Are social media's recent bannings a freedom of expression issue?

Great Debates
562

I really do not think this a fair portrayal. At all.

It is not unreasonable to take the position that 1A protects the big social media companies, whether from the perspective of thinking of them as “voluntary associations” (in which the owner, not the members, gets to make pretty much any decision they want moment by moment as to what expressions are allowed or not), or considering them as corporate persons with 1A rights and just fairly few responsibilities.

And I understand the argument that market forces will perhaps punish some level of egregiousness: users (who pay for the service with their private information) and advertisers (who pay with money) may move away from some level of whatever.

My and others disagreeing with your takes is not our hating 1A.

I have concern that oligopolic power of the dominant platforms is a problem, and is a bigger problem waiting to happen. I have concern about advertisers’ interest as the big drivers and regulators over expression that is not related to their product. Yes it was legal for the NFL to cancel Colin Kaepernick out of concern that football fans might lean to disapproval of what they saw as disrespect to the flag. They flipped when it became clear that flipping was the better business move after all. System works, right? And it is legal if at any point the big platforms decide to subtly or explicitly kneecap any expressed POV put onto their sites. Unpopular views are not so often a profitable thing; views that piss off those who regulate you might be good to restrict. Good business decisions.

I’d however prefer something that preserved 1A and protected us from a circumstance which creates “truth” by advertising convenience, or by mob rule, or by governmental fiat.

I do not believe that the answer to principles under dynamic tension with each other, the interest in having a public square full of a diversity of ideas, and the interest in slowing down the malfeasant disinformation, requires giving up entirely on one or the other.

563

Nice speech, but I was responding to @asahi, who said:

While I disagree with you about what exactly 1A should guarantee as to the platforms that one is entitled to, it is not you that has demonstrated extreme hostility towards the rights of free speech as enumerated in the First Amendment.

I feel that my portrayal of @asahi’s feelings toward 1A are perfectly fair.

564

I don’t exhibit hostility toward free speech; I exhibit hostility toward extreme interpretations of liberty that aren’t nuanced and don’t take technological, economic, political, and social advances into proper consideration.

565

You keep making that claim, but I have to disagree that not wanting the govt to determine what is true and what is disinformation, what may and may not be allowed to be said, is an extreme position.

It is the position that this nation has existed under since its founding, and I would consider your position to be the extreme one, the one where you want the govt to silence those who say things that you disagree with.

Free speech includes being wrong, it includes saying bad things. It even includes deliberately lying. If you do not think that people should be allowed to do this, then you are being hostile towards free speech.

These are not new problems, and they are not newly proposed solutions either. Many have called for the same remedy that you currently call for, and I am happy to say that we have so far resisted it.

566

See. :wink:

Even if you’re correct and more people on the right are calling for censorship, that doesn’t change my point at all. I don’t want the government - any government - deciding what is ‘true’ and what we are allowed to say. I think the only place we disagree on this is that I think the social media companies themselves could also have too much control of what we see and are able to say, and that I don’t want billionaire tech CEOs deciding what is ‘true’ either.

567

Depends on the context. You presumably are not opposed to the government enforcing laws against libel and slander, for example, where parties may be liable to legal punishment depending on what a governmentally-supervised legal process decides is “true”?

A society that has no effective mechanisms in place for distinguishing between what is factually true and what is blatantly false is not workable. You can say whatever you want (within very broad bounds, at least in the US constitutional framework), but you can’t expect that spouting lies and bullshit will be protected from all negative consequences.

All publishers “decide what is true” to the extent of determining what other people may use their platform to say. This is just as true of local newspapers who decide which letters to the editor they will or won’t publish as it is of “billionaire tech CEOs”.

568

The simple solution is to stop using whatever platform has the policies you disagree with. Or step up and sell the stock you have of those companies. Or go all in and buy some/ more stock and vote for a board that will set policies you like, even if it means taking a loss in share price.

569

So you are opposed to libel laws, then?

570

Yes, that’s a fair point. And truth in advertising laws also.

I think traditional news media was subject to a similar problem, where one person/business could own a really high percentage of the newspapers/TV channels/Radio stations in a given area and therefore have too much control over what news people heard about or didn’t, and how it was presented to them. The problem in traditional media is not billionaire media CEOs deciding what letters to print, but billionaire media CEOs deciding what news you need to hear about. The remedy for that is to have a law limiting the market share of any one person/business across different channels. And social media is similar in that if the views that are banned on one network are allowed on another, conversation will naturally shift over to the second network. But if there’s too much of a monopoly, the monopolist has the power to control the discourse.

571

That’s not my position.

So fraud should be legal then? Advertisers should be free to speak freely and make up fraudulent claims?

I should be allowed to bring hundreds of people to protest outside your house or apartment so that you can’t sleep at night. Free speech and free assembly, right?

572

I don’t have time for line-by-line rebuttals, so I’ll pick the more interesting tidbits.

Uh, in this case, fuck yes – that is exactly what I am saying. “My side” respected the outcome of an election in 2016; “their side” deliberately tried to create an alternative reality in which facts and truth don’t exist. Why? Because what you do not seem to understand is that you cannot have democracy and freedom if you are living in that kind of world.

“That’s the same freedom we’ve had for 240 years, and it has worked just fine.”

I wouldn’t be so confident of that. If a Constitution needs a civil war to save it; if it took another 100 years and waves of deadly regional violence and insurrections to finally impose the the civil liberties that it promised for Black Americans in the 1860s, and if it is highly susceptible to fascist insurrection in 2021, are we really a strong liberal democratic society, and is the Constitution something that should be deemed sacred and undisturbed?

It’s liberal democratic values that keep a society strongly liberally democratic, @k9bfriender , not some blind adherence to the ACLU’s interpretation of the First Amendment. There are other ways to interpret what “free” speech should truly mean in a modern and stable democratic society. But you cannot have democracy, or the liberties that we assume with it, without stability and a basic set of core values first.

573

I agree with this.

The problem with this is that you would be leaving it up to the govt to determine what we are able to see and able to say.

I find it far less problematic for the owners of a platform to determine their community standards than have those standards forced on them from above. Even if those owners are billionaires.

If I had my own messageboard, do you think that I could limit it to discussions about dogs, and forbid discussions about cats? Can I require everyone to only be positive, and ban anyone who says that they hate dogs? If so, does that hold if the messageboard becomes insanely popular and becomes a “monopoly” on discussions about dogs? Does it continue to hold if I somehow become a billionaire off of this site?

If you say “no” to any of those, then I strongly disagree. If you say “yes” to all of those, then I’m not sure where your disagreement lays.

574

I would be opposed to prior restraint in such situations, but if someone can show that misinformation has caused harm, then I am all for going after those who provided that misinformation.

That is generally what is being asked for. Not only the right to say it, which I agree with, but the right to not have any consequences for it, which I strongly disagree with.

They also get to determine what falls within their community standards, true or not.

575

I have a much bigger issue, and would much more strongly consider anti-trust, over media companies that actually do have a monopoly over a geographic area. But social media sites, by definition, are not that.

I disagree that being popular=being a monopoly.

576

Yes, and one of those values is support for free speech and the free exchange of ideas. We must allow people to spread ‘wrong’ ideas because we here, now, don’t and can’t have a perfect understanding of what is true and right. Allowing free exchange of ideas is essential in order to determine which are right and which wrong, and to allow progress and better ideas to replace less good ones.

577

I agree that we should encourage free, and even wrong, speech. I don’t propose legislating against the expression of ideas that are merely unpopular. Any regulation I would propose would be a light touch solution, and rather than focusing strictly on user speech, it would be more so aimed at the companies themselves, and requiring them to be honest about the product that they are pushing to consumers.

The most controversial proposal I think that I’d have at the moment is that I would explore legislative oversight that compels social media companies to state what its terms of service are and what its standards of user conduct are, and then compel companies to make a good faith effort to apply those standards consistently. If companies like Twitter and Facebook want to allow Oath Keepers and the KKK to use their website, then perhaps it should be their freedom to do so, but I’d want the general public to know about it. The problem, it seems (at least based on past precedent) is that these companies go to congress or in front of the camera, make phony claims that they don’t encourage hate speech, but then we later find out that this isn’t really true, and that they knowingly tolerate communities that promote hatred and the spread of false information.

And let’s be clear, there’s false information “Ha-ha! that’s fake” and then there’s false information that is seriously destructive and causes a toll. Anti-vaxxers kill people. Yes, you can argue that the anti-vaxxers are the problem, and I agree that they are. But if a flight school knowingly trains pilots who only want to learn how to land an airplane, is it just the terrorist who’s responsible for taking out skyscrapers?

578

Then I’m not sure what your position is. You have plainly stated that there are some forms of speech that you consider to be too “extreme” to protect. If they are too extreme to protect, then you think that they shouldn’t be voiced, and the one to stop that voicing would be the govt.

I’ve already covered this. Maybe if you didn’t just look at the “interesting tidbits”, then you would already know that. But, to recap, I don’t think that there should be prior restraint. I don’t think that advertisers should be required to submit their ads for govt approval before they are run.

If they are found to be fraudulent, then the can be held accountable fiscally, or even criminally if the fraud is damaging enough.

But that has absolutely nothing to do with what a private citizen says on the corner.

Do you agree that someone who says, “Buy my snake oil to cure your cancer” should be treated differently than someone who says, “The end is nigh!”

Do you think that we should police our corners, to ensure that no one is spouting nonsense and misinformation? Because that is exactly what you are wanting to do by requiring that social media conform to a particular set of standards.

In my dog’s only messagebaord example, would it be okay for me to have a forum that is dedicated to hating cats?

It certainly would be rude, and may run afoul of my city’s noise ordinance, but other than that, it would be your right. It is something that I should even expect, if I were to show up at the zoning meeting trying to get a permit to open a brothel by children for children.

Right.

I don’t know that we “respected” it. I heard lots of “not my president”. There were protests, some of which had some violence attached. I heard people on my side make evidenceless claims that the election had been hacked by Russia, or otherwise was stolen.

We didn’t storm the capital over it, not because these things were not said, but because they were not as widely believed.

Because their side believed it.

I understand quite fine. And it seems to be that doesn’t understand that you cannot have democracy and freedom in a world where what one is allowed to say and to believe is dictated by the govt.

You are a bit right that the civil war happened partially because of freedom of speech. There were quite a number that wanted abolitionists to shut up. If they had succeeded in doing so, we wouldn’t have had a civil war.

You are correct that we wouldn’t have had the regional violence and insurrections if the govt had imposed restrictions on speech, and didn’t allow people to organize and protest against their lack of civil liberties.

There are certainly some updates that could be made to it. I’ve got one all ready to go once I can get 35 states to ratify it. But, I leave the first amendment alone, leave it as first, and only look to update it to explicitly include modern forms of communication.

Good to know. And my position is not a blind adherence to the ACLU, it is my own, and it is quite nuanced, well thought out, and takes into account all the woes that you think it causes.

Stability itself is not something to be blindly adhered to. Slavery was stable. Jim Crow was stable. North Korea is stable. Sometimes, you need some instability to grow, to evolve, to improve.

Democracy means that the govt needs to respond to the wants and needs of the people, and it cannot do that if stability is a core value. If the govt says what sort of speech is allowed, then you get stability, but it costs you liberty.

579

I agree, stability by itself cannot be the value, just like unfettered “liberty,” viewed in total isolation of everything else and taken to an extreme, cannot be a virtue either. There comes a point when virtue becomes vice. You can’t have a liberal democratic society without, of course, the liberties that are required for it to continue being open, liberal, and democratic, but this society requires some stability as well.

What I’m arguing for isn’t total suppression of free speech. And despite you’re attempts to paint me into your circle, I’m not actually arguing that government be the arbiter of what is appropriate and inappropriate speech; I’m advocating that the “government” (composed of citizens who elect other citizens, and not some perpetually designated bureaucratic state, it should be noted) put into place some mechanisms that require social media companies to be more transparent in terms of how they operate with consumers, on grounds that they have disproportionate influence in our society. Any suggestion that I’m for repealing the first amendment is nothing more than more of your imaginary “The bogeyman hiding under the bed” arguments.

I think it’s worth pointing out that these paranoid “bogeyman”, slippery slope into the black hole types of rationales to do absolutely nothing on anything from gun rights, to overhauled healthcare, to social media are, contrary to those who espouse such arguments, not engendering and safeguarding liberty and democracy, but quite oppositely, obstructing our ability to roll with the times to give it periodic updates. We cling to rhetoric and thinking that might have been applicable in the year 1798 but ignore the fact that newer versions of democracy have been developed and implemented since then, and they have been arguably more inclusive, more stable, and more free than ours.

580

On balance, I’ll take liberty over stability.

Never said you were. However, it did seem as though you were arguing for some suppression of free speech. Otherwise, most of your arguments against what people are being allowed to say don’t make any sense. You bring up Republican claims of election fraud, and how those are problematic. What is the point of bringing those up if you do not wish them suppressed.

I am making no attempts to do so, just responding to the arguments that you have made. I would argue that your declarations that I take an extreme position that blindly follows the ACLU would be.

Then I really don’t understand the point of these arguments that you made:

Really does sound like you are arguing that people’s speech is the problem, not the TOS of social media companies… But we’ll ignore that, and go on with what you now are saying that you are advocating for.

Okay, so the TOS becomes a two-way contract?

I can sue SDMB if I don’t get my way in ATMB? That’s all you want?

Eh, I disagree, and think that it will be the end of small messageboards, but if you think that that is what will fix our democracy and reinstate those liberal values, go ahead and make an argument as to why.

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I’ll ignore the rest of your post as it is simply a bunch of straw and taking me to task over taking the arguments that you had previously made seriously.

581

Sure, you can, but that’s not really what I’m advocating here, is it? If anything, I’m arguing that if SDMB has terms of service and claims to be a board that has community standards of conduct, then it should make a good faith effort to enforce those standards consistently – which it does. to the chagrin of many an ex-poster.