Why should the size of the community matter? Under what rationale are you going to decide that HN can moderate but YT cannot?
If you believe YT is a monopoly, then it would be far less harmful to everyone if it was just broken up, rather than basically banning moderation on the internet.
The power of enforcement follows from policy, in a democracy policy is influenced by public opinion, public opinion is shaped by discussion. We ought to discuss moral issues for which there is currently no enforcement.
* a good portion of the law as it exists is actually a result of people thinking, in legal contexts, about what ought to be, at least insofar as any portion of the law represents values and ideals.
* any new "what ought to be" that turns out to be at some point in the future will need the force of law in one sense or another, which means it must be nested within a legal context, probably one enough like the present legal context that some if not all present constraints will matter.
"I very strongly feel that we should be very careful to avoid adopting a legalistic attitude towards freedom of speech."
and ending with
"What’s your point? That we should ignore how the courts and first amendment law actually works?" ?
The First Amendment is one specific protection of freedom of speech. It does not equal freedom speech, which is a general concept that private companies can also uphold (but I think everyone here acknowledges they are not legally obligated to)
Im still wondering why anyone expects this of youtube but would never ever expect it of the bar down the street.
I haven't been in a bar where the patrons were told they couldn't discuss quack medicine.
That's over specific.
All bars (even the worst ones I could find) usually have unspoken rules about what can be discussed, until you start to talk about those subjects (eg drug dealing, weapons dealing, planned violence, etc) openly. Of course you can't effectively restrict communication between individuals, but that's also not the issue.
Of course “more problematic” is not the bar for anti-trust regulation; I leave that to the lawyers.
See, YT bans all kinds of stuff that the first amendment protects, including pornography, violence, and a lot of other nasty stuff that they don’t want on their platform for entirely clear reasons. Eliminate YT’s right to clear those off their site, and it’ll be filled with the lowest common denominator very quickly, as regular users flee from the torrent of unwanted offensive material.
Of course, it’s easy to imagine that we can give YT the right to ban some “offensive” material, but who defines what “offensive” is? The Government? Giving the government the right to control what can and cannot be moderated on YT is kind of contrary to the entire point of this exercise.
If you believe that YT controls too much of the information in our society, then anti-trust or anti-monopoly law is a much richer area for fostering free speech.
Aside from that, removing the first amendment from my argument changes very little. You’d still be obliged to create a definition of what is and is not free speech and a mechanism for enforcement, which would be subject to the pitfalls listed above.
Yes, that's part of my point. That's an incentive to shoehorn, over-simplify, and strawman the ideas and arguments of others.
If Youtube presented itself as being a video platform for <insert political affiliation> from the getgo, then I wouldn't see a legal problem with moderating videos containing opposing views.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
Here’s the entire text of 230, it doesn’t have a “unless they’re biased” clause.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
You're correct that section 230 doesn't require neutrality, but that was part of the point of the legislation. The case law prior to section 230 did result in such a distinction, though not necessarily in those terms.
The cases in question are:
- Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe Inc., in which CompuServe was held not liable for content hosted on its systems as it was merely a distributor and did not have knowledge of the content, and
- Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co., in which Prodigy was held liable for defamatory content posted on its systems as it performed moderation and was therefore considered to have editorial control over the content
Section 230 introduced a carve-out for internet service companies to avoid liability for user-generated content, but given the case law it does seem like this is otherwise a distinction made in US law.
And if you think it's only natural that YouTube disallows "propaganda" that "reasonable people" would object to, why are you surprised that they would remove other varieties of propaganda? Of course, different people will have different definitions of reasonableness.