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this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Centralized for-profit companies policing speech doesn’t really solve free speech concerns. It doesn’t violate the US first amendment, but corporate-approved speech isn’t really free speech either. No person or organization is really suitable to be the arbiter of truth, but at the same time unmoderated misinformation presents its own problems.
Yes it solves it. Companies are not required to carry your voice around the world, which is what their platforms do. Stop equating guaranteed amplification with your freedom of speech. It’s wrong and dumb. I’ve lived in countries that actually restrict speech and whatever the Facebook mod did to you is NOTHING. The only reason Americans even fall into this stupid way of thinking is because their speech is so free. When your speech has never truly been restricted you have no idea what that freedom even means.
I’m not necessarily in favor of “guaranteed amplification”, as you put it. Anyone is free to yell whatever ideas they have on a street corner. Barring some specific exceptions, that is free speech. I understand why a for-profit company might not want to amplify any means everything someone decides to spew out. We’ve designed an un-free capitalist system though where some people do have guaranteed amplifiers, and others do not. That’s the problem I’m more interested in solving. It’s not forcing any one company to be forced to amplify any specific idea, but rather to make sure that centralized authorities, be they governments, social media companies, etc can’t in unison stamp out those ideas. I think decentralized platforms like this are somewhat key to that goal, even with individual instances having full moderation and federation control.
...and...
Those two statements of yours seem in opposition to one another. In your second statement you're calling out that some people have guaranteed amplifiers while others don't and say thats a problem. However your first statement says you're not in favor of guaranteed amplifiers for everyone.
The only logical third outcome I can make out that would make those two statement NOT contradictory is if you don't want guaranteed amplifiers for ANYONE, but I don't think you're saying that.
Can you clarify who you believe should have guaranteed amplifiers?
I’m not looking for guaranteed amplifiers. I’m looking for an outcome where anyone can find an amplifier if that’s what they want. No party should be required to amplify anyone else. It’s possible in this situation that someone could fail to find an amplifier, but I’d like to minimize that by just having many platforms with different incentives such that it is unlikely that they would all align against any one persons message.
The fediverse is built on this concept. Every instance can moderate their own users and communities, and choose which other instances to federate with. It’s unlikely that a specific user would be unable to find an instance that accommodates them, even if larger instances won’t. This contrasts with traditional social media where there is a sole for-profit entity that controls the entire network, able to completely remove people and ideas they don’t want.
How is that not a guaranteed amplifier?
So if a person's message is something clearly abhorrent like "white supremacy" advocating violence against other races, you're hopeful there is a platform that person can amplify their voice with their ideas to the general public?
My guess is that as the user increases the level of their bigotry, if the instance still allows is, that instance will be de-federated by nearly everyone. So they have their own echo chamber at that point. How is this different than what groups like that have done for decades prior to the internet with a private newsletter mailed out? This is essentially the situation we have at present.
What are you advocating that would change this?
"designed an un-free capitalist system though where some people do have guaranteed amplifiers, and others do not."
This is simply bullshit. Facebook has the same rules for everybody.
I don't get why people like you don't seem to understand that if you use someone else's system that has rules you have to follow those rules.
No you don't have free speech on fb. No it is not the same thing as "yelling on a corner".
You people have made up a concept of what you think free speech is that isn't reflected in reality in any way.
No one owes you an unfettered voice on any platform.
If you want to talk about corporate ownership of media, and how corporate media platforms are so powerful that they become the only thing that matters, there’s plenty to rail against there. It just doesn’t have anything to do with free speech. Here we are discussing how important it is not to let institutions squash ideas. Again, totally not even in the offing. The reality is that social media simply wants to moderate nazi hatred, while conservatives cry “free speech!”
There’s plenty of free media out there, including this platform we’re talking on. There’s no freedom of speech issue here. In my day we just said fuck the mods. We didn’t clutch our pearls and presume we had a god given right to say whatever we want wherever we want.
You can’t walk into Davies Symphony Hall and cry freedom of speech because you want to be heard by the crowd that came for the orchestra.
Courtrooms are arbiters of truth literally all the time. There are plenty of laws for which truth is a defence, and dishonesty is punished.
When battling misinformation, the problem is not that lying on the internet is legal - it is still actionable. Fraud is still illegal. False or misleading advertisements are still illegal. Defamation is still illegal. Perjury is illegal in the criminal law sense, not just torts. Ask Martha Stewart who the "arbiter of truth" is.
The problem is that it's functionally impossible to enforce on the scale of social media. If 50,000 people call you a pedophile because it became a meme even though it was completely untrue, and this costs you your job and you start getting death threats, what are you going to do about that? Sue them all?
So we throw up our hands and let corporations handle it through abuse policies, because the actual law is unworkable - it's "this is illegal but enforcing it is so impractical that it's legal". Twitter and Facebook don't have to deal with that crap so we let them do a vague implementation of the law but without the whole "due process" thing and all the justice they can mete out is bans.
If you disagree, then I've got a Nigerian prince who'd like to get your banking info, and also you're all cannibals.
You don't have free speech.