The deafening silence in these comments is telling of how boned free speech proper actually is.
Hope you all are enjoying the "free speech for me, but not for thee" attitude of this neo-feudalism that we live in.
Hope you all are enjoying the "free speech for me, but not for thee" attitude of this neo-feudalism that we live in.
We are here, it's just that this is only a part within the things we have been talking about for years, even if it might come as a surprise to the kind of people that probably cheered when things like net neutrality were crippled in the US.
I certainly won't defend far right and conspiracy portals that make a career out of harassing people and that don't know the difference between free speech and "freedom of consequence no matter what I say"/"everyone should be forced to listen to me". However at the same time Twitter does not deserve any praise for such a decision.
The part we all should agree on (and hopefully do) is that Twitter/Facebook/Google apply their rules pretty much arbitrarily at this point, they might as well remove them because in prominent cases they clearly don't matter.
Majority of discourse on the internet should not be subject to the pure arbitrariness of only a few corporations.
How would Project Veritas's freedom of speech translate to Wikipedia's obligation to host and broadcast?
Good riddance. Part of free speech is the public forming an opinion that some voices are wrong, and malicious. The public has a right to defend itself against it's foes, of which Vertias is one, one of a radical extremist & underhanded bent. It IS unfortunate that our public spaces are all operated by a couple communicative-capitalist super-entities, and I wish people would try more to use freer places, devise their own defenses. But here, the private companies made the right call, and protected democracy & the value of speech, by banning some particularly flagrant opponents of civic decency.
Beyond simply too much of the public being run by corporations, it is also deeply unsettling that getting kicked off a corporate network is determined based on single incidents. It is a wide array of behaviors that makes Vertias entirely unsuitable to have their voice supported & hosted by these communicative-capitalist giants, makes them an ill voice to carry. More honest assessments are due, their being kicked off should reflect a broadscale misbehavior, not a single incident.
These problems aren’t easy, and while I’ve lessened my free speech absolutism a tiny bit, I’m still quite concerned. We have to find a better way.
However, groups of private citizens, whose powers over the marketplace are/can be heavily limited through existing laws such as antitrust law, enforced by our democratically elected government have no requirement to carry speech they disagree with.
It’s surprising to me how quickly the Big Business/Small Government Republican Party switched as soon as they realized that big businesses don’t always have their interests in mind. I suggest looking over to the far left, as they have been discussing ways to curb power of large businesses for decades and also have a healthy respect of the dangers of giving the government too much power as the frequent target of said powers.
I'm personally very pro free speech but the wrong way to go about it is to give the government more power to compel speech from third parties. Use the tools available to prevent mega corporations from sucking up all the air in the room, then create your own platforms to spread the speech you want to enable.
The easy approach of just trying to use government to compel these companies to carry your speech has too many dangerous second and third order effects to seriously consider, especially if your goal is free-speech.
The left has plenty of respect for the dangers of both private and public power, but our system doesn’t listen to them because it requires a reflection on the bad parts of capitalism.
Twitter and Facebook profit off of speech on their platforms, and actively drive users to content that increase engagement. Furthermore they have no accountability when they cancel people and businesses, which again, the left knows about. We can change the incentives and repercussions without encouraging them to censor speech they unilaterally don’t like.