The point here is the risk of our social communications being concentrated via a few large companies, who have ended up with an enormous amount of power to control speech online globally.
Unless you want to make the claim that speakers are entitled to audiences, that is.
I'm not arguing you're entitle to an audience, either, just that taking your speech from a major player to a much smaller niche player is not nearly equivalent.
Maybe I'm just dense, but I'm not seeing the cost differential, either for the speaker or audience. What Facebook is doing is equivalent to saying "you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here." What's so wrong about that?
Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s not censorship.
The current Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, did exactly after the 2004 presidential election to reject certification of Bush's win:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?185005-2/debate-ohio-electoral...
In that sense, it's a very effective double-whammy that pretty much any social-media user has fallen victim to at some point. While Facebook and Twitter certainly aren't benevolent, I completely understand how their unpreparedness to deal with political figures would be misconstrued as censorship or suppression.
> Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient." Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies.
Yes, that's true. But for most platforms, like Hacker News, that's not a concern, because they don't have that many users.
> The radio station down the road is censoring you because they won't play your music.
That's not really what censorship means, because the radio station only has limited time, and they have to choose what music to play. (This limit on time also creates competition: Since one radio station can't play everything, there will always be many different radio stations, they same isn't true for social networks.)
Oh, so all of the sudden censorship is a matter of scale? I'd like to see a definition of censorship that involves scale in any way.
> That's not really what censorship means, because the radio station only has limited time, and they have to choose what music to play.
Yeah, and Facebook's servers have limited capacity and their bandwidth is billed at-cost. They're limited in the content they can serve, with the difference being that they can scale infinitely. In any case, your liability as a user increases as your share of that content scales. All you've done so far is deflect, without actually making any case. There are hundreds of social networks. You can build your own social network in 5 minutes with Mastodon and a VPS. Failing that, there's hundreds of decentralized and perfectly un-censorable protocols that you can use too.
Facebook is a business. They have every right to refuse you service if you break their rules. End of discussion.
This is a red herring. Facebook doesn't argue that they have to ban Trump to save bandwidth.
> In any case, your liability as a user increases as your share of that content scales.
I don't even know what this is supposed to mean.
> All you've done so far is deflect, without actually making any case.
This is pretty rich. My first comment in this thread was: "Yeah, I don't have a facebook account either, yet I'm concerned about censorship on facebook, because facebook has enough users in my country to swing any election."
All you've done is to deflect from my main point - the concern about facebooks power to swing elections - by playing wordgames with the word "censorship", making various claims about what isn't censorship without even offering a definition of your own.
> You can build your own social network in 5 minutes with Mastodon and a VPS. Failing that, there's hundreds of decentralized and perfectly un-censorable protocols that you can use too.
Needless to say, none of this engages with my main point either.
I think the term "censorship" is overwhelming understood to refer to cases where the suppression of communication is particularly onerous or harmful. There is a vast range of reasonable moderation that absolutely limits the distribution of communication but I would argue is not harmful, and I think it's unreasonable to refer to all such instances as "censorship."
(I'm not however arguing that this particular action by Facebook doesn't constitute censorship. I'm just arguing that the extremely simplistic definition you provided does not really match broad usage of the term.)
"Why do the people of conscience around the globe say "Death to America"? What do they mean? To the newly elected president of America, Donald J Trump, we say, dear Mr Trump, DEATH TO AMERICA!"
- Ayatollah Khamenei
https://m.facebook.com/khamenei.updates/videos/2205424783776...
Displaying the message "Go vote!" to likely voters of X, while flooding the walls of likely voters of Y with ballast is going to do something. The question is if we want to tolerate this risk of targeted manipulation.
As far as the old capability vs. intent pair goes, it is pretty certain that FB has the necessary capability. As far as intent goes, that can change on a moment's notice.
It is also not just the USA we are speaking of. Facebook campaigns are huge in other democratic states. And they want to add their two cents to the conversation.
How does your worst case scenario derive from this situation, where a user was banned for inciting violence (against the ToS of the platform)?
Somehow on Facebook or Twitter, censoring another user is always spun as 'an accident' or 'a mistake in the algorithm' or even simply 'an error'. Usually the political left cheer on how cancelling someone everywhere works, thinking that it would never happen to them will later find out that these companies will soon won't be on their side, or any side.
Because they are always on the side of profit.
The chickens on the left are cheering on the wolves eating the other chickens who disagreed with them.
I don't think that suspending private property rights is a particularly great idea for society. If we're suspending private property rights now, to copy your last sentence, everyone cheers but they don't seem to realize this will happen to their private property in the future once the other side controls these tools
The protestors were happy to remain outside. There's video evidence of Alex Jones using a megaphone to tell the protestors to walk around the building to the other side, specifically not to enter it.
The protestors were allowed into the building by Capitol Police. The Capitol Police opened the doors for them and ushered them in, offering no resistance. There's video evidence of this as well.
The only casualties were Ashli Babbitt, who was murdered by a still-unidentified member of Capitol staff, and those people who were assaulted by Capitol Police the following evening after the cameras were turned off.
Do your research kid. I can only hope you are joking.
We’ve let only a half dozen websites more or less completely control the internet on the front and backend - far fewer than the number of utilities it would take to turn off someone’s electricity. That kind of power is not just a free speech issue, it’s a national security threat and it’s only being celebrated because it’s being wielded, for now, against people we don’t like.
Imagine a future election where one candidate wants to classify social networks as utilities, and the other candidate wants to do nothing but set puppy orphanages on fire. Candidate 1 has her social media pages cancelled for nebulous violations to a labyrinthine TOS, and she loses the election - because that is how people are reached in the modern world.
In your ideal world of free speech, is Islamic State allowed to post recruiting videos or call for generalized action? If not, is that 'censorship'? Can you openly call for violence? Can you post revenge porn? Can NAMBLA have a Facebook page and sign up underage members?
The only overly simplistic take is imagining that the world's largest communications platform isn't allowed to have rules or a Terms Of Service. That's just incredibly naive- one can't realistically run a planetary scale (hell, even a small town-scale!) platform with no rules on speech. You seem to be advocating that rules themselves are impermissible. This is an unrealistic take, I'm sorry.
I think that Facebook & others would be best served by having more explicit rules and an independent arbitration system- which they've begun with the Oversight Board- that can make common-law style precedent that gets expanded over time. In your example, the banned candidate can apply to be reinstated- hell that's the case right now, Facebook has lost every case brought to the Oversight Board other than the Trump one!
Also please answer- threats, revenge porn, the North American Man Boy Love Association- can they be removed from social media? Wouldn't that be censorship as well?
I'm a bit fascinated by this argument that we should be relying on the government to remove bad speech- that that's somehow not censorship