In 2020, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Cloudflare are bigger gatekeepers of free speech than any government.
Tell that to people who live in China, N. Korea, or any country controlled by a theocracy.
Even in the US some states ban doctors from talking about abortion and/or force doctors to give women seeking an abortion false information.
If a link can’t be shared on Facebook, Google, or Twitter, it may as well not exist in most of the world.
Heck when you can literally close off entire markets, private corporations censor themselves.
Facebook has over 3 billion users.
Gmail has over 2 billion active users. All their products combined probably have more than 3 billion.
US has 350 million people.
By those numbers alone, aren't tech companies more powerful arbitrators?
But that's a bad metric. We should talk about enforcement rather than raw numbers. Government's interest and design won't allow it to censor expressions in the same way that private companies [0] do. Private companies can filter anything and since tech companies are digital, the enforcement itself can scale a lot more than government. Government maintains some sort of appeal system while tech companies don't have to.
Algorithms responsible for gmail filter billions of mails daily probably. Obviously, not all of it can be called censorship as majority of it is spam but anything wrongfully filtered is censorship, no? That's going to be a huge number that can't scale offline in enforcement.
0] https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...
[1]https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2019/05...
You don’t have to tell 1 billion people in China not to say F%%% China”. You just punish a few and the rest fall in line.
Once you punish a few, the rest self censor.
It's less severe, sure.
"Oh, you're friends with someone who says X? Welp, you must be a Bad User and your posts will receive a lot less visibility and the validation that you desire. But if you were to stop interacting with your Bad Friend, you could become a Good User again."
And oops, "Bad Friend" no longer gets invited to real-life parties because most people still consider FB the most convenient way to organize them and people only rarely remember to forward the invites.
The enforcement works better when you aren’t aware of it. Being covert means you don’t protest so loudly.
Bam, your reach has just expanded to 3+ billion people, most of whom aren't even your citizens.
It cheapens speech and denigrates those ACTUALLY living without freedoms.
Facebook, Google, Twitter, or any other online service for that matter controlling what is and is not said on their platform is not "gatekeeping" anything.
Posting something on Facebook is not now, has never been, and will never be "free speech".
No matter how much you want it to be.
Facebook has almost certainly already removed what would be considered free speech according to the UN declaration of human rights, it's unlikely that none of the thousands of government critical posts it removed in India alone at the behest of the government could be considered free speech in the human rights sense.
If you're referring to free speech in the US, while generally agreed that companies acting on their own volition can not be seen as suppressing free speech, it is not impossible they could be considered a state actor through several means, including their censorship rules considered as influenced by government policy.
Since it's not impossible to rule out that some speech on Facebook might at some point be free speech in the US legal sense, and that much of it is free speech in the human rights sense, it is not entirely incorrect to talk about free speech on Facebook, but entirely incorrect as far as I can tell to claim it can never be.
Personally I think it's ethically problematic to require companies to give voice to everyone equally, but it's also somewhat problematic to allow complete freedom of what or who to reject when companies and their services become large enough to be an integral part of society's fabric, and perhaps the political debate.
In some way companies like Facebook has a similar function as asphalt, it simplifies communication greatly, but it's not really whether or not a piece of land is covered in asphalt made by a private or government entity that determines what is public or private. It's not who made the asphalt, and in several countries it's not even who owns then area under the asphalt, but rather how the covered place is used as determined by interpretation of law.
Twitter is probably more similar to a public place as it is, but Facebook's marketplaces, events, and groups nevertheless implies character in a direction that can be interpreted similarly.
But they are misusing it. There are articles besides the 19th.
Tweeting content disagreeable with Twitter, Inc. cannot be a right under the UDHR because of Article 20.
Article 20
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
2. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
"An association" doesn't mean an organized body like a club, political party, or union. It means any tangible or intangible connection of any type between two parties.
The twin freedoms of speech and association means a newspaper can't be forced (in civilized countries) to publish content against their will. The owners of the paper can't be forced into an association with ideas or speech that is not their own.
Same goes for Twitter. If Twitter wants to delete or prevent the dissemination of any tweet for any reason at any time-- that's their right.
If this was not true, then my local newspaper would be violating my rights for not publishing my letters to the editor. Are they?
[1] https://www.city-journal.org/html/platform-or-publisher-1588...
You can sue anyone for any reason. Facebook and other online services enjoy broad immunity from civil suits IF AND ONLY IF they make a good faith effort to remove defamatory content.
I understand why conservative bigots are obsessed with Section 230: its repeal is being used as a threat against platforms that remove bigoted content. Conservative bigots know that Section 230 means nothing to the fact that Facebook can delete their bigoted comments, but they ALSO know that repealing it will cost Facebook money so they are pressuring Facebook, saying "If you allow our bigoted content we will drop efforts to repeal section 230".
I will never understand why people believe conservative bigots who say that it has anything to do with free speech.
Section 230 is literally two sentences, easily understandable by average persons. It has nothing to do with speech.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 [2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=149134315940390...