There is no free speech on private social media platforms
I think if a platform wants to not support free speech, that's a fair choice to make, but as a user I want them to communicate that in abundance. I don't expect the Disney Club to support sex workers describing their autobiographies, but I would expect them to not pretend they are a bastion of free speech or a platform for the world.
Whether it's newspapers or a town square, there have always been people who have been loud. Loud does not mean right. It also doesn't mean you need to muzzle the people who are loud.
I agree with you that anonymity is important too though.
Fortunately, there are ways to ensure data came from an original source without actually disclosing that source's actual identity.
This will probably require considerable mobilization of tech companies, governments, and citizens, but I think democracy and free speech online is important enough to warrant the effort.
How about no ? Voting and Speech are separate issues, lets' not confound them
"One person, one voice/account" has a similar rationale behind it. Technology is a force multiplier. The human mind gives more credence to things they hear/see repeatedly and from multiple different sources. This is a somewhat robust heuristic only when they are actually different sources. The "powerful interests" here are those with the knowledge to broadcast their message widely under multiple different aliases. This is why social media is such a problem.
If a particular platform is shown to be important to democratic discourse, there's a compelling argument that that platform should have rules ensuring the authenticity of the people's voice.
I realize a lot of people here in the bubble may not realize this, but it's not "the entire world minus some weirdos in my country" that don't fit into that. It's most of the world, except some of the US and some of Europe and misc folk elsewhere that add up to much less than those two. You can't both actively enforce this ideology that perhaps 10% of the world agrees to while projecting growth into the 75% range.
The President was elected by a lot of people who currently have Facebook accounts, and a lot of them are still planning to vote for him again. If you declare that political viewpoint verboten, well, let's just say you're probably going to get a lot more significantly less "voluntary" resignations from Facebook once the money stops coming in because the eyeballs left.
The way people twist this is entertaining.
I think it should be allowed to take a moral stand, which is why your freedom of speech has nothing to do with social media and I'm glad about it as well.
I wonder what happened to antitrust law enforcement in USA.
What recourse does the average citizen have to abuse from these entities? Think of all the ways Google or Facebook could screw you over or even shape the social/political narrative. This should be a free-for-all?
"Just build your own global social platform"... yea, not possible. In the mean time, they can abuse their power while you get up and running, or never do.
Think of it another way. If the government is constrained, but massive corporations (who pay off politicians) aren't, doesn't this clearly seem an end-around for "government" to encourage private companies to do the censorship they want, enact favorable policies for them in return, and the powerless individual, or small groups suffer similar consequences as if the government themselves censored them? It's an easy hack for the 1st amendment.
Those laws are relatively recent. By your very own argument, doing all those things was perfectly A-OK before the laws that barred discrimination went into place. Oops.
It is legal, due to the first amendment, but it sure does say a lot about you as a person.
Usually when people are talking about Twitter endorsing free speech, they are not asking for a law, but moreso asking Twitter to do so out of principle.
I don't like these arguments because they seem to end up revolving around one's interpretation of 'free speech' when both sides are really in agreement.
Will you continue to use moderators? If speech is truly free, there will be no need for content moderators. And yet as technologists we know that as soon as moderators stop doing their job, a significant amount of questionable or uncomfortable type of content will come in.
Whereas civil rights have a basic coalition of countries that support a finite number of things to protect, namely protection from discrimination on grounds such as race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, color, age, political affiliation, ethnicity, religion, and disability;