I wholeheartedly agree with this. First Amendment was written at the time when government was almost the only organization powerful enough to silence dissenters. Nowadays corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc have more effective control of the venue of speech, and they should be subject to the same scrutiny then, not be given leeway as "private entities".
The government still is the only entity that can silence dissenters. All the entities you listed are limited to merely kicking you off their platform. Facebook can't 404 your posts on Reddit, and none of them and none of them can stop you from standing on the sidewalk with a sandwich board.
Saying that social media platforms should be subject to "scrutiny" (which is pretty vague and non-actionable), or are somehow beholden to public opinion, is nonsense. They're beholden to users, at most. And it's not like Google shut down the blog of of someone saying "GOOG's target price should be about $12". Let's see how much backlash they gets from their users over this, ha.
The government still is the only entity that can silence dissenters. All the entities you listed are limited to merely kicking you off their platform.
From the standpoint of the one being silenced, what's the difference?
The fact of the matter is, the Googles and the Facebooks and the Reddits of the world hold a tremendous and frightening amount of control over public discourse and public opinion. I feel less and less comfortable with them wielding that power unaccountably.
You know how we hold companies to a higher and more stringent standard when they reach monopoly status in a market? Perhaps it's time to look into something similar for large social media sites.
- There are time (and money) consuming technical issues in migrating to another platform, and with the dominance of software-as-a-service platforms, it's often not even possible. Can you migration comments? Is the date going to be set correctly? Can you keep your current layout and images? So even on a purely technical level, you can't "easily" get your blog running again on another platform.
- Access to content: I'm hoping he has backups. Of course, if you developed the content on-platform, it may be nebulous what exactly you need backups of. E.g., did you think to include all the images+comments? If his account was deleted, he may simply not have all the data anymore.
- Network effects (this is the big one): a web site isn't just a bunch of bits; it's a place people visit. Being down for any considerable length of time means those visitors will drift away; the attention you've gained will be partially lost permanently. And that's the best-case scenario. In many cases, you cannot keep url intact, in which case even after you restore service, people won't find you. In a very real way, companies like google and especially facebook own your social connections to others - so even if you manage to find another platform, they're not going to give you your contacts back.
E.g. if you switch phone provider, you may keep your telefone number (here, at least, even against the will of the original provider). If you migrate from facebook, you cannot keep your profile url. That's probably a bad thing for society; but it's hardly surprising companies aren't dying to prevent lock-in. Even google, which nominally allows extracting your data, the most valuable assets cannot be transferred (not to mention that the data extraction process results can't be trivially imported elsewhere because there is no standard for these types of things).
It's absurd to suggest the user has much practical freedom when it comes to switching communication platforms. Any freedom he does have tends to mean he must have had the foresight to use only a small subset of the available features, including onerous restrictions such as limited social interaction or interaction via unusual means. More realistically, if you switch platforms, you're likely to lose readers.
I think your comment is just pointing out that freedom isn't free, there are always trade-offs to submitting oneself to the will to any platform.
If "practical freedom", means to get all the best parts of a platform while expecting that you can do whatever you want, then it's not surprising that some will be shocked when such costs suddenly come due having had ignored the writing on the wall. Although most never explore the boundaries of such to make a difference in distinction to them, such "practical freedom" never truly exists in anything we do.
I learned the "hard" way, bootstrapped a company that crowd sourced data seeded from "open" graph, only to get hit with a c & d and "my" facebook used account banned indefinitely 4 years ago. I can still create multi accounts and use them, but I don't think I'll be naive enough to use them in the same way as I did "my" main used account and not expect similar results as before. And if this is related to CP, its not like this is the first time ever someone has been censored by a private entity for this on the internet prior to this account becoming another stat in that book, and considering how general society sees these things, I'd be more surprised if the author is really surprised or just upset because it finally happened to them.
It's false if my point were that he wasn't being inconvenienced. My point is that he wasn't being silenced. If he wants to speak, he can put his voice on another platform. With all the news around the destruction of his blog, he might even reach more people than before if he's quick about it.
> The fact of the matter is, the Googles and the Facebooks and the Reddits of the world hold a tremendous and frightening amount of control over public discourse and public opinion.
They're not even as powerful as the editor of one of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, never mind the man himself.
I never read any articles from Murdoch's newspapers unless they're surfaced to me by one of those services. Do you buy a Murdoch paper, or do you get a link on Google News, your Facebook feed, or your favorite Reddit subs? I'm pretty sure I'm a 90% case, not unique.
Of course, it's all just rich people controlling the discourse. Murdoch can buy pieces of Google, Facebook, and Reddit too.
Now, they just get to micromanage it. Micro-censorship, Micro-surveillance.
Gonna disagree with you there. It's the same kind of power, just with a different (sometimes overlapping) set of demographics. Facebook is one of the most used websites in the entire world. Just the simple act of hiding one story to promote another one changes what millions upon millions of people will see and talk about.
To play Devil's advocate, these platforms help people engage in discourse, but much like HN, has its own set of rules. HN shadow-bans and moderates with gusto, but I suppose it doesn't qualify as big enough?
Google provides more walls for people to hang their art, but they aren't required to hang yours and I'm not sure compelling them to is a good thing.
The same voices calling foul on Google raise hell when Reddit shows what truly unmoderated platforms look like.
Just because you (the colloquial "you") call yourself an artist doesn't compel the Met to hang your art and neither does it compel Google.
> HN shadow-bans and moderates with gusto, but I suppose it doesn't qualify as big enough?
Actually, I do think the current moderation model of most forums are wrong. The users should be the ultimate arbiter of what they see or not. The power to block certain users should be in the hands of those who browse it, and the moderators simply give a recommendation that most users follow. Similar to how spam folder works, in that you can always override the recommendation by moving the spam into your inbox.
> but they aren't required to hang yours and I'm not sure compelling them to is a good thing.
If not all opinions are allowed on their platform, then those they allow come with a stamp of approval from them. The logical conclusion is that they should be held liable for any libelous claims made by the users, since the users' opinion actually reflect the platform's own. They cannot have it both ways by claiming to be independent from users' opinions while simultaneously influencing and filtering them.
They are, in my imaginary world, to deny me only for reasons not related to my content. For example, they can reject me if the pictures are too large or not in a specific format, but not if it expresses any views they dislike.
> The same voices calling foul on Google raise hell when Reddit shows what truly unmoderated platforms look like.
You give no evidence that it is the same voices. I am, for one, consistently opposed to Reddit's policy on banning subreddits and to Google and Facebook's manual interference on public discourse.
It's more like Google says 'yeah, you can hang your art here' then once the walls fill up, burns your artwork, moves out of the house and wont answer your texts.
At minimum, artists and other specialty individuals need extra allowances and certainties. Were they a corporate entity, this wouldn't have happened. Personally, I value culture at least as highly as most businesses.
