1. Ideally, we don't allow corporations to control so much of our communications.
2. Barring 1, we should set the expectation that communication platforms should protect their users' freedom of speech, with laws to enforce this.
> At the end of the day, these are private companies and they can enforce whatever arbitrary guidelines they want within the laws of the countries they operate in.
This is descriptive of reality but not prescriptive of how reality should be. As far as I am concerned, corporations don't have rights, people do, and when corporations start infringing on the rights of people (such as the right to free speech) that's a problem.
> Ideally, we don't allow corporations to control so much of our communications.
What laws would you propose to actually implement this?
I like free speech a lot as well, but it seems that boundaries get a bit fuzzy here. E.g. if you were to run your own forum like HN, don't you think you should be allowed to ban material from, say, KKK supporters?
>> Ideally, we don't allow corporations to control so much of our communications.
> What laws would you propose to actually implement this?
I didn't. Note that I didn't bring up laws until #2 in my previous post.
Programs which educated people on the dangers of social media the same way we educate people around the dangers of drugs and alcohol might go toward changing the way we treat these things in our culture, but on the other hand, there's enough problems with i.e. DARE that they might be counterproductive.
> I like free speech a lot as well, but it seems that boundaries get a bit fuzzy here. E.g. if you were to run your own forum like HN, don't you think you should be allowed to ban material from, say, KKK supporters?
I think if you combine topic-based moderation with a vote system, you don't need to ban KKK supporters. On a system like HN where all posts are in the same data stream, racist posts are going to be downvoted fairly quickly. And if someone posts racist comments on a post that isn't about race, it's off-topic, so topic-based moderation says it's okay to delete it. It's not a restriction on free speech--it's keeping topics organized to maintain the functioning of the forum.
The key exception here is that when the topic is race, then you don't delete racist comments. This is uncomfortable, but racism doesn't simply go away because you censor it--if anything, censoring a racist makes them feel they are a martyr, and strengthens their beliefs. Instead, if you leave the posts up, users will respond to them with the truth. Countering lies with truth is more powerful than countering lies with censorship.
There's a tendency, I think, to see bigotry as a monolithic problem in a person, without any reasoning behind it. But if you actually listen to bigots, you'll often discover that behind the bigotry they have legitimate fears and problems, and they think bigotry is the solution to those problems. Part of the problem we have in the US that those who value equality and acceptance too often see bigots as just bigots, and forget that they are people. If we see them as just bigots, then they can't change, or aren't worth changing, and we can discard them. But that hasn't worked--that's why we have the administration we have now.
Instead, I think we need to see bigots as people, and try to address their fears and problems with facts and truth. (Most) bigots don't benefit from their bigotry--bigotry doesn't solve their problems, and prevents them from seeing the real solutions. So if we can show them the real solutions to their problems, they might see they don't need bigotry any more.
Civil rights leaders of the past understood that a conversation about race had to be an actual conversation, not just shouting your ideals and silencing your opponents. If you refuse to listen to bigots they will refuse to listen to you. It's not us versus them, it's us and them versus ignorance.
Thanks for answering. I think we're going a bit off-topic here though. The crux of what I'm getting at is, do you think that you should have the right to moderate the content on your own platform that you built? Or should the government decide what is and isn't allowed? E.g. maybe instead of you running HN, maybe you run a content distribution network. As its own your network, don't you think you should be allowed to decide which websites you host? Just think of something that disgusts you: extreme right wing, left wing, religious views, whatever. They're allowed in the US and they're using your platform. You hate them. Should you be forced to offer your services to them?
> The crux of what I'm getting at is, do you think that you should have the right to moderate the content on your own platform that you built?
As I've said elsewhere on this thread, corporations don't have rights, people do. A more clear way to say this might be: corporations only have rights inasmuch as the people who make up the corporation have rights.
Even though you're not asking this rhetorically, the way you're asking this question is an appeal to me as a person, and obviously I don't want to be forced to host the content of people I disagree with.
But giant corporations are different from individuals. Either we should prevent corporations from being too big to fail, or we should ensure that their failures don't damage society. If a corporation owns a communication platform the size of YouTube, they lose the right to choose what content they host, because doing so infringes their users' rights to free speech, and their users can't just go elsewhere because there are no other equivalent platforms.
Just because a corporation doesn't have a right to an ideology doesn't mean we should not let any corporations have ideologies: we can let corporations have ideologies as long as we make sure it isn't harmful to the rights of individuals. The purpose of laws, as I see it, is to protect the weak from the powerful. If I started Dave's Liberal Hosting Service with just a server and a dream, and only hosted Democratic websites, that's fine, because such a service doesn't become the platform of the internet that everyone is forced to use--it's likely a conservative equivalent would arise even before I built a significant business. Part of the problem is that services like Reddit and YouTube have performed a bait-and-switch--they built themselves into major platforms on a free-speech ideology, and then when they were too big to fail, they turned into ideological platforms. Similarly in the realm of CDNs, groups like Amazon, CloudFlare, Akamai, or Google absolutely don't get to have ideologies. Anyone who wants to work on the internet has to work with these CDNs, so if they don't allow free speech, there isn't free speech on the internet.
Likewise, I'm also not saying free speech is the only right that needs protection. With the CloudFlare case, the "Freedom of Speech < Due Process" is a rational argument, at least. I don't have enough context to 100% decide for myself if I agree with their decision, but I do tend to think that if the Daily Stormer was inciting violence, that's a higher priority than free speech. But note how this isn't about CloudFlare's rights at all--it's about protecting the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of the people the Daily Stormer was attacking.
Random aside: I do wish that they hadn't been so nationalistic about it though. (He said: "I, personally, believe in strong Freedom of Speech protections, but I also acknowledge that it is a very American idea that is not shared globally").
> As I've said elsewhere on this thread, corporations don't have rights, people do. A more clear way to say this might be: corporations only have rights inasmuch as the people who make up the corporation have rights.
> But giant corporations are different from individuals.
You can see how this gets fuzzy then, right? At what point is a corporation "giant"? How to measure and who decides that? Why is it okay for your Dave's Liberal Hosting Service to arbitrarily moderate material but not YouTube? YouTube isn't even a monopoly on video hosting services. Both YouTube and Dave's Liberal Hosting Service are still made up of individuals, and you think that individuals should be treated the same. So why aren't they?
> You can see how this gets fuzzy then, right? At what point is a corporation "giant"?
Maybe the exact point where a corporation becomes integral enough to society that it needs to be regulated to protect people's rights is ambiguous, but it's not really ambiguous that YouTube is far past that point.
And I'm not being ambiguous at all about corporations not having rights. Limited liability has to be balanced by restrictions on what an LLC can do, or there's no incentive for people to act sociopathically (which they do). This is true at any size, and corporations violating the rights of individuals aren't limited by size. However, issues with small corporations are both less concerning and more likely to be handled by market forces.
> How to measure and who decides that?
Traditionally it has been regulatory bodies such as the FTC or the FCC. Congress typically hasn't made laws that target specific corporations or small groups of corporations, instead leaving that sort of micromanagement to the regulatory bodies. There are pros and cons to regulatory bodies versus congress handling these things. Ideally I'd want it to be elected officials so that citizens get more direct control.
"Measurement" isn't really applicable: you're looking for a size that can be quantified, but I'm talking about human rights violations.
> Why is it okay for your Dave's Liberal Hosting Service to arbitrarily moderate material but not YouTube?
I already covered this:
"If I started Dave's Liberal Hosting Service with just a server and a dream, and only hosted Democratic websites, that's fine, because such a service doesn't become the platform of the internet that everyone is forced to use--it's likely a conservative equivalent would arise even before I built a significant business. Part of the problem is that services like Reddit and YouTube have performed a bait-and-switch--they built themselves into major platforms on a free-speech ideology, and then when they were too big to fail, they turned into ideological platforms."
> Both YouTube and Dave's Liberal Hosting Service are still made up of individuals, and you think that individuals should be treated the same. So why aren't they?
Neither corporation has any rights: there's just not much reason to drop the hammer on Dave's Liberal Hosting Service if it's small enough that competitors could arise easily to meet need, and they've not banned any existing users. All the users who Dave's Liberal Hosting Service would "discriminate" against are already using Bob's Conservative Hosting Service, so free speech is available to society.
There are really only two household names in the video hosting space in the US, YouTube and Vimeo, and both of them ostensibly support all content, but don't actually live up to that promise. Not only is free speech not available in that space, but it used to be (at least, moreso), so previous users have had their channels taken away from them; their best options at that point are basically starting over if you've built a channel. If YouTube had started with the promise of censored content, they would have grown in tandem with competitors with more permissive content policies, and this wouldn't be the problem that it is today.
Both corporations are made up of individuals, but when they're acting behind the veil of a corporation and in fact decisions are being made by only a few of those individuals, while they trample the rights of the rest of the individuals that make up the corporation. If you're going to appeal to the idea that people shouldn't be forced to host content they don't agree with on a platform they built, you should realize that it's very unlikely that the engineers who built YouTube are the same people as the executives and board members making the decision to censor their content. The larger the corporation, the more disconnect there is between the individuals that make up the corporation and the actions of the corporation. With corporations of YouTube's size, claiming that individual rights confer rights on the company just doesn't hold water: you're only conferring rights on the decision makers of the company, at the expense of the rights of workers who devoted their work to older policies and may not agree with the new policies.
1. Ideally, we don't allow corporations to control so much of our communications.
2. Barring 1, we should set the expectation that communication platforms should protect their users' freedom of speech, with laws to enforce this.
> At the end of the day, these are private companies and they can enforce whatever arbitrary guidelines they want within the laws of the countries they operate in.
This is descriptive of reality but not prescriptive of how reality should be. As far as I am concerned, corporations don't have rights, people do, and when corporations start infringing on the rights of people (such as the right to free speech) that's a problem.