What we have here is a small group of companies exerting quasi-monopoly power; Apple and Google controlling "apps" or Twitter and Facebook controlling "social media". Sure, they have some smaller competitors technically, just like East Germany had some smaller political parties technically.
If it was up to me, I'd change the status quo: Let FAAGT decide if they want to be publishers, no limited liability, or open platforms, limited liability but at the same time they have to agree to Freedom of Speech for all, unless it's criminal speech like incitement to violence, or some narrow additional predefined exemptions such as the option to not allow pornography or nudity or gore.
And then, if Parler fails to moderate their content again and leaves up criminal stuff, it's the job of law enforcement and courts to not only sanction the people who abused Parler to commit these crimes, but also the state to sanction Parler.
... from government.
I will add that even with regards to the government, there are limits to free speech — falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater is the archetypal example.
Some people seem to think that freedom of speech is something that can be broadly forced upon private organizations, and that’s simply not true.
If folks don’t like companies that, in their opinion, unreasonably restrict speech, then I suggest they vote with their dollars, their attention, and maybe their work (e.g., via competitors).
Like Gab and Parler! Oh wait...
I generally agree private businesses shouldn’t be forced to do business with anyone they don’t want to, but we’re talking about near monopolies that in many ways wield more power than governments.
Apple and Google each have a monopoly on app distribution on their platforms. Facebook and Twitter combined effectively have a monopoly on social networks.
At this point, their only option to survive would be to build their own new internet. And that would need power/spectrum/land or other things that could be taken away from them by determined enough activism.
Maybe they could survive for a while by moving to a decentralised P2P/blockchain system of some kind. But that could potentially be blocked at an ISP level.
A few years ago I heard some people say we needed net neutrality. Republicans were against it.
As for Apple, yes. They do have a monopoly over their app platforms. Either a more robust PWA support framework or side loading needs to be a priority on iOS. I wouldn’t consider Google as having a monopoly over app distribution as you can sideload apps on Android and Android has (from what I’ve heard) well-rounded PWA support.
Big tech have basically declared that 30% of America is unwelcome on their platform. That is overbearing moderation that is likely to provoke a market response. I'd give it 6-12 months to see if they can hold on to a monopoly even leaving that massive slice of the market in play.
Why not? Private companies must respect your rights, like your right not to be discriminated against, so why can‘t they be forced to respect your right to free speech? Just because the status quo of the legal ecosystem is not ready to handle this edge-cases doesn‘t mean it can‘t be made to do it with some adjustments.
That mostly leaves Alibaba Cloud (I have no idea if it is available outside China) and "Others" - so a 43%. Not much to choose from considering that the big players have the best prices.
There’s plenty of existing examples of compelled speech. We could simply say, “you cannot run a public/large forum without allowing mostly free speech”.
I think the compelled speech argument is extremely weak, we have very narrowly defined and specific cases in strictly defined circumstances. This would make it the default for vast swathes of common communications and as I pointed out introduce huge problems with noise, spam and griefing.
The right of free expression is guaranteed by the first amendment by restricting the government from infringing upon your right. It doesn’t say the government or anyone else has to give you a microphone.
In order to ban me from a platform you have to take (negative) action towards me. My content is already on that network. Compelling to respect my rights means compelling a company to not negatively act against me.
Those businesses are also free to close up shop if they can’t handle it. If they are dumb enough to explicitly say they don’t want to do something for a certain legally protected class of individual solely due to their belonging to that class, then IMO they deserve to lose their shirt.
That would amount to involuntary servitude, which is not permitted by the 13th Amendment.
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation
I don't know what the answer is, but having seen these large private companies censor rational discussion of scientific fact, this scares me.
"Voting with your dollars" means taking your dollars and giving them to the 0.001% that agree with you. Then this will strengthen them a little so they may become 0.0011% or whatever.
Any large social movement should be able to support a share of the economy commensurate to its size, complete with their own journalists, printing presses, leaflet distributors, radio stations, TV shows, phone factories, app stores and social media apps, or whatever communication infrastructure they want to use.
Of course that requires lots of work, but if that work is divided by the number of people involved, it becomes manageable again (after all, the whole rest of society manages just fine).
If people want to skip that work and instead rely on others to provide them with everything, they shouldn't be surprised if they don't get exactly what they want.
This looks like a internet version of witch hunt.
To use an analogy closer to the founding of the United States: if you want to publish a radical new newspaper, you need to be prepared to buy your own printing press and build up your own network of stores, because the existing printers and sellers may not want to support you.
You are a republican, how do you publish your political pieces?
You have to create a 4th printing press from ground up (because people that have printing press parts are refusing to work with you).
Distribution is a more appropriate in this case.
Also see the Supreme Court case Brandenburg v Ohio (1969), which excluded from protection speech "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action"
Note that when this phrase was originally used, it was to justify imprisoning people who distributed flyers opposing the draft in WW1, and the supreme court later partially overturned it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/on-the-rudeness-of-mobs-pogue
'On October 25, the freemen of Essex County, New Jersey, proclaimed that anyone who adhered to the Stamp Act should be cast out of polite society, that decent people should have “no Communication with any such Person, nor speak with them on any Occasion unless it be to inform them of their Vileness.” This was not an isolated view. One writer to a Pennsylvania paper suggested, in language typical of the time, that a man paying stamp duties should be “branded with eternal infamy and reproach,” and cast out. “Let him be alone in the world—let him wish to associate with the wild beasts of some dark loathsome cave.”'
Take Fox News as an example. They're not going to allow their platform to be used for liberal propaganda, and most likely also vet any advertisers. They aren't expected to just allow any content to be broadcast.
I guess a devil's advocate viewpoint could be that some of these services are platforms, but then again the reasons given for some of these bans aren't necessarily strictly political.
It just doesn’t feel like the right thing for our republic. It feels like foul play, and I guess my recourse is at the ballot box.
I guess I think the points raised here and elsewhere about what businesses can do are specious. We still try to keep things fair.
There was once something called "Net Neutrality". As I recall conservatives were strongly against it.
We must decide if that needs to change.
This will require either amending the constitution to strip companies of their 1A rights, OR the supreme court ruling that companies are not people and have no 1A rights. Both are tall orders in my view, with far-reaching direct and 2nd-order effects.
Wait, in the US companies are considered people?
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mitt-romney-says-cor...
Not quite, the East India Company is a counter example.
The Boston Massacre was greatly exaggerated, really only five rioters were killed and arguably the British shot them after violent provocation. Paul Revere's engraving was fiction and portrayed them as murdering the colonists in cold blood, which planted the seeds of the American Revolution.
As far as the barrier to mass communication being lower, perhaps, but mass communication was more prominent in the 18th century than you might think. Pamphlets were fairly inexpensive easily duplicated short-form propaganda, and were read aloud in taverns and churches. Communication wasn't "instant" but it was possible, and the social aspects would have made it more like Twitter and Facebook than I think we'd like to admit.
I also think that us being forced to rely on private platforms for public discourse is a grave threat to democracy. There must be public forums that are strong enough to be viable and legitimate places for the majority of public political discourse to take place without relying on private institutions.
Is big tech within their right to censor how they see fit? Yes.
Is it antithetical to the American ethos? Probably.
Speech has never been, and will never be, completely protected without exceptions in the US.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
It's true that you _can_ find Parler out of those app stores, but a significant fraction of people would not be able to do so; nor would people encounter Parler as a popular app they might consider installing.
(The web hosting is a different issue since there are a bunch of hosting options.)
We're talking about the situation in the United States, not a free market. If there were viable alternatives, nobody would care about being blocked from Twitter or Google or Facebook. The fact that these monopolies collude in their censorship campaign makes the impact that much more severe. The situation with these monopolies colluding to block an aspiring competitor is clearly an anti-trust issue.
There's literally no reason for a "viable alternative" to not appear. I mean, Parler is a "viable alternative" to Twitter, isn't it? It got kicked off AWS? Go ahead, and create your own viable alternative, there's literally nothing stopping you, just like in a "free market".
And considering that Google banned the app GCP is also out of the question.
BTW. You know that the largest cloud provides in the world are also the ones I mentioned above? There is only Alibaba Cloud that is outside US and all the rest are just small businesses (that might just resell what the big three is providing).
And what would be next? Let's block the "new Parler" on the DNS or routing level - build yourself a new internet?
I hate far right wing and also hate far left wing, but I will protect both right to speak.
2) Smaller providers like Digital Ocean are in fact not reselling the larger services, but you’re right that folks like Heroku are based on AWS.
3) They all have the right to speak. But private enterprises also have the right to decide for themselves if they want to do business with them. That too is a freedom of expression. It’s unclear to me why you think the far left or far rights freedom should supersede the moderates freedoms.
But they aren’t monopolies. AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle, Digital Ocean.
Sure, there are only a handful of news networks in the US, just like there are only a handful of cloud infrastructure providers. But the first amendment doesn’t guarantee that everyone gets their own hour on the nightly news, and it doesn’t force private corporations in general to do business with all comers.
I don’t have to invite QAnon into my house, and I certainly don’t need to bake QAnon a wedding cake. And neither do AWS, Azure or Digital Ocean.
OK, but first you don't know if it is QAnon and second, are you also allowed not to bake wedding cake for a black couple, or maybe for Jewish one?
It is your freedom, right? So where is the line you can't cross? For me it is: if you open business you have to deal with everyone, sorry. If you don't like it, don't open a business.
You just need to follow the law, if courts say that "you can't sell wedding cakes to QAnon" you follow that, but until there is such law...
Can you explain what you mean here? I wasn’t aware that tech companies worked with one another when choosing who or what to ban.
But every time one of the entities takes some decision or step or action, whether censorship or otherwise, it makes it a little bit more excusable and easier for others to do it and justify it.
E.g. (hypothetical)
1. Reddit bans /r/ABC for "TOS violations".
2. It's news and many reporters report on it across various articles. Some say it's due to "repeated" "alleged" "hate speech" violations, whether true or not. Probably 50% true, who knows.
3. ABC makes its own website and has a mailing list from some mail newsletter provider X because that's just what you do when you have a site and need to keep in touch with visitors/members.
4. Activists on Twitter notice. Outrage mob starts. "@X mail provider hosting known hate-speech movement" "@X mail provider...did you know you're hosting known white supremacists?" "Everybody, please stop using @X, they're supporting white supremacists!" "@AWS please look into what @X is using your infrastructure for!" ...all citing some selective articles as legitimacy.
5. Articles get written about a "movement" to have X drop service for controversial and "alleged" hate-speech website ABC.
6. X mail provider gets pressured and eventually drops service to ABC.
At this point, X mail provider probably won't get many "legitimate", "official" and "mainstream" criticisms for effectively dropping customers (even if all the mail sent by those customers on X's platform is 100% legal and innocent). Nor can their shareholders complain about losing profit because "we can't be seen supporting racists".
The problem is that each time this sort of thing happens, it adds "partial proof" of the accusations without an actual "court-like" process that decides if it's really true or not. After a certain point, it's just accepted and then carries an aura of truth/legitimacy.
Edit. Formatting.
It was banned from Reddit for being “hate speech” and in fact you can no longer suggest that obesity is something to be ashamed of —- on nearly any platform! Including GitHub. (but you are allowed to mock mock cigarette smokers or meth tweakers).