[throwaway160303]

The government still is the only entity that can silence dissenters. All the entities you listed are limited to merely kicking you off their platform. Facebook can't 404 your posts on Reddit, and none of them and none of them can stop you from standing on the sidewalk with a sandwich board.

Saying that social media platforms should be subject to "scrutiny" (which is pretty vague and non-actionable), or are somehow beholden to public opinion, is nonsense. They're beholden to users, at most. And it's not like Google shut down the blog of of someone saying "GOOG's target price should be about $12". Let's see how much backlash they gets from their users over this, ha.

[Karunamon]

The government still is the only entity that can silence dissenters. All the entities you listed are limited to merely kicking you off their platform.

From the standpoint of the one being silenced, what's the difference?

The fact of the matter is, the Googles and the Facebooks and the Reddits of the world hold a tremendous and frightening amount of control over public discourse and public opinion. I feel less and less comfortable with them wielding that power unaccountably.

You know how we hold companies to a higher and more stringent standard when they reach monopoly status in a market? Perhaps it's time to look into something similar for large social media sites.

[daveFNbuck]

The difference is that he can easily get his blog running again on another platform. If the government were silencing him, he couldn't do that.

[emn13]

That's plainly false.

- There are time (and money) consuming technical issues in migrating to another platform, and with the dominance of software-as-a-service platforms, it's often not even possible. Can you migration comments? Is the date going to be set correctly? Can you keep your current layout and images? So even on a purely technical level, you can't "easily" get your blog running again on another platform.

- Access to content: I'm hoping he has backups. Of course, if you developed the content on-platform, it may be nebulous what exactly you need backups of. E.g., did you think to include all the images+comments? If his account was deleted, he may simply not have all the data anymore.

- Network effects (this is the big one): a web site isn't just a bunch of bits; it's a place people visit. Being down for any considerable length of time means those visitors will drift away; the attention you've gained will be partially lost permanently. And that's the best-case scenario. In many cases, you cannot keep url intact, in which case even after you restore service, people won't find you. In a very real way, companies like google and especially facebook own your social connections to others - so even if you manage to find another platform, they're not going to give you your contacts back.

E.g. if you switch phone provider, you may keep your telefone number (here, at least, even against the will of the original provider). If you migrate from facebook, you cannot keep your profile url. That's probably a bad thing for society; but it's hardly surprising companies aren't dying to prevent lock-in. Even google, which nominally allows extracting your data, the most valuable assets cannot be transferred (not to mention that the data extraction process results can't be trivially imported elsewhere because there is no standard for these types of things).

It's absurd to suggest the user has much practical freedom when it comes to switching communication platforms. Any freedom he does have tends to mean he must have had the foresight to use only a small subset of the available features, including onerous restrictions such as limited social interaction or interaction via unusual means. More realistically, if you switch platforms, you're likely to lose readers.

[cinquemb]

I think your comment is just pointing out that freedom isn't free, there are always trade-offs to submitting oneself to the will to any platform.

If "practical freedom", means to get all the best parts of a platform while expecting that you can do whatever you want, then it's not surprising that some will be shocked when such costs suddenly come due having had ignored the writing on the wall. Although most never explore the boundaries of such to make a difference in distinction to them, such "practical freedom" never truly exists in anything we do.

I learned the "hard" way, bootstrapped a company that crowd sourced data seeded from "open" graph, only to get hit with a c & d and "my" facebook used account banned indefinitely 4 years ago. I can still create multi accounts and use them, but I don't think I'll be naive enough to use them in the same way as I did "my" main used account and not expect similar results as before. And if this is related to CP, its not like this is the first time ever someone has been censored by a private entity for this on the internet prior to this account becoming another stat in that book, and considering how general society sees these things, I'd be more surprised if the author is really surprised or just upset because it finally happened to them.

[daveFNbuck]

It's false if my point were that he wasn't being inconvenienced. My point is that he wasn't being silenced. If he wants to speak, he can put his voice on another platform. With all the news around the destruction of his blog, he might even reach more people than before if he's quick about it.

[rangibaby]

That's like "free speech zones" at protests, the same thing as being silenced in practice.

[rodgerd]

> The fact of the matter is, the Googles and the Facebooks and the Reddits of the world hold a tremendous and frightening amount of control over public discourse and public opinion.

They're not even as powerful as the editor of one of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, never mind the man himself.

[pessimizer]

I never read any articles from Murdoch's newspapers unless they're surfaced to me by one of those services. Do you buy a Murdoch paper, or do you get a link on Google News, your Facebook feed, or your favorite Reddit subs? I'm pretty sure I'm a 90% case, not unique.

Of course, it's all just rich people controlling the discourse. Murdoch can buy pieces of Google, Facebook, and Reddit too.

Now, they just get to micromanage it. Micro-censorship, Micro-surveillance.

[rodgerd]

> I'm pretty sure I'm a 90% case,

I think you're in a profound bubble if you don't imagine Murdoch has vastly more control over public discourse than Google.

[Karunamon]

Gonna disagree with you there. It's the same kind of power, just with a different (sometimes overlapping) set of demographics. Facebook is one of the most used websites in the entire world. Just the simple act of hiding one story to promote another one changes what millions upon millions of people will see and talk about.