[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