff on their server, and they are free to do that.

i mean well named has stifled my freedom of expression several times for being sarcastic, should this be campaigned against? is he violating my free speech rights through censorship? i believe the stuff deleted would be hard to defend against being against the TOS, here, but they still got censored.

is there a conversation to be had about this abuse of "free speech" being orchestrated right now?

Nope.

agreed.

Well named is right to not want to have this conversation here right now, but notice that most of the Politics regs left in part because of exactly this. Like it or not, that conversation is being had.

they left because they were told by reds they weren't wanted here and that the forum was closing completely. it wasn't a free speech policing issue, the forum/platform was being eliminated.. the fact that it opened back up later as foxnews-lite may have kept some away, but no one is arguing that 2+2 shouldn't be able to create whatever platform for speech that they want.

Goes back at least as far as Athens.


and similarly when we argue against the right to bear arms, it does not imply we want to ban guns (although in fact many of us do want that). With free speech, not having a right to free speech doesn't remotely mean prohibiting most free speech which just about no-on wants.

It's the 'right to ...' that can become ridiculous if it becomes a religious like view that ignores reality forever after.

It's not a bad thing to try to define bad things as bad and good things as good.

This is probably getting a little abstract but: I agree, but I think the point might be that there's some pragmatic benefit to trying to construct social/political institutions in a way that functions even when the people involved go astray from the good.

Sort of like the checks and balances in the federal government wouldn't be necessary if you just assumed that elected officials would understand that good things are good and bad things are bad. And arguably there are still many institutional processes that are dysfunctional with bad actors. There's probably no way to totally avoid that, so your point is important: you can't have a functioning good society if the people in it are not good. But the pragmatic argument is not without some value as well. That is, try to create institutions that anticipate the ways things could go off the rails.

I think we’re pretty clear with the idea that the right to free speech ends when it violates the harm principle; get’s murky determining what constitutes harm in a modern society and who makes the call.

I am curious. Would a cultural anthropologist even think in terms of "good people" or "bad people?" I don't think an evolutionary biologist would ever frame an argument this way; it would be more a matter of relatively "well adapted" or "poorly adapted" to the environment, with no value judgement.

Cultural relativism as a principle of research would dictate not making such a judgement in the course of doing research. But the methodological principle doesn't reduce to moral relativism, and I'm not speaking here as a researcher, but as an interested member of a particular polity.

Anthropologists are allowed to have moral beliefs too (and of course I'm not an anthropologist), and it's also probably worth clarifying that cultural relativism is often more about not being too prejudicial towards unfamiliar customs, rather than meaning that one should exercise a complete suspension of moral judgement altogether. But again, doing research is a little different from just having a political opinion.

You need to get away from focusing just on people's rights in this context. It was within the rights of admins to close down 2p2 Politics. That doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.