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I'm not a progressive, but from a more libertarian leaning, I actually agree with the statement, "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want."
I'm happy if Blue Sky wants to make and enforce rules that favor their progressive/liberal base, and I'm happy if Elon Musk's Twitter/X wants to make and enforce rules that favor conservatives. Isn't that how it is supposed to work?
I can sort of understand the idea of wanting large social media sites to be common carriers, but I kind of fail to understand why it should be necessary. Did the Founding Fathers feel like every printing press in existence needed to be a common carrier that would print anything that wasn't illegal, or did they understand that if there were enough competing print shops, then Shop A might refuse to print something for Cause X, but Shop B would probably be happy to print it?
In the past, the way the mob denied you free speech was by destroying your printing press three times and then murdering you when you didn't get the message. I actually don't think any of the tactics that people use to shut down free speech these days come anywhere close to being that bad. By comparison to that, Americans have been living in a free speech utopia for decades, and barely have anything to complain about. I say this, even as I do think cancel culture and deplatforming are bad.
I'd be far more likely to support laws forcing credit card companies to be common carriers for anything that's not actually illegal, as I have witnessed Visa and Mastercard absolutely demolish free speech online over the last few years, because they're too prudish around niche fetish erotica. There is always cryptocurrency as a workaround, but I would just prefer one of the big governments (EU, US - I don't care) to pass a law that forces the credit card companies to knock it off, and stop worrying about fictional depictions of taboo things that can't possibly hurt anyone. Who elected the credit card companies as the arbiters of morality anyways? Unfortunately, very few people are willing to die on the hill of defending niche fetish porn, so the actions of Visa and Mastercard have continued unabated.
Killing people who say things you don't like is a tactic that people use to shut down free speech these days.
...Come to think of it, there were significant efforts to "destroy the printing press" of people whose speech was disfavored as well. Deplatforming, IDing as a "hate group" and debanking... is there a meaningful distinction you're pointing to here?
Even if things like SWATing and more direct attempts to kill people over speech are occasionally practiced, I would say that the vast majority of cases of people talking about encroachments of free speech online is the confused masses crying wolf over and over again. As part of my work, I ended up meeting a man in his 70's who was hardcore MAGA, and he told me that he thought Elon Musk had done more for free speech than anyone alive today.
And don't get me wrong. I'm genuinely happy Elon Musk bought Twitter/X, because I do think it had a positive effect on the quality of societal debate, but I think it is silly to suggest that he did anything to free speech one way or the other.
Far too often, the signal of genuinely worrying encroachments on free speech like the Biden government sending messages to large social media sites asking them to take certain posts down during COVID, or Donald Trump asking universities for control of hiring and firing practices, are drowned out by nothingburgers like "Person X got banned from Platform Y", which almost definitionally cannot have an effect on free speech one way or another.
Like, does anyone believe that Elijah Lovejoy's abolitionist beliefs didn't effectively blacklist him from writing articles in mainstream newspapers? A particular print shop is absolutely allowed to say, "Sorry Mr. Lovejoy, we won't publish your extreme beliefs." So too, a particular website is allowed to say, "Sorry, we don't allow that kind of talk here."
The thing that is killing societal debate is the fact that people are unserious and uncurious. They don't seek out opposing viewpoints, and they double down on dogmatic thinking that leaves no room for debate. They don't care about what is true, they only care about wielding power against their political enemies. And sadly, I think this kind of uncurious thinking is taking root on both sides of the political aisle. I respect genuinely independent thinkers who come to unique positions by following the evidence come what may, but they are a vanishingly small portion of the population.
Biden retaliated against Elon Musk (via capricious investigations of his other companies, fraudulent revocations of subsidies, etc.) for allowing the deplorables back onto Twitter. Musk lost ~$50 billion in net worth from that. If the COVID issue implicated free speech, I think this (the threat, implicit or explicit, of which we have to assume was behind a lot of the deplatforming by other social media and by pre-Musk Twitter) clearly does too. Of course, I'll also note that given the massive vibe shift from uncensoring Twitter, SJ's consensus-astroturfing operation does seem to have been quite successful until then; even had the US government not been involved, that does really seem like an instance of the problem free speech attempts to fix.
Also, missed this when writing my other reply:
Do note that some (though not all) of that niche fetish erotica is illegal in at least some non-US Western jurisdictions. Those laws are bad, I break them, and I want them repealed, but it does somewhat complicate the matter.
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And he's right. All the rest were willing to censor, and censor heavily, on behalf of the deep state.
Except it did, because this was a coordinated, partisan, ideologically biased, cross-platform censorship system which was encouraged and directed by parts of the government.
Even Grok doesn't believe that claptrap. Elon Musk is just as willing to censor for the government as all the other big tech CEO's, he just talks a better game about it.
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I mean thé issue with ‘different social media sites for different folks’ is that unlike newspapers, social media sites become better with widespread adoption- they’re more like a telecom company than a newspaper. The dynamics will always point to a smaller number of social media sites rather than a larger one, and those social media sites will be good at different things.
I guess my stumbling block is that I don't think widespread adoption or reach is necessary for free speech to flourish.
Elijah Parish Lovejoy's abolitionist pamphlets almost certainly had less reach than big city, mainstream newspapers of the time. He probably had a short list of subscribers who shared around his pamphlets when they were done reading them.
How are people, Left or Right, who complain about not being allowed on a given platform, not doing the equivalent of Lovejoy hypothetically complaining, "The big city newspapers should be forced by law to have a column written by me about abolition, so I can have the maximum reach possible!"
Free speech does nothing to guarantee reach. You have free speech if you're allowed to run a dinky WordPress site off of a Raspberry Pi, or hand out your pamphlets on the street corner.
If the big city newspaper doesn't want to run an article you wrote advocating your political position, or a large social media site would ban you for saying certain things, this has no larger implications for free speech, as long as there are other venues where you can say those things.
I just feel like people are being lazy when they insist that the large social media sites must carry their opinion. Like, yes I too would prefer to say my piece on Facebook instead of actually doing the hard work of printing out pamphlets and distributing them at train stations like a Jehovah's Witness. But the fact that you're unwilling to do the latter thing in advancement of your political goals just shows you are a coward and a hypocrite on top of being lazy, not that you have actually had any free speech rights denied in any meaningful sense.
Elijah Lovejoy replaced his vandalized printing press two times, and died for his beliefs. What have you done recently?
Ok, but are big city newspaper held responsible for the content they publish?
Social media sites are not, they are considered, in the jurisdiction that matters (US), protected by Section 230 as utilities are. Someone can say something completely illegal on Facebook and Facebook does not get in trouble. The reason why social media sites are given this protection is because forcing them to moderate content would have been, when the decision was made technically difficult , and out of concern that it would have a chilling effect on lawful speech.
Now since then they have demonstrated that they are both able to moderate, and also moderate in a way that chills some lawful speech, why do they need or deserve this protection? Of course, stripping them of this protection will make them very vulnerable to lawsuits, which they will probably want to avoid. So it's likely they will change their moderation policies (reducing the amount or kind of speech that is moderated) to maintain the protections.
I think this is a silly statement. Any platform worth being on will moderate some lawful speech, no matter how big or small.
I wouldn't join a Facebook parent's group if it was 90% spam ads for children's toys that I don't need. I wouldn't go to /r/DnD if it was 95% low effort AI slop. I wouldn't go to the Motte if they didn't moderate for tone.
All of the content in those three examples is perfectly legal, and I don't want to see any of it. Or if I do want to see it, I want it on a dedicated place.
I don't actually think there is a principled argument that could separate that necessary function of making any online space worth going to, and possibly restricting certain kinds of legal speech.
If you want to change the law and make the companies subject to suing and litigation, fine. But it is awfully silly to do it because they restrict lawful speech, because they all have to restrict lawful speech in some way.
Also, I think you're just not thinking about the second and third order effects of changing this. In your ideal world, do you think the Motte being subject to suing based on what its users post would make it a better or worse platform for discussion than it currently is?
I can see several ways around this. First would be technical moderation being considered different; it could either for messages that don't qualify as they are of a nature that inherently impede effective communication (ie: spam), or speech that is deemed off-topic. Then there's also distinctions that could be made between platforms that aim to service "specific communities" or are meant for "everyone". Facebook and Twitter at large, ignoring specific Facebook groups, are marketing themselves as social media for everyone. Then from there you could distiguish that hte platform is Facebook, or Reddit, not /r/DnD, and so while /r/DnD could enjoy the moderation they want, Reddit could not without risking their Section 230 protection ban someone from making /r/DnDAISlop.
Ultimately, beneficial moderation is likely to become irrelevant and unnecessary as AI will enable bespoke filtering of content. Whether it will be good or bad for humanity with regards to our already strong filter bubbles I'm not sure, but I think it's inevitable at this point.
I'm not sure the sites actually want to be for everyone, though. Reddit admin eliminated /r/CreepShots, because they didn't want to deal with the bad publicity of their website encouraging people to take candid photos of women out in public. Even if we assume a world where they could limit /r/CreepShots to such jurisdictions where taking photos of strangers in public without their permission was legal, do you think that Reddit's section 230 protection should be contingent upon Reddit admin allowing /r/CreepShots to exist whether they want it to or not?
Should Reddit have been forced to keep up /r/jailbait, which was "just" provocative images of fully clothed teenage girls?
Should Tumblr have been forbidden from banning porn from their platform back in 2019? Or is your expectation that all of social media should basically be a porn free for all, if sites want to keep their section 230 protections?
I just think that platform owners will legitimately have visions for how they would like their platforms to be used. And there will obvious, easy to put into writing criteria, like, "We don't want spam on this site", and there will be more nebulous, vibes based things like, "We don't want anything that would make it hard for advertisers to advertise on our site", or "We don't want anything that will reduce shareholder price or affect our brand image", and I personally think those are legitimate concerns for platforms to consider. They need to make money to keep operating, and I'm not sure the government forcing them to become common carriers will actually be the best way to keep these large sites operating in the long term.
Don't get me wrong, I find it extremely frustrating when run of the mill monetary concerns diminish a site I enjoy. I remember when TV Tropes Wiki had to disallow certain kinds of adult tropes and content, because the advertisers the site needed to stay afloat wouldn't advertise if those pages existed. But should TV Tropes Wiki really have been forced to choose between A) having the advertising revenue they needed to stay afloat but opening themselves up to being sued due to losing section 230 protections, or B) having to shut down the site because they couldn't find advertisers willing to advertise on their platform?
Heck, even if you want to argue that in a social-media-as-common-carrier world, everything will work out, and advertisers will make deals to only be shown on certain subreddits and never on others, do you really think platforms will want to devote database space, server cost, etc. to subreddits or accounts they can never get advertising revenue off of? They'll ban them for some other pretense, because who wants to be forced to have 10 Pentabytes of creepshots and jailbait photos that you can't even make any advertising money off of taking up space on your platform?
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The argument's based around network effects/natural monopolies and correlated incentives.
Social media is a natural monopoly, or at least an oligopoly based around different products, because people want large reach which means they tend to prefer sites that are already large (a network effect). This means that Moloch doesn't bite at full force on failure to obey the market incentive of "serve everyone who wants to be served". Note how most of Web 2.0 - the enormous profusion of specialised fora that took off in the early oughties - withered on the vine when the major social media sites started sucking up all the people; I can think of one site I visit that's grown massively in the late tens and twenties (Questionable Questing), but it is worth noting that QQ's niche is primarily that for the most part no titan site wants to host QQ's type of content due to the immense reputational and legal issues (most of its content is fanfic, which is in a legal grey area; much of it is erotic stories and cartoons of characters under 18 which is legally CP in the non-US Anglosphere (and AIUI decent chunks of the EU) and sends even most US advertisers running away screaming).
Relying on the various social media companies to pursue different non-commercial agendas doesn't always work, because the non-market incentives on them are not independent; they're highly correlated. All the major social media companies implemented the same SJ-based censorship from ~2014-22, because they were all being pressured (by cancellation, by jawboning, by being convinced, etc) by the same pressure group. Elon Musk broke that lockout, yes, but he did so in explicit defiance of his incentives (he lost about $50 billion from Joe Biden's retaliation over the next couple of years); true believers that committed and that rich are rare, and it's questionable whether someone else could/would have done it in his place (IIRC Zvi Mowshowitz had it as a pie-in-sky idea, but couldn't figure out where to get the money); certainly, if you look at theMotte back then, many of us weren't exactly hopeful.
It's not quite as strong as the argument for regulation of e.g. water/power companies, but it gets pretty close.
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That’s great. Can my private company not hire people because I don’t like their skin color?
Sure, why not?
If we were going to keep anti-discrimination laws, I would prefer to limit them to "essential" domains, like hospitals, banking, and communication technology. I think that that is sufficient for keeping a functional free market where all can participate.
If we really wanted to keep anti-discrimination around employment, I would prefer for it to be limited to military and government jobs, and I would want to implement it in a way that doesn't lower standards in any dangerous domain. (So all the 115+ IQ black men get slurped up to places they are competent to carry out the work, and the remainder get government janitor jobs or something with great benefits.)
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You can in fact set up some workarounds to that.
Isn't that adjacent to how the Arday situation manifested?
Companies began filtering on university degrees because they could, then everyone needed a degree.
No.
Companies began filtering for degrees because degrees filtered for more than just raw IQ, even if they were degrees in psychology or art history. IQ tests remain legal in hiring unless they can be shown to be used for the purpose of disparate impact(which on the case of Griggs was blatantly true). The private sector uses the Wunderlic test all the time. Most decent noncollege jobs, and not a few college jobs, require aptitude tests that are heavily G-loaded. Degrees (used to)show the ability to work in a white collar environment productively and without rocking the boat, and that is why they became required for white collar employment.
Companies that really want to discriminate have a very limited number of loopholes, but it’s technically doable- there’s a handful of companies which require new hires to join a particular private club, for instance(the largest of these is the knights of Columbus insurance corp, which is Fortune 500- obviously this means they hire only male practicing Catholics with conservativish political views- but these jobs are posted publicly to job boards in view of the public). And hooters declares all of its front of house staff actresses to get away with the crazy high levels of discrimination.
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If the progressives arguing "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want" really meant it, I'd have no problem with this line of reasoning.
But after Musk bought out Twitter and started banning people he didn't like, these same people were rending their hair. They didn't actually believe the libertarian principle that privately owned social media companies can do what they please: they just mistakenly believed that these privately owned social media companies would always be owned by people sympathetic to their progressive worldview.
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