One is that our assumptions and norms around free speech/press aren't from digital communications world. They're from TV & newspaper world. Letters & Telephone world. In the last generation, lines have been blurred between mass media, conversational messaging, documents, information, software. Apple's app store escalated the software part of it, AWS further confused it. What "speech" is, for the average person, is hard to draw lines around
Douglas Adam had a good bit on this. Paraphrased: It's explaining to rivers how "the coming of the ocean" will affect them. Currents and such will still exist in the ocean, but... Thus with online media. Do free speech ideals still matter? Yep. What do they mean? How do they work? What do they do? Those aren't, IMO, trivially answerable with analogies to telephone, letter and newspaper world.
Two is that whatever the hell freedoms like association, speech, assembly, media and such mean today, they run through FB, Google, etc. In parts of the world where FB have the dominant free internet deal, even moreso. It's their structures and rules that matter. Say a politician from medium-sized country X is banned from FB or Twitter, this can seriously affect their chances. Same for any kind of activist group, political party, union etc. FB policy people don't necessarily even know the language of the country. Where there are tensions between democratic rights and the new world, the tension is usually highest where a tech giant is.
Three is back to one. There is an interconnectedness here that's hard to stop. We have a digital democracy. It's young, but it's here. Whatever democracy is, happens digitally now.
I hope this isn't cynical, but I've kind of become accelerationist on this. Let's play this game. Force Google's policy courts to be public, maybe.
One is that our assumptions and norms around free speech/press aren't from digital communications world. They're from TV & newspaper world. Letters & Telephone world. In the last generation, lines have been blurred between mass media, conversational messaging, documents, information, software. Apple's app store escalated the software part of it, AWS further confused it. What "speech" is, for the average person, is hard to draw lines around
Douglas Adam had a good bit on this. Paraphrased: It's explaining to rivers how "the coming of the ocean" will affect them. Currents and such will still exist in the ocean, but... Thus with online media. Do free speech ideals still matter? Yep. What do they mean? How do they work? What do they do? Those aren't, IMO, trivially answerable with analogies to telephone, letter and newspaper world.
Two is that whatever the hell freedoms like association, speech, assembly, media and such mean today, they run through FB, Google, etc. In parts of the world where FB have the dominant free internet deal, even moreso. It's their structures and rules that matter. Say a politician from medium-sized country X is banned from FB or Twitter, this can seriously affect their chances. Same for any kind of activist group, political party, union etc. FB policy people don't necessarily even know the language of the country. Where there are tensions between democratic rights and the new world, the tension is usually highest where a tech giant is.
Three is back to one. There is an interconnectedness here that's hard to stop. We have a digital democracy. It's young, but it's here. Whatever democracy is, happens digitally now.
I hope this isn't cynical, but I've kind of become accelerationist on this. Let's play this game. Force Google's policy courts to be public, maybe.