That's probably a big contributor to the perception.
The leaders of many of the big tech companies are very public in their support of certain views, and steer their companies to publicly support those views, as well. So it makes sense for people with differing views to believe that that companies which don't share their views would be against them.
If the tech companies were to focus solely on being good technology companies and not trying to re-shape society, the public might have a different perception.
How, exactly? Is Facebook doling out admin privileges to random users? Or are we confusing "receive criticism" with "censorship" here?
That person is feeling 'censored'.
And now every other person is a 'bot' or a Russian troll.
That's no more "censorship" than me unfriending you on Facebook would be.
> On Facebook, a similar phenomenon might occur due to liberal users reporting conservative ideas they don't agree with as hate speech.
That'll put it in a review queue, upon which Facebook employees make a decision. If it gets deleted, it's because you violated Facebook's rules.
It's more complicated than that, though. It takes more than just a report to get someone's content deleted.
Take a look at the examples from their moderator training:
https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech-cens...
See, for example, the slide about "female drivers", "black children", and "white men" - Facebook's policies (via some pretty odd logic, IMO) protect posts about "white men", but not "black children". A liberal bastion, they're not.
> One document trains content reviewers on how to apply the company’s global hate speech algorithm. The slide identifies three groups: female drivers, black children and white men. It asks: Which group is protected from hate speech? The correct answer: white men.
> The reason is that Facebook deletes curses, slurs, calls for violence and several other types of attacks only when they are directed at “protected categories”—based on race, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation and serious disability/disease. It gives users broader latitude when they write about “subsets” of protected categories. White men are considered a group because both traits are protected, while female drivers and black children, like radicalized Muslims, are subsets, because one of their characteristics is not protected. (The exact rules are in the slide show below.)
Would it not be the same the other way around because of the subset rule? Black women would be protected whereas male drivers and white children would not?
Do you have any proof of that claim?
Too often “free speech” is a messy and conflated concept used to basically argue against anyone being told to shut up. Various arguments about the size or dominance of a social media platform are often used to try and get them covered like the government under the 1st amendment. Then if all that fails, the argument switches to free speech as a vague principle rather than a legal right.
To be fair, it isn’t just conservatives who seem to feel this way either. Americans in general just seem, on average, not to understand this issue as well as they think they do.
Maybe not, but on some sites you are abusing your privileges as a moderator by behaving this way.
Moreover people like Mill or Popper would argue people have a duty to engage every idea, because that's how the open society works.
The reduction of free speech to the first amendment and to State censorship is a modern american barbarism that is as absurd as it is baseless in either its historical roots or its application by any free judiciary, including the American one.
Telling people to shut up because their ideas are unpopular is and always will be illiberal.
You're free to think that it's all bunk and tyranny of the majority is just fine. Many people do.
I'd just like it to be clear to everyone that such an opinion is being against free speech. Because what greatly annoys me is when people try to claim that they advocate a "reasonable" version of free speech when they simply oppose it. Or indeed try to claim that their censorious position is a liberal one.
Which I am not at all accusing you of incidentally.
I would wager a large sum of money that if left-wing opinion were treated in the same way there would be much whining about minority rights and the importance of an individual's free speech from the left.
Other users can't censor. That's not an ability they have.
And really, the only hostility I've seen targeted at conservative views are those viewpoints that decide that certain people shouldn't have the same rights as everyone else. And I can very much understand that, if you were told that you couldn't marry the person you loved, or even that you shouldn't be allowed to exist in public, you'd be quite hostile to the people who spout those viewpoints too.