- "This is a free market; if you do not like it use another platform!"
- "I thought $conglomerate" had our back! They had rainbows and all; is that all it took them to fold"?
- "No, this is not a systemic issue; conversation needs to be steered away from attacking the system and rather its a few bad apples! Go after them and stop asking for systemic changes!"
- "Any attempt at regulating companies in an assault on #freedom and must not be tolerated"
And from that perspective, these quotes you're currently touting are ripped out of their context, making them sound asinine despite being mostly on point, fundamentally.
Twitter, Facebook, Google etc are private companies. They should be free to censor whatever they decide to censor.
I would personally hate it if they did, and it'd hope we'd get a competing platform that doesn't censor and that that'd become the standard, but it is what it is.
If a government makes the company censor something, then that is a violation of free speech (which I sadly don't have, as I'm not from the USA). And isn't that what happened in the context of Corona/antivax?
Why I think is hard it's because multiple rules can be made to make it impossible to spread ideas: talking loudly in the street => you disturb the neighbors; you send mails with pamphlets => it's spam; want to make an add on TV => extremely expensive. And so on.
What you're actually putting forth is wherever large social media platforms should be treated as utilities. (Which ISPs are).
If the legislative decided to categorize it as a utility, then any censorship the company decided to do could potentially infringe on your free speech, yes.
However, this is not the case as of today. If it's deemed as such, it'd definitely have a global effect. Wherever that'd be positive would be an interesting case study.
And I might add: lots of ISPs host DNS servers which do in fact censor / block certain domains from resolving
Most of them have a vision for their platform, i.e. town hall for Twitter, family and friend conversations for Facebook etc.
To adhere to this image they filter out spam etc. now, filtering out obnoxious content just becomes one more rule and thus the slippery slope begins.
But to answer your question: for me, any kind of interference such as deleting/hiding content or algorithmically influence which content is shown is censorship on social media platforms, and the user should be responsible for applying such censorship.
I.e. provide a UI which let the user configure their own preferences. But actually nailing such a feature with a good UX ain't easy, and how to actually implement it isn't either, so that's just a pipedream, realistically speaking.
Maybe the network should also limit interaction and exposure. It's fine if you get more interaction than you could do in real life, but I find worrying to have one person followed by tens of millions ... (and even if it was the case before with newspapers, I don't think it was ideal either)
I've understood it very well, I find it very funny that people which say stuff like Google is a private company and should do what it wants are the same people which say Google should respect net-neutrality (peering agreements, ...) and not do what it wants when it's about core networking and not social media.
Why? Private companies can't dump waste onto a river, can't build buildings not up to code, can't discriminate based on religion or sex, can't prevent their employees from joining a union, can't evade taxes (well these last 2 only in theory I admit)... Meta owns platforms with 3B, 2B, 2B users (fb, insta, whatsapp); why the hell wouldn't it be possible, in principle, to regulate them as public utilities and forbid them by law from censorship or other nefarious practices?
Your phone company can't spy on your conversations and your power company can't shut you off if you are black. Only on a society completely far off the deep end of neoliberal philosophy would people even think to invoke "but it's a private company" like some sort of holy taboo.
I think all of those are "fair game" now (if the price is right). I only wish I were kidding.
You're arguing with a strawman, I never said it's impossible in principle. I said it isn't currently categorized as a utility, hence they are free to censor as they see fit.
It's entirely possible for the courts of the USA to deem it a utility, and it'd be interested to see the long term effects of such ruling.
The ruling would only apply to citizens of the USA, so it'd be very interesting to see how the companies in question implemented the changes to stay compliant.
It'd be an interesting case study, but it's impossible to speculate on its fallout until a clear plan has been drafted. I.e. It could potentially make it impossible for newcomers to create platforms, depending on the angle for such a regulation. Or it could make changes to the algorithm borderline impossible etc.
basically countless pitfalls and without a clear draft, nothing of value can be discussed
A utility is something that is regulated, it comes with a lot of caveats and challenges. It's not just a label you can put on anything, you need to actually define and set boundaries etc to what the utility provider is required to do etc.
This has happened for ISPs, but none of that has happened for Twitter, Facebook etc... thus it's not a utility, thus it's not bound to the free speech amendment.