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Saying that "you don't need to use FB/Twitter, you can write your own blog" is like saying in 1789 "You don't need to be allowed to distribute your pamphlets in front of Faneuil Hall in Boston, you can exercise your free speech on the top of a mountain in Colorado."

Sure, if free speech is only about speaking, then someone can speak just as well on a mountaintop as they can in downtown Boston. But speech also has an element of being heard.

When the First Amendment was ratified, speech in a public square was the commonplace way of getting a message out to the world. Now, that commonplace medium is controlled by private corporations that don't fall under the jurisdiction of the First Amendment. If "free speech" continues to be important, then we need to create additional protections for speech in these virtual public squares where people can be heard, not just for speech in Internet wastelands that are the digital equivalent of an ice floe in Antarctica.

The solution is to maintain the public nature of the public square by taking steps to reduce Facebook/Twitter's de-facto ownership rather than to assert that the rules for the public square must also apply to the private sections cordoned off by Facebook/Twitter.

Here's why I don't think your time-based analogy is correct.

First of all, there's no geography on the internet. Being able to only speak from the top of a mountain in Colorado in 1789 would have severely limited the potential of the population to hear you (essentially, to zero). Being able to speak "only" from one's own blog only makes discovery difficult, it does not limit people's access post-discovery.

Secondly: you appear to consider FB/Twitter etc. to be "virtual public squares". They demonstrably are not this. At the very least, it would require legislation to make them so.

Thirdly: even given the 1st amendment, even physical public squares have distinct limitations in how they can be used. For one thing, they do have geography. Any given public square is a long way from most of the population in a country of any size (even more so in countries like the USA that span thousands of miles), meaning that a particular public square is not effectively accessible to most people. As a corollary, most of the public will never be present in any actual public square.

They also have geometry: there are limits to how many people can speak in them at once.

Finally, in a public square you still cannot do the equivalent of yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, along with presence of simple noise limits for many possible public square locations. These things work very differently, or are non-existent, for written communications.

>Being able to speak "only" from one's own blog only makes discovery difficult, it does not limit people's access post-discovery.

Exactly. And furthermore, while the big social media platforms help discovery and amplification, they're not that powerful (fortunately). They're not the difference between Faneuil Hall and a remote mountaintop. Posting on Facebook and Twitter is no guarantee of being heard. You can ignore all the major social media platforms and your ability to reach a wide audience is still incredibly democratized.

> you appear to consider FB/Twitter etc. to be "virtual public squares". They demonstrably are not this. At the very least, it would require legislation to make them so.

Yes, that is what I am saying. I am advocating for legislation to protect free speech on platforms like FB and Twitter in a similar (but not identical) way that the First Amendment protects free speech on a public street.

When the First Amendment was ratified, speech in a public square was the commonplace way of getting a message out to the world.

No it wasn't. If you wanted wide distribution of getting a message out to the world (or even wider than your literal public square), you needed it to be published & distributed. That means you had convince a publisher (i.e. a private corporation) to print your pamphlet or have the means to buy your own press. You also had to physically get it into people's hands. The Internet reduces these costs so that making your thoughts available to anyone is easier today than it ever was.

Even if it was, that still doesn't show any implied intention (it certainly is not explicit) of some right for one's speech to be heard. Enforcing such a right would be impossible and probably contradictory to some other freedoms granted in the bill of rights.

To expand your metaphor:

Facebook is a roped-off section at the edge of the public square. Most people who visit the public square spend most of their time in this roped-off Facebook section.

In the Facebook section, Facebook concierges monitor each person carefully. The concierge will occasionally bring various third-parties up to each person while constantly gauging engagement as a proxy for how likely a person is to return to Facebook section.

Facebook uses their engagement metric (plus all of the observations taken to derive the engagement) to value and sell access to (through the concierge) their patrons.

You are equating some specific consequences of this concierge service to censorship as if that is the only problem. This censorship is not the only problem it is also not even a relevant problem.

The problem with social media isn't that it's a conduit for misinformation. It's that it's an unprecedented amplifier and megaphone for misinformation. I think the real fix, which would also make them much less profitable, is to radically reduce the virality of their platforms. Since they're not willing to give up the billions that spreading rabble rousing lies makes them they instead have to play censor and make everybody unhappy.

I’ll be the first to step up and say Facebook and Twitter have the right to step up and censor their platforms how they see fit. Their servers, their property, that’s the way of the world.

That’s not the same as saying they should censor, at least not censor in such a way as to effect the public discourse. They have the choice, that does not mean we can only uncritically observe their choices. If they don’t want porn, fine, which is probably a good call because it makes moderating porn a lot easier if you just ban it all, and some forms are illegal and immoral. If they want to ban pictures with the color purple or somebody holding up their hands making an “OK” gesture? That’s a bit more controversial, they can, their servers, their property, that doesn’t make it less stupid were they to do so.

There’s a million alternatives to Facebook and Twitter, tons of social media companies, the goddamned phone system, FaceTime, most chat apps, the bloody pub when the pubs are open again. This does not mean Facebook, Twitter et al. are beyond reproach in their policies, and this is why they walk such a fine line: they’re taking it from both ends.

Customers and users have a right to ask for what they want, more censorship, less, none at all or an extreme moral panic amount, maybe every post should be pre-approved by the Facebook Thought Security & Public Morals Maintenance Bureau before it goes live? I wouldn’t advocate for it, but there’s probably someone that would prefer it and deserves a slap in the head for it.

But Twitter/FB/YouTube effectively drive the national conversation and consciousness at this point. Ben is correct to place emphasis there.

They do.

But this is the result of a complex intersection of factors, particularly contemporary journalistic practice. It doesn't just come down to their existence or size. The fact that journalists in the media that still gets the most "views" consider these platforms to be a way of "taking the temperature" of the country has at least as much to do with the way they "drive the national conversation" as anything else.

Look, I'm 100% fine with actually taking over these platforms, making them public spaces, removing all "censorship" of any kind (it would be actual censorship now, since it would done by the government), and watching them all deteriorate into an even greater stinking mess than they are already.

But I'm not fine with telling privately owned platforms what they can and cannot do, or with conflating their attempts to regulate what happens on their platforms with censorship (even in double quotes), or pretending that it matters all that much.

Meanwhile, I can still read Stratechery.

I think you might be surprised by how many people don't really use those platforms to any significant extent and, to the degree they do use them, it's mostly for entertainment and staying in touch with friends.

>drive the national conversation and consciousness

I honestly don't see that.

>Ben Thompson could post articles on Stratechery that make non-libellous false claims about anything he wants, and nobody will stop him. He could this every day for the rest of his life and nobody will stop him. He doesn't like the monopolistic aspects of current social media giants, but continues to insist that they are so important that any "censorship" on these platforms is a significant social issue. I find this contradictory, and naive, and in almost every sense, simply wrong.

This is the important catch that the article seems to miss completely.

More specifically, it ignores the way engagement-driven distribution affects communication in the FB/Twitter mega-silos.

For that matter, given that the post talks extensively about authoritarianism, I would have expected such a post to observe that preventing people from moderating their own servers would involve a substantial amount of new authoritarianism.

Yes... but also no.

In a world where, say, 3 large companies can decide to change the dominant narrative that 70% of the country reads, what those three companies decide is in fact a significant social issue. It may not be "censorship", exactly, but it's still a relevant issue.

It's an issue. But in that same world, it is the population, the citizenry, that controls the fact that 3 platforms "control the dominant narrative". There are lots of other platforms. Yes, FB et al. use manipulative psychology to drive "feed addiction", but it's quite different to say that they shouldn't do that rather than saying they should allow any and every post.

One can argue that this is a bad situation without simultaneously arguing that the platforms' limits on speech is socially important. One can argue for expanding the platform choices and reducing the manipulation->addiction games, and still be working towards a more expansive context for free speech.

Interesting choice of "addiction" there. One could argue that addiction is bad for society. And if we could reduce the addictiveness as well as increase the number of platform choices, then people would be more able to exercise freedom of choice.

So, yeah, I could go for that. More choices, less addictive, each platform carries whatever they want.

Thanks for the thoughtful counter arguments. I concede that there is a false extrapolation into the internet at large (or private institutions at large). I argue in his favor though that these social media platforms are, for many, their main sources of information. Hence his argument that we should, as a culture, focus on "improving our ability to tell the difference" between information and disinformation.

When I hear friends and families share conspiracy theories with me and I read that many people are deeply hesitant to become vaccinated, they cite these instances of YT or FB squashing posts as further proof of the legitimacy. All this is to say that these tech companies simply should not get themselves involved with answering the question of "what is true?".

I suspect that disinformation spreads faster on FB/YT/Twitter than information because it is sensational. Humans love to hear stories and are compelled by them more than facts. I second Ben Thompson here that we should focus on learning how to learn and how to parse information. We should learn how to tell when an argument is bifurcated or someone is appealing to ad populum and learn to accept nuance and disagree respectfully.

> focus on "improving our ability to tell the difference" between information and disinformation.

Yes, absolutely.

But from my perspective this has nothing to do with the idea of whether Twitter telling you that you cannot post, or flagging your post, is a socially-significant issue that should be considered as some kind of censorship.

> as a culture, focus on "improving our ability to tell the difference" between information and disinformation

This is an idea I continually see presented as a solution. What I have not seen is an executable solution or a provable hypothesis that it is feasible.

By no means do I think it's a bad idea. But how do you execute on such an idea?

IMO, most cultural deficiencies or 'disease' has to be worked from the inside-out. A healthy community is a strongly-coupled community with a sense of buy-in and accountability. It is formed through neighborhoods, churches, families, mentor-mentee relationships, etc.

It is in those fertile grounds that intentional education, mentorship and friendship can help cure the ills. When I hear that we are year-over-year distrusting our neighbors and citizens in deep-red or deep-blue states to do the right thing, we have to learn how to trust again and see each other.

It is going to be local. And it is going to be constructive, not destructive.

Is it censorship to add a warning message?

With limited exceptions, I'm against removal of speech as the verb "censor" is defined here: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/censo...

On FB I've seen warnings added to the bottom of posts, and on Twitter I've seen clickthrough warnings. I think they have every right to do so. What type of content do they go all the way and remove?

The large platforms are where the large audiences are.

Ordinary people (i.e. non-tech-nerds) are not going to abandon the large platforms for smaller ones, or federated ones. The huge amount of easily discoverable content large platforms are the reason the audience remains.

So yes, what the large information outlets does matter more than what the small ones do.

If I had said to you in 1993 that "ordinary people are not going to abandon the large platforms for these new internet discussion forums", what would you have said then?

Yes, there's a network effect. No, it's not everlasting, or all-encompassing.

Basing current policy on claims about how people will behave in the future seems like a bad idea to me.

For blogs it might still work somehow.

But where is the new Usenet for example? Where do you announce new software without using GitHub or Reddit or conferences for marketing?

Search engines don't find it. Torvalds had it easy with announcing Linux.

> You don't have to write on FB. You don't have to write on Twitter (and please don't try to actually write on Twitter).

Good luck building an audience from scratch without having a strong social media presence.

Additionally, your blog can absolutely be "taken down" or canceled, even if through self preservation. Just look at SSC.

I don't know what "SSC" is and a simple google search doesn't provide much, if any context.

Most hosting services have very permissive policies (they have to, they could not possibly preemptively police stuff running in VMs). If you need something more permissive, find an even more permissive hosting service (probably outside the US). I'm not saying that you do anything with a blog and be guaranteed that it stayed available, but you'd have to do way, way, way more than anything a platform like FB/Twitter would take action on.

SSC is Slate Star Codex, a blog formerly maintained by psychiatrist Scott Alexander. He took it down in advance of the New York Times publishing an article about it.

Thanks for that. Yes I remember reading about this at the time.

It seems to me that suggesting that this "takedown" has anything remotely to do with what is being discussed here is disingenous.

> It seems to me that suggesting that this "takedown" has anything remotely to do with what is being discussed here is disingenous.

What "seems to you" is entirely wrong, but I'm curious as to how you would rationalize dismissing that as "disingenuous"[1] without even attempting to explain how. It seems like you couldn't find a way to actually reject its obvious relevancy, so you chose just not to do it by using a word that seemed like it should be enough to shut down discussion, and leave it at that.

[1]: I'm not entirely sure how the other person was "pretending to know less" by bringing up how SSC had to be taken down because in today's climate, what what was almost done to the author would have threatened his livelihood. It's a quite apt counterpoint to your notion that owning your own domain is some sort of magical protection against censorship.

I've never understood this take. Suppose in the far future some super corporation owns all property on Earth and facilitates all communication through any channel.

Would you still believe "you don't have to interact with Supercorp?" If so, the same is true trivially with a government as well. It's very easy to leave the United States if you want. Even if you couldn't leave, you don't have to speak. After all, you have the right to remain silent.

That aside, you would think a sensible government would prevent a private entity from reaching the heights of its abilities in any area.