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Facebook and Twitter ban for political reasons, which is entirely different than banning spam.

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.

> Banning spam is a strawman in this discussion. I don't think there is constructive discussion on that basis.

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.

>to bad blatant misinformation

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-...

> Imagine what the government of Mississippi or Indiana during the Jim Crow era would label as blatant misinformation.

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.

>But we're not talking about the government, we're talking about private platforms. Others are allowed to spread misinfo if they so choose.

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.

That's irrelevant: it's still not the government doing the banning, other platforms could use different heuristics or just not have those moderation policies at all.

> 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.

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.

Just out of curiosity what are the political posts that have caused people to be banned?

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.

I don't really know anything about the people you mentioned, I am not from the US. I know Sanders and Cruz but not about any instances of censorship.

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.

These other people that were mentioned are from all areas of the political spectrum.

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?

Just because it was political doesn't mean that a particular person or group in the government was responsible.

> I don't really know anything about the people you mentioned, I am not from the US.

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.

I agree. It doesn't help that these platforms themselves want to be all things for all people and have partially succeeded. That's why most people just don't see the parallel with publishing and its rules. For them Twitter and Facebook are the internet

"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."

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.