[giantrobot]

The owner of a service has no requirement or duty to carry anyone's speech. A person's freedom of speech doesn't override anyone else's freedom of association. So a private company can censor or reject any speech using their service unless otherwise mandated by law (common carrier etc).

[eric_cc]

Practically everybody knows this already and yet this comment shows up every time freedom of speech is discussed.

Censorship is bad even when legally permissible. And we should still fight corporations acting unethically even when the law is on their side.

[giantrobot]

What is unethical about not wanting to carry speech you don't agree with, is inflammatory, or outright misinformation?

[eric_cc]

Large platforms (twitter, YouTube, etc) banning views that they don’t agree with gives them power to truly shape society by controlling acceptable discourse.

What they deem outright information may in fact be true. And even allowing clear misinformation (1+1=3) is important. We need people to learn to process information not protect them from it. Using 1+1=3 analogy, wouldn’t you want people to rally around tooling people to learn math?

[giantrobot]

> We need people to learn to process information not protect them from it.

Flagging misinformation is attempting to educate people.

[adamrezich]

ok, so what's the impetus for censoring it then

[giantrobot]

It's inflammatory, outright disinformation, outright misinformation, or just something the service owner doesn't want to carry. Discussion a lab leak hypothesis is not the same as claiming COVID leaked from a bioweapon laboratory or was intentionally leaked for <reasons>.

That being said, social media sites flagging posts is very different from outright censorship. It's not uncommon for someone to actually get censored/removed from a site claiming its censorship over discussing some topic when really it was a history of dipshit behavior and flagrant TOS violations.

[adamrezich]

> It's inflammatory, outright disinformation, outright misinformation

so, the vast majority of social media then? what makes this issue so special? why did all of the major social media networks censor/"flag" anyone publicly speculating only certain speculations about this issue?