[kmeisthax]

I really hate how people just read the title of this post, got offended, and just constantly link it to say "See guys? Mozilla wants to censor you!" when that's not what the actual post is saying. It is almost guaranteed that whenever someone posts anything Mozilla-related, people bring this up, possibly with an invitation to switch to Brave or something.

The article is specifically trying to criticize social media without sounding like Mozilla is siding with the Capitol rioters. If you want to argue that it's a bad headline, sure - people's continued misreading of it definitely is evidence of that. If you want to argue that it's Mozilla "showing their true colors" and calling for Facebook and Twitter to take over the government or whatever, then I will disagree with you all damned day.

[robin21]

74MM ppl voted for someone who used to be President and is now permanently banned from all social media platforms. This article agrees with that. If you were one of those people, you would not want to associate with this company.

[kmeisthax]

Well, I'm not one of those people.

And Donald Trump isn't an ally of Internet freedom - if anything, he's been in favor of letting social media companies para-censor what they want. He called Net Neutrality "Obamacare for the Internet", so he clearly also doesn't care if Comcast censors things. Furthermore, the GOP has traditionally been in favor of "private companies can say what they want and you should have no legal recourse for that". As far as I'm concerned, him getting banned from Twitter was him getting hoist by his own petard.

There's also the related problem that any reasonable free speech protections that apply to private fora would almost certainly not have protected Trump here. Twitter had an explicit policy of letting Trump off the hook for things that would ordinarily get you banned, even things like copyright violations. (Yes, Donald Trump and Donald Trump alone had DMCA immunity.) If we had regulated Twitter like a common carrier, they wouldn't have been allowed to have this two-tiered world leaders policy. So Trump would have been banned in 2017 instead of 2021.

I really can't think of a way in which Trump stays on Twitter without some massive intrusion into the way the Internet runs. Either you...

1. Require private fora to not have any speech rules - in which case we turn the entire Internet into USENET/4chan and anyone not as spammy/toxic is para-censored by being talked over

2. Require private fora to not enforce speech rules against world leaders - in which case you've taken away the platform's right to free association without any of the benefits of common carrier regulation

I don't see how either of those improve freedom online. Given that Mozilla's non-profit arm has a stated goal of protecting user freedom, it's perfectly reasonable for them to not have any particular sympathies for Mr. "Obamacare for the Internet". The best Mozilla can do - and what they actually did - is argue for transparency and regulation on how social media companies use their power to shape public discourse.

[robin21]

Mm it’s a tricky situation. Ideally the free market would solve it by coming up with another service with an alternative moderation strategy. Which may yet still happen. In 50-100 years maybe Twitter and Facebook will no longer dominate and alternatives will emerge. I think there is a big resistance to big tech that will only grow and ideology of social media company employees and leaders will balance out.

Because big tech is controlled by liberals they can get away with this stuff without repercussion. But it’s quite obvious that if this happened in reverse...which there is plenty of precedent throughout history...you would see the left complaining.

The reasonable person would think: this is a bad precedent to set and it’s the reason we allow free speech because if the tables turn on the censors, they wouldn’t like it.

Liberals outside of the US find it troubling too.

Anyway, let’s hope the free market solves it in the end. I think tech ideological diversity is changing too for the better.

[kmeisthax]

This has happened in the past and liberals and leftists have complained rightfully.

If anything, I'd say the last decade or so has been right-wingers sticking their fingers in their ears and pretending the oncoming train liberals were warning them about didn't exist, right before getting hit by said oncoming train.

You are correct that "big tech is controlled by liberals" (I'd also include libertarians here as well), but in order to be anywhere close to consistent and get what you want you need to also embrace at least some left-wing or libertarian ideas about money and power. Any one of the following viewpoints are reasonable:

Left-wing: Ideological diversity should be allowed up to intersectionality and social media companies should be regulated like common carriers

That Mozilla blog post: Somewhere between the "left-wing" and "left-libertarian" viewpoints.

Left-libertarian: People should switch to federated Mastodon instances run on the basis of mutual aid (e.g. recurring donations or P2P technology) and centralized social media platforms should be recognized as harmful and shut down

Center-libertarian: Something like NearlyFreeSpeech's "Morons Funding the Fight Against Morons" policy, in which we sell server hosting to neo-Nazis and then donate all the profits we made off them to organizations that fight neo-Nazis.

Right-libertarian: People should outcompete monopolistic social media platforms with less paracensored versions and the government should take no action (This appears to be what you're advocating for, although in practice I've seen this tried and fail multiple times)

What isn't reasonable is the right-authoritarian approach, which is to just complain about "being censored" when it happens to only you, and then threaten to repeal CDA 230 if the platforms don't change their mind. (Don't get me started on left-authoritarians, or I'll be here all damned day.) That's not free speech by any definition - either the strict "Congress shall make no law" approach or the more general considerations of paracensorship that I'm trying to build a theory of speech rules around.

[robin21]

Thanks for the insights. I like the more nuanced spectrum you present. I find myself too often in a simplistic left/right divide. I think there is great value in a more fine-grained spectrum coming into common usage.

The conundrum that stands out for me though is when one group defends another group’s right to censor, and then that group uses that right, to censor the other. I think that’s where we are today. The legislative restraint of the Republicans to regulate seems they are living up to their principles to their own disadvantage. But this just leaves them to be taken advantage of by the other group to the point of severely damaging the next election prospects of Trump runs again.

Will defenders of freedom always be subjugated to those who want to use freedom to restrict others? Sustaining this freedom is the challenge of humanity and a very careful balance. We’ve seen so many free countries fall to left/right authoritarianism over the ages. It’s almost like we cycle back and forth between authoritarianism and freedom. This century will surely be a big test.

I think we are quickly heading into left authoritarianism which is ironic because the most vocal complaints are of right authoritarianism which I really didn’t see any evidence of the past 4 years. It was just a trendy thing to say. I don’t even know where the accusation of Trump authoritarianism began.