The right embraced private corporations having "religious and moral rights" with the cake shop and Hobby Lobby cases. This is the other side of the coin.
Free Speech is a principle that the First Amendment applies when restricting government. Private corporations that decide to be a platform for public speech (I think publicly accessible social media posts count) have to consider how they promote free speech. If, on the other hand, the private corporations want to exercise their freedom of association and take clear editorial positions, that's fine too. But, philosophically, they can't have it both ways.
Also note that Google, Facebook, and Apple seemed to have coordinated the ban. Both in size and in style, this is a different beast than Masterpiece.
Finally, Masterpiece was about being compelled to make specific cakes. Customers weren't banned from all cakes or anything. In that way it resembles demonetizing specific YouTube videos more than banning entire channels.
* I think it's fine to boot Alex Jones on the merits, for the record. Though the level of coordination among the BigCos here is concerning.
YouTube hosts videos. Apple doesn’t host podcast. Apple didn’t feel “compelled” to scrape Alex Jones podcast.
And, applying the Masterpiece ruling narrowly, Apple just needs to be careful that a pattern of discrimination against a protected group isn't established in its decisions.
But that's all legal reasoning. The original point is that people should be allowed to speak and the best response is better speech, not censorship, even if the censorship is private.
And Apple is the least interesting of the bunch since they're not really a microblog platform or social network. The coordination with the other platforms is probably the only concern there.
The Supreme Court found that Colorado didn't give enough respect or credence to the owner's religious beliefs. The owner's religious beliefs being openly mocked by a Colorado Civil Rights Board member was used as an example. The board was found to not have worked under the assumption of religious neutrality.
For those reasons, the case was found in his favor.
The Supreme Court did not at all rule on whether or not it was legal for Masterpiece Cakeshop to deny his gay patrons the cake they wanted.
They made no decision on whether it was within the owner's first amendment rights to deny service, or if what happened was denial of service.
Hope this helps.
> ...Apple just needs to be careful that a pattern of discrimination against a protected group isn't established in its decisions.
I was just pointing out that the facts of the case didn't involve a persona non grata. It was about compelling someone to create something (speech?), not about businesses' right to choose their clientele.
Alex Jones podcast was not "banned" from Apple's platform. Apple never hosted either the media or the RSS metadata. Anyone who wants to listen to the podcast can go on Google do a search find the feed subscription and add to the podcast app.
Edit:
Changed "was banned" to "wasn't banned".
And what exactly is Alex Jones' brand of conservatism? Does it involve a narrative of white extinction and false black victimhood? Climate change as a conspiracy? Obama is a Muslim who isn't even a US citizen? What makes Alex Jones conservative?
> People around the country still think that those parents lied about the death of their children in order to score financial or political gain.
Who made money originally selling them this lie and then perpetuating it?
If his ideas really are that popular, he should be able to create the conservative versions of Twitter, Facebook, etc. All of the FAANG companies started out competing against entrenched incumbents by offering a service they didn't. Why can't he do the same?
Alex Jones will be fine. It’s the up and comers who are clearly being locked out of the market.
If your ideas are popular enough and you know how to market yourself, you don't have to be a sharecropper on FAANG's farm.
I also wouldn't be surprised if the thinking behind so many Fortune 500 companies is at least due to a calculation of brand posture going into the future. A lot of the companies being discussed at the moment are social media companies, and youth are the ones who can drive a MySpace event.
I also must ask for elaboration as to the Alex Jones brand of conservatism -- does it involve a narrative of white extinction and undeserving blacks? False flag stories about the Sandy Hook shooting? Does he represent American conservatism?
Even if you aren't controversial, you are just one of millions of people trying to get your ideas out. You're going to languish in obscurity unless you have an alternate means of promoting yourself.
No one "stifled" Alex Jones' speech. His podcast is still being published on his own site like it always was and you can still add it to your podcast app of choice.
One of the most troubling aspects of the Alex Jones ban is the obvious coordination among Apple, Facebook, YouTube and others to completely take him off their platforms at the exact same time. How this doesn't bother HN is crazy.
It's truly crazy how YouTube takes down Alex Jones easily but ElsaGate pedo like predatory channels are still thriving on their platform, with millions of views and comment threads full of cryptic information exchange of the worst kind one can imagine. And it's still up. Insanity prevails.
The courts have affirmed corporate personhood, and their resulting freedom of speech, and in this case they are free to suppress things they host on their platform.
There is an interesting legal argument I heard recently that says that if you operate a private space much in the way as if it were a public space (like a privately-owned park open to the public) then there is a sliding scale regarding how much that space is legally considered 'public' (regardless of ownership), for the purposes of law enforcement, or whatever else (like being a venue for protected free speech). I wonder if, at some point, Google/YouTube et al could possibly be seen under such a lens. Maybe then you could argue private takesdowns are a violation of free speech.
One issue we have is that companies today, in the era of the internet, have grown well beyond any conceivable notion of what it meant to be a company in the past. Facebook now has more than 30% of the world's population in monthly users. They have more active users than any country has citizens. And they exercise more control over them (at least within the confines of the digital world) than nations do as these users' rights and privileges are dictated under a set of unidirectionally imposed terms as opposed to any sort of a public constitution or system of rights. In a way it almost feels like the digital era is perhaps echoing back our evolution from master-slave societies which gradually evolved to feudal societies and eventually onto democratic ones.
Should companies begin to be treated more as we might think of governments once their reach begins to expand beyond that even of governments? I'm not sure, but I do think that we also can't simply appeal to former views. For instance the founding fathers certainly gave no consideration to how companies, with more users than the world population in the 18th century, ought be regarded.
Saying "companies are too big, we have to do something about them" is making a point grounded in concept, not concrete law or action. I too am worried about our current crop of megacorp but if history is indicator the US government will outlive them (as stable governments usually do).
However, this is a major problem because people of both 'sides' of the issue engage in the exact same behavior, ignoring bad behavior when the victims are people they dislike. In our little parallel world where the victims are swapped, suddenly those currently "alarmed" by the behavior would be appealing to "Well, it's not technically illegal - so whatever." This results in bad behavior never being constrained because, so long as society is sufficiently divided, somewhere around half of people will be okay with even quite awful actions.
On corporations, I do disagree with you however. I see no reason to think that the trend of megacorps will end. On the contrary, I see no reason to think that they will not continue to grow in power and influence until they are effectively more powerful than governments and eventually may even begin to supplant governments as the effective ruling forces of the world, even if governments remain as a proxy.
20 years ago, Yahoo was king, Amazon was a minor bookseller, Microsoft was thought to be unstoppable, Apple was nearly bankrupt and BlockBuster was king of video rentals.
15 years ago MySpace was king.
The old guard especially in technology can get “disrupted” quickly.
For all practical purposes does it matter? Facebook in particular creates such an echo chamber. People only see opinions from other people they already have. If it wasn't for my one wacko MAGA conservative friend, I would never have known that thier was a child molestation ring controlled by Democrats under a pizza parlor, Obama was a secret Muslim trying to impose Sharia law, the military was trying to take over Texas or that Walker Texas Ranger was going to rescue it.
Back when we had private company towns they tried to restrict speech claiming they owned the roads, sidewalks, parks, etc.
They were stopped by the Supreme Court who ruled it was a de-facto public space.
Most people do not intuitively see wedding cakes as art, but you can see the issue much more clearly if you view him as a literal artist. An artist refusing to sell a print of one of his pieces to a gay individual because they were gay is illegal and absurd. An artist refusing a contract because he felt the piece requested would endorse homosexuality, which went against his personal views - is not unreasonable.
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As for companies positioning themselves for the future, I think you might be surprised if you decided to do some searching for information on the aggregate views of generation z. Political trends in the US are on a pendulum. One side goes batshit insane in one direction which results in the growth of a major counter culture which eventually reaches a happy medium but then they themselves start to go batshit insane in the other direction, breeding what would now be seen as a counter-counter-culture to people who have lived long enough. This repeats seemingly to no end. The 60s created the 80s which created the 2000s which is now creating the 2020s. Probably not coincidentally that 20 years is just about the length of time it takes for a new generation to come into its own. Oh well, we can all at least look forward to the 2030s - Mars and political sanity!
Edit:
To clarify that Apple doesn’t host the RSS feed. It just indexes it like Google indexes web pages. The RSS feed is self hosted on another server.
I’m Black, live in a town that was famously a “sundown town” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town) up until the mid 80s and even here the demographics and mindsets are changing. We are still very much the minority but my son’s classmates and thier parents welcome him with open arms into thier homes.
True the county is overwhelmingly Republican but they are more Romney/Bush style Republicans thsn Trump populists.