You don’t think that someone who thinks that they were wrongly moderated, or someone else that thinks that someone should have been, would sue?
Once a few have gone there and lost because there was clear process in place that was followed? No. There are always some who threaten and some who do of course. But cases bound to lose get brought infrequently.
Really, would you like to make an argument here? How about citing the part of this document that defines what is an illegal monopoly to support your contention?
I can site part of you cite, where it says
And I don’t think that you can make the argument that twitter does either.
Did you have another part of that 42 page document that you think is relevant that supports your opinion?
Easy entry traditionally makes the case harder to prove but does not disprove in and of itself.
IANAL but I’m not sure if that’s Constitutionally legal.
I don’t have time to respond to all points at the moment but this caught my attention.
Not necessarily. If the target or niche market is big enough, it’s possible for someone like a Tucker Carlson and Rush Limbaugh to survive. Things have to get to the point of taunting the parents of dead school children (a la Alex Jones) before a company even considers cutting ties with them. As laudable as FB, Twitter, and YouTube’s collective decision to ban Alex Jones was, they never addressed the problem of repeated violations of terms of service and basic online decency - because they knew they didn’t have to. So even though they took down the noisiest, nastiest of the nasty shit disturbers online, there were countless others who were allowed to do pretty much what Jones did and created an online ecosystem of misinformation, hate, and just bad conduct.
And I suspect that is why regulators would have a fight on their hands: these companies have terms of service that give them the power to decide how their product is used. Those terms of service protect their product, not the users, not the community, not the society that consumes the information by the hundreds of millions. But that “product” has a reach and an influence that is massive and unprecedented, and it has enough impact to literally create an insurrectionist movement – and we’re going to say that our democratic government has no right to defend itself on behalf of its citizens because someone’s individual rights may get infringed and the rights of these companies to protect their product outweighs the rights we have collectively to defend ourselves against authoritarian insurrection? No, sorry, I can’t go along with that. Yes, you have a right to drive an old clunker, and yes a company has a right to build a factory, but we collectively have rights of our own not to be polluted by this socially toxic shit.
If you keep living in fear of right wing extremists who have that kind of interpretation of free speech, you’re going to end up with those kinds of restrictions because the entire government will be full of My Pillow Guys. Sitting around and being worried isn’t doing anything to solve the problem. Actively working with government, private and public organizations and institutions, and other citizens to build a society that has a good value system is the way we prevent a My Pillow Guy Republic.
I honestly think that’s a pretty naïve view of how litigious people can be.
Who would determine when a social media platform is large enough to be regulated? Under what guidelines?
Prohibiting speech because it’s speech we don’t necessarily like is almost surely unconstitutional, as it should be. But government can regulate business practices, and we can regulate business agreements and contracts. I see nothing inherently illegal or unconstitutional about telling an interstate business that if they’re going to have terms of service, they should do a better job of enforcing them consistently.
The truth is, we actually can regulate certain forms of “speech” when it is regulated as business conduct. We regulate advertising. We regulate contracts. We regulate agreements. We regulate labels on food and medicine. We regulate speech all the time, when there is a valid public interest purpose to do so, and when it isn’t intended to promote a partisan or ideological purpose. I see no reason why we can’t do that with social media and big tech, within limits of course.
I don’t think that’s fair. Twitter allowed Trump to tweet for so long because he was POTUS. I’m not sure I agree with their stand but I think it’s a reasonable position. In the end Trump became so toxic that Twitter finally had to ban him even though he’s POTUS.
Sure. Monopoly is determined by degree of market power which is defined as follows:
“ Market power is defined by economists as the ability profitably to price above marginal cost.15”
The tricky parts get over “substantial” and “durable” and how they get applied to these specifics.
I think that I’m not going to respond to this, not because it has no merit, but because it is off the track of the thread, and my reason for being in this thread is to argue against the government forcing companies to be platforms for any speech not deigned to be illegal.
My position, for both arguments, is that the govt should pretty much stay out of telling private companies what to do. I am not really up for arguing against both the government compelling companies to carry speech, as well as arguing against the govt having more restrictions on speech.
It’s a worthwhile argument, but I think that, if you want to continue this, we should do it in another thread.
Right, and it is important that you caveat that it is by what degree.
Just being able to have a profit, which is the definition of market power, does not a monopoly make. I price my services above marginal cost, and gain a profit for doing so, but I’m certainly no monopoly.
A monopoly can set its prices at whatever they want, and people have no choice but to pay them if they want the product. Twitter cannot do that. If they demand too high a price, then there are plenty of other ways for advertisers to spend their money, and there are plenty of other services that users can move to.
My real argument is that the government could do more to prevent the problems of misinformation, hate speech, and other online forms of misconduct if it would simply be required to enforce its terms of service more consistently – that’s what the government actually could do. But I would agree that the pressure to have terms of service that promote these values would first have to be agreed to, and that’s where I think public pressure comes into play. I think there’s a role for both ordinary citizens and consumers and the government in this case.
The more I think about it, I wouldn’t want the government to be the ones setting up the standards or setting up some commission that decides what is and what’s not acceptable discourse – the community should decide what community standards are and then pressure these companies publicly if they don’t have these kinds of standards in their TOS or community guidelines. But then I think it’s fair for regulators to say, “Okay, you say you have these terms of service (and oh by the way, you guys have lobbied us in the past to, in some cases, actually criminally prosecute users who don’t follow these terms). Maybe you, too, should be bound by these same guidelines to some degree, no? Or are these just platitudes and rules that you can selectively enforce whenever an account holder becomes a persona non grata?”
Right. Not by number of competitors but by the degree of market power … with not complete clarity on what level of substantial and durable degree. Easy entry making the durable degree case harder. Note though it does not need to be absolute market power to qualify as substantial and durable.
Not naive, realistic. People can be as litigious as heck and will be up to the point of paying a lawyer by the hour. Not paying by the hour? Then the lawyer needs to believe there is a good chance of winning. Within well defined guard rails with a process that was clearly followed (possibly including a right to appeal to a committee of the company, just like insurance companies have appeals procedures) and no problems.
Any size company for this aspect. Again companies have 1A rights. They want to be platform devoid of all politics, of only progressive positions, free from right wing arguments, only of right wing arguments, no insults, only clear facts, any claim goes, whatever. But it needs to be clearly labeled as such in the TOS, a process set up for implementation, and then the TOS and the implementation process consistently applied.
This aspect is independent of oligopoly level power.
There is nothing wrong with having oligopoly level power. Hell, having 100% of a market is absolutely fine. If I make the best product but there is nothing stopping you from making a better one, then it doesn’t matter how large my market share is. The government will leave me alone. It’s how you got and stay there that is of interest to the courts. Twitter has
The Supes take on it:
The purpose of the [Sherman] Act is not to protect businesses from the working of the market; it is to protect the public from the failure of the market. The law directs itself not against conduct which is competitive, even severely so, but against conduct which unfairly tends to destroy competition itself.
As I’ve stated previously, there are indeed some anti-competitive behaviors illustrated by both Facebook and Google (although neither in areas that would seem to hinder free expression), I see no evidence that Twitter has been doing anything that could be construed as anti-competitive. Break up Facebook and Google all you want. It won’t help or harm expression, but go for it. Either way, we currently don’t have an issue where the size of the audiences destroys competition.
The document that you dropped in as your cite was about monopolies, illegal monopolies specifically. We are not talking about anti-trust here, we are talking about regulating companies that have crossed some arbitrary threshold that they are now to be considered to be limiting someone’s freedom of expression if they have any sort of community standards higher than SCOTUS allows for government entities to enforce.
Anyway, this was in another thread for completely different reasons, but I think it proves my point.
Is Telegram now part of this oligopoly? Do they now need to follow whatever regulations it is that you are wanting to impose on twitter?
Any market that can have dozens of millions of users suddenly go to a competitor is not a monopoly or oligopoly.
It doesn’t cost all that much to file a lawsuit. To win it is a different matter.
Keep in mind, as well, that you are talking about creating a govt regulatory body, where that body would be the one fronting the costs of investigation and litigation.
If I violate my employee’s rights, they can either sue me directly, or they can go to various labor boards that may do it for them.
So it would apply to the SDMB?
If so, then say goodbye to it. The first complaint that requires that they pay a lawyer a cent to defend it, and the plug is pulled.
And if you’ve ever checked out ATMB, you know that there would be someone that would go to one of these regulatory bodies that you want to set up to complain about uneven moderation.
That’s going to be the case for many, many small independent messageboards. If we went with what you are proposing, then that creates exactly the barriers to entry and anticompetitive market that leads to the oligopolies that you are afraid of. Instead of volunteer mods, we’d have to hire lawyers to adjudicate moderation disputes, for fear of possibly coming across as inconsistent.
I assume that Giraffeboard’s TOS that says that moderation may be arbitrary and capricious wouldn’t fly.
What you are proposing would have pretty much the opposite effect of what it is that you claim to be wanting.
Wouldn’t it be far easier and better to just go to one of a near infinite number of platforms that will allow you to express yourself in any way that you like, than to destroy small messageboards and social media sites, and demand that the rest follow the rules that you want to impose on them?
I see the former
Ah, no, the evidence shows that Trump abused one of the few social media outlets that he managed somehow to learn. Worse, that abuse included the dereliction of the official ways of communication from the White House where orders from the office of the president were supposed to be made. The result (as intended by Trump for sure) was a way to get around those official communications (that are still available to him!) and set a level of confusion when Trump dismissed people or ordered things by twit.
Twitter should have banned his ass a long time ago based on their rules, and forced him to be a president and not the asshole in chief.
I guess that was not a “done deal”:
“However, Epik told FOX Business that it has not engaged in discussions with Parler about hosting the alternative social media platform.”
…
" Davis told FOX Business that Epik proceeded to have a phone call with Parler after being blindsided by its registration, but never discussed hosting the platform. Instead, the conversation strictly revolved around techniques Parler could utilize to improve its oversight and content moderation practices to keep political discourse on its platform from getting out of hand.
“It wasn’t about hosting,” Davis said. “It was Parler literally wanting to find out what the best ideas were to prevent hateful content on their networks in the future ."”
I’m beating that the data center below would be happy to host Parler. Probably even for free, or what they like to call “cutting out the middle-man”.
So this piece might be interesting to some people. It doesn’t talk about First Amendment issues, it does talk about PUA and where they came from and how complex the space is and the service provider dependencies (i.e. Akamai and Facebook have a PUA between each other - the piece makes it sound a little like the pre WWI European treaty situation).