Blocking your Facebook account can lead to losing access to support groups and local marketplaces that may be important to people in need, and it is absolutely disgusting that they are allowed to kick people out for no reason.
Don't you have that backwards?
In the US, at least, “plain discrimination” by private parties is generally legal, but for regulated utilities (which Facebook is not) and fairly narrow sets of specifically prohibited bases of discrimination by public accommodations.
If you want a general rule applying something like the rational basis test used as the minimum standard applicable to public discrimination to private commercial discrimination, that's a fairly radical change to the law.
There's no such thing as a “de facto utility“.
If you mean “Facebook is the kind of thing that the government should regulate as a utility”, well, that's fine, but that's something that requires at least regulatory, if not legislative, action to make happen and set the regulatory rules (including any applicable anti-discrimination rules) for.
So, again, the applicable rules need to be created elsewhere in government before Facebook is taken to court for allegedly violating them.
Where did I say they are to be taken to court?
Electricity, water, natural gas, internet, and district heating are utilities. Facebook isn’t. There are no transmission lines or pipes running to each Facebook user directly from Facebook, there’s no physical reason that other social networks can’t exist.
It’s not a utility just because several billion people use it.
Yeah but you can also make the same argument for education: education is not a utility because several billion people like to be educated.
Facebook connects people and businesses, groups. It’s basically the same as if someone decided to ban you from using SMS or snail mail or libraries at this point.
> no transmission lines
> no physical reason that other [social networks] can’t exist
Sorry for nitpicking, but you can get internet without transmission lines too (just as phone service) - and it's still an utility :V
But I am just nitpicking, sorry :V
No, they are expressly for what would be, under the law without Section 230, publishers.
The entire purpose of Section 230 is to allow platforms (and users!) to freely moderate content on based on their own views of what is appropriate without incurring liability as a publisher as would otherwise accrue to those exercise such control of distribution.
(Section 230 protections wouldn't be needed for common carriers, who would, as such, be forbidden from exercising the kind of editorial control which would, without a safe harbor, produce the kind of liability from which Section 230 provides a safe harbor.)
That being said I log into Facebook once every 6 months approximately. It was replaced by WhatsApp and Instagram for me, however my point still stands as much for those platforms as it is for Facebook.
I might not like it, but they are in their right. I can always create my own web property.
By that unjust actions they actually show the value in de-centralizing WWW back to good old days.
You shouldn't argue that a farmer who was kicked out from Facebook for absolutely no reason should no longer have the right to access a wider variety of local offers for farm equipment on Facebook Marketplace, or have a better chance to sell their produce.
And you shouldn't argue that people are destined for this fate for the rest of their lives because of a primitive algorithm put in place by people who have no morals.
They are not in their right. They are abusing their position, and they are harming people.
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They are so huge they should probably be classified as a public utility of sorts. This is a tough pill to swallow for this site since it could possibly derail the tech gravy train.
This is a problem with most of mega tech right now. Nobody can spin up a fair competitor to Youtube because Google can throw money from other parts of the business to keep it dominant. How are you supposed to compete fairly with Amazon when they can reinforce with AWS money?