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by threatofrain
1993 days ago
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But on other side of free exchange of ideas we have this idea of cancellation, which results from freedom of speech + freedom of association. As part of freedom of speech, we can also use that speech to narrate moral perspectives of whether some speech is good or bad. |
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Some people have made laws outlawing discrimination based on some of those characteristics. This is a kludge, with all kinds of annoying implications.
The classic argument in favor of unconditional freedom of association is, "If some companies are refusing to deal with some group of people for stupid reasons, then they will get outcompeted by other companies who don't have such prejudices and can therefore hire cheaper workers or charge higher prices."
This argument works less well when certain extremely valuable services (some would call them "essential") are provided by a small group of huge companies, and entry by new competitors is very difficult.
The solution I would favor is reducing those barriers to entry. Ideally by repealing laws that I think are unjustified in the first place.
In particular, for these social networks with their network effects, but also have something that sucks (be it "they use dark patterns", "they ban people for bad reasons", "their 'feed' algorithm is bad"), why can't someone create a "better network" that acts as a new interface to the old network, but also has better features or has additional members that aren't part of the old network?
My impression is that it would be "against the site's terms of service", and there may also be allegations of copyright violation, and that anyone who made such a thing would eventually get sued. Well, could we change the law so that the site would have no standing to get sued?
I think that, fundamentally, the principle would be, "If users can use a site through the site's interface, then they can also use it through someone else's interface. The site is free to try to detect the difference and block people who do this, but cannot get the law to punish anyone." So the site can either play cat-and-mouse with those developing better interfaces, or they can improve their own interface enough to keep their customers; in terms of banning people, they could either fix their banning practices, or just gamble that those who care enough to use the alternate interface are a sufficiently small group.