Describing Zuck's censorship of nearly 200 million posts on Facebook alone as "moderating content" is like calling a tsunami "a bit of rain". It's irresponsible.
Calling a platform with 3 billion monthly users a "glorified bulletin board" doesn't sound very credible to me either.
Scale matters. Everyone on HN knows this.
Why would the Biden Admin have a right to lean on FB to censor true and important information?
"We need you to censor this false [read: true] information from your 3 billion users, because reasons" - not a very defensible position.
By the way, I've advocated for tearing Meta apart and putting it in global public ownership for years, partly because of their acceptance of over-censorship. There's such a thing as public responsibility, and Meta has repeatedly failed. I said so here, just yesterday.
I'm 100% fine with Meta and others censoring some things: drug sales, scams (I wish they would!), and worse.
But censoring scientists trying to say true things of a devastating pandemic, or minimize the harms from terrible policy? Censoring discussion of stories that politicians find embarrassing? Censoring the word "Zionist"??!! That's indefensible.
Again, there's a basic responsibility there; whether enshrined in law or not, and whether the law is enforced or not. Allowing a platform used by nearly half all people on Earth to warp our collective understanding of issues up to and including war, plague, genocide and famine is unacceptable, whether by government "request" or not.
Ten people being denied their rights is no different from hundreds of millions?
Do I really have to explain this? We cannot permit even one person denied their rights. It isn't acceptable in small quantities and then suddenly become a problem when it's 200 million.
But as I have clearly stated and has been obvious for years, you don't have a right to use privately owned web sites. The attempt to paint it as such is only a marketing ploy by those very same sites in order to paint themselves as essential to our lives. They are not. Delete your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. they are garbage.
Nobody said it’s acceptable. What’s ridiculous is to claim the difference in scale “doesn’t matter.”
> you don't have a right to use privately owned web sites
Under the First Amendment, no. Under the freedom of assembly, no. Under the principles of free speech, it’s more ambiguous.
I don't think it is. The First Amendment gives companies control of what gets posted to the sites they own. And it gives you that control for the sites you own, too.
No, it does not. It prohibits the government from abridging the freedom of speech.
The First Amendment is a particular expression of the broader principle of freedom of speech/expression [1]. If you are in my home and you express a view I dislike, it is completely within my legal rights to ask you to stop speaking or else be asked to leave. I could not at the same time, however, say I stand for free speech.
And that does not give companies and individuals the ability to choose what they host on their sites?
No, it does not. The First Amendment is silent on e.g. ISPs or payment processors blocking a particular site based on its content. Until 1897, it was unestablished whether it restricted the states in any form [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago,_Burlington_%26_Quincy...
The answer to all this censorship is simple: break up Facebook. If we absolutely, positively can't, then make them a common carrier, regulate them like a utility, and strip out all the profit incentive to keep bad actors on the system. The funny thing is that Facebook's crimes are not merely censoring what they believe to be disinformation, but also amplifying people who break their own rules. Facebook and Twitter had world leaders policies intended to justify keeping politicians who break their rules on platform, specifically so they could amplify them, because it made the company money.
In other words, everyone angry that Twitter banned Trump in 2021 should also be angry that Twitter didn't ban him in 2017.
If slavery is allowed then it is. If it's a million or 1 it doesn't matter, it's equally allowed. If we give someone the right to freedom that means ALL get the right to freedom.