There can be. There's no legal right to free speech on social media platforms, but a platform can (and I'll argue should) support free speech.
I think if a platform wants to not support free speech, that's a fair choice to make, but as a user I want them to communicate that in abundance. I don't expect the Disney Club to support sex workers describing their autobiographies, but I would expect them to not pretend they are a bastion of free speech or a platform for the world.
A DDOS is an attack because it removes resources. Other people having opinions that disagree with yours isn't removing resources from you.
Whether it's newspapers or a town square, there have always been people who have been loud. Loud does not mean right. It also doesn't mean you need to muzzle the people who are loud.
1 person can be millions of people online. Based on your response I don’t get the perception you understand the gravity of the problem we are facing.
But the platforms are pretending there is. Not necessarily overtly, but implicitly in their guidance they give to Wall Street. If Facebook explicitly came out and said "Facebook - Where You Can Share Any Silicon-Valley-Liberal Approved Viewpoint And Not Much Else" they'd have to accompany that with guidance indicating future shrinkage.
I realize a lot of people here in the bubble may not realize this, but it's not "the entire world minus some weirdos in my country" that don't fit into that. It's most of the world, except some of the US and some of Europe and misc folk elsewhere that add up to much less than those two. You can't both actively enforce this ideology that perhaps 10% of the world agrees to while projecting growth into the 75% range.
The President was elected by a lot of people who currently have Facebook accounts, and a lot of them are still planning to vote for him again. If you declare that political viewpoint verboten, well, let's just say you're probably going to get a lot more significantly less "voluntary" resignations from Facebook once the money stops coming in because the eyeballs left.
Why? If I'm running a platform, I would run it with my personal values which might or might not be the same as what's considered moral or right by the eyes of law. As long as my values are not directly illegal, I won't compromise on the values nor let anyone else use my product or platform for that.
I think it should be allowed to take a moral stand, which is why your freedom of speech has nothing to do with social media and I'm glad about it as well.
Corporate monopolies over the discourse. Though it wouldn't be "the government", why would should the massive power of a $billion/trillion corporations have no check?
What recourse does the average citizen have to abuse from these entities? Think of all the ways Google or Facebook could screw you over or even shape the social/political narrative. This should be a free-for-all?
"Just build your own global social platform"... yea, not possible. In the mean time, they can abuse their power while you get up and running, or never do.
Think of it another way. If the government is constrained, but massive corporations (who pay off politicians) aren't, doesn't this clearly seem an end-around for "government" to encourage private companies to do the censorship they want, enact favorable policies for them in return, and the powerless individual, or small groups suffer similar consequences as if the government themselves censored them? It's an easy hack for the 1st amendment.
maybe the network effect on a billion-person scale? the fact that they are monopolies with billions at their disposal to acquire or crush any competition? I can keep going
Sorry but it's not so simple. If you follow that line of logic, should an owner of a restaurant be able to discriminate (race, sexual orientation, national origin, etc.) against customers, based on their "personal values"? This line of thought leads right back to the era of segregation.
You already cannot discriminate against a customer because of certain characteristics of who they are (race, orientation, etc). You can however kick someone out of your restaurant for what they say, how they act, or what they do, similar to being banned or fact checked on private social media platforms.
> "You already cannot discriminate against a customer because of certain characteristics of who they are (race, orientation, etc)."
Those laws are relatively recent. By your very own argument, doing all those things was perfectly A-OK before the laws that barred discrimination went into place. Oops.
Usually when people are talking about Twitter endorsing free speech, they are not asking for a law, but moreso asking Twitter to do so out of principle.
I don't like these arguments because they seem to end up revolving around one's interpretation of 'free speech' when both sides are really in agreement.
No one can define what "free speech" really is in clear, unbiased terms. China and the USA have vastly different interpretations of free speech. Which do you engineer your platform to support?
Will you continue to use moderators? If speech is truly free, there will be no need for content moderators. And yet as technologists we know that as soon as moderators stop doing their job, a significant amount of questionable or uncomfortable type of content will come in.
Whereas civil rights have a basic coalition of countries that support a finite number of things to protect, namely protection from discrimination on grounds such as race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, color, age, political affiliation, ethnicity, religion, and disability;
I think if a platform wants to not support free speech, that's a fair choice to make, but as a user I want them to communicate that in abundance. I don't expect the Disney Club to support sex workers describing their autobiographies, but I would expect them to not pretend they are a bastion of free speech or a platform for the world.