It's your right to have an opinion, it's my right not to have to listen to it.
As Frederick Douglass, a former slave and writer, wisely stated, “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the right of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money.”
Social Media websites and platforms are acting as common carriers. They provide you an audience, without upfront cost.
If they discriminate against you for an opinion their 'experts' do not like, they should suffer the consequences for it because social media websites, let me publish my own newspaper.
You don't have to register to send a letter to the editor. The newspaper has discretion about whether or not to publish it.
There's certainly a difference in scale, but I don't really see a fundamental difference in kind.
If you create a service deliberately designed so that anyone can sign up and start posting things without so much as an employee approving their registration, then you've deliberately created what amounts to a public square.
To then selectively censor people on such a platform is tantamount to a bait & switch. You promised people a public square, and then revoked that mechanism for people you disagree with.
And if you think big tech doesn't all have the same bias, take a look at this graph: https://i.imgur.com/Si183zE.jpg
Social media like twitter and facebook aren't a newspaper. They're not a podcast. They're not a TV show. They're a digital public square. The sooner we collectively admit that, the better.
That makes no sense. You can literally build something identical to a literal physical public square in the real world and still kick people out because it's private property. This is no different than that.
So if I host an open-mic night in my comedy-club, i lose the right to reject applicants?
Is your hypothetical comedy club deliberately and indiscriminately trying to drive people into coming in to increase the number of people inside it? And bragging about how many people are in there?
The internet is the common carrier.
The analogy of the printing press doesn't work, because the printing press symbolizes a big clunky piece of machinery that a regular user can't build, maintain, run or afford. With the internet it's not like that is it? There are literally thousands of options for a regular user to create their own 'newspaper' without having to pay large sums up front or anything at all.
That's like saying censorship is not censorship because the banned users can just write their opinions in a text editor.
Even the software is free. Now, the problem with social media is the network effects creating popularity and visibility, which cannot be replicated.
The analogy is clunkier than expected, but it mostly works.
However, you are still not prevented from building your own printing press or copy machine. There were regimes that attempted similar controls...
That said, analogies are just that, and social media are just not common carriers. By their design, they are selective about information they show you, whether by algorithm, your choice or the operator's choice. Especially since they use user submitted data including social network structure to manage your feed, it's editorializing by design.
A common carrier version would have to make the algorithms public, well described, remove moderation and other more undesirable features that increase income. This is not what these private companies run.
What's funny is, y'all claim you should be able to hear what you want to hear, but when others don't want to hear it - you scream "cancel culture".
You can't have it both ways. Either grow up and run your own businesses/communities and attract revenue to support them or realize your ideas are bad and can't be sustained. This happens to everyone regardless of their beliefs.
You can't take successful companies and force them to be unsuccessful by embracing communities that fail.
This isn't forcing a mom and pop store to bake a cake, it's giant corporations that are picking and choosing which users and ideologies in the world can be heard.
We don't let ISPs or mobile carriers do this, why let giant social media platforms do it?
These platforms have government officials and even entire administrations solely using them.
what does it matter how big the company is? Rules should be the same for everybody regardless of how big they are.
> that are picking and choosing which users and ideologies in the world can be heard.
I don't agree with this at all. You act as if twitter is the only platform that allows people to post their opinions. It's not, it never was, and it never will be. If an oppinion is not on twitter doesn't mean that it 'can't be heard in the world'.
The cynist in me suspects that it's just people who are buthurt that bad orange man was banned, and these people rather bitch, moan and throw tantrums until people adjust to them, rather than get of their lazy ass and create their own platform.
Do you support existing antitrust laws? I'll respond to the rest of your post once you answer that.
Exactly. On social networks, the block button is there for anyone to use if you don't want to hear it.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Attributed to Voltaire but actually from SG Tallentyre 1906.
A more accurate quote for todays crowd may be "I disapprove of what you say, and I will fight to the death to stop others from hearing you say it."
The difference now is that corporations have to allow this, and that if you don't want to deal with that content, you essentially have to not start a company because you can't moderate it, so it closes the door to the freedom of running opinionated companies, which is anti-thetical to conservative viewpoints.