The current situation is pretty goofy. We've hyper centralized speech into a tiny handful of outlets, with those outlets increasingly recklessly operating with exactly 0 accountability to anybody, in spite of the dramatic and undeniable consequences of their actions are having on both individuals and society at large. IMO the one and only reason this hasn't been dealt with is because we're going through a brief phase of dystopia. Governments seems more interested in trying to myopically exploit the centralization speech to their own benefit, instead of actually thinking of the longterm, to say nothing of making society a better place.
It all depends on politics. Some people have opinions on how much court "activism" should be allowed, but they reliably flip the script when one of their pet topics shows up.
People used to insist Antonin Scalia was a sort of "strict constructionist", himself among them. But the moment he got a case where he had a personal opinion that contradicted his "strict" claims, his true colors came out. Then it turned out his strictness really did just mean corporations always win and individuals always lose, as his record had always suggested and his critics had long asserted.
(Never guessed I would have cause to miss him... He was not, anyway, Bork.)
Yes it’s easier to gain a following online, but throughout MOST of history, people started these movements/conversation offline. Don’t let these companies trick you into thinking you don’t have a voice, or power, without voicing your thoughts on their “platforms”. You have a voice, and you can use it. You’ll just have to get out the house and start talking to people face to face.
Edit: I didn't mean to establish a condescending tone with the second sentence - I was simply making an observation.
I suspect you're older - imagine the US without a public highway system. Imagine every highway is private. Imagine what arbitrary bans from those highways would do to impact how you live. Talk to me about how well we should communicate face to face in that situation?
Idea not that appealing? That's what you're advocating for today.
A complete loss of a highway system that has no public replacement. By the way - those "18-24 age range" are all being forced to help pay for those "private highways" with their tax dollars anyways, in the form of govt subsidies to private cable companies.
Should we discount the ability to still communicate face to face? Nope. Damn well shouldn't.
Does that make this ok? Nope, Damn well doesn't.
Most couples now meet online. Good luck convincing them all the internet is not real life. And those stats are from 2017. Given a few years of lockdown the trend has surely accelerated.
Discord is how a lot of young people talk these days. If you're banned from Discord, it's not very comforting to hear "you don't need Discord son, in my day we didn't have Discord and we wrote to our pen pals. I'm sure you'll make some new friends."
Why can't it be regulated? Phone is and it's provided by private companies. The law even allows me to port my number between them.
Consider the postal service — imagine if you could permanently lose the right to send things in the mail at the whim of an unaccountable customer service rep in the USPS. No trial, no recourse. Unthinkable. I suspect you CAN be banned if, e.g. you commit mail fraud or send something hazardous, but only after you're convicted with due process. That's the part that's missing. You can argue that the USPS is a government-owned entity and thus different rules apply... but again, that's the point. The carrier of last resort, at least, should be run in a way that is accountable, whether technically government or not.
Ok, if the internet is not "real" life, then what is it?
Is it "in" reality? Do we interact with it? Does it interact with us, or within the ineffable, largely unseen soup of causality from which how things are/become in this world emerges? Does anything matter?
An NGO I consult for runs its entire business on Google. All its documents are on Google docs, all digital assets on google drive, using google play store for their mobile app, using firebase on the backend ....
They work on children's education, and have lots of photos of children attending their workshops. My biggest fear is that Google AI will identify some photo as objectionable and shut the entire operation down in a hurry. Without recourse.
If you want government-run services that act as public versions of these services, advocate for that. But I don't support this particular method of socializing private businesses.
There's even precedence when a private company is a de-facto public space (and must follow the governments' mandates on public spaces) in the physical world; extending this to the digital world makes sense.
That's not some law of physics. Just a man made law that game them those "use of their private proverty" rights (or rather, rich and powerful people lobbied and bought legislation, and got them for themselves).
We can take them back. And we can also stop treating them as legal "persons" while we're at it.
>You may call them "public spaces" or "public services" but that is an abuse of the word "public".
Public in the legal sense is just what we deem public in the legal sense.
As for public in the dictionary sense, that's irrelevant here.
Besides, after offering a service used by millions, that's basically a public service (I mean in the dictionary sense: directed at a mass public) - and even legal scholars have argued that they function as a kind of public utility (and could/should be regulated as such).
If we're to take it even further, then it's also a historical fact that all countries, including the USA, have nationalized companies (made some private companies public the same way public libraries are, either entirely or in part - e.g. having the state be shareholders of large part of them). So it's not like it's some unprecedent thing.
https://thenextsystem.org/history-of-nationalization-in-the-....
Just because a company is "private" doesn't mean they can do anything (manufacturing illegal goods, selling things that are harmful, not hire a certain category of people, etc.) We could add to the list of illegal behaviors the fact of denying service without justification and recourse.
Secondly, when those companies confiscate our accounts, they deprive us of what we had stored there (emails, messages, etc.), which should be considered stealing, even if they don't directly profit from the steal.
But most importantly, the size of these companies make them akin to utilities; while not impossible, it's incredibly difficult to operate in today's world without a Gmail account, or in certain circles without access to Instagram, Facebook, Discord, etc.
Given the impact to someone's life to be deprived of such access, the decision should not be left to companies, "private" or not, but supervised public authorities.
In France, the fact, for a professional, of refusing to sell something for no reason is punishable by up to three years in prison[0]. (If the victim sues, the reasons for not selling have to be presented to the judge, who then decides if they're valid or not.) I don't think this has ever been used against a FAANG but it would be a very interesting test.
[0] https://www.economie.gouv.fr/dgccrf/Publications/Vie-pratiqu...
I know it doesn't, but that doesn't change anything I said. All of the privileges corporations enjoy are negotiable and can be revoked by that which created them in the first place: governments.
AT&T can't restrict who can use their network to make phone calls based on the political views or the content of the call. Why should Google, Facebook, or Twitter? Especially when special liability exemptions were made without which they likely wouldn't even be in business.
Plus we could make them civilly and criminally liable for every bit of fraud, defamation, child porn, copyright violation, and etc. that involves their network.
Maybe they roll a D20 if you don't fill out the survey and if you roll a 1, you're banned for life (what can I say, they make up the rules for bans). Would the almighty free market really build another grocery store for that 5% of banned people? No... they would go hungry.
We don't live in a libertarian utopia where private property is not regulated. If you're a store-owner, for example, there are some things you simply cannot do or must allow. In California, for example, a private space, like a mall, has to allow constitutionally protected speech[1].
You can regulate platforms to allow for, say, free speech rights.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
"under the California Constitution, individuals may peacefully exercise their right to free speech in parts of private shopping centers regularly held open to the public, subject to reasonable regulations adopted by the shopping centers"
I made no judgment on the decision. The decision itself is periphery to my argument, namely that governments are perfectly capable regulating speech on platforms ... because they already are in many many other domains.
I know, because it happened to me, and it will happen to you, too. Eventually, you'll have a "hot take" on a topic against the hive mind of whatever media you use, and you're done.
If media companies allow public access to their services, they MUST become public spaces, and/or public services. TOS be damned.
If they want to restrict users when they sign up (just an example) "you must be liberal or conservative," fine. They are preemptively limiting their customers to certain conversations. But if they allow everyone in, you cannot mute one set of people.
If the USG were to approve a publicly-funded centralized chat program and contracted that work out to Discord, I would support/approve subjecting them to the rules people are suggesting here. But that hasn't happened and most likely will not happen.
