> Couldn't someone have said the same thing of the printing press in the year 1440?
Yes, and they did. Society went through a period of disruption and experimentation and came out on the other side with new institutions and cultural norms.
The same is happening here. That suggests what's considered acceptable for pamphleteers and public speakers may not be acceptable on an auto-curating micro-targeting real-time nonlocal platform like Facebook.
There was a balance between free speech and the common interest and it's been disrupted. Holding as absolute policies and norms from mass broadcasting in the era of social media is delusional.
The question would then be whether the owner of a particular printing press should be required to publish materials widely considered false and offensive.
They have done so, and it has been argued by people worried about Social Media that the introduction of the printing press directly led to the Protestant-Catholic schism and all the associated bloodshed.
The printing press lowered the cost of making copies considerably but it was still not cheap. Options for widespread distribution of the copies you made were very limited. On top of that the literacy rate was only around 30%.
You have to get rid of those kinds of barriers before you can get anything like what we are seeing today, where some crazy idea with no evidence to support it can quickly spread far and wide.
Yes, and they did. Society went through a period of disruption and experimentation and came out on the other side with new institutions and cultural norms.
The same is happening here. That suggests what's considered acceptable for pamphleteers and public speakers may not be acceptable on an auto-curating micro-targeting real-time nonlocal platform like Facebook.
There was a balance between free speech and the common interest and it's been disrupted. Holding as absolute policies and norms from mass broadcasting in the era of social media is delusional.