It's increasingly uncomfortable to realize that a handful of tech companies are in many ways more powerful than the government. I don't like the direction anything is headed in.
It's even more frustrating when people supposedly loving freedom say that freedom of speech was only meant to protect from government and private companies can discriminate as they wish.
I'm 99.99% certain if freedom of speech was formulated today, it would include private companies as well.
Which "freedom of speech" does? European Freedom of speech has quite a few caveats too.
There were cases where people lost their jobs for their extracurricular legal activities that were hate speech according to someone. Like in US, private companies seem to give in much quicker than government that tries to follow the law to the letter.
Usually because that's the only place it's really codified into law or any other legitimate document in the US. The Supreme Court has limited the scope of the first amendment, but that's all just implicitly codified via past decisions and opinions - a less discoverable format I've yet to find.
Surely you can be free to say whatever you want but a business doesn't have to do business with you. For example I could wear a Nazi T-Shirt with "Hang all Niggers" emblazoned in it, and a shop could quite rightly refuse to admit me to their store or refuse to serve me if I did go into their store. So why is it different for Google or Facebook to say "we don't want you as a customer"?
The problem is really that a very few private companies have become core infrastructure providers on the Internet, effectively acting as the government of the net, however they face little to no regulation or accountability - Google, for example, is too firmly entrenched for consumers to realistically move to an alternative.
So the question is, at what threshold (of size, competitors, etc) should free speech move from the corporation's policy to decide to the customers'? At one end of the spectrum, we've got corner stores, where there are a million options, and policy is decided by whoever's working at the time; on the reverse side, there are governments, who must inherently be monopolies, with policy decided by the voters. Google, cloudflare, godaddy, all fall somewhere in between, with the concern being that they fall too close to government in terms of power, while decisions remain made by internal managers, without user accountability.
But you are not being prevented from using the Internet, the shop is not preventing me from buying, just from coming in whilst wearing the t-shirt, take it off and I can shop freely. The Nazis can use the internet, they are not being barred from it, they are just not allowed to use Google or Facebook to display their message.
I think that something like ifps.io may partially solve this issue as the Nazis could host their own site and individual nazis could provide storage and bandwith to keep it online.
> they are just not allowed to use Google or Facebook to display their message.
I think the concern is, what if Google and Facebook can be thought of as essentially being the internet. It's certainly true that the internet has gotten far less decentralized in the past decade. Google essentially has a monopoly on how people find information.
By your definition, true freedom of speech would force me to open my home to Nazis so that they could come in and yell at me about how much they hate my consorting with Jews.
In the real world, freedom of speech is generally free enough as it is, and in the example above, is in tension with my right to freedom of association. Yes, the Nazis are allowed to yell at me, just as I'm allowed to distance myself from them. If I own property, I can go one step further by going home and locking the door.
I don't like Nazis, but Google's censorship here is giving me pause. Yes, of course they have every right to refuse to do business with whomever they like. Thankfully, so do I. If I don't care for Google's censorship, I'm free to use Spotify, or Pandora, or whatever other company (hopefully) makes a principled stand against censorship.
At the end of the day, it's their house, and if they want to lock the door to keep Nazis out, I can't imagine any fair world that would force them to open those doors.
At least in my country, there're laws for disturbing public. Even if you shout "I love political correctness" too loudly and too long, you can be taken to custody and fined.
If Nazis are such a big problem, secret service and whatnot should start looking into them. It's not a job of private company to enforce it's own point-of-view on the society. Wether it's correct not, but a private company cannot hold a a fair trial. And censorship without one is just wrong. I'd rather have a pissed off bakery serving gay cakes and coffeeshop serving nazi teaparty than letting a private company apply censorship.
To be fair, in America we have "time, place and manner" restrictions for that sort of thing as well.
> I'd rather have a pissed off bakery serving gay cakes and coffeeshop serving nazi teaparty than letting a private company apply censorship.
I'd rather have bigoted companies free to be bigots, so that at least I could know who they are, and to avoid patronizing their business at all costs. The alternative is that they are forced to pretend to be not-bigots, I give them my money, and then they donate it to bigoted charities.
Or they'd fly certain flags high to attract certain clientele and make sure people they don't like don't come. Yet if you're in need, they'd serve you.
I'm not talking about making everybody pretend to be not who they are. That's totally fine by me. If a bakery wants to fly a Nazi flag - so be it. But if gay couple wants a selfie drinking smoothies by said flag - that's fine.
Really? You think that you could make private individuals carry water for ideals that conflict with their own? And that people, far and wide, would just be openly accepting of this idea?
I’ve heard “freedom of speech” defined as a natural right, but this idea is the most unnatural way for people to act.
Private individual getting paid is not so private anymore. Especially once "protected classes" are brought in. Either go all in and allow anybody to refuse service to anybody or make everybody serve everybody. I don't see middle ground in there. It'd always result in he-said, she-said.
Point in case - people bringing up the gay cake in mentioning of google memogate.
Is a bus company right to refuse service to protesters going to a protest? Can a train company cancel trains specifically on a day of event they don't like for some reason? Can cellphone carrier shut down service for people they don't like for some reason? Can gas station refuse selling gas to skinheads on a roadtrip? What if they're just going to work on a regular workday?
There’s ways to convolute any of those scenarios, but let me just explain why I think there are notable differences:
1. Protected classes are defined by a history of prejudicial treatment and blocked access to essential services, and they exist as a class of people defined by biological markers. So you can control being black or being gay, and you can’t access any bus service or use the same water fountain anywhere. This is very different than holding an opinion, and not being serviced by an add-on provider.
2. There are great differences between being denied a voice and being denied an amplification platform for that voice. We never mandated that newspapers print every letter to the editor, or even provide equal time to classes of opinions (although that did happen in a natural way).
If you tried to get a cake plastered with swastikas, that would not be protected free speech and could be denied service. You have to go find a Nazi baker or append the speech yourself. This is very different from being black and you can not get any cake from any baker, and they’ll know too, because you can’t exactly hide the fact that you’re black.
"Protected classes" as currently defined is an insult to freedom of speech. Once "protected classes" collide, we got oppression olympics.
Christians have enough of hard time for their believes in quite a few places. Why are they less protected than gays? Why is their freedom of speech is worth less than gays?
One could argue that gay cake is not biologically defined marker. For example, by christian believe, marriage is to make babies. Gays can't make babies. Thus gay marriage is not biologically even possible.
Then we step into another issue. Frequently "protected class" is taken as free pass to do anything rather than being protected for their specific attribute. For example, people being called racists for rightfully calling out black person for his bad behaviour.
A private individual providing public accommodations has many additional responsibilities than a private individual.
We see this in the offline world, ADA compliance can be expensive, but is a cost of doing business. Providing services to someone you find morally repugnant can be emotionally expensive, but you may not be able to legally refuse them service, while servicing others. It's not clear to me why it's ok to pick and choose customers because of their (terrible) political beliefs, offline or online. If their content is illegal, let a court decide that and issue an order requiring it to be taken down. The domain registration, and associated NS records are unlikely to be illegal.
But wouldn't you limit the speech of a person that way, I mean it is also the freedom of association that is given to those companies and they choose not to associate with them.
Yes, like all those conservatives fighting for Hobby Lobby to not provide contraception support for it's employees because "first amendment" and all those mom and pop shops that don't want to serve gay people in the South because of first amendment rights.
Seriously, conservatives in America want to have their cake and eat it too. "We meant freedom for corporations-as-people but only when it helps us".
> and all those mom and pop shops that don't want to serve gay people in the South because of first amendment rights.
Citation? This seems like a clumsy attempt to bash the south. Considering that the two largest cases for violating public accommodation laws hail from Oregon (Sweet Cakes) and Colorado (Masterpiece), with other cases from Las Vegas (Walmart) and Ohio (Take the Cake), it seems ... off.
Which is not good either. IMO, any business shall serve any customer regardless. Unless said customer is breaking a (sane) law.
For the record, I'm not American. I grew up in ex-USSR country that was just recovering from total censorship. What is going on today in the world is sickening me. A lot of rhetoric in the West is too similar to USSR craziness. I'll be happy to be offended and keep my right to offend you. The other way ain't pretty.
> any business shall serve any customer regardless
Amazon blacklists people who abuse their service, like return policy. They are not breaking the laws, but blocking these bad customers is not only a moral choice but also a rational one, since it protects the sellers and other customers. Likewise, if you are making a scene in a private space, if it disturbs the usual operation, the owner should have the right to kick you out, because you are damaging their business.
So I say otherwise, any private business owner should have the right to refuse offering their service to people who they consider harmful to their interests.
Google could argue, hosting those hateful content draw negative attention from the media which tarnish their image thus hurt their business interests.
The one and only problem is, Google is too big and too powerful, their decision carries significant impact which should not be taken lightly.
What is gay couple is making a scene in a private space and demanding a cake? And the bakery happens to be by the church and having gays hand-in-hand would severely hurt their business? What if instead of gays it's cyclists in undersized lycra? I'd rather not have either of them kicked out.
I'm pretty sure abuse of return policy is covered by some kind of law. On the other hand, blacklisting customers who just use advertised return policy to it's full extent is not moral either. False advertisement is breaking of the law too.
This is a facet of American culture that I've always found interesting...
Self determination is a very core part of what I, an outsider, see as American-ism. But self determination only seems to apply to government interference, not private.
For example, in the US organisations like HOAs (Homeowners Associations) and employers are allowed to encroach on what from my perspective I consider personal freedoms, but people accept it in the US because they're non-governmental in origin.
Here in Europe, freedom is freedom. It is irrelevant who is telling you you cannot paint your home orange be it local government, a private entity, or your next door neighbour. But in the US freedom only applies to government, private entities are allowed to violate people however they want under the guise of "choice."
What I've found in my life is that choice is a perk of the wealthy. The poor often lack choice.
Our communications must be decentralized as much as possible, if we want to avoid the dominance of any kind of thought police. Maybe it's the best time to start rolling out wireless peer-to-peer networks everywhere and to switch to software that doesn't rely on Google or Facebook datacenters.
Not only that, but the companies you have listed are all to eager to get in bed with the Chinese government and then for efficiency reasons, they start moving everything to that least common denominator of free expression. We definitely have a problem here. I'm thoroughly disgusted with tech companies right now--these are not the brave risk-takers that made me so hopeful for the 21st century.
I agree, in that it sucks that it's a literal handful, but on the flip side it's nice to know the government is set up in such a way that it isn't by default the most powerful entity in every imaginable way. The people themselves, private companies, etc have a chance to be more powerful than the government in a variety of ways.
I'm a pro-government liberal who is extremely wary of the power of global corporations, but I still take some solace in what this says about our system.
Show me examples of corporations mass murdering people, though? Your faith in big government is completely misplaced. The truth is, you can't trust any entity with consolidated power to be forthright and favor humanity over all other considerations.
>Show me examples of corporations mass murdering people, though?
United Fruit Company in Guatemala, Shell Oil in Nigeria, BP in Iran... there are countless examples of corporations paying off people to do their dirty work for them
The entire point of my comment was to say that while I would generally be considered a "pro-government liberal", I do NOT trust "big government" and prefer to see power be more diffuse.
What did you think my point was, I'm interested to see how I could be more clear in the future.
>on the flip side it's nice to know the government is set up in such a way that it isn't by default the most powerful entity in every imaginable way. The people themselves, private companies, etc have a chance to be more powerful than the government in a variety of ways.
That's been the case before, it's not a great thing. In the late 18th and early 19th century, a few magnates were arguably more powerful than the US government. They certainly ran the US government. A lot of the protections we have today are a response to that time period
I mentioned that I'm uncomfortable with how few companies have so much control. It's far better now than it was in the pre-Trust-busting days, for sure. However, it's trending the wrong direction.
The problem is the government is supposed to keep the private sector in check for such things.
But since we've basically given up on stopping monopolies and mega-mergers the companies and now so big and control so many things they have power without competition to keep it in check.
There is a big difference between the government and a private organization. The government can throw you in prison and strip you of your constitutional rights. Private organizations cannot (unless hired by the government, which is should not be happening)
Well sometimes it works out in our favor. Like when Apple fought the FBI trying to get legal precedent for compelling them to create a backdoor for their own devices / software.
As strange as it is, who else but a huge powerful tech company could do that?
