[joshuamorton]

An alternative framing:

1. Republican party threatens teach industry with heavy regulation if they censor to the degree that the tech industry wishes to.

2. Republican party looses power.

3. Major companies in the tech industry do what they wanted to do the whole time.

At what point is (1) a first amendment issue? The government shouldn't pressure private companies to do things that violate those groups first amendment rights.

[travisoneill1]

This would be an issue, but I dispute point 1 because the leaders of the tech industry would very much like to wash their hands of politics and be seen as neutral platforms so they can save money on moderation. Most of these same platforms pretty much had an anything goes unless it's illegal attitude from the time they were started until a few years ago when they started getting a lot of political blowback and blame for "helping Trump" by not moderating more.

[esoterica]

They can't sell ads next to terroristic threats or other forms of extremism. So they would absolutely need to moderate even without political pressure.

[joshuamorton]

> This would be an issue, but I dispute point 1 because the leaders of the tech industry would very much like to wash their hands of politics and be seen as neutral platforms so they can save money on moderation.

No, they'd like to be approachable by the broadest groups possible (or really the broadest set of ad-viewing groups possible). Calls to violence are unappealing to most people. This is the reason unmoderated platforms fail: people don't enjoy spending time on them. To be palatable to normal people, the sites need moderation, which they do, to appeal to users.

> Most of these same platforms pretty much had an anything goes unless it's illegal attitude from the time they were started until a few years ago when they started getting a lot of political blowback and blame for "helping Trump" by not moderating more.

This is completely untrue. Here's one of the first Trump related posts I can find: https://www.fastcompany.com/3054611/when-does-hate-speech-cr..., notably "Though it apparently violated Facebook’s own internal guidelines, Trump’s video was not removed".

They've been, since the beginning, getting blowback for making exceptions for politicians instead of evenhandedly applying their policies. What you've seen over the past 5 years is simply the platforms growing in influence (and thus controversy).

The act of not moderating trump when he violated existing policies was an attempt to appear neutral to conservative users, while actually biasing to more loosely moderate a particular conservative. I can only hope platforms have learned from their mistakes.

[travisoneill1]

So why didn't they crackdown on this type of content back in the Obama administration when the threat of political blowback also wasn't there?

[joshuamorton]

What type of content?

[fallingknife]

The same type of right wing nonsense they are going after now. This type of stuff was all over Reddit/FB/Twitter back then. (Remember all the nutty Obama conspiracy theories?) Surely advertisers back then didn't want to appear next to that content anymore than they want to now.

[joshuamorton]

It's been a while, but I can't say I recall calls to violence, much less ones that were acted on, back then. Of course, I wasn't paying as much attention. Birtherism (which was trump led for a while) was lighter weight than q and the more recent stuff.