During the founding of this country we probably had trolls too, but its easier to regain a pleasant town square when the troll has to directly, physically, face the consequences of his free speech.
The goal of free speech is not to create a "pleasant town square", it's to protect individual liberty and not allow powerful entities to control what can and cannot be communicated.
I have some pretty unpopular opinions because of my support of this Constitutional underpinning. For instance, I think that there is nothing wrong with exclusive country clubs. Or hoisting Confederate/Nazi flags on private property. Or even kneeling during the anthem. Etc.
Our government does not stop any such activities. (And if they did, I would consider it an act of governmental overreach on the level of treason against the Constitution.)
Now from the other side of it, if that exclusive country club does not want me on their grounds, that does not restrict my activities. I don't have any rights that impinge the rights of others. That is, the country club does not have to give up its right to be exclusive, because I want to go eat there.
My rights, shouldn't trump anyone else' rights, but I believe my rights should almost always trump the government's rights. And my honest belief is that that's how the Founders saw things as well.
That's the way I think things should work.
But when it comes to YouTube or Facebook, no moderation policy is appropriate because there is no single set of community standards for all users. When you have more users than most countries have citizens, you're acting in the role of a government.
Obviously the best solution to this is to get back to a decentralized internet where no one site has more than 5% of the total users, but in the meantime the big players shouldn't be censoring anything. And if that so happens to make them less competitive against smaller sites without so many users they're expected not to restrict anything -- good.
i would like to see governments take more of a black/white stance toward "safe harbor" protections. if you need to moderate for the bottom line, you can do it, but this should come with additional liability.
It isn't bad to have moderated spaces as long as they're actually run by individual communities and not amalgamated general purpose platforms imposing one party's views on everybody else.
As soon as you impose liability you go from moderation as a mechanism to weed out malice to essentially an editorial board that has to pre-approve everything as officially sanctioned by the platform. It excludes an important middle ground.
There doesn't have to be.
In my view, YouTube and Facebook, are private property. It's like the example of the exclusive country club. I can't argue that the country club is big and has all the best restaurants, so they have to let me in. It's their club.
Or perhaps a more analogous example. What happens a lot up here in Wisconsin is that some families sit on a lot of land. Needless to say, during deer season, there are a lot of people who think they can just go on that land to hunt. But that's not how it works. I don't like it. I'd like to hunt on some of that land. It's all of the best spots being monopolized by one family, but it's THEIR property.
My right to hunt doesn't mean that all of a sudden they don't have a right to their land. It's their land.
Same with YouTube. Go to another video streaming site. Or start your own. But you don't get to tell YouTube what to do with their video streaming site.
Your right to speak freely is not impinged at all by them precluding you from their site for instance. Any more than my right to hunt is impinged by a certain family, that shall remain nameless, not sharing their land.
If someone has a thousand times more land than the average person, but still only 5% of all the land, they have no obligation to share. If someone has more than half of all of it, it's antitrust time and different rules apply.
You don't like his service, use another. YouTube doesn't own all of the video streaming services around. Not even close.
All your arguments just don't apply to the case you're trying to make. YouTube doesn't own all the video streaming services. And the government doesn't restrict your right to speak freely outside of YouTube.
So where is the necessity to speak on YouTube coming from?
You haven't presented an argument that would, in any way, support abrogating our social compact of private property.
Sure, all you have to do is get all your viewers to switch from Facebook/YouTube to something else. Which you have no real control over, hence the problem.
YouTube is not forcing your friends to use YouTube, and neither is the government. Your friends can easily view your video stream on any other service.
So "but my friends won't use Twitch instead", is not really a legitimate reason for us to abandon our belief in private property. Sorry.
If this were true, why isn't it what actually happens? Why is there a single dominant YouTube with majority share rather than dozens of competitors none of which has more than a single digit percentage of the users?
Presumably because YouTube is better? Or maybe just easier?
I'm not an expert. I couldn't tell you.
But what I can tell you is that it's NOT because the government forces everyone to use YouTube. It's not even because YouTube forces everyone to use YouTube.
If someone starts forcibly preventing you from using, say, Twitch, then give me a call. I'll be the first one to agitate for getting that restriction removed. But if you and every one of your friends are free to use whatever you like, and you're choosing to use YouTube. Then there is no real problem to be solved.
What it sounds to me like you're asking for, is for us to effectively confiscate someone else' private property because you kind of like it. Well I'm sorry, but this is not Cuba. That's just not how things work here. Here in the US, the principle of private property is held sacrosanct. It takes a lot more than what you've put forward for us to go confiscate and nationalize someone's property.
There are plenty of video streaming services. Your issue is that you don't want to use the others. That doesn't make YouTube a problem. The problem is that you don't want to use the others. And that's not a problem that the Constitution or the government should solve for you.
But you CAN view live video streams at numerous other places.
This is the difference that's glaringly obvious to everyone else, but somehow seems to escape you. DailyMotion exists. Twitch exists. Vimeo exists. Facebook video exists, and is actually larger than YouTube. (by megabyte stored.) Twitter video exists. Instagram video exists. Snapchat video exists. The list goes on and on.
You have to have a monopoly, to break up a monopoly. YouTube doesn't have a monopoly. You, presumably, just like their property more than Twitch or Instagram video or whatever. So you want to use YouTube.
Fine. I get that.
But that's a 'YOU' problem, not an 'US' problem.
Also, if you view YouTube as merely a video hosting service, you're completely missing the point. It's the second largest search engine on the web.
That's not free speech.
I'm not trying to get in the middle of your guys' argument, but I have a serious question.
Why does a troll being anonymous or public, make his speech any more, or less, free? (Assuming that soldiers or police, or Saudi Intelligence Agents, aren't coming to drag said troll away.)
Never gave you a right not to be ignored by your neighbours, or not banned from the bar, or not having others nudge their friends to make sure they notice and avoid, etc. Free speech almost always came with consequences until the internet age.
It is like that where I grew up in the Midwest, too. Knowing that there will likely be immediate physical consequences for inflammatory speech is a great way to limit that kind of behavior. Unless, of course, it's Saturday night and you're mildly drunk and looking for a fight.
it's also a great way to limit unpopular political speech and marginalized people taking up public space. "gay bashing", for example, is still a thing that happens to some of my friends.
unless we can count on people to only administer beatings to the right folks, i don't really see how you can have it both ways.
It's also a great way to defend unpopular political speech and marginalized people. The civil rights and gay rights movements used the same means of inflicting social and physical consequences against the status quo that its defenders used to defend it.
Speech doesn't exist in a vacuum completely separate from the universe of physical consequence, it never has.
They're not my ideas, and they don't benefit only those in power. If that were true, no protest, union or revolutionary movement of any kind would ever have been successful. The paradox of tolerance[0] is a real thing.
That's not free speech. That's silencing what you don't like with violence.
I'm not advocating public violence to limit speech or "de-platform" people. We have too much of that already. Rather, the point was to contrast the kinds of things people will say online that they would probably not say in person.
Preaching Bible can offend my atheist neighbor. My neighbor's blasphemous speech can offend my religious sentiments. There can be no end to this. In effect, no one will be free to speak their mind.
That is, in fact, the definition of free speech.