I do see it differently and disagree with that perspective, but moreover would point out that we as a society for several decades have agreed that private companies do not have the right to such practices, precisely because the effect on society is so harmful.
AT&T today, under the law, does not have that power and I would argue for good reason.
Isn’t lack of moderation an even more harmful thing for society?
We have all seen how 4chan and 8chan turned out. We are in one of the most heavily moderated forums of the internet and we keep each other accountable to the system.
Lack of accountability and moderation will cause discussions to regress and devolve onto pointless dog whistles and virtue signalling.
While protecting speech is important, not all speech is important nor worthwhile.
We have moderation under the law. If you discuss something or say something that crosses a line that we as a society have deemed to be a danger we have a fair system for that.
There’s a reason we have concepts like published laws, a jury of our peers, appeals processes, etc. Replacing that with hidden arbitrary rules that are interpreted differently from one day to the next, by faceless IT oligarchs that have no accountability, no observable appeal process, etc is dystopian. You have to ask yourself, if you’re no longer using the law to make the speech rules, who is making them?
If we had what we have now over the last 150 years, where any viewpoint that isn’t aligned with the establishment in power is banned, we wouldn’t have racial integration, women’s rights, gay rights, marijuana reform, all things the political establishment would have happily banned from discussion at one point.
We have multiple concrete examples where these IT companies have banned discussion of ideas that later turned out to be 100% legitimate. You were banned for discussing the lab leak theory, a year later Fauci comes out and says it’s very possible. The New York Post had its story about Hunter Biden’s laptop banned, possibly changing the results of the election, the NYT comes out later and says the laptop is real. Silicon Valley executives should not get to decide for society what is true and what is false and what we’re allowed to discuss.
The whole “private company” thing is fine when you’re not big enough to change the results of an election or steer the discourse of our entire society. Once you are big enough to do that, you need to be hands off, which is precisely why we have common carrier laws that legally ensure that outcome.
AT&T today, under the law, does not have that power and I would argue for good reason.