I can't remember people being denied service for their political views until just recently.
Another odd thing is that a company would give a rip about their employees political views.
These are strange times.
The idea of not discriminating based on politics or other overt characteristics, as a widespread cultural phenomenon, was relatively new and short-lived.
In the early 1970s? I'd like to see some citations of that.
Edit: the above is perhaps a bit of an incomplete thought. I'd generally argue that picking wartime era hysteria is a little misleading, that happens to basically every country. On the other hand, there's a reason why people always jump on the "myth" of the First Amendment when it's mentioned in discussions about private companies: Americans often confuse the constitutional principle with the general principle, and they do this because Americans are largely supportive of the general principle.
My point is that, as far as I know, the kind of freedoms and political neutrality the West enjoyed between 1980s to 2010s were a short-lived anomaly. Implied in that was an observation that we're on a downslope now and I agree with 'OneEyedRobot that we're not enjoying much of that neutrality today.
Probably wasn't as noticable when they were turning far more people away because of their race, religion, or gender.
For common carriers that has been a longstanding policy, for example, telephone companies can't deny you service for things you say over the phone.
The fewer the viable alternatives to a service are, the more that makes sense.
The big shift is the exact opposite, that you would allow companies that run services with network effects to choose what messages are sent over their services while at the same time avoiding liability for the messages that are sent.
If you try to say revolution is a political viewpoint, I guess you could make that point, but it seems entirely reasonable that asking for select people to be killed is crossing a meaningful line. Especially in a democracy.
There is enough legal and philosophical body of work around that question. But either ways it is not a meaningful reason for "regulation". All platforms already have restrictions for such things and very likely government regulations will force platforms to allow for "kill all X" talks but not "kill all Y" talks making the platform very toxic.
For example, American company's response to Jan 6 appears to be far more mature and useful to American society than that of American federal government and FBI.
The whole situation is crying out for some sort of civic process. If we live part of our lives in cyberspace, we need a voice in how those spaces are governed. Something “By the people, for the people.” We don’t let corporations run towns in the real world and do this sort of thing. It’s entirely consistent to want to bring democratic values online too.
We already have a framework for physical networking services that does this: Common Carrier. It doesn’t and shouldn’t apply to companies other than “dumb pipe” utilities. No company which can or does do any moderation of content should be governed by CC laws.
You seem to think forcing all companies on the internet to maximize democratic values is somehow either possible or a good idea. I can’t see how that could be implemented without destroying every company’s ability to build a brand, to enforce their own contractual terms.
Example: you local church/temple website that accepts with user-generated comments would be forced to allow and keep every comment submitted, no matter how offensive to the members or the faith the church practices. Non-believers would be able to deface the service in a way that trespassing laws prevent IRL. This compelled democratic values maximization concept doesn’t exist in the offline world so you would have to build the logical/rational foundations for doing it from scratch. Obviously the church/temple example is contrived and those are far from Big Tech companies, but if you assert that some services are required to retain all offensive content and others aren’t, then you need to develop a litmus test, which I argue is futile.
And from where I stand, demanding a civic process is really strange considering most civic processes in the USA are deteriorating while Big Tech is doing the opposite.
As an example, in Germany nudity is much less of a taboo than in the US. Facebook has a blanket ban on nudity for American cultural reasons. A nudist event in Berlin can be argued for and against in Berlin by the communities involved. They can talk about it in council, protest, write letters, vote or get politically involved. On Facebook people can’t effectively do any of those things. They just enforce America’s squeamishness from on high. If Facebook and Twitter want to be an online version of the public square, people need the right to govern our own communities online as we do offline.
I like Reddit’s moves in this direction with community moderation of subreddits. I’m not a free speech absolutist - I like that entire subreddits can still be banned if they become too toxic (as we saw recently). But this makes people really angry because Reddit’s internal governance is entirely unaccountable. An unelected monarch is ruling over a bunch of small community run spaces. The next healthy step is for the monarch to be replaced with a board of directors or something - who are themselves accountable to the users. But like all kings throughout time, reddit has no incentive to do that.
And on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube it’s much worse. At scale, the editorial choices made by their content algorithms are inordinately powerful, invisible and actively destructive to society. I don’t know the right way to reign in this stuff. But I’m worried that if we don’t, society at large won’t survive the partisanship, extremism and conspiracy thinking that these editorial algorithms en masse create.
I agree there’s something deeply wrong in Washington. I wish us technologists were making things better instead of making things worse.
A local website with a few hundred users shouldn't be held to the same standards as one that has made itself a dominant factor in public discourse.
I don’t agree that FB should be a content neutral platform. Just because there are network effects and social media is common do not mean they are “the” town square. They are more like a private mall where lots of people are allowed, but some people have been banned for trespassing.