[mundo]

This strikes me as a timely and important sentiment.

When we demand that Twitter ban anti-semitic tweets, or that Cloudflare block white supremacist websites, or that Youtube deplatform Alex Jones, we are taking the power to limit speech (which the founders felt was too important to be wielded by the government) and handing it to middle managers at software companies. The de jure rule is "Freedom of Speech shall not be infringed" but the de facto rule is "Don't say anything that would upset the advertisers."

This seems like a Bad Idea (tm) but until/unless a decentralized Mastodon/Scuttlebutt style platform gets traction, I don't know what the solution is. It's a natural result of relying on private apps as a primary method of communication.

[charlesism]

    > we are taking the power to limit speech (which the
    > founders felt was too important to be wielded by the 
    > government) 

Someone spray-paints a swastika on your car. Do you think the founders would mind if you painted it over?

[mundo]

My point was that American free speech is not based on the belief that all speech is good or that no speech is bad. It's based on the idea that there's no one we trust to distinguish the good speech from the bad speech. Pointing out examples of obviously-bad speech doesn't disprove this, because it's not the existence of bad speech that's in question, it's the exact location of the borderline separating good from bad.

[manfredo]

It'd more like Ford trying to ban people from putting Hilary or Trump bumper stickers on their cars. In your scenario, an individual had their property vandalized. That is not comparable to platforms censoring certain views.

[charlesism]

    > That is not comparable to platforms 
    > censoring certain views.

Historically, it has been. If someone had sent a letter to The Pennsylvania Chronicle, containing a recipe for baking a turd pie, I don't think Ben Franklin would have felt the need to print it.

Facebook, Twitter, Google... they're the ones footing the bill to host their users' content.

[manfredo]

The Pennsylvania Chronicle isn't a platform. It's a publisher. Readers' letters getting published is the exception, not the norm.

The ideas discussed here would be more like a telecoms provider specifically refusing to do business with someone because they disagree with their politics.

[mundo]

What's the difference? AFAICT the idea that when a website gets big enough it becomes de facto infrastructure and gets governed by different rules is pure imagination.

[basch]

There are rules that treat telecoms differently precisely because there is opportunity for market failure.

The argument is, that some software companies have crossed into becoming a telecom like entity. A market failure exists, where consumers may need protecting.

Obviously, current laws dont treat facebook, google, or microsoft that way.

Do we feel the same way about gmail/outlook starting to censor emails that google/microsoft dont approve of?

[forgottenpass]

Do you think they would mind if robots owned and operated by Ford patrolled the city at night and painted over swastikas on neo-Nazi's cars?

[dwighttk]

Even Mastodon instances can get in on the banning.

[mundo]

I'm a lot more sanguine about communities muting someone because they don't like that person than about companies muting someone because it's profitable to do so.

You can hypothesize a future in which Mastodon gets very popular, and in which a single for-profit node or a coordinated group of such nodes monopolize it and end up wielding censorship power similar to traditional centralized social media sites, but that's not what it's designed to do and there's no reason to assume it's a fait accompli.

[dwighttk]

It's already happened https://mastodon.cloud/@wilw/100635779449174251

[bilbo0s]

Yep.

In the end, even most of these hypothetical distributed social network instances would have the de facto rule:

>Don't say anything that would upset the advertisers...

[51lver]

What advertisers? I haven't seen any on mastodon. In fact, I think the network would be actively hostile to their presence.

[bilbo0s]

We're talking about a world where the distributed social network instances replaces the facebooks and twitters of the world.

And be assured, in such a world, the advertisers would move to the distributed social network instances.

[mundo]

All I really want from a social network is to be able to share small files with my friends and see small files that my friends have shared with me. It's convenient to have a for-profit handle all the hard parts (checking whether people are who say they are, storing the stuff when one of us is offline, etc) but it's not an actual requirement. Especially if some portion of the members of the network have a $5 VPS, which is certain to be true.

(As an aside, it mystifies me that some VPS provider hasn't already built this. A FOSS decentralized social network that requires a small dedicated server would be like a whalefall for that industry. If I were a PM at Amazon, I would have a team contributing 'store my files on AWS instead of my phone' to Scuttlebutt right now, and ditto for every other promising-looking decentralized social app.)