It is amazing to me that there are so many people, smart people even, that are adamant that we shouldn't have free speech in society.
You have a right to free speech until it infringes on someone else.
The real problem is that people falsely think YouTube is the only way to publish a video on the Internet...
but if it's true for youtube, why it cannot be true for an hosting company or a service provider? can't they just shut down my server or my ip? they are private after all...
is there a legally safe to speak freely on the internet? or our freedom of speech is limited only to photocopies?
This can be attributed to nothing more than personal political bias. There is no way these people would be arguing for censorship if the censorship favored the other side.
It also makes me want to move. There is no advantage to being an American without the freedom of speech and press.
In that sense it's like the concept of freedom in general. It's slippery, difficult to define, and has fuzzy boundaries. We're not always going to agree on the extent of each freedom. Where does your freedom end and mine begin?
In this particular case, how big does a company need to be before we start forcing it to host content that it doesn't want to host? When is it ok to force someone to provide a universal platform... to tie their hands so they can't moderate as they see fit?
Do I have a right to stand on your stage and shout whatever I want at your audience?
The government will also punish people who commit crimes against you merely because they dislike your words, which frees you to say things you might otherwise keep to yourself.
What you don't have a right to do is amplify your message using the massively powerful social-media megaphones which are created and owned by tech companies. If you want to amplify a message that these companies find strongly objectionable, you'll have to build your own megaphone, or find one owned by someone with different views from Google/Facebook/Twitter.
That said, I wonder if it's sufficient to reduce the amount of amplification rather than outright censoring things the company disagrees with. For example, YouTube could let conspiracy videos be hosted but leave it up to viewers to discover them rather than recommending them in search or "related videos". It seems likely that censoring will have unintended consequences.
> We asked whether people believe that citizens should be able to make public statements that are offensive to minority groups, or whether the government should be able to prevent people from saying these things. Four-in-ten Millennials say the government should be able to prevent people publicly making statements that are offensive to minority groups, while 58% said such speech is OK. Even though a larger share of Millennials favor allowing offensive speech against minorities, the 40% who oppose it is striking given that only around a quarter of Gen Xers (27%) and Boomers (24%) and roughly one-in-ten Silents (12%) say the government should be able to prevent such speech.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-mille...
Values change, what people find acceptable and what they do not find acceptable changes.
Fortunately for all of us, it's not the general population of millenials or boomers who decide what speech the government gets to prevent; it's experienced justices, who tend to take the constitution much more seriously than the average person.
The statistic that 40% of millenials want laws preventing statements offensive to minorities is kind of baffling to me. Do you think they just don't understand the constitution, or do they want it rewritten to allow this kind of law?
There is some talk about changing or repealing the first amendement. A good article about how this shift in values happened: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-cod...
Imagine if the value that changed was that we treated people with different opinions with respect instead of changing the opinions that get you run out on a rail.
What makes anyone think that other groups won't be able to create their own social-media megaphones? The tech is well understood already and they're highly motivated and well funded. It's been tried a couple of times already and eventually they're going to succeed. And if the last two US presidential election results are any indication, they might grow as big (or bigger!) as any of the other social-media giants. What will we do then?
Wrong twice.
First of all, the United States doesn't have laws against hate speech. The US Supreme Court has said hate speech is protected by the first amendment. So, you're protected from government retaliation, even if it's hate speech.
Second of all, that's NOT what "having free speech in society" means. It's what the first amendment means. In American culture, writing op eds to a privately owned newspaper is a classic example of free speech, going all the way to revolutionary times (and actually predating the constitution). In the past (before the internet), prominent newspapers would brag that they would publish editorials from any significant public figure, even if they detested that public figure, because free speech was a good thing. That's why the NYTimes has published so many editorials from dictators.
I don't think the government should require tech companies like Google to support free speech. I think Google should support free speech because it's the right thing to do. I believe the author of this article feels similarly, just as the editors of major American newspapers did from about 1600 to 2005.
Interesting, thanks for enlightening me! Canada does have laws against hate speech and I'd mistakenly thought the US did as well. In any case, speech intended to incite lawbreaking, whether a hate crime or otherwise, is not protected under the first amendment. If you tell your Twitter followers to go burn down all the Jewish-owned business or whatever, and they do, your speech is illegal. So there are at least some limits.
And I agree that freedom of speech goes beyond the first amendment. But the "significant public figure" of that is important: not anyone could get published in the New York Times, you already had to have reach and notoriety. They wouldn't have published articles by some random basement crackpot moon conspiracist, because that person wouldn't have a chance to get famous in the first place. They probably also don't publish opinion pieces with easily-disproven counterfactual statements. YouTube's algorithm, by default, makes no distinction: any idiot can go viral and get tons of reach on a video loaded with outright lies. YouTube has provided a platform that makes the spread of misinformation much easier and in my opinion it's their responsibility to take action to correct that.
The standard is "imminent lawless action." You can in fact advocate lawbreaking, including violent lawbreaking (e.g. people advocating punching all Nazis are protected).
I think the standard could change, considering that when that standard was set, such advocacy couldn't be effectively spread without a trail of publishers and broadcasters that would be vulnerable to direct retaliatory violence.
(Although I'd prefer an economic system that makes monopolies fundamentally impossible or very unlikely - i.e. one that constrains the ability to concentrate capital.)
The scarce resource here isn't freedom of speech, it's people's attention. As always, you can say whatever you want, and as always, it's hard to get people to listen to you. Before the internet, you basically needed an already-famous person to take an interest in you in order to get noticed. Now a message can go viral organically, without needing to involve any journalists or talk-show hosts, but the platforms are free to stop something from going viral if they don't like it. Facebook giveth and Facebook taketh away.
But to answer your question, I think breaking up the platforms would be a better solution than treating them as de-facto public services and trying to regulate them as such. Or appropriate them and make them into actual public services :)