>How can we, as a society, claim to value free speech, yet allow social discourse platforms to censor and silence political enemies?
Quite easily. Freedom of speech is freedom from government suppression of that speech - it's quite clear in the constitution. Freedom of speech doesn't mean I or anyone else has to give you a platform to speak from.
And antitrust laws are designed precisely to prevent corporations from monopolizing and abusing market position. Freedom of speech means I have the right to hear from people I choose to assemble with. Monopolies dominating the market for speech and then dictating the terms of speech is an antitrust situation. Not least of which because by the same mechanisms they can use to silence political opponents they can use to silence and squeeze out competition or mentions of competitors.
This isn't crazy or unprecedented. We don't give unlimited contractual rights to landlords. You'd end up with a virtual serfdom otherwise. So we grant tenant rights exclusive of any contractual terms. Past time to do the same for social media participants.
The notion that any entity can "dominate the market for speech" is absurd. Freedom of speech doesn't mean you have a right to free eyeballs at <insert company here>'s expense.
Freedom of speech and freedom of association mean that Twitter has the right to put or not put whatever it wants on its website.
This is a well-reasoned response. The comparison to the tenant / landlord relationship is excellent.
It seems that breaking up monopolies as in the past is not viable with tech empires like Twitter / FB, therefore some type of regulation in this area is where the focus needs to be, and I say this as someone who usually takes the libertarian position.
That's apples and bananas. A more apt comparison would be: does your local newspaper HAVE to print anything you want on the front page? No? Then why should a social media site be forced to?
Facebook doesn't control whether you pick up the phone and call your friend to voice your opinion. Twitter can't prevent you from driving to your local bar and telling your drinking buddies what you think of the president. Then again, the bar owner can kick you out of his establishment if he disagrees with your thoughts and gets sick of listening to you.
Because again, your freedom of speech doesn't mean a business has to host you.
> [Y]our freedom of speech doesn't mean [that] a business has to host you.
We are truly in uncharted waters at this point: historically, your newspaper comparison would have made sense, but it simply isn't applicable anymore.
At what point do we need to acknowledge that these platforms are the public square? When they control 99+% of online speech? When there is a worldwide quarantine meaning that people head to the internet to speak to each other, and meeting up isn't even an option? When being banned from one implies being banned from all of them?
Increasingly, there are difficult questions that we need to answer around this: Does this argument imply that even if all speech was transmitted through Facebook's servers, that wouldn't change the calculus around what "freedom of speech" means? How does this interface with laws worldwide? How does this interface with morals worldwide (the morality of the coastal US is not as universal as many people would like)? Is it morally acceptable for all businesses of a particular kind to collude wrt refusing to serve a particular person? Would it be morally acceptable for every business of every kind to collude wrt refusing to serve a particular person, whatever the reason?
Arguing from this place of finality by appealing to the way things currently work means that people get to ignore these questions. Not to mention that failing to look at changing circumstances is usually a bad idea: omnis conventio intelligitur rebus sic stantibus. This sort of argument generally reads a bit like rules lawyering to me: even if this is how the law works in letter today, it seems to be against the spirit of the law and broadly self-interested ('as long as the people getting banned are people I think deserve it, I'm all for letting the social media companies decide').
> So it is quite a bit more complicated than just saying "its their platform, their rules"
How about this example instead: Do phones have to serve you? Phone companies are user communication companies, after all. Seems like an appropriate analogy. Whereas a newpaper is more of a publishing company.
> That's apples and bananas. A more apt comparison would be: does your local newspaper HAVE to print anything you want on the front page? No? Then why should a social media site be forced to?
Yes, but there is the other side of that coin: a newspaper (as in the company) can get sued for libel or other such things, precisely because they have editorial control.
It's seems that social media companies would like to have their cake and eat it too. They are explicitly protected from their users content (thanks to section 230), and yet they seem to flex this immunity by arbitrarily blocking users, often without recourse. IIRC they have even occasionally flipped between being publisher or a platform depending on the question.
To be fair, there is no winning for large social media companies, either they preform this filtering and everyone hates on them, or they don't and everyone hates on them. I do not believe there is a perfect way to block only people who everyone agrees should be blocked, as every method has both false positives and false negatives.
I can agree with you, but still think there's a problem. The fact is nobody who wrote the constitution thought we'd get to a point where there was such a dominant private speech player.
So yeah, it made sense at the time, since government was the big player historically, but we're looking at a different situation now.
I think HN has a gross overestimation of twitter's influence. There are 7.9 Billion people on the planet, and 185 million daily active twitter users. I can't say I've ever once gotten my news from twitter and don't plan on ever starting. In my social circle I've got exactly 2 people who use twitter daily.
> Papers in the 1700s had just as much dominance in speech as social media does today.
The important difference is that less than a billionth of what people communicate was through those newspapers. Nowadays? Maybe half is the the internet and most of that is through the big players (e.g. Facebook).
> There are 7.9 Billion people on the planet, and 185 million daily active twitter users.
Twitter is a US platform first and foremost. It doesn't make sense to compare the total number of Twitter users against the number of people on the entire planet. According to Statista:
> Social network Twitter is particularly popular in the United States, where as of January 2021, the microblogging service had audience reach of 69.3 million users
I can’t get this sorted out in my brain but y’all think self-help with breach of peace(had to look up that phrase) ought to be casually tolerated in a modern nation...?
...nevermind, I just realized that US is a union of States where a repossession man just casually walk into front yards and tow away a Camry from debtors.
Who decided that Freedom of Speech only applies to government suppression? Does the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment only apply to the government as well?
> Who decided that Freedom of Speech _only_ applies to government suppression
Which freedom of speech are you referring to? Because if you're thinking of the first amendment, then the people who decided that are the ones who wrote it, and it's pretty clear in the text.
I feel like you're being obtuse. The concept of free speech was not invented by the US Constitution and has existed long before it was written. Free Speech as a societal principle and ideal has been around for hundreds of years.
"Free speech" might be a societal deal, but it's never meant what you are claiming it means. You are free to redefine it as you like, but it's never meant people are forced to publish your book or an employer can't fire you for being rude.
Quite easily. Freedom of speech is freedom from government suppression of that speech - it's quite clear in the constitution. Freedom of speech doesn't mean I or anyone else has to give you a platform to speak from.