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Comment by ziml77 | Hacker News Reader

So are platforms supposed to regulate speech or not? People complain if they stay neutral and don't remove false information and people complain if they moderate and do remove false information.

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I'm confused as well. When it benefits these platforms to be private orgs they claim to be within their rights as a private org. When it's beneficial to claim they're a town square of sorts then suddenly they're a town square. If you think that moderating posts infringes on free speech then perhaps they should be regulated as a utility?

I personally have no issue with any of these platforms moderating to their heart's content for the following reasons:

We are entitled to free speech but we are not entitled to use Twitter's megaphone.

I am against megaphones. I don't like companies like Twitter. With any hope, the more they moderate the more people will move away from centralized platforms. Don't regulate them and they will moderate themselves out of existence (I wish).

>When it's beneficial to claim they're a town square of sorts then suddenly they're a town square.

When did Twitter ever claim to be a "Town Square?" Furthermore, when would it benefit them to claim that?

"A lot of people come to Twitter and they don’t actually see an app or a service, they see what kind of looks like a public square. And they have the same sort of expectations of a public square. And that is what we have to make sure that we get right. And also, make sure that everyone feels safe to participate in that public square.”

-Jack Dorsey

https://www.wired.com/story/jack-dorsey-twitters-role-free-s...

I am not endorsing his statement but Twitter's CEO apparently considers it as a town square.

It's a normative continuum between full state regulation (i.e. totalitarian but defensive) and no state regulation (i.e. completely free speech but vulnerable).

The US is very liberal. Most European countries are leaning towards regulation.

See the book "How Democracies Die" for a summary of the three most prominent legal approaches.

If your algorithm is deciding what to promote or display to people, then you’re already not staying neutral.

One should hope that one can distinguish between lies and nonsense on the one hand and fact and honest debate on the other, good faith and bad faith engagement, without discriminating between ideological positions. If you find your ideological position is indistinguishable from lies and nonsense ... well ... that could happen. But the idea non-partisan platforms that censor content are working from is that nonsense is apart from partisanship.

I'm happy to recognize the distinction between fact-checking and partisanship. But if you're running an algorithm that decides who sees what content, you're responsible for the choices that algorithm makes. I think platforms try to disclaim responsibility by claiming to be "neutral" in the sense that they don't actively censor based on partisan preferences, and this is disingenuous.

Those are different people though? I don't think you can make everyone happy.

Oh, sometimes those are the same people. Offense giving and offense taking can both be used strategically by the same group.

See e.g. the book "Hate Spin" on religious hate speech which explicitly deals with this two-sided phenomenon.

They can be the same people. A mentality of "delete the things I don't like, but you better not touch the things I do like"

They are more often than not the same people. An example off the top of my head:

Florida governor signs bill barring social media companies from blocking political candidates - May 24, 2021

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/24/florida...

[Florida governor] applauds fired whistleblower’s Twitter suspension, the latest in an ongoing feud - June 7, 2021

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/07/rebekah-j...

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