[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.