| >I’m arguing the “ought” rather than the “is” here. I disagree with the philosophical stance that simply because Reddit is a private website, they are entitled to control the content as they want and that no level of qualitative difference between Reddit and the average website is enough to change this. I disagree on a philosophical level. the rules and users may be frustrating, but in the grand scheme of things, reddit isn't breaking the law nor spreading hate (well, no more hate than your average internet user. We're not talking about Infowars here). I see no reason for government interference on basis of their moderation and curation, like this thread is suggesting. >In general, we regulate private enterprise when it has negative externalities on society, and I think there is a discussion to be had about what those externalities are here. Sure, but I honestly can't think of any societal effects that wouldn't be felt from regular old physical analogs that is "people talking and arguing with each other". - You can talk about groupthink, but that happens IRL and can be taken to an extreme with cults. Cults aren't illegal until they break other laws.
- You can talk about restricting artistic freedoms, but said freedoms aren't really that protected in the world at large.
- you can talk about freedom of speech and fall into the same conservative trapping as other groups. Convinently forgetting that those freedom of speech is meant to protect government from censoring your speech, not other individuals.
- there are privacy concerns which are already being addressed. That's one of the few analogs not easily transferrable to the physical world.
- Then there is the anonymity aspect of reddit, which has its share of issues caused ever since the days of "bathroom writings". There are plenty of ways to be offensive without yelling it in someone's face. I just don't see an angle here that would justify a need to "anti-trust" the site as some public good and force all posts to remain up, nor clamp down and enforce civility in a website. |
What I am in favor of is recognizing, as a society, the value of free speech, not just as a constitutional technicality but as a principle. I believe we ought to value it as a good. And I think that as a society, we should stop and be like, hey, wait a minute, online communication is now dominated by a handful of sites, doesn't it violate the spirit of free speech if, in practice, all those sites enforce roughly the same overton window, and your options are to (a) get in line or (b) not use the 5-7 sites that everyone else uses?
In fact, I think the conversation about the constitutional limits of 1A, or governmental rights, or whatever, is a distraction. I'm not suggesting the government step in. I'm just saying we clearly have a situation where the principle of free speech is being violated — where people are not able to share certain ideas on the platforms that everyone else uses. I'm aware we don't have a law protecting that. I'm making a prescriptive argument that society ought to view this as a bad, dangerous thing.
So in terms of a practical agenda, I dunno, I would like to see a stronger shared appreciation of free speech, and bottom-up pressure for the big communication platforms to stop enforcing their own capricious filters. From this perspective — not the 1A perspective — I think the argument that "private enterprises can do whatever they want" is pretty weak and irrelevant. The actual question is what externalities it has on society when the platforms used by everyone decide what you can say on them. I think the answer to that is not obviously "nothing," and probably "something."