Fair. Though that has more to do with potentially being illegal. The more serious (violation of free speech) thing is political censorship
Death threats, and many other forms of hate speech, are illegal in many jurisdictions, and yet that is not used to justify a blanket ban on angry text.
> The more serious (violation of free speech) thing is political censorship
It is not obvious to me that these things are even separable; to pick but one obvious example, a topless photograph posted by advocates for an equal right for both men and women to be topless in public is clearly political speech.
More broadly, look at someone like Larry Flint. The pornagraphic is the political. The current hand-wringing over “censorship of political speech” seems terribly narrowly focused on but one fairly conservative form of speech, to the point that it’s a bit hard to take at face value.
I don’t really care what’s cost effective for Facebook’s lawyers; we don’t have to care about that, so we should stop enabling the lie that their main concern is enabling free speech.
Costs, playing nice with established powers, not scaring away advertisers by putting their ads too near a nipple — these are their concerns, and we should stop participating in the destruction of the meaning of “free speech” by calling “a narrow spectrum of speech compatible with our current corporate goals” “free speech”.
Which is what I’m doing?
I’m not clear what your issue is with me pointing out the inconsistency between their their new fluffy marketing and their actions, given what you just wrote.
Sure, but you can state the same opinion with words, and not get censored.
If certain opinions are forbidden from being expressed, it's a very different thing.
Sure, but that is in no sense what “free speech” means, so we should stop pretending that “free speech” is what Facebook is offering.
This is a reflection of a larger point, which is that any sufficiently-dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government. Especially with the introduction of Libra, that's starting to sound less like a cliche and more like an axiom. This also (should) give the rest of us more input in how the company does business.
My personal opinion is that Facebook should be broken up, but social media remain unregulated, since a ban on lies only rewards the most skilled liars, whose statements can fool the evaluators.
This is pretty vague though. It also raises questions about why we don't limit the political proclivities of other types of companies that also deal in political speech (cable news, broadcast news, talk radio, public radio).
I also disagree with the idea that access to Facebook and similar platforms is fundamentally important; it's well known by now that these systems are engineered to be addictive and that heavy use of social media is associated with poor mental health, if anything we should make ad based social media platforms illegal altogether.
> My personal opinion is that Facebook should be broken up
Why? I am not opposed to the idea but I just don't see how it would improve the situation at all.
That's what people said about MySpace before Facebook. It's also what people said about IBM, Microsoft, AOL, Nokia, and Kodak.
Big companies have a hard time changing direction. They also tend to be more risk averse, causing them to coast on their brand and network effects. Eventually they're usurped by smaller companies that take more risks and innovate better.