[fragileone]

> American citizens may have freedom of speech, but they find themselves with vanishingly few public forums in which to exercise it fully.

Well put. As we've also seen from numerous leaks and incidents over the years, big business and government often works hand-in-hand, with revolving door policies and barely legal indirect bribes happening regularly.

That the government is now seeking to curtail the First Amendment by exerting pressure on these companies should be alarming to anyone.

[drewrv]

It seems to me like there are more forums for free speech now than ever before. When in our history has it been easier for the average citizen to find a platform to host their views?

[prvc]

Yesterday. After that, last week, easier; then last year, yet easier; 5 years ago, easier still, and so on. I will not speculate as to when the maximum was reached, but it was somewhere between the creation of the internet and the present.

[debacle]

I would argue that the peak was on reddit, very briefly before the culmination of the Democrat primary in 2016. The descent was a panic response to two populists nearly winning the major party nominations in the US.

We can likely reach pre-2016 levels of Internet freedom again. I'm not sure if Gab is a critical piece of that, but they seem to be doing mostly the right things right now (though I would like to see some sort of /r/all mechanism for popular activity, right now feeds appear to be completely self-curated).

[BeFlatXIII]

On Reddit, it would have been right before Gamergate became the political opinion spam that never went away. 2014 rather than 2016.

[debacle]

I forgot about gamergate. You are probably right.

[vangelis]

Doubt. Good luck not getting instantly banned on Gab for left wing opinions.

[aww_dang]

>When in our history...

Before the masses were corralled into walled gardens. If a free and open Internet was a threat to gatekeepers, walled gardens are the solution. You can say anything you want on their platforms, as long as it adheres to the party's content guidelines.

The gate-kept illusion of freedom is arguably more toxic, because it normalizes the curated garden of propagandized views.

Yes, you have more options than broadcast TV, newspapers and radio. Especially if you espouse mainstream views which one would easily find on those sources.

There was a time before eternal September, let's call it August. Google searches were populated by independently run forums and websites. Tech giants were not bent on imposing their political will. Individuals were getting the word out about Hans Blix on independent sites. One can only wonder how Twitter or Facebook's fact checkers would handle that today.

"Experts confirm Saddam has WMD"

In the august days before fact checkers and Facebook, users could still obtain free hosting. They could even post on forums without learning the basics of HTML. That's when the history of the Internet turned.

[code_duck]

Anyone can easily obtain various forms of anonymous free hosting at the present.

What some people don’t seem to understand about the first amendment is that while the government is obligated to not stop you from publishing, no private party is obligated to assist you.

[vanattab]

> What some people don’t seem to understand about the first amendment is that while the government is obligated to not stop you from publishing, no private party is obligated to assist you.

What some people don't understand about freespeech is that it's a bigger principle then just the 1st amendment protections. Most of us are not arguing that companies ARE violating the law/first amendment. only that political/religious speech restrictions by large gate keeping institutions can have similar negative effects on society. We are arguing for ether more protections to be put in place or even for social change where instead of demanding companies censor these who disagree with us we demand they allow them to speak, EVENTHOUGH we disagree with them.

[pron]

What some people don't understand is that the freedom to create a reputation by selecting which speech to amplify and disseminate is, itself, an integral part of free speech, and the reputations of the oldest, best established social institutions for the dissemination of information -- such as schools, universities, and publishers -- have been built on what they don't publish as much as on what they do. We are arguing for more freedom of speech for organisations to allow them to choose what level of scrutiny, or even what bias, to apply, so that we can establish the level of trust we think they deserve based on their record.

[slavik81]

> Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant — society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it — its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries.

> Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

> Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

> There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.

~ John Stuart Mill, On Library (1859)

[ewindal]

Free speech is the concept, the human right. The first amendment is the government’s pinky promise to not violate that right. Swearsies. Unless you say something they’d rather be secret, of course.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Before the masses were corralled into walled gardens

The total audience for the internet was far less in those days.

[Workaccount2]

It's weird to think back to a decade or 15 years ago where it was shameful to be an "internet addict". Spending a lot of time online was generally frowned upon, and not something you would talk about.

Now the entirety of society is an "internet addict". I'll admit the nerd inside me feels a bit vindicated, even if horrified overall with where the internet has taken us.

[effingwewt]

Wow, I had forgotten that term!

The other day I was thinking back to when I was younger and people freaked out at the possibility of dating someone you met online. Now with dating apps it's the norm.

[aww_dang]

Agreed, but that isn't a rationalization of the walled garden or proof that the Internet couldn't have continued to grow without the model imposed by "platforms".

To the contrary, the Internet was still growing by leaps and bounds. I propose that the Internet had reached a point where vested interests needed to capture it to maintain control of the narrative.

[tw04]

>Before the masses were corralled into walled gardens.

I'm not sure how old you are, but when is this time you speak of? AOL had users in a walled garden for decades. Then those users moved to myspace, then facebook. You're going to need to be more specific about this magical time when the average user was somehow "free of walled gardens".

[slumdev]

Compuserve and a number of other credible alternatives to AOL existed during that time. Usenet and BBSes also existed. Myspace and Facebook (initially) were only for teenagers, college students, and people who never grew out of those phases. You might as well put Livejournal in this list, because none of those platforms (at those times) were as effective at corralling and suppressing wrongthink as Twitter and Facebook have been today.

[tw04]

CompuServe and bbs's weren't "the masses". CompuServe peaked at 3 million users to AOL's 35 million.

There have always been alternatives to the walled gardens, they have never been larger than their walled alternatives.

[slumdev]

Apart from their obligations under the law, AOL did not police content. In one example, AOL banned explicit discussions of homosexual activity but did not ban anti-homosexual hate speech. They policed the first type of speech because the CDA required them to prevent the transmission of explicit material to minors, but they did not police the second type of speech because it was not illegal.

Facebook and Twitter are actively policing speech that is not illegal.

That is why your analogy is inapt.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gays-protest-aol-censorship/

[aww_dang]

The drink coaster distributor was popular without a doubt. They never factored into my use of the Internet. Without fact-check, there's a mild equivalence at best. It is hard not to encounter platforms and their agendas in some form today.

The free hosting providers were not engaging in political censorship. Google had a maxim, "Don't be evil". They didn't have infoboxes explaining, "Experts agree that enhanced interrogation is not torture".

[tw04]

I'm not even sure how to respond other than to point out AOL is literally where the term walled garden in reference to the internet came from. They were WORSE than what is around today by an order of magnitude.

[aww_dang]

I never used them and don't know of the political parallels. I know they had more biz relationships for search results as an example.

Maybe start by explaining how they were worse?

[bjowen]

A historian’s word for this might be inclosure. A wag’s might be the hostile corporate takeover of everyone’s private life.

[piokoch]

Good luck posting your doubts about Covid vaccination results on Twitter, FB or YT. You will not even notice how fast your wrongthinking will be detected and removed.

[devwastaken]

Twitter, fb, and yt are the platforms for COVID misinformation. Contrary to popular belief this content rarely removed.

[seattle_spring]

If this garbage was actually filtered and censored, then how is it still rammed down my throat at every turn?

[rat87]

Sadly you are incorrect

Dangerous antivax nonsense is not well moderated on many of those platforms, especially Facebook

[criley2]

It's terribly put. The American concept of freedom of speech has nothing to do with access to public forums but rather is a limit on government action against your ability to run your own forum (newspaper, etc), and if you consider that when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were actually written, most Americans had significantly less forums. A few newspapers made up almost the entirety of public forums when the right was written, and none of them were forced to publish political content they disagreed with.

In fact, when you realize that the internet has provided more forums for free speech than any technology in history, it beggars belief to suggest that there are less forums now than before.

We are at the ultimate highpoint of access to freespeech forums in American history, and to suggest otherwise is nakedly ignorant conservative propaganda pushing an emotional angle against technology corporations who enforce common sense rules against violence, terrorism, and hate speech on their private networks.

I maintain that until Fox News or conservative talk radio is mandated by the government to stop suppressing my free speech rights to have access to the network to say whatever I want, that Facebook and Twitter should not be forced to support insurrection and violence masquerading as free speech.

It's hard to understate how outrageous this lie is. It's like suggesting "folks today have less access to electricity than at any point in American history". It's such immensely stupid lie that how could anyone fall for it?

[simiones]

While I don't think the original claim is in any way obvious, and you may well be right overall, you're also making a huge mistake in your look at history - newspapers are not and have never been "public forums" (except to the minor extent that they occasionally published letters to the editor).

Instead, historic public forums were mostly related to in-person meetings - town halls, clubs, pubs etc. These have not been outlawed nor disappeared entirely, but they are almost entirely atrophied. Instead, public discussion has moved almost entirely online. This has created a complex situation, as online forums are almost always private property, unlike the forums of the past.

This situation is creating an unprecedented situation for free speech - as private mega corporations, not bound by the first ammendment, are now in control of a huge percentage of public communication. It seems pretty clear that Facebook or YouTube can't just be handled as publishers, nor as network operators, nor as broadcasters, nor as any other traditional form of communication. We will need to invent a new concept of how such communication should be regulated and moderated.

On the other hand, it's also true there is more public communication, and with higher reach, then probably ever before in history.

[criley2]

I think you made a similar mistake in your thought process with "public forums" which almost always took place in private places, like churches, clubs, etc. It's not a given that public forums were on government property, and most local governments couldn't afford large meeting spaces.

The idea that every government and "public" forum in American history was government land is crazy to me. People weren't going into the courthouse to have friendly debates. They were in inns, bars, churches, etc. I would wager the vast majority of all "public forums" you refer to happened in a private location.

Thus this isn't some unprecedented scenario, as the church has controlled public speech in all but the biggest of towns in this manner for our entire history.

I'm reminded of the Red Scare where socialists and communist sympathizers could not meet because all the meeting spaces were private and they were banned from meeting there. So much for historical public forums! What few private forums were available were targeted by the government and its sympathizers for shutdown, violence or worse.

Imagine putting the government that ran the red scare IN CHARGE OF what constitutes free speech and who can publish what.

>We will need to invent a new concept of how such communication should be regulated and moderated.

No thanks, I like Free Speech and Liberty and we never need to invent a new way for the government of the day to control speech.

[josephcsible]

> Instead, historic public forums were mostly related to in-person meetings - town halls, clubs, pubs etc. These have not been outlawed nor disappeared entirely, but they are almost entirely atrophied.

Last year they were outlawed.

[natural219]

Well put. I wonder if conservatives would have better purchase framing this as more of a 14th amendment thing (private bar owners throwing out customers whose "kind they don't want around here") rather than a 1st amendment thing.

[commandlinefan]

You might (might) have a point on an article about somebody complaining about having their Facebook or Twitter account suspended for being too right-leaning, but this article is literally about the U.S. government trying to use judicial pressure to shut down a social media platform.

[josephcsible]

> I maintain that until Fox News or conservative talk radio is mandated by the government to stop suppressing my free speech rights to have access to the network to say whatever I want, that Facebook and Twitter should not be forced to support insurrection and violence masquerading as free speech.

You don't think there should be a difference between platforms and publishers?

[tptacek]

Whatever you may think about this, in the law, the distinction does not exist. The idea that there are special rules for "publishers" is a Twitter meme.

[josephcsible]

Note I said "should be". I know there's no legal distinction today. I'm saying that that's bad, and I want there to be one.

[tptacek]

Sounds mostly like a way for people to limit the speech and association rights of others by threatening to declare them "publishers".

[jcranmer]

... how do you distinguish between a platform and a publisher?

[kthejoker2]

A notice board in town square is a platform; no endorsement by anyone is presumed by content posted there.

A billboard is a publisher; the content there is clearly governed.

So the criteria seems simple:

* is content freely posted? What is the approval process for content?

* if content is freely posted, are the rules for removing content uniformly applied and viewpoint neutral?

* what mechanisms exist for appeal, protest, modifying the rules, etc?

Platforms are defined by what they don't allow.

Publishers are defined by what they do allow.

[jcranmer]

So Reddit's a publisher (because most of the subreddits have various on-topic rules for posting) and my newspaper's a platform (because their rules for posting comments are what's prohibited).

One of the problems with trying to use an actor's own policy to distinguish between platforms and publishers is that the goal of creating such a distinction in the first place is to restrict the ability of the actor to undertake certain policies.

[josephcsible]

I don't know of a perfect formal definition, but this kind of gives a rule of thumb: is the content considered their own voice? For example, The New York Times is a publisher, because if an article on their website says X, then saying "The New York Times says X" would be reasonable, but Facebook is a platform, because saying "Facebook says X" just because a post on their website says X would not be reasonable.

[tptacek]

Whether you say "The New York Times says X" or "Astead Herndon said this" is entirely subjective, and has more to do with what culture currents you pay attention to than with anything particular about the NYT. Illuminating counterexample: a pretty good chunk of nerd Twitter routinely refers to "what HN has said".

So no, that won't work. Try again.

[fragmede]

Abstracting out the subject becomes a problem, and the hated gatekeepers of knowledge become the necessary filter in front of the firehose.

[rscoots]

>that Facebook and Twitter should not be forced to support insurrection and violence masquerading as free speech.

Where is "force" coming into this other than various government demands and threats?

[criley2]

The entire conservative war against Big Tech is about fake "censorship" (which is actually Free Speech by the private network) and they want to change laws and use the courts to force Facebook and Twitter to allow any content they want to post, including insurrectionist content.

This entire debate is about making private networks such as Facebook into "public/government spaces", thus meaning the Bill Of Rights would apply to a private company (an outrageously anti-Constitutional concept) and it would count as government censorship for Twitter to ban an insurrectionist like Trump.

[rscoots]

Thanks for reminding me about those efforts. Glad they've mostly petered out by now.

[criley2]

They have not petered out, and if the Republicans take control of the House in 2022, they have already sworn to immediately pass legislation on this subject.

And with this radically anti-Free Speech conservative supreme court majority, you better believe that the rights of private networks to publish content free from government interference is still high risk.

[AnimalMuppet]

What is your evidence that the Supreme Court majority is "radically anti-Free Speech"?

[natural219]

He literally addresses your first point a few paragraphs into the meat of the statement. Do you have any kind of rebuttal or historical backing besides "nuh uh"?

[1] https://i.imgur.com/WuvtYIy.png

[otterley]

I think it depends on whether your point of view is pre- or post-Internet. If you take the longer view, it is an incontrovertible fact that there are more forums for discussion than in the pre-Internet age; and nobody back then was complaining that there was a lack of fora for their views.

And even if you take the shorter view, there are still more places for people to discuss them. Facebook and Twitter didn’t even exist until the mid-2000s and the Internet has been readily accessible since the late 1990s.

[natural219]

right. my view is post-internet, since i grew up in a time when the internet already existed and already had long-evolved and widely-understood cultural patterns around its use and misuse as a very slight alteration of a substrate in which to carry out ordinary public speech (every kid and grownup I knew when I was 10 understood the root guidance of "don't believe anything you read on the internet", for instance).

to my generation, this is much more poorly framed by arguing whether Facebook is comparable to a pre-internet private establishment, than it is framed by the internet being simply the air that we breathe, an ether in which sound naturally vibrates and which trying to legislate the dynamics of should seem equally ridiculous.

[otterley]

Interesting. To me, Facebook and other social media sites are most definitely not the Internet and don't really prevent anyone from being able to conduct free speech, since you can always go outside these places. (This very conversation is happening outside them!) Facebook is a for-profit business and we've seen these come and go over the years. Yahoo was ubiquitous once; now it's in some hedge fund's portfolio.

There will always be a place for people to express themselves, but it may not always be as convenient as some would like. But the Constitution does not require convenience or free amplification services.

[natural219]

> but it may not always be as convenient as some would like.

This is the entire rub, though. Exactly how convenient it is should be a matter of primal importance to the root relationships between citizen, state, and countrymen that the founders found and advocated for. Beyond the momentary mire of the current legal/political order, one feels that all citizens should have some instinctual understanding and positive desire for the sort of healthy, dynamic, and free social order that we're all ostensibly (or increasingly just nominally) in support of as Americans. Whether this dynamic comes under repression from this type of entity or another is a flatly ridiculous non-sequitur (I'm positive that the founders had the same level of love for the East India Company as they did for the British crown)

Complicating this, the surrounding legal framework and precedents around computing technology is near-universally acknowledged to be in a state of completely hopeless shambles; every critical chunk of the system was designed and implemented in the 20th century, with the assumptions of 20th century media tech casted squarely into them. Exceedingly few TOS and EULA precedents have progressed an inch since the era of 1980s shrinkware tech. The "Congressional inquiry of big tech leaders" parade we continue to put on is a gigantic joke and a gross historical embarrassment. the DMCA and the CFAA routinely horrifies any sensible person that examines them for a couple of minutes.

So two things; while the current legal system collectively catches up to modern tech basics like "how to use an AOL modem", we should be direly concerned that a large portion of the country seems to have abandoned any personal sense of (first creeping, now a torrent) of the predictable horrors incurred under a tyrannical regimes that expressly suppress YOUR (God-given!) constitutional rights.

The second thing, of course, is that all this stuff eventually needs to get resolved in the tangible court of legal opinion. I have no doubt that Mr Torba's constitution claim will fail under our current legal system, and I generally accept the rebuke that the 'digital native' class haven't done enough of the aforementioned positive work themselves to outline how these new usages of these new technologies should harmonize with the constraints and institutional knowledge of the existing legal/political system, which has accumulated a ton of valid merit over its mostly-contiguous 250-year-long history.

At some point there's going to have to be a big palaver regarding one's fundamental right to own, operate, and make sovereign decisions (as a citizen subject to the constitution) about some part of their computing stack. Probably won't get resolved today, but I think Mr. Torba's response seems like a healthy statement to rally around.

[criley2]

I think you misunderstood what you quoted here, because Madison in no way suggests that invididual newspapers should be forced to print opinions they disagree with in the interest of Liberty

Instead he argues that there should be a lot of newspapers, to accurately capture the growing audiences and government should not interfere in the growth of private speech

It was considered virulently anti-Liberty to use government to force a newspaper to print an opinion they disagree with, and that concept remains true today.

If Facebook does not wish to publish violent speech, they don't have to, just like the New York Times editors can choose, just like Fox News can choose, just like every "free speech" newspaper, news channel, or network can choose.

This is the essence of free speech, that the government cannot unfairly control your network and tell you that you can no longer choose what to publish.

It's sad that people are this against Liberty that they demand government forcibly control networks to allow whatever speech the ruling party currently feels is "free".

[natural219]

the internet is not a newspaper.

you can't simply switch off of Facebook the way you would drop a publication you dislike. the network effects keep everyone trapped in. i can't believe we're still having this asinine back-and-forth a full decade after we learned how natural monopolies form via the ordinary dynamics of social graph consolidation.

Metcalfe's law is a thing people, you can read about in on Wikipedia [1] and we can maybe start moving beyond a 1993 understanding of what an internet platform is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

[ladyattis]

I don't believe Gab and other alt-righters really are being honest about the issue. They're only raising alarm because they're a small segment of society that doesn't get along with the rest of us so they don't have many or any lifelines to call on. For the rest of us, it's just a Tuesday, we've been acclimated to the sad reality that the State can and will infringe on rights whenever it sees fit to do so. This doesn't justify what the Congressional committees are doing but that the alt-right in general would be completely fine with having Congress sending out subpoenas to Food not Bombs or the IWW because they're looney leftists or some other spiel. But the moment the mailed fist of the State decides to smash them they squeal as loud as possible. I'm not taking their bait. They're not the good guys. When they universally agree that the rights of life and liberty are to be respected for all parties including leftists like myself then I might consider helping them. Otherwise, I'm not going to waste my time with them nor should you.

[1MachineElf]

>This doesn't justify what the Congressional committees are doing but that the alt-right in general would be completely fine with having Congress sending out subpoenas to Food not Bombs or the IWW because they're looney leftists or some other spiel.

Imagine all of the people who have been arbitrarily labelled as "alt-right" in social and traditional media. Do you actually think this is what they generally want?

[ladyattis]

>Imagine all of the people who have been arbitrarily labelled as "alt-right" in social and traditional media. Do you actually think this is what they generally want?

Many of them self identify as alt-right. It's largely a self-selected identity. They're often proud of the term too. I have yet to see someone mislabeled alt-right when they're a vanilla conservative. Alt-right really is the far right of old but with Gen Z aesthetics.

[OrvalWintermute]

I'm alarmed. Mainly by the government coercing industry (lots of them, not just BigTech), getting in cahoots with industry, or directly paying industry (govt is definitely a monopsony in medicine since insurance rates are set off of medicare rates). I used to think govt had little control over our economy, but I was wrong.

Am hoping that our protections will be renewed because of potential loss of market share, and financial interests. BigTech isn't worth much if they go after 45% of their user population, I mean, product. Because of that I still actively use Amazon, Google, Facebook, and others

[phailhaus]

What pressure? Gab is not in trouble. You just don't have the right to conspire to overthrow the government. It's well-understood that Gab is not in any danger, but its members are if they did.

[colonelpopcorn]

Conspiring to overthrow the government is a national pastime in these "13 colonies".

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

Just because the causes have not been enumerated lucidly or coherently doesn't mean that there's not two different peoples in the USA who would like to dissolve the political bands connecting them to one another.

[rscoots]

There are obvious ways the govt can pressure people who've committed no criminal act.

Being put on a no fly list or terrorist watch list are some examples. Happened all the time during the war on terror.

[caeril]

> big business and government often works hand-in-hand

The bizarre irony is that this condition is a core tenet of Fascism, which is something the "woke" anti-free-speechists claim to be fighting against.

[slumdev]

It's pretty common to imagine the worst faults of oneself as being the motivators of one's opponent.

[bsksi]

This reminds me of the story of kiwi farms and how expensive and mentally taxing for the founder it's been to keep it online.

https://kiwifarms.net/threads/biting-the-hand-that-feeds.808...

[UncleMeat]

Total disagreement. There has never been a time in history where people have had anywhere near the capacity to express completely free speech, including wild bigotry, than today.

[BeFlatXIII]

The most recent Congressional Dish episode[1] has a discussion on this exact topic. Now I'm off to a rabbit hole of looking up information on fusion centers.

[1]https://congressionaldish.com/cd-237-hunting-domestic-terror...

[mc32]

Unfortunately people have stopped discussing free speech and our rights around speech on fist principles and have thoroughly subsumed them to tribal interests.

Free speech is good for antifa, bad for pboys. Free speech is good for pboys but bad for antifa.

They are both groups of hoodlums and both have the same rights to free speech, but people will want whoever they agree with more to enjoy it and those they agree with less to not enjoy the rights.