TL;DR free speech is between you and the government, not between you and someone else or some other company.
TL;DR free speech is between you and the government, not between you and someone else or some other company.
this is a clear violation of the First Amendment, which makes it legal to publish lies.
Yep — here we're getting into Prior Restraint. It's both against the law to restrain free speech such as lies, but as you rightly point out, this speech can have other legal consequences.
Then the government should pass laws stating that these private corporations are no longer able to moderate their own platforms as they see fit. There is no "second meaning" without concrete legal precedent.
Tell them to call it freedom of expression if you're so inclined, and keep supporting their fight for it.
Anything less is detracting from their point, seemingly intentionally.
(the term gets thrown around a lot, and has been devalued into meaninglessness by the Russian government, but it does have a legal meaning in Germany and France)
really now?
That and its excessive use on social media renders "Nazi" mostly useless as a descriptor, outside of those groups that explicitly and deliberately reference Nazi symbology and ideology.
Note: smaller than that of the same ideological but different geopolitical alignment that Russia has been sponsoring for years (Azov exists, but it's smaller than Sparta) in the same conflict.
>some far-right militia activity in some places
FYI, those guy with wolfsangel and black sun insignias and swastika tattoos are not a militia but a legitimate unit of Ukraine's national guard
https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/sonnen...
https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/wolfsa...
That's up for debate. Modern communication is so monopolized by twitter/FB that the argument of "they are a private company" no longer holds.
We can bemoan Russian interference in the elections all we want. But the power Twitter/FB hold is far more impactful on domestic and international democracy than any russian agent every could be.
Yes, everyone knows that.
It's a bit different though when you have massive social media platforms that have monopolies over public discourse.
Well, one alternative would be that they have to decouple their front-end and back-end and provide open APIs to their backend (posts/tweets, friends lists, etc.).
Facebook/Twitter can moderate/censor whatever they want on their own front-ends, but they can't remove anything from the backend.
People/companies can build alternative front-end apps that access the fb/twitter graphs and censor in a different way - so that users have an alternative.
(Note that FOSTA/SESTA already imposes a proactive legal obligation to censor within the US, and overrides s230)
No, it's not. If you want corporations to be beholden to the first amendment then pass laws saying that private companies can no longer moderate their platforms, full stop.