Thanks Rieman, I was lazy about defining positive right and normative which you did very well in my opinion.
“The market” will never take care of that particular issue. But the alternative - unfettered access for everyone - not only won’t solve it either but is demonstrably part of the reason things are so fucked up right now.
So you’re left deciding whether you let the government moderate malevolent use of social media or you let the private sector do it. Neither are ideal and both have histories of - and potential for - abuse. But the only other option is not moderating it at all, which is a recipe for disaster.
This is obviously a false dichotomy.
And expanded on in the next paragraph. If you have another option besides private sector control of social media, government control of social media or no control of social media, I’d love to hear it.
If someone makes an incorrect claim, I will point out they’re wrong.
My freedom of expression does not depend on Dorsey, the Zuck, et al allowing me to use their companies’ private property.
Well it’s a free speech issue in that involves who is practically able to speak, not just in some legalistic sense. It gets even more complex. Who has their voice amplified by the owners or by a algorithm with who knows what bias?
If the community forum’s raison d’etre is to sell advertising yet is vital to our functioning as people, I am not any less worried.
We can’t just always choose another.
Banking systems that can destroy lives if allowed to maximize profits at the expense of human lives? Deregulate. Natural resource companies that are capable of literally destroying the planet if allowed to drill or frack or strip mine wherever they please? Deregulate.
A space that mainly exists for people to post pictures of their cats in fancy sweaters? MORE GOVERNMENT CONTROL IMMEDIATELY.
But okay. Snark aside, the question to me seems to be this:
“At what point, if any, does a private company become a public carrier by virtue of its extreme popularity and integration in society?”
And if a private company can become a public carrier, has social media risen to that level?
The thing is, conservatives have been fighting Net Neutrality for years. If the internet itself is just part of the free market and shouldn’t be regulated to force providers to treat customers equally, certainly a component of the internet likewise can never ever ever rise to that level.
Getting banned from Twitter does not affect my ability to speak.
Twitter, Facebook, SDMB, etc. are not vital to our functioning as a people, and you will be unable to show otherwise.
Indeed - it is the argument of the spoiled teen (“But Mooooom - I need it!”).
And for people who wish to address these with numbers, some may be found here:
You can throw the hypocrisy argument at people who think extreme deregulation of banking and ignoring environmental impact are great ideas. I certainly don’t.
You’re making my argument here. Extreme deregulation of all these things is bad for society. The market does not solve all problems, and we can’t assume that it will do so for the the free exchange of ideas with modern media.
I don’t know what the answers are, but I’m just astonished that so many people insist that there’s nothing to see here because people had it all figured out in 1791.
So… I am a little bit conflicted on this. Let’s look at 2 different cases, Twitter banning Trump, and AWS banning Parler.
Amazon Web Services is, in principle, a neutral provider who rents computers, and they are a near-monopoly. Although I agree Parler was refusing to moderate assassination plots, and intervention was 100% appropriate, I’m somewhat uncomfortable with AWS having the sole power to do that.
So I think that, in the cloud provider space, some divestments and legislation are appropriate to remedy that. Bring back net neutrality regulations. Expand them to include cloud hosting. Add some legislation to allow quick law-enforcement intervention for situations like assassination plots. And break up AWS, or at least have Amazon divest it.
Once that is done, then I’m fully comfortable saying I don’t care what Twitter does, and nobody else should either. If Twitter displeases you, go start your own network.
Seriously… Twitter is not the sole form of mass communication. It’s just a glorified mailing list. Getting on Twitter doesn’t give you automatic deep reach unless people already want to hear from you. Twitter never eliminated regular web sites, or email, US mail, phone calls, TV press conferences, blogs, books, magazines. You can still buy massive email lists and email a hundred million people if you want.
Twitter is a great platform for trolling, lying, and attention-seeking, which is all Trump really ever wanted. For all his complaining about social media censoring, he never even bothered to log onto Parler, the purported having for allegedly-persecuted Trump supporters.
We’re only dunking on Twitter because Trump was too stupid or lazy to diversify his media strategy. I don’t think that’s the fault of existing legislation.
The answer as I see it is that strict enforcement of Net Neutrality and existing antitrust laws means the free market can take care of individual platforms.
The internet itself is the shining jewel that needs to be protected. The UN has recognized internet access to be an essential component of freedom of expression and I agree with that.
But the individual social media platforms are still businesses, and none of them IMO have risen to the level of embodying freedom of expression in and of themselves. If you violate the ToS and they boot you, that’s fair play.
Is there room to regulate Terms of Service agreements? Absolutely - a lot of them are wordwalls of nonsense that boil down to “we have rights to everything and you have rights to nothing.” But that’s probably a different conversation.
Yes, my perspective would be that Rupert Murdoch would now be the person who has final say on who to ban from Twitter, up to and including Joe Biden, without legal ramifications. You don’t see me claiming that Parler (or Gab or all of the other alt-right echo chambers) can’t ban every single liberal that they come across. Of course they can. I can laugh at them when they crow about Twitter’s “censorship” while doing these mass bannings, but that changes nothing about the legality.
AWS has about 32% of the cloud market share, not the internet, the public cloud. Companies move back and forth onto and off of the cloud all of the time for an infinite number of reasons. If AWS disappeared tomorrow (and a large chunk of it did disappear for a few hours four years ago), you’d notice it, but the internet would still hum along just fine. Netflix, Instagram, Slack and many others would be missing for somewhere between a day or two to several weeks, but would be perfectly fine elsewhere. If all public clouds went away, we’d still have an internet. In fact we did for a good decade or so before they existed.
While I completely agree with everything else you said, I’m not even sure how a social media platform could rise to the level of embodying freedom of expression, short of buying up all of the Tier 1 networks and disallowing other platforms.
The lack of a barrier to entry makes the internet unlike the other industries that everyone else keeps comparing it to. TV? I can buy a single 29 minute time slot for several hundred dollars, with a potential reach limited to those who live in my general geographic area. To go national, the price gets pretty crazy. For 5 bucks a month, I can put up an internet platform that is visible to billions of people. I might have to upgrade a level or two if they all want to visit at once, but that’s why you see ads on the big sites.
No need to set your snark aside sir, I believe your snark was well deployed indeed. Snark onwards against those who would make such an argument and take my snark and deliver it to them too if you are snarking in that direction.
Public banks sound like a good idea.
My issue is that I have yet to see a proposal for regulating social media that allows the SDMB to continue to exist.
Regulations may end up putting more government control over what social media companies can do, but they will also raise the barriers to entry for the space, making social media companies consolidate, and leaving fewer options for consumers.
Right now, the free market actually is the best solution. You have a space with effectively no barrier to entry for anyone who wants to compete in it. It’s extremely rare to have that sort of market, it may be the closest thing to a true free market that we have ever had.
Regulations that tell social media companies what they must do, what speech needs to be allowed, and what needs to be prohibited, what penalties they face for violating these regulations, and what bureaucracy they need to fulfill in order to prove compliance will destroy the free market.
Right now, I can start my own social media site in minutes, for almost no cost. Add in a bunch of regulatory paperwork, add in the need to pay lawyers to adjudicate moderation disputes, and the potential for fines or other punishments for running afoul of these regulations, and my voice has been severely diminished.
I agree, which is why it’s still important to enforce existing antitrust regulations.
Absolutely!