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by throwawaysea
1611 days ago
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The thing is social media, including YouTube, is the new public square. Exercising our fundamental civil liberties like free speech means exercising them on places like social media. Otherwise those rights are simply not as useful. Social media has a massive impact on our society, including on politics. If it doesn't have that impact, then why bother censoring someone at all? I also think platforms above some size simply should not be able to ban people in order to make Democracy work. Another angle here is that social media companies are ultimately just plain old telecom companies. We regularly regulate private businesses and limit the ways in which they conduct business. Your electrical utility is not allowed to deny you service based on your political opinion. These companies shouldn't be able to do so either, as they are common carriers (https://reason.com/volokh/2021/07/16/conclusion-social-media...). Additionally, social media is built on network effects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect). The larger the network, the stronger the service, but also the higher the barriers to entry. Businesses built on network effects inherently face limited competition and must be regulated since they do not face competition as much. Finally, our government is already censoring speech by hiding their influence through these social media companies. Tech companies have an incentive to play nicely with the government, since they might otherwise face difficulties like anti-trust action. Glenn Greenwald had written extensively about this proxy censorship: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-sho... https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-in-a-five-hour-hea... https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-and-media-do-not-... |
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