Just focusing on this portion:
> Finally, and perhaps most importantly, private companies making editorial decisions about what content they allow on their own private property is not (and cannot be!) taking away First Amendment rights. The First Amendment restricts the government, not private property owners from making their own editorial decisions.
That's really the whole debate when it comes to social media. Is it ok that they are governed like private property where the owners can make whatever moderation decisions they want or is it more like a modern "public square" where it should be possible to say anything you can shout on the street without being moderated for it.
Personally, I don't know if there's a right answer. Perhaps the best approach is encouraging more competition among social media companies so there are alternatives to the dominant platforms - but the network effects of something like Facebook are very strong even if competitors existed.
Treating social media like a private space is the status quo, but it rubs me the wrong way that there's not really an equivalent of public spaces in the online world.
Edit: I find it weird how many people are happy to defend unchecked corporate power when it comes to this issue. The lack of any guardrails on moderation is why YouTube has slowly transformed into a baby-talk version of itself. Now people talk about "unaliving yourself" and "PDF files" instead of using the normal English words for these concepts.
I always thought this scotus case was interesting and relevant to the question of “can a private space count as a public square?”. Clearly in some way it can. Curious what a real lawyer or constitutional scholar has to say about this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
I used to be a fan of the idea of places with absolute free speech. The problem is that repeatedly, in practice, these places suck. It is not an idea that scales. Once a place is larger a single friend-group that can ostracize any assholes, the assholes show up and start being assholes. You either moderate them, or everyone else leaves except assholes and people who are highly tolerant of assholes. This isn't something that's happened once, it happens repeatedly.
That doesn't mean that the horrifying sterile nature of youtube is great. There are acceptable in-betweens, it just won't happen while the internet mostly consists of corporate giants that don't want to spend the money for real moderation.
> I used to be a fan of the idea of places with absolute free speech. The problem is that repeatedly, in practice, these places suck
So public places sucks? I like being able to talk about whatever I want when I walk around with friends, if someone tells me I have to go home to talk about that it would suck.
Since this works in public I don't see why it couldn't work online. All you need is anti harassment policies etc just like in reality, not anti speech.
>I find it weird how many people are happy to defend unchecked corporate power when it comes to this issue. The lack of any guardrails on moderation is why
It's not weird at all. We've already seen some places try to have little or no moderation, and the result isn't pretty: 4chan, and today's Xitter immediately come to mind. Shitty people and trolls take over, driving everyone else out, because who wants to read all that shit constantly?
Leaving the moderation to some corporation might not be ideal (look what happened with Reddit), but it's better than no moderation at all. At least with corporate-run moderation, if we don't like it, we can go somewhere else. What the "free speech absolutionists" are trying to do will just end up ruining ALL online spaces, so we have nowhere to go, except perhaps online spaces entirely operated in foreign countries where they don't subscribe to this idiocy.
Under Carr and his ilk, social media is not going to become a public square. They don't want fairness or equality: they want attention, regardless of whether people actually want to give it to them.
I like to think of it this way: we all have freedom of speech, but don’t we also have the freedom not to listen to it? People think their freedom of speech is diminished in cases where the reality is the audience doesn’t care for it and removes it from their view. There’s not a single opinion out there you can’t find somewhere online. Freedom of speech is as grand as it’s ever been. The complaint is isn’t some don’t get a say in their piece; it’s that people have signed up to media outlets in which they don’t have to put up with listening to i. It’s not some secret agenda Facebook blocks, say, racist content. They just don’t want it on their feeds and, yeah, honestly, they don’t think their user base being constantly offended and, frankly, bullied is what’s being asked of them to provide. 4Chan is there for those who want that sort of thing. Most people don’t want it.
I’ve never had to read a book I didn’t want to, or watch a movie I didn’t care for, so why is it suddenly every right-wing pundit’s right to have an audience with me? Im sick of being forced to listen to these people