Are big tech getting too judgemental?
blog.9struct.com
blog.9struct.com
I think one of the primary ideological motivations for treating governments and companies differently is to optimize freedoms. An action by a government has the ability to negatively affect millions of people who lack meaningful alternatives. By contrast until very recently any given action by a company could negatively affect the "freedoms" of an extremely small section of society, and there would generally be plentiful alternatives available. The only exceptions being in things like cartels, which is why we passed laws making such illegal. So optimizing for the freedoms of companies, and limiting those of governments, increases the overall freedom within a society, instead of reducing it.
But today while the actions of governments can negatively affect millions leaving them with minimal realistic alternatives, the actions of a handful of companies can negatively affect the freedoms of billions leaving them with minimal realistic alternatives. This is a scenario that's never really existed in humanity in a meaningfully similar way (the problems of e.g. Standard Oil or The East India Trading Company were quite different), and so we have no precedent or words of wisdom to guide us - we're on our own.
More like US politics has imposed a global capitalist free-for-all on this front for their benefit, and the consequences are catching up. One faction maybe will want to have some governance and regulation down the road, while the other faction wants Donald Trump back on Twitter.
So too today, a handful of corporations controlling the vast majority of media and digital discussion is extremely handy from the perspective of the powers that be. Don't want people engaging in politically inconvenient discussion about e.g. the possibility of a disease having escaped from a lab? Simply "encourage" your "corporate partners" to censor that discussion and you've probably done far more in terms of suppression of speech than even a law could have, without ever having to concern yourself with that pesky piece of paper called a constitution. And even better, there's no concern about a loss of face when you decide such discussion is in your geopolitical interests a few months later, and decide to take a hard 180 on it.
The point I'm making here is that this isn't really one faction vs another, but more of the interests of entrenched corporate and political powers against the interests of society as a whole. And so seeking to solve this with regulation or governance is going to be somewhat more than difficult. It's like trying to end the two-party system. Nearly everybody in society would agree some sort of proportional representation system would be better (and also immediately end gerrymandering, which is exclusively a product of district based first-past-the-post voting), but the problem is that the 2 parties in power have 0 interest in ever ending the 2-party system, unless it's to replace it with a 1-party system.
[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/13/calling-abol...
Can't reach them by phone, they don't have an email to write to, and the online help is a joke.
Why should a company be forced to pay other people for hosting their content if that content isn't something they think they can profit from? If anything, people should have to pay to host their videos on YouTube if YouTube doesn't think they're monetizable, but yet they don't charge people.
>Companies banning people from using their websites
Why should companies be forced to carry the speech of people they disagree with? Forcing companies to carry speech of people they disagree with is itself a violation of the freedom of speech. It's not like these people are banned from using the internet (which WOULD be a violation of free speech).
>Platforms should be focusing on transparency in order to build consumer trust.
Why? There's plenty of social media sites, and so far very few users care enough to move to other social media sites for its transparency (like WT.Social, for example). Even the near-bastion of free speech, 4chan, is one of the least transparent social media sites on earth.
This is such an entitled perspective. No one owes you access to their web services, which cost a large amount of money to build and maintain. If there's anything to complain about, it's the lack of any Net Neutrality legislation/policy to keep the internet truly free and open.
Personally I’d rather have this then all the platforms be some disgusting form of 4chan where almost everything is permitted and hate, bigotry, propaganda and violence are rampant.
What is 'repugnant' to society isn't fixed, and isn't always universally agreed upon.
Someone with your view 60 years ago would have said similar things about depictions of love between queer people, or 100 years ago would have said that different races shouldn't be allowed to post pro interracial marriage messages in the newspaper.
You cannot use that to justify outright hate, advocacy of violence and bigotry which is just as objective. Objectively bad.