Lawmakers are skeptical of Zuckerberg's commitment to free speech

Freedom of speech, in the other hand, is part of a moral code that believes in inalienable rights, that humans implicitly have the right to express themselves. The government does not grant the right to freedom of speech, because we already have it. The first amendment says that the government must respect that right, but creating the right.

That's a bit vague. Nothing about this statement on its face would preclude some speech regulations so it reads more like an empty platitude to me.

That is a recursive and meaningless definition. Free speech is widely understood, and codified, as being able to say stuff without having the government send you to jail for it. That is a pretty basic requirement for a functional democracy. Altough, depending on where you live, even free speech does not mean fully free. In the U.S it is mostly limited by libel/defamation, but in a lot of country hate speech is not allowed. Whether you think it is a good thing or not that is up to you, but this is actual free speech.

- I don’t feel a right to decide the vibe of how a business curates its space. My bakery, coffee shop, local library, etc. all curate a space with an opinion. I don’t feel I have standing to assert that my preferences should dominate their choices.

As an aside, businesses are also an extension of the people, the best ones tend to just not be mode collapsed

First, commercial speech is certainly speech. If you don't restrict anything at all, your platform will drown in a constant deluge of spam. So on that basis alone there's something you must remove if you want to have any kind of conversations happening, and therefore can't be an actual absolutist.

Second, there's illegal and just icky content. Posting pictures of poo isn't illegal. It can be "speech" after a fashion. That will also quickly result in people leaving.

Third, a free-for-all is only tolerable to a small segment of the population. HN for instance only works because it's moderated and curated. You can have something like r/worldpolitics which embodies the "no moderation" ideal. It's a subreddit where the moderators do the absolute minimum Reddit requires. Meaning it's mostly porn. And what's the point in having more than one of those? They're all more or less the same.

Then try yelling racial slurs in your local town square and see how that goes for ya.

> I don't understand this position. Why do people want private companies to decide what's allowed and what isn't? Shouldn't lawmakers, and by extension the people (at least in democratic countries) decide what speech is allowed and what isn't?

Why shouldn't I be allowed to police what can be said on my private property ? If you are in my home yelling racist stuff, I will ask you to leave, and make you leave if you refuse. I don't see why I shouldn't be able to do the same on my plateform. If you want to yell racial slurs, you can go to truth social or whatever.

> By centralizing human communication like Facebook has, they’ve placed themselves in the funky place of being the arbiter for communication through their social graph. You don’t own your audience, they do. You don’t have direct to audience communication (even if your audience is just your friends and family!) - they do.

Respectfully mate, how is that any different than radio, TV and newspaper before ? If anything, it is far better now, you have at least many platform to choose from and you can host your own.

But even by the U.N definition, the only part that could be of concern here is "receive and impart information and ideas through any media", but how exactly would that be put in place ? It is not like you can go to your local radio station and ask them to give you the mic since this is your right to impart information and ideas through any media.

A large percentage of people genuinely buy into the "just world" fallacy, regardless of whether they consciously recognize this. They believe that if someone is in a position of power, they deserve to have that power.

Of course, many of them also believe that, variously, the world is inherently just, people are inherently good, or the world's structure is ordained by a loving God. Therefore, these people deserving power isn't just Fated, it's also because they're better people. Smarter, better leaders, possessed of the qualities that fit one to rule.

Therefore, "the people in power are smart, have the best interests of the many at heart, and are worth listening to" is effectively axiomatic for a great many people in our society.

If there is evidence of improper coersion by government employees, for example threatening to withhold public funding or permitting based on political views, that would likely be illegal and indeed should be handled by the judicial branch.

That's neither what the First Amendment says explicitly nor how it is applied by the courts (though the way each of those differs from your description is quite distinct.)

To me, we should be less concerned with how a platform is moderated and more concerned with the fact that the most successful, influential, and devious publishing empire in human history is essentially the personal property of one man.