[dilap]

A side-effect of actions like this is it makes it much easier for governments themselves to justify censorship or internet restrictions.

See, e.g., this interview by Der Spiegel w/ the president of Uganda:

> DER SPIEGEL: Observers complain that they have been denied access to social media.

> Museveni: If you're talking about the all-powerful rulers of Facebook, I can tell you it was the other way around. Facebook blocked my party's accounts. Is that freedom of expression? If the people at Facebook think they're silencing me, they're wrong.

> DER SPIEGEL: It wasn't just about Facebook. The entire internet was blocked in Uganda for days.

> Museveni: That was done for security reasons. The internet was misused to stir up trouble. The opposition spread misinformation about the election results. The block has long since been lifted.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-ug...

[notahacker]

Governments have been justifying internet restrictions since before Facebook was an idea. If Facebook had a policy of absolute tolerance of political speech in Uganda it would have been just as easy a segue to "security reasons... misinformation".

Even the developed and democratic world doesn't look to the US, still less US corporations, as an actual inspiration for its policies on speech.

[dilap]

Sure, there has always been & always will be a tug-of-war, but I think the dominant social media institutions quite blatently engaging in political censorship certainly has to be a help to those tugging for the censorship side.

It's true without FB's actions, Museveni could've immediately started with "security reasons & dsinformation", but that would've been a far weaker answer.

> Even the developed and democratic world doesn't look to the US, still less US corporations, as an actual inspiration for its policies on speech.

The trend everywhere, it seems to me, is to look to China for inspiration on speech policies.

[notahacker]

A dictatorial leader who has censored the press in his country since before the internet existed, like the dictators before him, does not need "help" in justifying censorship.

> The trend everywhere, it seems to me, is to look to China for inspiration on speech policies.

And yet there is more access to less censored media in most parts of the world than at any point in human history.

[dilap]

The question is, if the giant US internet companies acted more in alignment w/ the speech values the US professes to believe in (at least when convenient), would that contribute to those values being more widely adopted?

You're taking the position that no, it wouldn't make any difference, other entities will just do what they were going to do anyway.

But I don't think the US example is entirely without influence. Eventually policies reflect beliefs which reflect narratives; the narrative of the internet as a non-partisan enhancer of freedom becomes much harder to sustain when its major sites are clearly picking sides.

> And yet there is more access to less censored media in most parts of the world than at any point in human history.

Because of the internet, of course.

Now, in reaction, we are seeing rising censorship (since the internet suddenly made speech much more available and powerful). Whether we'll end up having more or less uncensored access to information ultimately is still unknown, I think.

[notahacker]

> The question is, if the giant US internet companies acted more in alignment w/ the speech values the US professes to believe in (at least when convenient), would that contribute to those values being more widely adopted?

No. Why would people and parties who have journalists arrested and tortured become true believers in freedom of political speech because a foreign website allows it? Big Tech's social media actually has skewed quite close to US censorship norms (i.e. you can censor anything you like but be very careful if it claims to be political) for most of its existence and the results are not something most liberal democracies see as admirable, never mind paternalistic ultraconservative countries or outright dictatorships.

> Now, in reaction, we are seeing rising censorship (since the internet suddenly made speech much more available and powerful)

It's not "rising censorship" because a couple of companies decided EULA policies they'd enforced with varying degrees of consistency against everyone else since the beginning also applied to mouthpieces of the POTUS or the Burmese military. Censorship has been around everywhere forever, and claims a website which has long censored people for not using their real name or showing a nipple has stepped into unacceptable censorship when reasons for bans were political violence is a very narrow, US-centric concept of "rising censorship" that apart from anything else is highly unlikely to convince most cultures that "rising censorship" would be a bad thing.

[dilap]

Absent the ability to the split the universe and do a proper experiment, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about likely wider impacts of places like FB engaging in political censorship.

If you read carefully, you'll notice I'm not making claims one way or the other about the goodness of the censorship. I think a rising demand for censorship is a predictable reaction to technology enhancing the power of speech.

I would not say trend of speech restriction is limited to social media giants. E.g., the US is attempting to extradite and prosecute Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, which, if successful, will, in the words of the NY Times, "open the door to criminalizing activities that are crucial to American investigative journalists who write about national security matters".