Exactly! I should be able to join or leave groups discussing any sort of topic or view point I like on social media platforms without having my options limited or my views censored.
If I don't want to associate with someone I can unfollow them, unsubscribe from their subreddit, block them etc.
What matters is that it's my choice to do that. We shouldn't have that choice made for us by the people running online platforms.
If I make an online space (subreddit, FB group, etc) about a specific topic (eg hiking) and some clown comes in and repeatedly posts about unrelated politics, that person should be moderated away.
So me and my buddy Tim are going to come to your house and talk about how much you suck.
Autoexec: But this is MY private property.
So yes, So are online platforms. They can kick you out at any time they want and you can pound sand. If you don't like it set up own server online to freely associate. You don't get to demand their resources. You don't get access to their network.
> So me and my buddy Tim are going to come to your house and talk about how much you suck.
My house isn't a global social media platform. It's a private residence. Different rules. It's not that small private online groups shouldn't exist either, but we absolutely should expect major social media platforms to uphold free speech ideals and allow people to speak without excessive censorship. We should seek out and support platforms that do this and shun those that do not.
I have no need for another gatekeeper deciding for me what I'm allowed to see and hear based on their personal ideology. A platform like that isn't serving me. If someone wants to create platform as a service for others, that platform should empower the users it serves to find and engage with the content they want and block/ignore what they aren't interested in.
I hope conservatives that use the "social media is a public square" argument will finally approach logical consistency and call for a publicly-owned, federally managed Mastodon site that upholds all the free speech they think people should have.
I think morally, social media platforms should work to stomp out nation-state disinformation campaigns, tell professional trolls to fuck off, and can spam and illegal content. But as opposed to you, I'm not convinced they should be legally required to do anything but the last item on that list.
> If someone wants to create platform as a service for others, that platform should empower the users it serves to find and engage with the content they want and block/ignore what they aren't interested in.
If someone wants to create a platform as a service for others, they can do whatever the hell they want.
> I hope conservatives that use the "social media is a public square" argument will finally approach logical consistency and call for a publicly-owned, federally managed Mastodon site that upholds all the free speech they think people should have.
Not a conservative, but I support free speech and I'd definitely like such an instance. What point are you trying to make?
The stereotypical conservative supports the right of businesses to do pretty much whatever the hell they want, but gets mad when Twitter or Facebook tries to moderate disinformation and hate speech. But they also hate government being useful or providing public services to anyone, so they would likely oppose a government-funded "public square" platform. And surely, they would be upset when that platform inevitably has to moderate hate speech and veiled threats and trolls, who would then have even more credence to complain about "censorship" since the government would be doing it, causing even more shit.
Basically, I am saying conservatives have conflicting views on the rights of businesses to conduct themselves when they try to say Twitter must let them say nazis are cool and vaccines don't work.
> think morally, social media platforms should work to stomp out nation-state disinformation campaigns, tell professional trolls to fuck off,
If you think about this for a bit you'll realize how impossible this actually is. The professional chaos monkeys are going to play both sides so you always loose.
Please show me where these different rules are codified? It's a bullshit argument and you know it. Social media does not make sense globally. You cannot appease both the US government, conglomerate of EU governments, and the Chinese government without being in conflict of what one of them wants. 'free speech' cannot exist with current national laws in most places and would be banned at DNS level, with the more authoritarian governments banning it at the transit level.
You again want access to someone else's network and software you have absolutely zero right to. You use these services under surveillance capitalism without paying directly yourself and make demands of them. Their platform owes you less than nothing and we see this codified in the TOS's that state exactly that.
Disconnect from them completely and take their power away. Run your own services and control what is said on your own network. Demanding that someone else do it is insanity.
> Please show me where these different rules are codified?
Well, for starters, there are laws where I live against billions of people showing up in my home even though billions of people show up on social media platforms. the rules for residential housing and social media platforms are different just as their intended uses are different.
> Social media does not make sense globally.
And yet here we are... on a global social media platform. It somehow works.
> You cannot appease both the US government, conglomerate of EU governments, and the Chinese government without being in conflict of what one of them wants.
social media platforms shouldn't concern themselves with what every government on earth wants. An online service should (generally speaking anyway, this is obviously an oversimplification) only worry about the law says in the country they're located in and it should fall on users to make sure what they post doesn't violate local laws. Some governments won't like that and may block your platform but that's a problem for that country's citizens to sort out with their repressive government.
If every person and service on the internet had to concern itself with the laws of every nation on Earth the internet itself would be impossible.
> You again want access to someone else's network and software you have absolutely zero right to. You use these services under surveillance capitalism without paying directly yourself and make demands of them. Their platform owes you less than nothing and we see this codified in the TOS's that state exactly that.
Within certain legal limitations, a platform has every right to be as restrictive as it wants. It can allow only connections from certain IP ranges. It could only allow people to sign up if they pay them. It can refuse to allow anyone to post anything but the number "8" if it wants to.
What a platform has a legal right to do, and what it ought to do are very very
different things. I'm not arguing that a platform MUST under the law allow anyone to post anything they want. I'm stating that a major social media platform SHOULD allow people to discuss the topics that interest them freely and openly. It SHOULD avoid censoring people for ideological reasons.
We, as users of social media, should make demands of the platforms we use. They exist to serve us. We provide the entirety of their content, which those platforms get and publish without ever paying us directly. It is OUR content that drives the traffic and engagement they see. We should reward platforms that follow free speech ideals and enable us to discuss what we like and we should shun platforms that censor us and limit what we're able to see and do.
> Disconnect from them completely and take their power away. Run your own services and control what is said on your own network.
That's the problem with a global internet isn't it. Let's say I do decide to create my own social media platform. I still need to depend on others to host my domain and my servers. I depend on payment processors to pay for those things. I depend on every other ISP to carry traffic to/from my IP. I depend on protocols and software written by other people. You cannot have a social media platform on the internet without depending on others. At every step in the chain countless people have the power to censor things they don't like. It's better for everyone when they don't. Censorship should be heavily discouraged everywhere, but especially online.
> My house isn't a global social media platform...Different rules...we absolutely should expect major social media platforms to uphold...
How exactly is this different from you deciding that all the popular kids at school must be friends with you, that churches have to welcome you into their pulpits to preach, and that Random House has to publish the book you wrote?
Neither the world, nor other people, exist to meet your needs. Nor to implement your professed value system.
> How exactly is this different from you deciding that all the popular kids at school must be friends with you
If we're running with the school/friends analogy the problem we have now is that schools are preventing us from becoming friends with all the popular kids at school. Schools shouldn't control who we are able to be friends with at all. Schools should enable kids to gather together and form friendships with the kids they like, and also allow kids to avoid harassment from kids they aren't interested in without kicking those kids out of school because other kids might want to be their friends.
Social media platforms shouldn't censor what topics we're able to discuss or decide who we can talk to. They should provide a place for users go gather and discuss what they want, while providing a means to unfriend/hide/unsubscribe from things users aren't interested in (while still allowing others to see those things if they want to)
> that churches have to welcome you into their pulpits to preach
If a church puts a giant welcome sign up that invites members to come up to the pulpit to preach, and I find that idea valuable they surely have a right to turn me away for arbitrary reasons, but that probably makes them an asshole and I'd look for another church. A book publisher doesn't have to accept my manuscript, but a world where the only books that can get published are ones that support a certain ideology would be dangerous and undesirable.
Social media platforms can exist to serve the needs of the people, or they can exist to be self-serving. The more platforms that exist to serve the people by providing a space for them to discuss what they like without forcing them to see content they aren't interested in the better off we all are.
We should support social media platforms that exist to meet our needs and we should reject social media platforms that fail to. We, as a people, are best served by social media platforms that respect the ideals of free speech. Online platforms would rather dictate what we're allowed to see and hear, but while that sort of self-serving behavior is common it is also increasingly harmful as the influence of a platform grows and as it becomes increasingly difficult for less repressive alternatives to exist.
> Social media platforms can exist to serve the needs of the people, or they can exist to be self-serving
Why do you think these are the only two possibilities?
Why can’t a social media company exist to serve the needs of only some people? Or to serve the needs of everyone, while also serving its own needs, in a balance decided by the company’s owners?
Then I would assume that you're screwed. With that said, there's a regulator on IP allocations and their may be something doable on the governance level to revoke said IPs if you're not playing nice with the rest of the world.
As for the actual server resources, you have not established where you have any legal right to them.
With that said we typically treat transport (phone lines, network connectivity) different than applications, and absolve the carrier of the traffic from the content of the traffic itself. With non-transport hosting it gets more complicated quickly.
But until the time we adjust our laws (and good luck with that) it's going to be difficult to nullify property rights and freedom of association of the property owners over the users of the services.
TL;DR (I did but very quickly) the vast majority of for profit entities do not give one shit about free speech. If you think any online forum does you are in conflict with all evidence presented so far.
But it is an important point not to have just one site like Twitter or Reddit or even HN so we can go to one the competitors and complain about the former without angering the later.
If I don't want to associate with someone I can unfollow them, unsubscribe from their subreddit, block them etc.
What matters is that it's my choice to do that. We shouldn't have that choice made for us by the people running online platforms.