[ben_w]

And what should we do when it's the un-elected corporations, rather than the democratically elected government, whose censorship of us and our views is a consequence we object to?

e.g. how Paul Graham got his Twitter account suspended for posting "This is the last straw. I give up. You can find a link to my new Mastodon profile on my site.": https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-suspends-account-paul...

Musk was 100% allowed to do that. Should he have been allowed to do that? It was undone, but should it have been within the set of things he was allowed to do in the first place?

[krapp]

>And what should we do when it's the un-elected corporations, rather than the democratically elected government, whose censorship of us and our views is a consequence we object to?

Find another service. Find another platform. Or make one.

You say "un-elected corporations" as if to imply something sinister about the fact that businesses can have terms of service, but every business in existence is un-elected and has terms of service. What is the alternative, to have a grand jury decide everything?

>Musk was 100% allowed to do that. Should he have been allowed to do that?

Yes, it's obvious Musk should have been allowed to do that. Just as the mods on Hacker News are allowed to do that. It's their shop, they can refuse service to anyone.

Should Musk have done it? No. He's an asshole, and that kind of behavior ruins the value of his platform. Should it be legal for Musk to be an asshole and ruin the value of this platform? Yes, because Twitter isn't a monopoly and people can (and have) gone elsewhere.

The alternative is direct government control of all online platforms and all means of communication and replacing private censorship with government censorship, which is worse than letting Musk be an asshole, because Musk can't put people in jail or shoot them dead in the street for their speech. I can far more easily leave Twitter than I can my government's sphere of influence.

[ben_w]

> Find another service. Find another platform. Or make one.

1. Which is the topic of the post, and where the solution is being objected to.

2. Network effects are a thing

3. Efforts to deeply integrate these networks into societies, make them seem irreplaceable, are a thing; in the case of Twitter in particular, it appears to have full-throated support of the US government, despite how this kind of thing is what DOGE itself was objecting to when it was in the form of fairly cheap radio stations in random 3rd world nations.

> You say "un-elected corporations" as if to imply something sinister about the fact that businesses can have terms of service, but every business in existence is un-elected and has terms of service. What is the alternative, to have a grand jury decide everything?

First: When it's a matter of freedom of speech, that can be encoded into the law, then it is just like the various bans on discrimination against protected groups. Are those done with grand juries?

Second, consider the opposite: given Musk's censorship preferences, is it OK for the US government to make heavy use of X.com for direct communication? Or is that use, as per judge ruling from first Trump term saying the POTUS account wasn't allowed to block people, now covered by 1st Amendment constraints despite being theoretically a private corporation?

https://web.archive.org/web/20180524014547/https://knightcol...

Third, there are rules about what is and isn't allowed in terms of service. Is Apple now banned from banning app developers from linking to non-Apple storefronts? I've lost track of which jurisdiction has placed which restrictions on them and where they're at with appeals.

> The alternative is direct government control of all online platforms and all means of communication and replacing private censorship with government censorship

Not so. First: there are many laws governing corporations and online platforms and means of communication, none of which are "direct control". All corporate law, in fact. It is a setting of the rules of the game, and no more "direct control" than a referee in a ball game.

Second: The US government has the 1st Amendment, the EU has the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (amongst other things), these are meta-rules, rules about which rules may exist, restrictions against other restrictions.

> because Musk can't put people in jail or shoot them dead in the street for their speech.

There are plenty of people arguing the case that Musk's purchase of Twitter bought him the US government. Were they right? I am uncertain.

> I can far more easily leave Twitter than I can my government's sphere of influence.

Can you leave Twitter's sphere of influence, just by leaving the site? If you're an advertiser, will they let you leave or sue you for it?

Private corporations have tried moving advertising away from Twitter only to be met with legal retaliation from Musk. Speech about Twitter showing what it gets wrong has met with retaliation from Musk that exceeds the budgets of those making that speech, silencing the critics. Nations demanding Twitter does not interfere with trials about domestic attempts at overthrowing elections have been met with Musk trying to circumvent those rules. Nations whose population and government both demand that Twitter does not spread CSAM are now facing threats from the US government itself.

[krapp]

> 2. Network effects are a thing

Network effects aren't laws. It isn't illegal or impossible to leave Twitter - millions of people have already done it.

> in the case of Twitter in particular, it appears to have full-throated support of the US government, despite how this kind of thing is what DOGE itself was objecting to when it was in the form of fairly cheap radio stations in random 3rd world nations.

The problem in that case is government influence over the platform and the collaboration between government and the press (if Twitter counts as the press,) not the free speech rights of the platform itself. Wanting greater regulation of online platforms only exacerbates that problem and normalizes it. If you don't trust the American government's influence on Twitter - and you shouldn't - why would you trust your own?

Hate speech laws are well and good until opposing your government's involvement in genocide gets classified as hate speech.

>When it's a matter of freedom of speech, that can be encoded into the law, then it is just like the various bans on discrimination against protected groups. Are those done with grand juries?

Fair enough, but what is the "protected group" in this case? It can't be everyone.

>There are plenty of people arguing the case that Musk's purchase of Twitter bought him the US government. Were they right? I am uncertain.

I don't know, but if so the problem there again is the government's own corruption not the platform's right to free speech. Powerful influential people have used the media to influence elections and sway voters ever since mass media made it possible. That is arguably a fundamental and necessary part of the democratic process.

If a platform doesn't have the right to advocate for a political position or candidate then it also doesn't have the right to call out political corruption.

>Can you leave Twitter's sphere of influence, just by leaving the site?

For all intents and purposes, yes. What exactly can Twitter do to me on Hacker News? Or in my own home? Nothing, legally.

[ben_w]

> Network effects aren't laws. It isn't illegal or impossible to leave Twitter - millions of people have already done it.

Irrelevant. They have the impact of making it difficult to leave. (Conversely, the more who do, the easier it gets for the rest to leave; if Musk cared about money from the platform, this would be an important concern, as the hysteresis slows initial departures, but when enough damage is done they can't mend their relationship with their customers by undoing just whatever happened to be the metaphorical last straw which broke the metaphorical camel's back).

> If you don't trust the American government's influence on Twitter - and you shouldn't - why would you trust your own?

The point is, that government influence is always present. Pretending they're actually independent is a fig-leaf to deflect blame while allowing censorship anyway. If you force the same laws that apply to the government to also apply to these organisations, if you let Twitter (and Facebook, and all the others) face the same consequences that the government would face, that means they are as limited in what they can censor as the government itself is.

> Hate speech laws are well and good until opposing your government's involvement in genocide gets classified as hate speech.

Is an additional problem, yes. And yet, in its absence, you can get banned without recourse, without trial even, from all the private sites for the same.

Consider: If you have a democratic right to talk to your representative, and that representative decides to only make themselves available over ${insert network here}, then ${that network} banning your account has the same effect as that representative banning you, only without any court able to order them to re-enable access for your democratic rights. Previous link to judgement regarding Trump and Twitter amounts to this, even though in that case it was Trump doing the blocking rather than Twitter.

The absence of government intervention does not help, it creates a power vacuum in which the same problem exists without democratic oversight.

> I don't know, but if so the problem there again is the government's own corruption not the platform's right to free speech. Powerful influential people have used the media to influence elections and sway voters ever since mass media made it possible. That is arguably a fundamental and necessary part of the democratic process.

If corruption is a "fundamental and necessary part of the democratic process", that's not a democracy, it's somewhere in the space of oligarchy, nepotism, kleptocracy, and aristocracy. Of course, no system is pure anything, but the point is that this isn't putting the δημο into "democracy".

Many countries, amusingly including the USA, have rules on silence right before an election; some recent electoral weirdness has been attributed to social media violating this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_silence

> What exactly can Twitter do to me on Hacker News? Or in my own home? Nothing, legally.

Sue you personally for your free speech for saying Musk's (in your words) "an asshole", and that his was the "kind of behavior ruins the value of his platform". Which ought to be protected free speech, may be legally protected in theory, but can you afford even just enough lawyers to get an anti-SLAPP against him? Some organisations have closed down because they could not.

It can promote propaganda that fuels a mob hell-bent on overthrowing your government while censoring anyone trying to organise against it.

What's that saying, "your freedom to swing your stops at the end of my nose"? Same applies here. His freedom to decide who is and isn't allowed to say what on his platform ends the moment it becomes censorship itself.

[JuniperMesos]

Should the previous ownership of Twitter have been allowed to suspend all the accounts they did? And make all the other moderation decisions that inspired Musk to spend billions of dollars buying the site and changing its moderation policy? Plenty of people argued so at the time, generally because they broadly agreed with the moderation decisions the previous ownership was making.

I don't trust either an un-elected corporation or a government chosen by an electorate full of people I don't agree with not to censor my speech, or the speech I want to see. As far as I'm concerned all centralized social media platforms are vulnerable to censorship of some kind or another, and the best way around this is to build systems that make it as technically difficult as possible for a 3rd party to intercept a message one person broadcasts to willing listeners.

[ben_w]

> I don't trust either an un-elected corporation or a government chosen by an electorate full of people I don't agree with not to censor my speech, or the speech I want to see.

A government *always* has this power, constrained only by their constitution (not just the American big-C Constitution, but anywhere that would have e.g. a court that can tell the government "no").

Allowing corporations to censor is to grant this power to additional actors, without the oversight or limitations the creators of a constitution place upon subsequent governments within that constitution.

Consider the same question with a different right: a government which implements the UN declaration of human rights at a constitutional level, that includes the right to life; if such a nation permits a literal Pratchett-style Guild of Assassins, would this not be outrageous? That the government wasn't the one ordering the killings ought to be irrelevant. The same applies to censorship.

And in reverse, if there is a constitutional-level protection of speech that binds on the government, it ought to also bind on those that provide spaces for discussion.

And when one set of rights comes into conflict with another, let it be judged in public by the constitutional court, not by the secret court of an opaque private review process.

> As far as I'm concerned all centralized social media platforms are vulnerable to censorship of some kind or another, and the best way around this is to build systems that make it as technically difficult as possible for a 3rd party to intercept a message one person broadcasts to willing listeners.

Even America deems some speech to be unlawful.

Copyright infringement, NDAs, and non-disparagement clauses in contracts being the easy example where some private actor can invoke the power of the state to silence a certain category of speech.

Speaking personally, I think copyright should be much shorter (perhaps 20 years or so, perhaps variable with medium as news often stops being important after just a matter of days, but novels and music can remain relevant for a lifetime); I can understand why NDAs should exist, but I think they should also be time-limited; and I think non-disparagement clauses are exactly the kind of thing which any proponent of free speech should consider harmful.