It’s the fact that as @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness said, such a significant portion of public discourse is happening on these platforms that makes it a problem. If they banned all political discussions, then they would cease to have this monopoly power.
I’m sure there is some utility for Facebook. However, we muddled through before Facebook, and we can muddle through now without it. If we could organize people in the 1050s, we can do so now. And the technological options are numerous. Emails, web portals, messaging, chat rooms, and god knows what else. I was told years ago that our firm simply must have a facebook and linkedin presence. We don’t.
I have seen what passes for “public discourse” on Twitter. I think we’d be fine if that just stopped. I assume Facebook is the same or worse.
Showing your age there, lol. People managed without computers in the 50s, too; that doesn’t mean it’s feasible now.
Ha. Sorry about that. I agree it’s not feasible to function without the internet and computers. I am not convinced we can’t get by without Twitter and Facebook.
What other technologies could you substitute in that sentence for “Facebook,” and is that an argument for ignoring monopolistic tendencies in those technological industries?
What can we do about big tech monopolies, though?
What we really need to deal with is the monopoly power MySpace and GeoCities hold these days.
I believe it important to specifically point out one issue which Kimera757 got incorrect, though no disrespect is intended. Posting “hate speech” is legal in the United States even if it is morally wrong, and many other countries take roughly the same view or forbid only specific speech. Posting specific exhortations, instructions, or direction to commit violence generally would not be (though for the record I Am Not a Lawyer, not a Constitutional Scholar).
Posting hatred is morally incorrect, and private companies which host platforms are not obligated to allow someone to continue doing so, and additionally they may set different boundaries from one another. The 1st Amendment, both in the plain text and in how it has been applied by the courts, very strictly blocks the U.S. government from imposing controls on what views may or may not be expressed publicly under punishment of the law. There are some restrictions which have been allowed historically - but not very many.
The reason it is not a freedom of expression issue is as described by others in this thread.
Edit: Why does the quote function no longer work, or is there a thread explaining it somewhere?
Modnote: it does work, not sure why it was so screwy in this case, but mostly fixed it for you. What Exit?
Get by, sure; however, the enormous and, more importantly, enduring popularity of social media shows it isn’t going away anytime soon. Social media is bigger than the companies involved. So, we need to figure out how social media can be used predominantly for social good (nothing will ever be perfect, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try).
The quote tags need to be on their own lines.
Nobody. Just like nobody stops the restaurant from taking down my flyers from their bulletin board, and nobody makes the radio station air my call, and nobody makes the newspaper publish my op-ed. It’s their property/business, not mine.
Interestingly, at least some attorneys with the ACLU agree that there are troubling implications for the marketplace of ideas: MSN?
Twitter should be more consistent, but I think they were right to ban advocates of violence like Trump. They probably should have done it long ago, since he’s been pretty consistently advocating violence for years. I think there is reasonable criticism that they should also have sanctioned/banned various foreign officials who also advocated violence on Twitter, but that doesn’t mean they shoudn’t have banned the most prominent and egregious violator – Trump.
By the way, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this discussion. The last time I saw it, it was about malls having replaced the public market, and how in malls, unlike on public streets, the mall owner can evict a guy who sets up a soap box and starts attracting a crowd.
A recent closed thread asked if it was a first Amendment violation. It is not. But one poster in the thread raised the issue of whether it might be an oligopoly issue. In a world in which a very few companies, and in fact a very few individual executives, control the soapboxes of the public square, should there be some consideration to that power by a very few, that it not be applied capriciously?
Case made by Russian dissident and assassination attempt survivor Alexey Navalny.
Neither is Merkel a fan.
IMHO, not yet unacceptable, but it indicates a worrying direction.
Not at all. It was about promoting violence, not about political viewpoint. Promoting violence is not a legitimate political viewpoint.
Similar thread
By this same token, Facebook/Twitter could have banned support for Black Lives Matter or the 2019 Hong Kong protesters. Both involved violence.