HN users continuing to conflate "Private company doing private company things" with "rights" and "censorship".
Private companies have always banned/blocked problematic users. That's not censorship.
Private companies have always banned/blocked problematic users. That's not censorship.
There are many definitions of censorship. Government censorship is not the only valid version. To wit, Wikipedia even states "Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies"
Not communicating a piece of information and not helping others in communicating a piece of information is not censorship. Censorship is preventing others from communicating a piece of information by force. Facebook is not doing that, they have just decided not to help communicate some information. Another example would be that you would not be censoring me if you removed a political bumper sticker I placed on your car, even if you leave other bumper stickers placed there by other people in place.
This means that section 230 of the CDA needs to be repealed and that they become liable for what their users submit. They will probably react by censoring even more, making their services even less palatable to more and more people. With a bit of luck that will give the decentralised 'net the push it needs to take the lead.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
But Facebook (and Google, Apple, and many other "platforms") are such an indispensable part of our lives that we should have difficult conversations about what individual rights look like in these quasi-public private spaces. (It's worth noting that the explicit business model of many of these companies is to create gigantic platforms/walled gardens.)
I personally do not believe that many of the norms and common law relating to physical public/private spaces should be transferred to the modern age of digital oligopoly.
If you accept that Facebook, like every platform in Internet history has content moderation rules- then Trump violated them, hence his suspension. Here's my logic chain, I'm open to a critique:
1. Facebook has content moderation rules 2. Trump violated them by inciting a riot or insurrection 3. The penalty for said violation is a suspension
Where is the problem in the chain? That Facebook isn't allowed to moderate content, that inciting a riot isn't punishment-worthy (??), that the punishment is too harsh.... Where is the exact issue?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-politics-disinformati...
Therefore, Facebook is just exerting their market power to push a partisan narrative.
> known white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys
The Proud Boys were headed by a man named Enrique Tarrio [0]. Enrique Tarrio is of Afro-Cuban descent [1]. How many white supremacist organizations are headed by people of Afro-Cuban descent?
And before you suggest that he's a token figurehead, how likely do you think it is that an actual white supremacist would join an organization led by a man of Afro-Cuban descent? Do you think that leader would attract many actual white supremacists? Aren't there plenty of other white supremacist groups led by white men?
No, it's simply not believable. The claim fails. Reuters is willingly participating in a disinformation campaign.
"We recognize that the West was built by the White Race alone and we owe nothing to any other race."
https://www.newsweek.com/proud-boys-based-stickman-enrique-t...
An actual white supremacist rejected the non-white leader of the Proud Boys and split off to form his own group.
The Proud Boys were not a white supremacist organization. Attempts to use this despicable man's quotes to smear the entire organization (which he rejected) are naked appeals to guilt by association.
Now I personally don't know what all of those limits should be. But I think there needs to be more open discussion from all corners of American society about that. I also think that the platforms should approach this problem with open arms.
As an example of one situation that needs to be limited is that a platform like Google is allowed to ban someone entirely from their services, with 1) no appeal to an independent party and 2) no ability to (quickly) recover data stored with that platform. Every so often, someone posts to HN saying that they lost all access to decades of email and photos because Google's algorithms banned them, and they have no idea how to talk to a human to explain or correct the situation. I think that kind of action from Google needs to be regulated out of existence.
I don't agree, I think the opposite. The government should be working to make them more dispensable. Every company you listed needs aggressive antitrust action from various worldwide governments.
But at the same time, I am sympathetic to arguments that aggregated platforms have efficiencies that are passed down to the everyday consumer, or network effects that make the platforms more competitive against similar platforms elsewhere in the world (e.g., data for training ML models).
That being said, I think it is fair to raise some questions when inyalowda decide to enforce their policies in a seemly arbitrary fashion. Trump is toxic and his presence on social media did nothing to raise the intellectual bar of public discourse. But, he is far from the only world leader to share self-serving, destrucive, and misleading propaganda online. Users should demand clear policies and fair universal enforcement from FB.
The existing CDA protections that are relied upon by social media giants was originally intended to allow content hosting platforms to manage issues that most everyone agreed upon, like "Content hoster should be allowed to remove explicit porn from their public interest bulletin board"
They never realized that social media giants would one day use their content moderation to bend large-scale public opinion to their will on day-to-day political and public health issues.
In addition to the overreach of the CDA safe harbor provision are issues of public accommodation, monopoly control of free speech, and in-kind political donations to candidates and parties that bypass existing election finance restrictions.