Free speech doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's a cultural value. Once the cultural value disappears, so too will the first amendment, either by a new amendment or by judges raised in a society where wrongthink was censored on every platform they grew up with. Yes Twitter doesn't technically have to support free speech as a private corporation, but its censorship is nothing to celebrate.
I think it's important to remember the context in which the USA created its laws about free speech. In that time, it was your right to buy a printing press, paper, ink, movable type, and print your own pamphlets. The government was not to stop you from doing that. The government was not going to force you to print your neighbors pamphlets.
Your neighbor is Milo. Your printing press is Twitter.
It's much different now. It's a lot easier to get access to a printing press than to something equivalent to Twitter.
Everyone is mutually addressable in meatspace. If you're in the same space, and someone else talks, you have no choice but to hear it or leave the premises (note that here, the people who don't like the speech must vacate, not the people speaking unpopular things). There's a great equalizing power in that.
In ye olden tyme, you could walk up to your neighbor and give him a copy of your paper. He could throw it away or refuse to talk to you, but there was no [legal] way to totally disappear/silence you.
As for corporations, if they didn't like you, all they could do is print their own counter-arguments. Now the corporate entity can effectively disappear you and cut you off not only from the larger world, but your personal social graph.
This is particularly insidious when it comes to the practice of shadowbanning (and I'm speaking in general -- not trying to start a debate as to whether Twitter engages in this or not).
It is actually much much much easier to start something like Twitter than it ever was to buy your own printing press, run it, and distribute its pamphlets. The analogy is whether or not it was easier to get access to the Philadelphia Gazette's printing press (or whoever was big back then), or to Twitter. Clearly, it's still easier to get access to Twitter, but similarly to the Gazette, they can decide not to print and distribute your pamphlet.
And if they did agree to print your diatribe against the President of the day under an anonymous byline, they sure as hell would have claimed the right to not release your name to the government.
I know that's the analogy people make, but it doesn't hold up.
Newspapers were hawked by criers in the street, or sold at stands directly adjacent to competing newspapers, or delivered to your doorstep where the other guy could place his competing paper right next to it. All the conduct was in the real, person-to-person world where every physically able person has the same access.
That access is completely non-existent in cyberspace; the user pulls only what he wishes to receive. In the physical world, the user receives pushes from everything in his environment.
Twitter is not a publication, but a piece of telecom infrastructure. People do not go to Twitter to see what Twitter thinks. They go to Twitter because they believe Twitter will successfully carry the communication from the people they trust and want to listen to.
Is it equally OK for the phone company to kick you off and take your phone number because they didn't like what you said through "their" telephone infrastructure? What about your ISP kicking you off because they don't like what you're posting over "their" pipes? If you don't like it, you can go to another company, or heck, even start your own, right?
Not only were newspapers publications with a monolithic, easily attributable point of view, but newspapers did not have circulation that reached into the billions either (and if one newspaper did get that large, they'd have been broken up in antitrust).
Now, companies can alter or silence someone else's speech, and remove the entire audience, because ironically, the audience no longer needs to go into the real, physical world that exists behind the keyboard to find out what's happening. They implicitly trust these platforms to present the information they request.
There are many big differences between cyberspace and physical space. We've made a lot of short-sighted policy by pretending there's a 1:1 mapping. Let's not keep that habit up.
You're proposing a lot of regulation that I'm personally not interested in.
And why is it that Twitter has to carry that regulatory burden? At what point does a company/website become telecom infrastructure?
One of the issues with ISPs and other utilities is that they have been given local monopoly in exchange for regulation, so I would not say they are similar to Twitter. This is also why your statement "you can go to another company, or heck, even start your own, right?" is supposed to cut.
You're also not giving very much credit to the audience you speak of. The audience has always had to ensure their own information sources are good.
>You're proposing a lot of regulation that I'm personally not interested in.
I'm not really proposing any specific regulation. While it is telecom infrastructure, I'm not suggesting they must be subject to exactly the same regulations as hard-line providers, and there are reasons to craft a different class of rules for them.
The point is that just saying "they're a private company, they can alter things and silence customers however they want" shouldn't work anymore.
>And why is it that Twitter has to carry that regulatory burden?
Because they're a massive communication platform that people depend on to accurately represent conversations. Why should Comcast or AT&T have to carry regulatory burden? Same reasons.
>At what point does a company/website become telecom infrastructure?
Whenever they act a carrier or intermediary in conversations not intended to go directly to/from them. If you're talking to someone else through something and trusting it to carry your communication, it's a telecommunication device.
Of course, there can be limits on when/where any potential restrictions should become effective.
>One of the issues with ISPs and other utilities is that they have been given local monopoly in exchange for regulation, so I would not say they are similar to Twitter. This is also why your statement "you can go to another company, or heck, even start your own, right?" is supposed to cut.
Whether the monopoly is imposed by fiat or occurs organically, it should still be recognized and addressed as a monopoly.
>You're also not giving very much credit to the audience you speak of. The audience has always had to ensure their own information sources are good.
Yes, but in the past, it was not really possible to shut everything else out. There was an opportunity for competitors to get their attention in the physical world where everyone in the same vicinity shares equal access. You couldn't get outside information whilst remaining cloistered up inside your house; you at least had to go to the doorstep or mailbox, where people could leave their own publications.
In cyberspace, you have a blank window until you explicitly request some content. There is no opportunity to present anything that the user doesn't explicitly pull, and then the user is pulling that data from platforms entirely under the control of a very small handful of corporations.
When at least 90% of people are getting their data from the same sources, it's reasonable for some controls to be in place.
This isn't new; until the early 00s, we had rules that prevented a single corporation from controlling too many media outlets in a specific market. Until the late 80s, we had the Fairness Doctrine to ensure that controversial public issues were presented fairly.
If those controls were needed to help control broadcasters whose range was 50 miles, how is it absurd to suggest similar things apply to Twitter/Facebook whose range is infinite and whose user base reaches into the billions, an appreciable percentage of all humanity?
There is rightly a very high bar for a private entity to be regulated as a public utility, and definitely Twitter does not meet it. Twitter has nowhere near a monopoly on "the communication from the people they trust and want to listen to", or any structural advantages that would lead to one. The internet has an extremely broad and diverse range of venues where folks can make their voices heard. If that weren't true, I might have some sympathy for your argument, but as it is, I think it is very misguided.
I can't edit my post now, but the original intent was to point out that Twitter does not have to publish Milo according to my understanding of the USA free speech laws and how they would analogously be applied.
For some reason, it seems like most people interpreted this the other way around.
Nothing stops you from making your own website now and distributing it. Indeed, there are entire portions of the internet devoted to giving people like Milo a platform.
You're free to move on to another platform to "express" yourself if you feel the need to. There is no shortage of sites dedicated to reprehensible content. A whole World Wide Web full of them! If you don't find one you can even start your own! You've never been able to go to someone else's property to express yourself in ways they don't agree with. They would throw you out. Nobody is forced to host unwanted guests.
IRL everyone censors themselves. I don't say what I think of my in-laws in front of them, I smile and nod and limit my exposure to them to a few hours less than once a year to keep face. Later I go to a friend's house to bitch about them. This is how a functional society works.
The idea you ever had some sort of right to use a private platform to broadcast any random garbage that comes to your head at the time is just absurd. We never put a cultural value on random mouth diarrhea. We are polite in some company and sometimes say controversial things in other company. That's a cultural value.
Having non-mainstream discussion in non-mainstream places and business restricting activity that's bad for their bottom line and/or interests is not an insult to culture, it's normal social interactions.
Personally I like moderation/censorship and it's even necessary for a functional community, otherwise all forums would degrade to the lowest common denominator, spam, memes, and shitposts, given enough time.
Not much. Probably not. I don't know the particular instance because I don't follow US Twitter politics that closely. First time I heard about M. Y. was when he has blocked from giving speech at some college campus.
However, as a general argument, things that are cultural values include 1) trusting people to recognize the few who say stupid things by the virtue of those things being stupid and wrong things to say, and 2) in the public sphere of life the disputes are to be resolved with discussion. Words either fought with words, or ignored for their sheer stupidity, not by removing the words from the arena. (And Twitter is big enough that it counts as a "public sphere". It resembles more a public park where people can yell at each other than a newspaper.)
In general, it is about respect: that one respects their fellow humans to believe that there's enough civilization in left in humans that the civilization will prevail if one acts civilized. And these values can be furthered only be leading by example, because you can't make people into some mold, you can only make them realize who they can be.
Now, of course the line between free speech and speech that can't be allowed constantly muddy: one is not allowed to yell "fire" in a crowded theater, one is not allowed incite people to commit crimes. But the culture where people are allowed to say stupid and wrong things is necessary for a liberal democracy, and it does not hinge only on what kind of censorship government enforces. Why, history has plenty of examples where the government only quietly nods in the background when the private individuals enforce the censorship.
But this is a tangent to the main topic. From what I read, in this particular case Twitter is for once doing the right thing by fighting this order. It might look like somewhat hypocrite in the process of doing so, but that does not matter: While it's bad for the culture if Twitter shuts people down because that kind of thing slowly erodes cultural values of free speech, it's by a magnitude worse if the government does it as that could not only erode but crush those values into pieces.
There is no moral courage in defending people who advocate for destruction of others' liberties or lives. Why should others suffer existential anxiety so you can feel good about your inclusive attitude to speech while doing nothing to uphold their safety?
Which is where the "I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it" quote comes from. But I never believed the people who spread that quote.
Well maybe you'd like the first amendment to be removed? Just because something has no cultural value doesn't stop someone, in this country, from having the right to say it. That's the beauty of our country. We can say great things, boring things, vile things, agreeable things, dissenting things and it's all protected. You remove protection for one, and you risk losing all of it.
I agree it's within Twitter's rights to censor the data flowing through their own platform, it's fairly impossible to argue otherwise. That said, I think speech should absolutely be protected, even for racist dickheads. Otherwise, who decides what's "right" and what's "wrong?" Some government committee? A handful of corporations? What happens when your opinions are suddenly unpopular? Whoops, should have defended (or at the very least accepted) the idea of free speech for all people and ideas.
I don't see that defending the right to free/unpopular/hate speech is the same as providing a platform for it.
A grocery store owner might not want anyone to stand in their store screaming epithets about black people, or ranting about Trump, or Clinton, or whatever. That doesn't mean the store owner believes these things should be blocked, just that they should be done somewhere else.
Incidentally, California state law allows people to collect signatures and get their message out (as long as they don't disturb the peace) in any public place, and includes grocery stores in "public place."
I remember seeing people collecting signatures at the mall when I was a teenager. The mall always posted a professionally printed sign saying, essentially, "these people have a right to do this, but we don't agree with them and we ask you to ignore them."
> Just because something has no cultural value doesn't stop someone, int he country, from having the right to say it.
Nobody is denying them that right. You don't have a right to a twitter account. If someone won't allow you to post on their website, you're free to post it on your own website. That's free speech.
And? I don't have a stake in the integrity of twitter or any other private business. If I don't like the product, I don't use it, same as any other business. Frankly, my default assumption regarding any business is that its integrity only goes as far as it affects the bottom line, and that has proven to be true with pretty much every business I've encountered. None of this has anything to do with free speech.
Your right of free speech ends at the point where it reduces my safety. We do not have unlimited rights of speech, and for good reason. To paraphrase Justice robert Jackson, the Constitution is not a suicide pact.
"Well maybe you'd like the first amendment to be removed?"
See, this is what I'm talking about. I said I see no moral value in racists harassing people. And make no mistake, the topic we were discussing is exactly that. Racists harassing someone on a private company's platform. And now you're trying to make it like I want the 1st Amendment repealed. Despite the fact that Twitter is not bound by the 1st Amendment, nor have I called for anyone to be jailed.
"Just because something has no cultural value doesn't stop someone, in this country, from having the right to say it."
No, but that thing being harassment, which the event in question absolutely was, does stop you from having a right to say it.
"We can say great things, boring things, vile things, agreeable things, dissenting things and it's all protected. You remove protection for one, and you risk losing all of it."
I do not agree in the slightest. I'm pretty sure Twitter can not allow hate speech and harassment on their private platform, and free speech would be absolutely fine. There would be no chilling effect whatsoever.
"That said, I think speech should absolutely be protected, even for racist dickheads."
And I believe they have absolutely no right to harass another user, which is what we're talking about.
"Otherwise, who decides what's "right" and what's "wrong?""
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that advocating for the genocide of an entire people falls very squarely within the "wrong" category, with absolutely no risk of any slippery slope.
"What happens when your opinions are suddenly unpopular?"
I don't call for the genocide of an entire people, and I don't make racist remarks. I'll be fine.
"Whoops, should have defended (or at the very least accepted) the idea of free speech for all people and ideas."
Yeah, no. I'm still never going to defend or accept the idea that harassment should be tolerated.
Great points, and as short as your comment was, I somehow missed the distinction between right to free speech and right to harass people. I do think that line is, also, a bit of a gray area.
I also have to admit, I don't know exactly what happened with Yiannopolis' account (seemingly removed for violating TOS, although the alt-right seems to cry "censorship!!").
I think after reading your response, while I share your views on a lot of things, I still think things like racial cleansing should be protected speech, slippery slope or not. I think the people who subscribe to these ideas are vile people, but I do think they have the right to express their ideas, whether or not I want to hear it.
Everyone agrees they have a right to say it. They can buy a domain name and a hosting account and go just a crazy as their racist little selves can be.
Both the alt-right Milo crowd and I agree on that. I also think that Twitter has the legal and moral right to say whatever they want to publish on their own privately owned site. However, the people who most cry about the "censorship" of Milo disagree here. They grudgingly admit the legal right exists, but believe there is no moral right to control what I publish. By giving you an account, they hold that that right has been taken away, and that ethically, you can prevent me from exercising my right to speak as I want on my own site. How am I the restrictive one here?
The topic is not moral value. The topic is freedom as an individual to say and think what I wish within the eyes of the law. When a special interest of people decide what is right and wrong in the eyes of the law, it becomes well... the law. If the law is "you may not verbally harass someone" then what is the interpretation of what verbal harassment is? What is sufficient harm to a victim that would justify legal action? What is the legal action for verbally harassing someone (not in a workplace but in a public setting).
Some sad news for the social justice crowd... these types of internet harassment problems are simply not that important to enough people, and do not cause enough harm for laws like this to be enacted or even seriously considered on a federal or state level. Corporations like twitter can do as they wish, and will be scrutinized for censorship by all Americans who value their first amendment right.
Who...surprise...are the majority! The united states has made its military so strong and has armed itself to incredible levels of overkill just to protect these rights from foreign powers who disagree. That's not just coincidence. The people who founded this country, as well as the ones who now live here clearly want and value those rights and freedoms. So much so, they are willing to die in massive numbers for them. That's almost the opposite of genocide.
>What is the legal action for verbally harassing someone
There is no 'legal' action. There is Twitter's right as a private entity to enforce its property rights. I can't tell what's causing this irrationality and whataboutism.
Why should AT&T be coerced into allowing racist phone calls? Why should ISPs be coerced into hosting racist web sites or allowing racists to download racist content?
The distinction between telecom infrastructure and Twitter/FB/Google is becoming less and less clear by the year.
If GoDaddy was the only DNS provider, would you feel the same way? At what point does the government need to step in and say the Constitution applies here?
In an environment where law, custom, or technical challenges makes it difficult to silence dissent you can speak out against popular injustice as well as voice unpopular racist opinions.
