You know perfectly well we were talking about people building and hosting their own website or blog, not using Twitter. I’m going to stop responding to this hijack now.
I don’t consider this a hijack. It has a direct bearing on my thoughts on why social media bannings are not a problem. You are the one who continues to believe that any of the things that are available for people to express themselves are only for rich people or the technically inclined. I’m simply disabusing you of that notion. You can believe it or not shrug
Clarification understood. The amount of the public square controlled by one to several players (controlling which speech can be expressed in it) is not concerning to you so long as there is some space, no matter how small and how out of the way, for dissent to exist.
In response to the first order of business being to decide if there is a problem and to define it:
Sorry no. That, to me at least, is more a given. Givens -
- There is a public interest in controlling disinformation and hate speech.
- There is a public interest in having the square contain a wide diversity of opinions and ideas.
Then, to me, this becomes the problem to be solved -
- Do they conflict? If so how are they balanced? Is there a need to have some system that balances those dynamics such that a few individuals alone do not have excess effective and arbitrary control over what is contained in each bucket, lest they at some point do the censorship work of the autocrats for them in return for opportunities to make more profit, in a way compatible with the 1A rights of the corporate persons?
IF we accept that as a problem for the system (even if we disagree whether current exercise of that power demonstrates concerning behaviors), then what are ways to strike those balances? Those public interests are part of “the commons” and the free market unfettered and unregulated is not the best method to protect the commons without tragedies. AND governmental ability to regulate this aspect of the commons is, rightly, very constrained by 1A.
Part two. What is the point at which individual persons (be they flesh and blood or corporate persons) would be considered as having dominant control over what is in each bucket? Is it, as posited above, not the case as long as there is easy entry into any portion of the space, no matter how small and how “out of the way”, no matter how much market share the major controlling “persons” possess? If it is that you know it when you see it, then pretty sure we know it too late.
It may be small, but it’s not out of the way. By virtue of being on the internet, it is accessible anywhere, to anyone, at anytime. (Well, except in places where the government has taken control over the public square, anyway.)
There has never been another time in all of history that it was easier to get your voice out, to express your speech.
Well, I agree that it is a given, that’s why I don’t feel that we need to keep going over that step over and over.
Yes. Not exactly mutually exclusive, but close. Your disinformation is someone else’s truth. Your hate speech is some else’s obvious observation.
And that is the step two that we are at, brainstorming ways of balancing freedom of expression against people’s freedom to lie and say mean things.
Yes, and it is called keeping the government, who can have an excessive and arbitrary control by a few individuals, out of it as much as possible.
They make profit off of advertisers and users. I’ve never advertised on twitter, but I have on facebook, and I do on google. It is public pressure that can keeps them in line. Otherwise, people can find a different platform upon which to spend their time or their money.
It’s not about 1A in and of itself, it’s not because of 1A that we have to tolerate the rights of everyone, including “corporate persons”. 1A exists because we should tolerate the rights of everyone, including corporate persons.
Any system that takes the power away from the corporate persons gives it to those autocrats that you are so worried about.
That is a very good question, indeed. Do you have any ideas?
There is no tragedy of the commons if your cow pasture is effectively infinite.
The externalities that we experience are entirely because of the speech of the users, not of the platform. This is more calling it a tragedy of the commons, not because having too many cows is overgrazing the pasture, but because people are eating too much meat.
If people eating too much meat is the problem, I don’t think that we regulate the pasture, we provide PSAs and educational opportunities for people to choose a healthier diet.
Yes, because if it were not, rather than alleging that they are behaving in certain ways as a means of currying favor with the government, you would very rightly say that they are behaving in certain ways because they legally have to.
This is a bit ambiguous. Are you asking about them having dominant control over their bucket, or all buckets? To the former, whenever they make their bucket. If I set up my own messageboard, then I can have dominant control over it. To the latter, that would happen when the power is concentrated through legislation and regulation into the hands of a few government entities.
I mean yeah. NY Times doesn’t have to publish your letter to the editor, I don’t have to let you borrow my megaphone. But, that doesn’t constrain you from printing your own newsletter, it doesn’t stop you from shouting your own lungs out.
The size depends on your audience. Do you have a message that people want to hear? Then you will grow. If you don’t have a message that people want to hear, then you will stay small.
Once again, what do you mean by “out of the way” in the age of the internet? If I made my own messageboard, I could send you a link, and you’d be on it in a second. If you don’t want to come to it, then you wouldn’t, but that’s not facebook or twitter’s fault, that’s my fault for not having produced attractive content.
There is no “out of the way” or “hard to get to” on the internet.
I see it as far less about market share than it is to barriers to entry. If they are preventing competition from existing, then that becomes a problem very quickly. If they are just better, and so most people use them, then that’s actually a pretty good function of the market.
If someone possesses 100% market share, that’s a problem, but it’s also a tautology to your first question of this part.
There is a fine line between being pre-emptive in solving a problem, and jumping at shadows. Is your concern that twitter will be the only way for you to get your message out, to make your speech heard?
Prior to the Internet most people didn’t have the ability to print their own newspaper. Would a newspaper refusing to publish an editorial be stifling their freedom of expression?
People are not guaranteed an audience. People are guaranteed only the right to say what they want (with most countries having some limits that vary from country to country). They are not guaranteed to say it wherever, whenever or in any form that they want. That means you might have to stand on the street corner and have a very limited audience (and so long as you’re not disturbing the peace, of course), but until you are no longer allowed to even stand on the street corner, your rights to expression have not impinged.
Yes out of the way. Accessible, anywhere/anytime? Yes, if you know where it is. But not so easy to find or to be aware of when space in the square is dominated by a very few platforms.
You see this as a protective force? Free market forces are what you see as protecting the commons in regards to speech? That is more what makes me scared.
I am not so concerned that any of its moment majority views have a place to get heard. Popular views usually need protection less than unpopular ones. I am more concerned about the possibility of tyranny by the majority, especially if coupled with a populist demagogue gaining power. This last doofus was, thankfully, a populist demagogue who was quite unpopular, who gained power with a minority of voters supporting him, due to structural factors. That was lucky for us. I don’t like depending on luck.
Key there is the “as much as possible” I guess. And 1A assures that there are strong constraints on how much it can be involved, directly, in a regulatory fashion. Yet being completely out and letting the free market handle it without any constraint is, to my take, negligent.
“Should” in this context is immaterial. It exists, it is not being repealed, and fears that a guardrail would be abused are to some extent fears of a toothless tiger because it exists. But, staying consistent with 1A, we do still have, and should have, some constraints on the expressions of persons.
Disagree with the analogy. It is not too much meat. It is that the meat in the packages is contaminated with E. coli. PSAs are not the solution for that. Food safety guidelines for the plants is, and truth in labeling regulations required.
I am asking about when the former’s complete control means overwhelmingly dominant control of the latter because of overwhelming market dominance.
Returning to this, I return also to the meat analogy. I’d give pretty wide berth to allowing bad meat to be sold (the bar to proving the meat is bad and in need of regulation, rather than just meat I don’t like, has to be very high, as it is under 1A interpretations currently), so long as there are consistent rules within each platform used and there is truth in labelling of what they are. So yes, that returns to clear TOS that obligate the platforms, contain a clear appeals process, and a limited the role of government to verifying that there is truth in labeling, a body independent of the current Executive branch and Congressional branches adjudicating disputes over whether or not the TOS were indeed followed and applied fairly when conflict persists beyond the appeals process.
In a different avenue I’d be looking at any behaviors that are potentially anti-competitive very closely, and aggressively pursue any that seem to be.
If you have other better ideas I am open to listening. If your position is the free market will protect us and there is NO role for the government in pursuit of protecting those two potentially conflicting but not mutually exclusive pillars of public interest, then I disagree.
My god, do you really not understand that a 13-year-old child can set you up a blog in 10 minutes? It’s scarcely more effort than what you expended to sign up for this message board.
I’m starting to see why folks are so dug in on this issue. A crippling ignorance of basic technology will lead to some weird technology policy positions.
It is always interesting to see that the poster who labels others as[quote=“HMS_Irruncible, post:448, topic:930330”]
… increasingly condescending … snidely gloss over …
[/quote]
is the same poster who jumps to also labelling others has having
FWIW I am SURE that relatively I am more ignorant than many who post here. I am equally sure that I am less ignorant than the median level of knowledge of persons in the United States on the subject. Free standing blogs, not hosted and supported by the big social media titans, may have a low bar of access to those who are not ignorant of how to do them and to find them, which for all I know may include quite a few 13 year old children, but functionally and effectively they, in aggregate, inhabit a relatively tiny portion of the social media landscape and functionally and effectively they do not exist for many citizens.
Oh for heaven’s sake. DemonTree suggested that only rich tech wizards can start blogs. That’s obviously a woefully ignorant thing to say. And this kind of subject material is the minimum bar for being able to converse meaningfully about this topic.
I have no idea why you thought it would be improved by the odd suggestion that blogs “functionally and effectively” do not exist, or exactly the point of the rest of that post, but you both should just stop embarrassing yourselves like this.
The be aware of part is simply a matter or audience. And I do not think that you are supposed to be guaranteed an audience. You do your own legwork.
As far as find, well, can you type “www.dogcarenocatsallowed.com” into your browser? If you can, then you can find my hypothetical dogs only messageboard. (You can’t, as I haven’t actually done that, but you get my point, I hope.)
Well, no, I actually don’t think that it needs protection in the first place, but as far as keeping them in some sort of check, yes. You know why they don’t say “Fuck” on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert? It’s not because of the FCC, that doesn’t apply to late night, it’s because of the sponsors.
Good reason to not put regulation of our avenues of free speech into the hands of the govt, right there.
Eh, he wasn’t that unpopular. He only lost by a bit, less than I’d like. And I’d say that more people love him than love Biden.
Really glad that that last doofus didn’t have any power over twitter. Rather than putting disclaimers on his tweets, they would have banned his opponents.
Those structural factors will continue to favor Republicans, even if they become a smaller and smaller portion of the population.
Yep, there are a few things that are illegal to say or do, and the rest is pretty much hands off for the govt, as, IMHO, it should be.
Careful when you call for restraints on speech, they may one day constrain something that you want to say.
I feel that we could be having this same exact conversation in the 15th century about this newfangled printing press and how we need to control what people are allowed to print.
Not entirely immaterial, it’s just words on paper, words that can be changed with enough effort. There is quite a bit that is constrained by the Second Amendment that I think should be changed. That exists, and it is unlikely to be repealed, but I would advocate that it was or that it was changed. OTOH, I think that 1A is just fine the way it is.
We do have constraints, we can’t incite riots, we can’t divulge govt secrets, we can’t share child porn, some pretty out there things that very very few want to do, and that have direct harm attached to them. I don’t feel all that constrained by that, but it does demonstrate that it is not an absolute. There was a time when just regular porn was regulated, and it’s not 100% out of the woods even at this time. There could be interpretations that are considered to be for the good of society that allow further restrictions on 1A.
You are the one who brought up the analogy with the tragedy of the commons, I was just continuing in that vein.
Okay, we’ll go with your new analogy, but who is actually contaminating that meat? Is it the platforms, or is it the users of the platform? It is not facebook that is making the claims that Biden is a satan worshiping pedophile, it is your uncle. Is the govt also going to come in and regulate what he can say during your Thanksgiving dinner?
If you do not practice safe food handling, who is at fault if you get sick, the factory that packaged the meat, or the person that left the ground beef out all night? What regulations can you impose on the factory to make the consumers treat the food correctly?
Like I said, the solution lies in education, not regulation.
When they have complete control.
Once again, you are not looking to regulate the platforms, you are looking to regulate the users.
The problems that I see with this is that anyone who is not happy with the result of an internal appeals process will escalate it to that body, meaning that any social media site will constantly be dealing with arbitration and adjudication. I also do not see how congress can make a body, which would necessarily be run by the executive branch, and either of them have a “limited” role. They will become politicized, probably before the signature is even dry.
Sure, I have no problem with that. As I said, the fact that easy competition with these sites is one of the main reasons that I do not see their actions as being a freedom of expression issue.
If they actually behave in ways that make it hard to compete, then absolutely stop them from doing that.
But being big or popular doesn’t make one a monopoly.
My idea is:
Huh, but you
But that’s a strawman. I do think that various forms of public pressure, both from the users and the sponsors, do have an effect of keeping them at least somewhat in check, but I am under no illusion that that, “protects” us.
Other than that, education, focusing on critical thinking and evaluation of evidence. It’s not social media’s fault that people are ignorant and easily misled, that’s actually the fault of a multi-decade Republican led war on education.
If you get social media regulated because it allows users to communicate falsehoods, will we go after right wing radio and cable networks who also transmit falsehoods to their audience? I’d say that that is much more a form of e coli packaged in with your meat than when one of your friends on facebook shares a Qanon meme.
Indeed. And it seems to me that a lot of people (including some bigger names, such as Andrew Sullivan) have very recently started blogging on substack. Something that wasn’t even a thing a few years back.
There really isn’t a big bar to this.
Of course whether your blog will reach others is a big question. Though prior to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Pinterest and such the way to get people to read your stuff was though newspapers and magazines.
Do you really understand that this doesn’t even make any sense? My “amount of the public square” is the amount of people I can attract to my blog, or my website. None of the “big tech” companies can prevent people, no matter how many, from seeing my views.
Start a blog. If you have something that is interesting, people will come and read it. You don’t need Twitter to get your voice heard. You don’t need Facebook. You simply need something interesting to say that people want to read. Is it really that hard to understand? Twitter and Facebook and even Amazon AWS are preventing nobody from seeing what you want to publish.
Yup. The vast majority of users on the major social media platforms aren’t reaching large numbers of people. Trump did, when he was on Twitter, but that’s because he was Trump. If he started up his own blog/website, at least hundreds of millions of people would continue to read what he has to say.
Blogs and websites started by ordinary obscure individuals, by contrast, are not going to get large numbers of readers. But those individuals don’t have large numbers of readers on major social media platforms, either.
Yet, as a society, we have to trust someone to do that all the time–the courts. That is what they do. The term for those who determine the guilt/liability in a court case (often jurors) are the “triers of fact.” And, more directly, there are defamation cases, and one of the requirements is determining of the claim of the accused is true or false, and whether they reasonably knew it was false.
Now, I’m not saying that we need to get the courts involved to fact check claims on social media. I’m just using them to show that what you stated isn’t an insurmountable obstacle.
I’m arguing that fact checkers on social media platforms could borrow ideas from the courts. They could stick with lies that are dangerous or harmful. They can see if it’s a full on incontrovertible fact or something less certain (or a matter of opinion.) They can be careful, and err on the side of assuming it’s not misinformation.
Plus, if we go back to treating social media as having freedom of speech in the same way you and I do, then the analogous situation is that, if someone told me a lie, and I checked and found it to be a lie, I should still spread that lie. I have a right not to, but I still should.
I say that fact checking should be something all responsible social media platforms do. They allow misinformation to spread more rapidly than ever before, and thus they have a responsibility to try and prevent that, same as you or I have the responsibility to not to spread gossip or falsehoods. Granted, they have to prioritize. And they shouldn’t censor mere opinions. But if it’s a known false claim that is dangerous (like lying about the election results or COVID-19), it’s actually their responsibility to step in.
I didn’t join a forum about fighting ignorance for no reason. I genuinely think that the spread of ignorance is harmful and something to fight. And, if the misinformation is bad enough and easily believed and causing harm, it should be stopped.
We are, in my opinion, much better off that Twitter hobbled QAnon, got rid of the former liar-in-chief, and shut down scammers and con artists even if they didn’t commit a crime.
And if Twitter does start making a decision about these thing that contradicts what the rest of society at large wants, it will lose its position. It’s good business for their fact checkers to be as accurate as possible.
I actually think one of the bigger problems in society is how we’ve lost track of how there genuinely are facts and truth. Not just that there are some situations where we don’t know the facts. Not just that some facts are unclear. Not even that some things are a matter of opinion. We’re in a society where people feel entitled to their own facts, and that is, I believe, extremely harmful.
That’s why, particularly after 2016, so much pressure was put on social media to try and prevent the spread of false information. It’s what we need as a society.
We need to find a way, a set of practices and methods, that we can trust to do it. Just like we did for courts.
I’m curious why you think social media platforms should be responsible for anything? Are you under the impression that social media companies make decisions based on “morals”? I’m pretty sure they make decisions based on what will make them the most money.
No I didn’t. I suggested that the two ‘simple’ remedies offered for people banned from the major platforms were in practice only available to those with money to spare and to the technically inclined, respectively. I’m really tired of this condescending attitude that if you don’t know how to set up your own webserver in your basement you’re some kind of moron. That encompasses about 99% of the population.
Stupid people somehow need to have the right to platform too even though nobody else does! Waaaaah!
That isn’t even a strawman, it’s a hay bale you’ve stuck a smiley face on. I won’t be replying to this stuff any more.
You’ve misstated my comments here, unsurprisingly. I will simplify: Even a moron can start their own blog on a blogging service (or any one of the million free online authoring services).
Nobody’s calling you a moron, but when you continue to imply that you’re not up to a trivial task requiring nothing more than ordinary message-board skills, nor even care to investigate it with a cursory Google search, you’re sort of self-labeling there.
Ok, lemme rephrase…
If your (generic you) spew is so odious that nobody wants to give you a platform or an audience, then you either need reasses what you’re spewing, or you need to put more effort into spewing it and either learn a thing or two about spew platforms, or pay someone who does know. Either way, not a free speech issue.