[joshuamorton]

> "the game has changed" after thousands of years of human history proving it hasn't.

But it clearly has. Only in the past 5 year did it become possible for one guy in Romania to pose as a small town Ohio news agency (or 4) and spread nonsense to millions of people.

Do you feel that academic journals violate the principle of free speech? If not, why is what facebook is doing any different?

[wooter]

Benjamin Franklin, a runaway, started his own newspaper - as did his brother - which were called far worse than "fake news" in an "objective" way by the british.

[joshuamorton]

What's your point? I doubt anyone argued that the British East India Company needed to act as a distributor for that paper.

[wooter]

my point is that anyone who explicitly refused to reprint Benjamin Franklin's writings on the realities of the US because they were declared fake and treasonous deserved to be called censorious and biased against freedom of speech. Mind you, more than a couple of his articles were actual fake news meant to stoke discussion on British policies.

[smhost]

But the fear of censorship is that truth will be obscured. If free speech is being abused to do what we're afraid censorship will do, doesn't that create a contradiction in your logic?

And to be clear, what we mean by "fake news" are stories that are demonstrably false with incorrect information that's never corrected even when it's revealed to be false. We're _not_ talking about what Trump calls "fake news," by which he means any narrative that doesn't paint him in a positive light.

[wooter]

> If free speech is being abused to do what we're afraid censorship will do, doesn't that create a contradiction in your logic?

Irrelevant. Limiting speech doesn't solve that contradiction, it only guarantees the worse outcome. More speech solves your proposed "contradiction" just fine.

[smhost]

That seems like a distinction without a difference. Would you be happier with a system that pushed disproportionately more "true" speech at the vulnerable (ignorant) demographic?

[joshuamorton]

So to be clear here, it was the British government declaring his speech treasonous and attempting to censor him?

If so then yes I agree. Government censorship is unacceptable. But that's not really comparable to private entities censoring on their own private whims.

[majewsky]

For all intents and purposes, Facebook is the government of a large part of the internet.

[joshuamorton]

What does this sentence mean?

In what way is Facebook at all comparable to a government? Is there some social contract that all people are entered into with Facebook? If so, what are the rights and responsibilities of that contract? And do note here, I'm talking about an implied social contract, not an actual contract (like an EULA).

What large portion of the internet do they "govern"? As best as I can tell you're arguing that any sufficiently large entity is essentially a government. That's ridiculous. So please, please explain what you do mean.