Only very establishment public opinions will now be allowed to be shared on mass media. What good is freedom of speech if you’re not allowed to publicly assemble because of COVID and social media is cut off from you?
Next time there’s a destructive unpopular war or bank bailout or police shooting or event that threatens corporate profits there’s no public ability to call the corporate press out on their BS.
There are still plenty of places you can put up your own website.
Free speech doesn't mean that others are obligated to subsidize your speech.
On some level, private companies have to allow everyone neutral access. Like phone companies and the USPS, the internet should be accessible.
On the other hand, comment sections under news articles are really not the way I'd make this argument. Let's talk about net neutrality first.
Actually, it does, that's the liberal ideal of free speech, that it 's a public protected good. Having a free opinion and practically keeping it to yourself because you have no audience is not freedom of speech.
It absolutely is. You are still free to propagate your ideas. You have no claim to use other people's tools or access other people's property to do so.
You are not entitled to an audience. If that means you're literally screaming into the void because nobody else wants anything to do with you, then that's still free speech.
I m actually talking about the case where you are not. Private actors cancelling people is exactly that, taking away their freedom to propagate them. They can say "build your own twitteR", but we don't say that about other fundamental needs like, nobody says "build your own electric grid". We live in era of digital communication, and just like in the past the state built roads to connnect people, it needs to build basic infrastructure for communication and social networking. Association is a fundamental human right and that includes digital association (esp. in a time of pandemic and lockdowns)
No, you aren't. You're talking about using other people's services, infrastructure and registered users.
Twitter is not the world. It's a small subset of the world shouting at each other. It's not the way to reach everyone, nor is it the only way to reach people. And it's certainly not the commons or public property.
> They can say "build your own twitteR", but we don't say that about other fundamental needs
But you can build your own twitter-alike, and people have done, rendering this entire point moot.
Further "fundamental need"? Maybe take a step back and look at your life if you don't think you could get by without twitter. I've never joined, I know very few people that bother with it.
> Association is a fundamental human right and that includes digital association
Clearly it's not a right, as people can be and are frequently denied access to the internet entirely by judges in many countries including the US. And even if it were, using a particular platform is not.
Your right to free speech doesn't extend to other people's property, and you do not have a right to access any audience. And you never have had.
It's always someone else's services, whether that was a printing press or a telegraph. We can't go back to primitivism
> Twitter is not the world.
Governments are in it in official capacity, and not in some other system. It is a lot more than "one private company"
> Further "fundamental need"?
Yes communication which includes social networking is a fundamental need for a modern civilized society, i think it should be obvious in this pandemic
> Clearly it's not a right,
Freedom of association is a fundamental human right. The fact that it being taken as punishment is just an admission of it
You can easily make your own printing press or telegraph system, though the work is in laying lines. Further, you never had the right to compel someone to print your book, nor send your telegrams. You are inventing these rights.
> Governments are in it in official capacity, and not in some other system.
Are there really governments who put information on twitter that is not published by other means? That's a massive dereliction of duty if so, given twitter serves a small subset of any given population.
> Yes communication which includes social networking is a fundamental need
Twitter kicking you off is not denying you the ability to communicate. Social networking is not a fundamental need, as evidenced by the fact that not everyone uses it, in fact the majority do not. The vast, vast majority if we're talking about twitter, which has an audience of around 100-150 million worldwide. You are exaggerating this massively.
> Freedom of association is a fundamental human right
Your idea of digital freedom to associate is clearly not something that exists at present, nor ever has.
You had the protected right to distribute the thing you printed, it's called freedom of press. There's a reason why those freedoms were enshrined to constitution and not just left undefined.
And i m not sure why you keep bringing up twitter, i m not claiming that twitter should be forced to accept everyne, but that individuals should be a) protected from complete deplatforming by providing them a publicly-funded alternative and b) should be always able to keep the audience they acquired by themselves
But you couldn't, for instance, gain access to private premises or gatherings to do so, or force them into people's hands. You could (and still can) hand them out on the streets. Marconi was never obliged to broadcast it on his radio systems.
> There's a reason why those freedoms were enshrined to constitution and not just left undefined.
And they aren't under threat.
> And i m not sure why you keep bringing up twitter
You mentioned it first, if you go upthread - "build your own twitteR", so I presumed that platform was primarily your concern. It certainly seems to be one that's copping a lot of heat for deplatforming lately, mostly around election denial, Q etc.
> a) protected from complete deplatforming by providing them a publicly-funded alternative
I mean, nobody is completely deplatformed at the moment. There are choices up to and including building your own pages. What if nobody uses the publicly funded alternative, because it's crap? No problem is solved, people relegated to that public platform would still be shouting into the void.
> b) should be always able to keep the audience they acquired by themselves
If they do so on a commercial platform, which they joined because it already had a critical mass of people, I don't believe you can say they acquired them all themselves.
You seem to be arguing there for a federated system - might be worth your while looking into Mastodon.
I m not american and i don't care at all about those
> nobody is completely deplatformed
I m pretty sure there are quite a few who have been chased out of the internet completely , without being illegal
> What if nobody uses the publicly funded alternative, because it's crap?
So what, public TV usually doesnt get high rankings but is still valuable. It's still better than having no platform at all
> don't believe you can say they acquired them all themselves
They should at least have a real way to get a copy of their audience, through some well defined protocol. The friend identifiers they get should be actually usable, enough so that they could find their audience in another platform.
Mastodon is actually a good platform to use for a public platform, and i look forward to seeing publicly-funded servers.
That has nothing to do with what the original post was about. Yes, you can print whatever you want. But you cannot compel someone else to do it. You moved the target for some reason.
>but that individuals should be a) protected from complete deplatforming by providing them a publicly-funded alternative
So your argument against censorship is to hand the reigns to the actual government? What happens when your free platform for individuals to ensure they cannot be deplatformed becomes a voice of violence and hatred against a minority group?
>b) should be always able to keep the audience they acquired by themselves
They didn't acquire the audience themselves. They used a 3rd party platform to do that. I don't understand this statement.
> a voice of violence and hatred against a minority group?
Then it becomes a subject or what is allowed by the legal system, which is a situation vastly superior than being at the whim of a few high ranking employees with no transparency.
> They used a 3rd party platform to do that.
That's like saying dostoyevsky didnt write his novels, he used someone's pen to write them. Sorry i find that absolutely weak
You sound a lot like someone who is against net neutrality with this statement. Does ATT or Comcast have to allow all content through their network or not? Why can't they regulate what goes through their infrastructure? Twitter has a near monopoly on their type of service, similar to ATT or Comcast. What makes it ok for Twitter to regulate but not more root services? What about DNS? Can the registrars regulate who can register a name? Why?
Twitter has a user base of approximately 1.5% of the world's population. It's not an essential communications tool by any stretch of the imagination. There are multiple other services, most of which gain little to no traction because it appears that to most humans, twitter-style communication is entirely uninteresting. I count myself in that (large) number.
> similar to ATT or Comcast
Except those companies appear to have literal monopolies on internet access in places in the US, which is not the same situation at all. Not being in the US I find that situation bizarre.
> Can the registrars regulate who can register a name?
Probably. Certainly the various authorities are empowered to do so.
> Why?
That's a far more interesting question, and certainly up for debate. Should some level of communications access be a right? If it is, who pays for it? Who runs it? Does anyone or any government get to decide what's acceptable behaviour on such a system? Why? But equally, why not? I'm entirely open to that discussion, it's probably a discussion that needs to be publicly had in western societies, at some point.
But "It's my right to exercise my speech on twitter!" reeks of entitlement and is not supported by any existing concept of speech rights. It also reeks of conflating twitter, a large but still niche service, with communication in general. Twitter just isn't as important as people like to make out.
You don't and can never have, a right to an audience, because people have a separate right to choose whom they associate with, and everyone can choose not to be in your audience if you're terrible/boring/stupid enough.
I don't understand the "right to an audience" argument. Maybe CNN can claim they have own their audience because they literally earned it, but in social media individuals earn their own audience and the companies can't claim ownership. Even though one's social network is not yet protected legally, it should, and people's audience grown in a platform still belongs to people, the same way that private information put on a platform is still owned by people
It really isn't. They can keep you off their platform, nothing more.
> states should provide social networking/communication services to their citizens.
And you think this would be less censored?
> in social media individuals earn their own audience
So ... individuals got all those people to sign up to twitter? Twitter itself has nothing to do with it? You really think that? Platforms just pop out of the air fully formed?
yes?
It's nothing at all to do with twitter building the platform, advertising the platform, creating a user base? Nobody followed someone else because the platform promoted something, or made it easy to discover people, anything like that?
In that case twitter itself is completely unimportant. If you can build an audience without relying on twitter's existing user base, then why do you care if twitter bans you? Go build that somewhere else.
Interesting view of the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_public_utili...
Your question is poorly worded. Twitter created the platform and fostered the community. The content creators and the platform have grown together. I'm challenging your idea that the platform has contributed nothing, not asserting that it contributes everything. Without their creative ideas to build the platform in the first place, make content discoverable etc etc, it wouldn't exist either.
> that world view is by no means uncommon
I'm not convinced that wikipedia article describes the worldview above - "twitter is both a fundamental right that cannot be easily replicated, and a complete irrelevance that has done nothing at all"
I understand why there might be interest in developing ideas around digital communication rights. It's definitely an interesting topic and one that's going to become more relevant over time.
I am specifically challenging you on the idea that they already exist, and are encompassed by rights such as freedom of speech, which has never encompassed free access to the means to disseminate that speech, or freedom of assembly, which has never included the right to assemble on someone else's property.
Go ahead and argue these are useful ideas we need to talk about, that existing rights need to be mapped and interpreted more expansively in the digital world, that we should start building platforms as a society which encompass these ideas, I might even be on your side.
But being banned on twitter is no violation of any existing right. Especially as twitter is a niche communication tool.
Look, i see this as shorthand for "twitter gathered the attention".But that doesn't mean that they own the attention or the people whose attention they have. Good of them to be pioneers, but, like everything, social media is 15 year old tech now and is commodity. The undeniable thing is, users funded 99% of the effort with their work and often with their own ad money, and twitter did 1%. Same (or worse) would go for other social networks. They created a viral vortex, but the intrinsic value of that is not as high as is perceived to be -- in fact most of the value is in lock-in and monopoly rather than in technical facilitation. I find the fact that neither twitter nor FB pay their users quite egregious, and attribute it to 2 things: 1) they have no competitor in their niche and 2) user collectives dont exist and users are not uninionized while those companies are uber-powerful in terms of money and lobbying.
> they already exist,
They don't exist but are coming, in fact i'd say they are late already. I think we 'll soon see major shifts to that direction . Practically, yes they will be just an extension of freedom of speech laws, that's the category where they belong (like how e.g. sexual orientation was added to anti-discrimination laws).
I m not arguing that free speech/free assembly rights will trample on property rights, but that the state should make sure public spaces exist for people to exercise those rights. However platforms should be required by law to make user data (including their friends identifiers) exportable.
I m no legal expert but I wouldn't rule out that some companies may be held into account if a judge judges that they acted in coordination and maliciously to obstruct someones free speech rights.
You can't have this both ways.
There are no free speech right implications at all for this, a judge would throw the case out.
FB and Twitter don't pay their users because they're providing a service that their users value for free. Frankly if that's not a good enough deal for you, don't use it. I try not to, they're a waste of bandwidth IMHO.
>And you think this would be less censored? By law, in the USA, it would have to be less censored. They could only censor constitutionally unprotected speech.
>> in social media individuals earn their own audience
>So ... individuals got all those people to sign up to twitter?
Is this honestly how you interpreted the OP comment? Without people posting to Twitter nobody would be following Twitter. They are nothing without the content creators since they don't create any content.
No, but I believe that in general they have a legal right to control the services they make available, within the limits of the laws on hate, discrimination etc.
> By law, in the USA, it would have to be less censored. They could only censor constitutionally unprotected speech.
Twitter is not just in the USA, FYI. People engaging in unpopular speech on "Gov Twitter" could still be sidelined effectively, by other groups. I imagine an adblock-style distributed blacklist might spring up pretty fast. Then what? I have a right to be heard by anyone I choose to spew my opinions at?
> Without people posting to Twitter nobody would be following Twitter.
Without the platform on which to create and disseminate said content there would be no audience. I'm not trying to say that it's all one party responsible. Quite the opposite.
I'm trying to point out that this - "in social media individuals earn their own audience and the companies can't claim ownership" - is wrong. The company have provided a platform and fostered its use, which gives people a place to go and gather an audience. It's symbiotic. You can't at the same time claim that twitter is a fundamental, irreplaceable human need (that 98% of humans apparently don't need) while claiming it's contributed nothing to creating a community and an audience.
That doesn't make it wrong and we do seem to be headed in that general direction. Just understand that what you're proposing doesn't necessarily follow from pre-internet free speech protections and is a different ideal.
I actually think the opposite , that in the past free speech was a well guarded liberalist ideal, and we 've regressed to confusing the freedom of internal monologue as free speech.
It does require more effort though; there is that.
What good is freedom of speech when powerful and influential organizations (like Twitter or Facebook) control virtually all speech in society? Above a certain size, these platforms are public utilities and public town squares. For the right to free speech to be at all practical and meaningful, they must be required to platform all legal speech.
So newspapers will be required to publish any story, no matter how true? Universities will be required to teach any theory, no matter how crackpot? Twitter will be required to promote porn just as it does other content?
> What good is freedom of speech when powerful and influential organizations (like Twitter or Facebook) control virtually all speech in society?
But they don't. You have huge, successful websites devoted to porn. A publication like Quillette builds its reputation around pseudoscience and is free to do so. You have entire cable news networks devoted to conspiracy theories. But yes, more mainstream venues try to shape their reputation by not amplifying more fringe speech. Not only has this always been the case, but that's what everyone understood "free speech" means. You have more mainstream publications and fringe ones.
I think we’re getting a bit off topic but since you mentioned it - universities already teach many crackpot theories - the social “science” fields are full of them (https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...). But they don’t teach the alternative viewpoint to those crackpot theories. As institutions with tremendous power, they influence society greatly but their commitment to a one-sided biased environment serves to only amplify one ideology, and this unbalanced outcome is effectively propagandizing all of society. Giant social media platforms are similarly problematic, because their degree of reach and network effects give them power other new social networks cannot mirror or challenge. Their policies restricting content that they don’t like ends up amplifying one worldview disproportionately while shutting down others, which also is effectively propagandist. In both cases these institutions are as powerful and influential as nations’ governments, and their choices to promote certain speech or censor certain speech are as damaging as the government taking such action. We have outsourced the ability to exercise fundamental rights like free speech and free thought to spaces that are legally non public but really should be held to the public standard.
Your claim is that there are “huge, successful sites” or other media that fall outside the control of these institutions I am complaining about. However, that’s not really the whole truth because the scale of those alternatives is simply completely different. Facebook has more users than any country and Twitter is probably close to that as well. Universities have no diversity of thought and there isn’t much of an alternative to the university system at all. It doesn’t matter if some other alternative site could have millions of users carrying speech blocked on Facebook or Twitter, because the amplification of ideas allowed on the biggest platforms will drown out all others. These are really public squares that should be held to public regulation, including upholding the right to free speech.
As an aside, your inaccurate and uncharitable characterization of Quillette as building a reputation around “pseudoscience”, when it is actually built around high quality critical thought, makes me think you’re on one side of this ideological war and happy with the status quo because your ideology is currently winning the power struggle by censoring/deplatforming dissenting views. But what you’re labeling as fringe wouldn’t be fringe if it was given a fair chance to be heard and amplified in various institutions or platforms. Because ideologues have tried to suppress and diminish challenging views in aggressive and unfair ways, these ideas are in lesser prominence than they deserve.
Can you be more specific about which views precisely are being censored/deplatformed en mass, which, in your opinion, gained more mainstream dissemination and/or respect in the past?
When people attack the freedom of speech in the name of the freedom of speech, what they want is their fringe speech to be treated with the same respect as more mainstream kinds of speech. That is not freedom of speech, nor has it ever been the norm. Freedom of speech includes the freedom of various institutions to relegate some speech to the fringe.
> universities already teach many crackpot theories - the social “science” fields are full of them (https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...). But they don’t teach the alternative viewpoint to those crackpot theories.
That those theories are crackpot is the opinion of a group of people who are not researchers in any relevant field, based on a "study" that, itself, meets no criteria for scientific research, but you are free to believe what you like and even say it -- see, no one is censoring you. The point is that universities are free to choose what to teach and what to "censor" as that is freedom of speech. It is not freedom of speech to demand the same level of academic/publishing respect to be afforded to all views.
BTW, my characterisation of Quillette as a platform for pseudoscience is accurate and based purely on scientific rigour. It is perfectly reasonable for respectable publications to avoid that content, and yet those who seek it or disseminate it are not censored.
They would have to get rid of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, HackerNews, on down the line for this to be true. There are dozens of places where you can call out the media for their nonsense.
As recent politics have proved, calling someone out for their bullshit is pointless when you have millions of people willing to buy into their bullshit regardless.
In my opinion, the current state of our response to Covid shows that the social cohesion of society has already been destroyed, mostly by pigeonholing everyone into neat little online boxes.
The corporate press doesn't care about being "called out" in an online comments section.
Real-life cohesion is incredibly more powerful than anything online.
Content producers of any ilk are in no way obliged (and imo expected) to provide and administer a public forum alongside their work.
This was a good decision. Nothing of value was lost. The 2% of productive commenters can go back to writing letters to the editor. The 98% can go back to the chans.
You would have a point if 'mass media' wasn't privately owned.
From the article:
The First Amendment limits the government’s ability to regulate speech. It does not require news organizations to treat all speech as equal, or to provide an open forum for comments. Rather, the First Amendment ensures The Inquirer’s right to publish what The Inquirer chooses to publish.
Freedom of speech is necessary in a democratic society in order for citizens to be able to criticise their government freely. It is not meant to protect any (non-existent) right to verbally attack one's fellow citizens with impunity. Indeed, most modern nations that have legislation that protects freedom of speech also have legislation that protects their citizens from defamatory, or libellous speech, and many also protect individuals from hateful speech that targets personal characteristics like sexuality or religion.
tl;dr, freedom of speech sets you free to punch up, not to punch down.