[naasking]

> Facebook is a corporation not a government agency and they have the right to control their own products.

It's always fascinating how quick people are to jump on the free market bandwagon when it suits their ends. Free speech protections also sometimes apply to privately managed public spaces, like malls.

> These individuals are free to shout their ideas in the public square.

Facebook is arguably the new public square, which is precisely my point.

[schmidtc]

It's always fascinating how quick people are to jump on the slippery slope bandwagon when it suits their ends.

Your suggestion that privately held malls are subject to free speech protections is misleading. See Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner. There are counter examples of course, be these apply only in niche situations.

Regardless, Facebook is not a public space. It's very much a private space. Suggesting that Facebook be treated as a public space is a pretty radical idea.

[naasking]

> Your suggestion that privately held malls are subject to free speech protections is misleading. See Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner.

Not misleading at all, I said it sometimes applies, which is true because some states recognize it as a right and some don't.

> Regardless, Facebook is not a public space. It's very much a private space.

A private space that anyone and everyone can freely access, and are, in fact, encouraged to frequent as much as humanly possible, and arguably has become intrinsic to the daily life of many, perhaps most, Americans. In fact, it's probably one of their primary means of socializing with friends and family, and definitely a medium for political discourse. Arguing it's a private space seems increasingly flimsy, frankly.

[naasking]

> Regardless, Facebook is not a public space. It's very much a private space. Suggesting that Facebook be treated as a public space is a pretty radical idea.

Further precedent I recently came across suggests it's not so radical after all:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packingham_v._North_Carolina

Unanimous decision by the Supreme Court actually called social media the public square.

[drak0n1c]

Are there no constitutional protections if you live in a company town? Facebook is effectively the company town of mass real identity to real identity communication. One of the Net Neutrality arguments championed by the EFF was that private oligopolies being allowed to do whatever they want with their own property constituted a threat to free speech.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/attack-net-neutrality-...

[rainonmoon]

> Facebook is arguably the new public square, which is precisely my point.

Hey, I think Clay Shirky wants his point from 2008 back. Since we actually have more than 10 years to have reflected on this idea, we can now see it's patently nonsense, given that the idea of the "public square" doesn't encompass harvesting the conversations which happen therein, aggressive tailored marketing, and leaking of personal information from everyone who crosses through. Facebook capitalises on the notion of a public square. That does not make it one.

[naasking]

> given that the idea of the "public square" doesn't encompass harvesting the conversations which happen therein, aggressive tailored marketing, and leaking of personal information from everyone who crosses through.

Oh, so marketers aren't allowed to poll, film or listen in on conversations that happen out in public? In fact that's perfectly legal.

> Facebook capitalises on the notion of a public square. That does not make it one.

And free speech protections also need not be limited to overly strict definitions of public square. The question these types of controversies should be raising is whether free speech protections should extend to services like Facebook.

Facebook is a private space that anyone and everyone can freely access, and are, in fact, encouraged to frequent as much as humanly possible, and arguably has become intrinsic to the daily life of many, perhaps most, Americans. In fact, it's probably one of their primary means of socializing with friends and family, and definitely a medium for political discourse. Arguing it's a purely private space seems increasingly flimsy, frankly.

[schmidtc]

Going back to your slippery slope argument, where does it end?

Is HN not a public forum as well? Are my constitutional rights being violated when a moderator deletes something a post here on HN?

What about all those shadow banned users, are they entitled to their free speech on any website that allows comments?

[naasking]

Firstly, I don't think I ever made a slippery slope argument. That seems to be something you've read into my comments somehow.

Secondly, any legal distinction is established via a multi-part test. As a first pass, I would ask:

1. Is the site open and particularly, targeted to the general public?

2. Does the site enjoy widespread use by the general public?

3. Is the site intended to foster open discussion on any topic? For instance, the public itself drives most conversation on the platform.

This isn't necessarily exhaustive, just a first pass. HN is targeted at a technical audience (although its open to anyone), it's typically used only by this subset of the general public, and its content is narrowly focused on technical subject matter, so it would fail two parts of this test.

Facebook definitely passes all three qualifications, Twitter doesn't have as widespread use by the general public but it continues to grow.

> What about all those shadow banned users, are they entitled to their free speech on any website that allows comments?

Shadow banning seems like a poor idea. Terms of service that encourage civil discussion are perfectly fine, and violators should get an explicit and public timeout, never a ban. I've toyed with the idea that repeat offences trigger exponentially increasing timeouts.

Judging violations of ToS should be a transparent process. Something like jury duty as a term of using a service also seems like it might be a workable idea. Corporations have their own motives for censorship, primarily profit motives to draw in advertisers, and so they have incentives to bury anything even remotely controversial and are not incentivized to evaluate anything "fairly".