>Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
[1]: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
But even by the U.N definition, the only part that could be of concern here is "receive and impart information and ideas through any media", but how exactly would that be put in place ? It is not like you can go to your local radio station and ask them to give you the mic since this is your right to impart information and ideas through any media.
Similarly with internet. You can make your own web server. You can't just hijack someone else's web server or send government goons to make them say what you want.
By centralizing communication like Facebook has, they’ve placed themselves in the funky place of being the arbiter for communication through their social graph. You don’t own your audience, they do. You don’t have direct to audience communication (even if your audience is just your friends and family!) - they do.
Facebook owns the content delivery channel. And so they control what is permitted to flow through that channel.
I honestly don’t think there is a role government has to play in this [1]. This isn’t a regulation thing IMO, it’s an architecture thing. I think the solution is to agree with you on your points and build platforms that allow people to communicate directly with their audience without having to go through any centralized gate keeper.
[1] other than stopping the laundering of 1st amendment violations they’ve committed through the loophole of separating censorship “requests” from enforcement.
> By centralizing human communication like Facebook has, they’ve placed themselves in the funky place of being the arbiter for communication through their social graph. You don’t own your audience, they do. You don’t have direct to audience communication (even if your audience is just your friends and family!) - they do.
Respectfully mate, how is that any different than radio, TV and newspaper before ? If anything, it is far better now, you have at least many platform to choose from and you can host your own.
But it’s a quirky bug we’ve discovered in scaling the architecture of the web that we are going to address.
Soon you’re going to own your own content distribution channels.
The current state of jurisprudence on this is nearer than you think to the side of Youtube must not violate your first amendment rights. I think the original reasoning mostly holds, despite youtube not being an actual town.
The number of people using social media makes it the town square of the present. We should treat it as such.
First, commercial speech is certainly speech. If you don't restrict anything at all, your platform will drown in a constant deluge of spam. So on that basis alone there's something you must remove if you want to have any kind of conversations happening, and therefore can't be an actual absolutist.
Second, there's illegal and just icky content. Posting pictures of poo isn't illegal. It can be "speech" after a fashion. That will also quickly result in people leaving.
Third, a free-for-all is only tolerable to a small segment of the population. HN for instance only works because it's moderated and curated. You can have something like r/worldpolitics which embodies the "no moderation" ideal. It's a subreddit where the moderators do the absolute minimum Reddit requires. Meaning it's mostly porn. And what's the point in having more than one of those? They're all more or less the same.
"Social media" should not be a hyper-concentrated collection of advertising targets. That single aspect has probably caused 99% of "social medial ills.
- I don’t feel a right to decide the vibe of how a business curates its space. My bakery, coffee shop, local library, etc. all curate a space with an opinion. I don’t feel I have standing to assert that my preferences should dominate their choices.
As an aside, businesses are also an extension of the people, the best ones tend to just not be mode collapsed
Then try yelling racial slurs in your local town square and see how that goes for ya.
> I don't understand this position. Why do people want private companies to decide what's allowed and what isn't? Shouldn't lawmakers, and by extension the people (at least in democratic countries) decide what speech is allowed and what isn't?
Why shouldn't I be allowed to police what can be said on my private property ? If you are in my home yelling racist stuff, I will ask you to leave, and make you leave if you refuse. I don't see why I shouldn't be able to do the same on my plateform. If you want to yell racial slurs, you can go to truth social or whatever.
Not a legal positioning, a social pressuring.
If a society values and protects free speech, we would observe institutions, businesses, and individuals being very permissive and polite to speech they find objectionable.
If it doesn't, we would observe that its government doesn't care much about free speech either.
Free speech involves making sometimes uncomfortable sacrifices for a principle. Why would anyone support a government making such sacrifices if they don't believe in making such sacrifices at an individual level?
That is a recursive and meaningless definition. Free speech is widely understood, and codified, as being able to say stuff without having the government send you to jail for it. That is a pretty basic requirement for a functional democracy. Altough, depending on where you live, even free speech does not mean fully free. In the U.S it is mostly limited by libel/defamation, but in a lot of country hate speech is not allowed. Whether you think it is a good thing or not that is up to you, but this is actual free speech.
Freedom of speech, in the other hand, is part of a moral code that believes in inalienable rights, that humans implicitly have the right to express themselves. The government does not grant the right to freedom of speech, because we already have it. The first amendment says that the government must respect that right, but creating the right.
That's a bit vague. Nothing about this statement on its face would preclude some speech regulations so it reads more like an empty platitude to me.