my concern would be if youre starting a social media type business and the government is both trying to say "you cant remove people" and "youre legally responsible for things people post", how do you reasonably manage those 2 opposing points? it seems a bit ridiculous, unless im just not understanding the 2 points of view correctly (which is possible, im a mess of a human).
trying not to be held responsible for others actions is what lead the the removable of parler from google, if google is going to be held responsible for content posted there. they still had their web platform, and for now at least, their apple platform. so they never were really "shutdown". they tried to loophole in that their ToS said they could remove content so that was good enough. google and apple are asking them to implement the policy and practice.
i dont agree either, i dont think it should have been removed so swiftly, it was pretty clearly a knee-jerk reaction to the happenings, they should have been given a reasonable timeline to get it out. but it is what it is.
in 2021, i dont think theres a way to have a social media platform and not police it. people abuse it and you have to protect yourself as a business. this is on them for thinking they could just do whatever they want with no repercussions. youve got to protect yourself.
the trump thing was because he was using it send out official items, and the courts said since he was using it that way, he couldnt block people from viewing the messages, was it not? again, not sure on legalities, but i cant imagine because he chose to use it as a government tool to discern his messages, that it means the company cant police their own platform.
I don't disagree with a large majority of your post;
The people policing the major companies (Facebook, twitter) are clearly ideologically compromised while operating under a monopoly. There's no other explanation as to the selective enforcement in which they hide behind violations of their TOS.
Without getting into the obvious and at this point well worn Trump banned vs Ayatollah not comparison, the multitude of examples of blue check twitter overtly violating these rules they've put in place in terms of hate speech, promulgation of "fake news", violent rhetoric towards political figures and their supporters with nary a consequence, even excrement as comparable as that jerkoff Lin Wood re: Pence could go on and on and on. The current standard cannot stand. Bree Newsome and Arthur Chu get to spread absolute insanity, but whatever one thinks of Branden Straka, his comparatively speaking completely benign presence gets deleted as if it never existed. This is how fringe conspiracy theorists get created and in their minds and that of their supporters, justified.
I don't know what to do. I don't think a repeal of section 230 is a clean solution by any stretch either. I'm nowhere near as eloquent about this as Caitlin Johnstone and I don't think she can be accused of being a right wing crackpot,
"Supporting the censorship of online speech is to support the authority of monopolistic tech oligarchs to exert more & more global control over human communication. Regardless of your attitude toward whoever happens to be getting deplatformed today, supporting this is suicidal."
ill start complaining about the power they're wielding once they start to ban people from speaking outside of qanon - related cases and incidents, and it may honestly start to happen soon, but i see and have no issues whatsoever with any group or company seeing a need to stop the blatant lies and hysteria spready by qanon accomplices. this is not debatable for me. this country and our society is fvcked up, this has been made clearer than ever over the past several months and the past few days. this also is not a debate.
You can just say you're ok with tech censorship until they come down on things you believe in or don't personally find harmless.
But you can start complaining now.
https://twitter.com/Wildman_AZ/status/1347998602161840128I am 100% there, and I was before she made it a policy position. The US has a long and effective history of breaking up monopolistic positions at the right time - look at how they dealt with Ma Bell in the 80s - so quite why FAANG has been allowed to grow in such an unfettered fashion is beyond me, but it's way past time your government started wielding a very large antitrust stick in their direction and gave them the opportunity to divest or be dismantled.
As to your point on Parler, I'm not sure what your issue is there. It's not a free market argument - Google Play and the App Store both have clear rules about app content, they pull apps every day that provide or host content deemed to be contrary to their terms of service. Go onto the App Store and find something that serves content related to porn or radical Islam or any of a host of other things - it's not there. The only shame on this is that it took a bit too much sunlight for Parler to get pulled.
I agree with you its not a free market argument except thats constantly what I'm being told in terms of this not being a first amendment violation, "its the free market." No, its not, these are multinational corporations that during their formative years and beyond have been given massive tax breaks and grants in this country to help achieve their position, which you correctly stated is monopolized. I can't tell what's more annoying about that argument, the shifting of the goal-posts from "well if you dont like twitter start your own" to "lol look they started their own echo chamber" to "LOL START YOUR OWN APPLE" or the idea that as you identified, free-market principles are even at play here.
If Parler can be compared to porn or radical islam, so can twitter or for that matter reddit. You can then make the argument that both should go under apple or google plays terms of service, which would be nuts, as is the banning of parler.
But we have multinational corporations that have ultimate influence on the new frontier of how information is put out into the world, they answer to no one, they operate without any fear of competition because they can utterly destroy it, and they operate their own terms of service as arbitrarily as they want. What could possibly go wrong?
Hm, at the end of this, I think you're right. Just break them the freak up, but I don't see given the end result of what happened to Ma Bell that FAANG would agree to such similar concessions.
FWIW, I've found parler stupid as excrement and for that matter designed like it was built by a fifth grader, but considering that facebook and twitter seem to be content given their selective enforcement of their terms of service to be echo chambers, it was only natural the "bizarro" version would pop up. Think of me what you want, but I would like to think my continued presence here lends credence to the idea that I think echo chambers are freaking stupid.
