Random people being able to post content for thousands or even millions to immediately see, with no explicit gatekeepers prior to submission; this is largely a recent thing. And it makes sense that of course everywhere has rules, bare minimum basically nobody likes people spamming stuff, for example, even in cases where it's legal.
If you create a message board about model trains and some rando starts constantly spamming ads for their series of NFT's, I guess banning them is technically 'censorship', but you could also call it 'the bare basics of maintaining a functional community'.
I think that for platforms like Twitter and Facebook, perhaps it may make more sense to end up a situation more like newspapers, where you have more reputable papers like the NYT, WaPo, and WSJ that have stricter rules, and then you also have the National Enquirer or other random outlets that have little to no standards. If Twitter and Facebook want to have somewhat tighter rules where they censor people, that's fine, the people being censored should then just have options of other platforms with different or fewer rules. Just seems like the problem to me is that people expect these mega platforms to be all things to all people, when that's probably not realistic.
Banning spam is a strawman in this discussion. I don't think there is constructive discussion on that basis.
Free speech protects good faith debates.
It's not a strawman, as many people assert that platforms should just let anything not-illegal stay up. You may not believe this, but there are others who I've seen assert it.
> Facebook and Twitter ban for political reasons, which is entirely different than banning spam.
It's not the same, but the issue is that once you're past the border of "we'll only ban illegal stuff", you're now in the realm of much more subjective decisionmaking. In practice, many forms of speech could be classified as both political, and harassment/bullying/other bad stuff, which is what usually happens with Facebook.
In their case, they don't want to get into the political sphere, but they do want to bad blatant misinformation, and in practice that does overlap with politics.
This is also dangerous. Imagine what the government of Mississippi or Indiana during the Jim Crow era would label as blatant misinformation.
Also, in a recent court case, Facebook admitted their fact checking was opinion and therefore protected from defamation. So to put those together, Facebook is censoring because of their opinion disagrees with the opinion of the censored.
https://nypost.com/2021/12/13/facebook-bizarrely-claims-its-...
But we're not talking about the government, we're talking about private platforms. Others are allowed to spread misinfo if they so choose.
> Also, in a recent court case, Facebook admitted their fact checking was opinion and therefore protected from defamation. So to put those together, Facebook is censoring because of their opinion disagrees with the opinion of the censored.
Fact checking is an attempt at objectivity that is nevertheless partially subjective, but that doesn't mean it's not better than doing nothing. You wouldn't improve the New York Times or Wall Street Journal by dragging them down to the level of the National Enquirer.
Yes, but we are. A lot of the COVID misinformation isn't declared misinformation because the fact-checker isn't an expert at COVID, it's because they are cross checking it with what the government says (CDC/NIH/etc). So the fact checker is using the government's facts, so imagine if they used the government's facts on race during the Jim Crow era.
>Fact checking is an attempt at objectivity that is nevertheless partially subjective, but that doesn't mean it's not better than doing nothing.
Depends on who is doing the fact checking. To continue with the prior hypothetical, what if someone stated in 2003 that there weren't WMD's in Iraq. The fact checkers would check with the government's facts who states there were WMD's in Iraq. The fact checker (not an expert on WMDs) would possibly label that as misinformation. In this example, it would be better to have done nothing.
In the situation where the facts are whatever the government says, that's not fact-checking or journalism at all, that's just being a mouthpiece to power.
I don't remember the government providing any real evidence of this though, whereas for, say, the COVID vaccines, they've each had different medical trial phases, followed by data on the general populace once they reached widespread deployment. Those are very different situations.
You're right that of course there's nothing that absolutely guarantees that fact checking is better than no fact checking 100% of the time. Just like, say, a white supremacist forum's idea of 'moderation' may be worse than no moderation at all. I should amend my point: moderation and fact checking are potentially better than doing nothing, and in the case of the major platforms, definitely are.
I see Jo Jorgensen, Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Mark Rubio, Mitch McConnell, etc. I've never seen anyone banned for saying to end the Fed. To cut taxes. To have family values.
Who do you think is the target of deplatforming which the current US government promotes? There are also articles about how deplatforming allegedly works, so it has to target some people I guess.
After the Capitol Attack in 2021, Twitter deplatformed then President of the United States for inciting violence. Who in the US Government do you think is leading the deplatforming?
In the US, I have not seen Facebook banning people for explicitly political reasons, and IIRC studies have not found any obvious partisan bias there.
There are reasons for banning that overlap with politics, certainly, like promoting conspiracy theories, as those tend to be more common on the far left or far right.
Don't forget, media outlets can get the pants sued off of them for knowlingly publishing false and defamatory information. I think we're well past the point of websites being held liable for the content they host, user generated or not, and make public/promote algorithmically.
> [...] he noted that there exists not just a right to speak but a right to hear. “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
But this is of course a gray area. You don't have to listen to anything anyone has to say, but it's also possible to sideline something enough that it is effectively censored without being outright forbidden.
> You don't have to listen to anything anyone has to say
If you're a student, and it's in the state mandated curriculum, then you do.
> it's also possible to sideline something enough that it is effectively censored without being outright forbidden.
I 100% agree with this.
You're right, I misread your comment. He really does not differenciate this clearly, despite having examples for both cases.
At the same time, people are freaking out when parents want a say I what books their children are evaluated on.
If it was up to me, we’d focus on the classics: Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, etc.
Now do the steel man (emphasis mine)
We don't debate this enough, because it's invisible to most people.
Free speech in the broadest is exactly about curation, implied approval (proof by authority doesn't work philosophically, but absolutely does work rhetorically and politically), and access to airtime and audiences.
All of those can be bought with money.
To make an obvious point - if you can use money to impose your choices wrt curation etc, speech is no longer free.
This is a completely different meaning to "Talk about this and the government will imprison and/or murder you."
The latter hardly happens to anyone now. The former is absolutely foundational to the media.
There is no "marketplace of ideas" because those with money and political power can always enforce their narratives on those without - and they can do it cleanly, deniably, and effectively without needing to murder or jail dissenters.
They can even do it from behind various front organisations and curated movements, pretending to be scrappy freedom fighters railing against an oppressive mainstream.
Speech isn't free in any genuine sense while that remains true.
Eventually education turns into an actual search for truth, but that only happens in university where actual research happens. Until then it's all a more or less guided preparation for independent research.
From my current point of view, curriculums are largely set by the state which has an interest in promoting itself with very little capitalist or free-market elements involved.
Or how about this analogy, Zambia is a real county with real history. However, I care about what American kids learn. While they can spend a week learning about Zambia (and Tajikistan, Gabon, Kiribati, and all 200 world countries [taking 4 years]), I would prefer that they spend that time doing something else more important just as US history. So I would like to restrict the amount of world history from the curriculum.
Once you take this step you legitimise the idea that there is an authority with the power to censor - ostensibly for good reasons - and sooner or later that power will bend somewhere else.
It's important that children learn about everything, especially about opposing ideas because only then can they form their own opinions and develop critical thinking, and most importantly the ability to reevaluate an idea based on changing data.
To paraphrase your analogy I prefer my children to only learn about the US healthcare system, and not waste time learning about how other countries do it for better outcomes with less money.
And this is the problem with your post - who decides what is OK, and what is a waste of time?
Ps - I am upvoting you not because you are right, but because you add a valuable perspective to the conversation, and I support your willingness to bring it.
Assuming you mean what you wrote, you may be arguing for abolishing the public school system. In principle that seems like an interesting idea, but the rest of your post isn't quite congruent with that so it seems possible you've missed that this part of the thread is about school curriculum.
I don't have a problem with that, and I don't have a problem with teachers bringing their own personality to the classroom. I am not vegan, but if my kid has a vegan teacher that would be valuable in exposing them to that world-view.
I do object to political interference in education. When the govt decided what material is OK, and what is not, then you remove the variety of thought which exists in the world. And ultimately that leads to a lack of personal critical thinking which leads young (and older) adults to belive anything.
It is hard for the government to control the school system and also for the government not to exercise any control over the school system. I think you might be advocating voluntary, private-only schooling here - although I also think you might disagree with that opinion.
I guess my primary point surrounds censorship, especially when it comes to dictating what teachers can say or teach (in addition to, in the context of, not necessarily in place of the cariculum)
Assuming this is referring to Maus, it wasn’t a part of the curriculum, it was just a book that was available in the library. The school board removed it from the library, clearly in an effort to limit access to it.
It was.[1]
[1] https://www.wate.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/2022/01/Cal...
Just because Pinocchio isn't in the curriculum doesn't mean it's banned. You can still get it in the school library.
Not in curriculum != Banned
Schools however are a grey area because attendance is mandatory and the state sets the curriculum.
All education should be consensual
In a public school there isn't anyone else there to choose the curriculum. Everyone there is a government employee.