But the key in my comment is the precondition the government is truly "of and for the people", and thus any moderation they did benefited "the people", and not the government which likely holds more power than the people.
What happened with Trump was that he convinced his followers that it was OK to only get their information from the places that agreed with him, de facto making anything he says the only trusted source of information. This is the essence of political censorship. By taking away competing sources of information, you can basically write your own rule book, because those that only hear from you couldn't fathom a different reality.
Information needs to survive the competitive landscape and emerge as valid. Information that isn't put through the wringer should not be trusted.
And we need to go back to... censorship at the government level, vs publicly traded or private companies.
The government having a huge megaphone that reaches basically everyone, and then that same government censoring (turning the volume/reach way down) on competing messages - that's a very dangerous thing. It puts an awful lot of power in the government.
When the government says lots of dishonest things, or things that completely lack evidence, it is the duty of anyone with some influence on spreading messages to counteract that problem. In fact, when the government tries to discredit all competing sources of information, that's a very dangerous thing.
The people arguing against (government) censorship should be well to do to realize that right now, President Donald Trump is the loudest voice in government, and he's trying to drown out all opposing messages, and have you only listen to him. Read about the history of censorship, and figure out what kind of message muting you want to fight!
Moderation and censorship are two very different things.
Also, trusting the government is silly. It has a lot of opportunities to call any speech harmful to state policies as 'hate speech', 'misinformation', etc. - and before long you could find your country turned into a authoritarian failed state like Russia.
For it to be government censorship, they'd have to use government power to censor. No formal power was used. It's also not urged by the federal government, which is the organization that Trump runs, but instead by elected representatives.
I also think it's misleading to call it partisan, as if truth and falsehood are just two different flavors of ice cream, or two different sports teams. An informed populace is a necessary precondition for democracy to survive. Google might have the right to profit from misinformation, but I don't think they have an obligation to do so. They are allowed to support free and fair elections, just like the rest of us.
I welcome critical points of view but the fact remains that few are allowed to even see posts like this, much less discuss them with logic. The root comment here dismisses the article without any argument. How is a ticketing portal between government and social media companies for post take downs on subjective matters not evidence of censorship? Why is our government subsidizing moderation?
The distinction between government and private groups is
not a clean as you might think. At a large enough scale,
private groups can start to take on a role in society that
resembles that of a government, should we not then expect
them to be held to a standard that resembles that we expect
of governments?
Absolutely agree that companies, particularly companies with large market share, can effectively wield state-level powers and that it is something we need to figure out as a country.
In this case we're talking about Google's all-hands discussion about weeding out bad-faith actors. They weren't trying to silence people who simply thought Trump was the better candidate, they were talking about something very close to spam filtering. "Silence Republicans" is something that (even as a liberal) is something I'd be absolutely opposed to; filtering out outright fraudulent news sources (from any part of the political spectrum) is something we should all support.
We've been doing something similar as a country for many years. Notice how tabloids like the National Enquirer aren't typically lumped in with "real" news sources at the newsstand.
Imagine a scenario where Twitter and Facebook lose their ability to unconditionally moderate the content of their platforms. Presumably they would need to check with government censors first? Again, I understand how annoying moderation can be! I just don't understand the alternative and I do not see how this alternative is not a huge violation of the First Amendment — this would precisely be the government telling private companies what they can and cannot publish.
The argument that "it's not censorship if a private company does it" was always weak.
What these revelations show is that a lot of so-called moderation was done at the explicit direction of government employees. How do you defend this? "it's not censorship if the private company willingly complies with government requests"? A refusal by twitter would have had quite high costs for the company.
The cooperation between private companies and government censors is so deep that this is barely distinguishable from direct censorship.
While I agree that we don't want 'bunch of silicon valley liberals' moderating content, can we actually trust the government to censor instead?
Let's give one prominent example that occurred recently that affected hundreds of millions of people. In Australia, and around the world, our government authorities told us repeatably that the covid vaccines stopped you catching the virus and thus giving it to others [1], or at least significantly reduced the likelihood of doing so. It then came to light that Pfizer never tested for this during the trials and thus the authorities had no scientific evidence to say that this actually was the case. Infection rates amoungst highly vaccinated countries has also proven their position to be incorrect.
Yet anything on social media going against the authorities message at the time was flagged, removed and users accounts in some cases were banned.
What is considered misinformation one day can become 'fact' the next.
We should be careful on allowing any authority to censor our speech.
That's perhaps a fair reading of the initial comment, although reading "regulate" in "it has become easier for governments to monitor and regulate online content" and "moderating" in "the collective well-being of humanity should always be a top priority, and this includes moderating harmful or extremist content on the internet" to both mean simply "government input" is somewhat questionable. See also your own use of the word "moderate" ("Can the government force me to not delete that due to free speech, or do I have the power to moderate my blog however I want?"). Also your point that historically non-government entities can decide whether to follow government input or not needs to be qualified considerably. Contempt of court was not considered free speech until relatively recently. for example see Los Angeles Times contempt of court 1938. Then there is of course the Sedition Act of 1918. In any case this is very far from your claim that "everybody here is talking about speech in the context of a walled garden owned by a company/person." We are most certainly talking about government here. Whether or not the initial comment was refering to government simply "giving input" or outright censoring, we are still talking about government, so your claim is in my view inaccurate even under your own explaination of the comment, which is itself somewhat questionable.
Censorship doesn't necessarily mean censorship by government. If an entity is powerful enough (Google, Facebook, etc.) they can engage in censorship just as well.
Only a government can censor. A company is free to host whatever they like. You can host it elsewhere if you want. Sometimes elected officials say incredibly dangerous stuff. You remember Trump in start of COVID-19 crisis?
Governments aren’t homogeneous. In the US there’s plenty of energy (especially among conservatives) to restrict social media giants’ right to censor, at least with respect to political censorship.
The US government didn't stop there though. They used their influence to censor US citizens' tweets. That's censorship, and that's what happens when you give the government this power. Put censorship in quotes all you like, you support it.
I'm curious. Isn't this precisely what you want your government to do, not to shut down media but to get a handle on what is going viral and why, and what external influencers might be involved, and try to interdict it? As opposed to shutting down legitimate discussion? And to make all of their efforts and discoveries public as well? I've lived in repressive states, and to my knowledge they don't publicize their methods or intentions in cleansing their media sphere of anti-government sentiment, and they also don't allow platforms to continue operating openly. I think everyone has a right to free speech, but no one has a right to use a megaphone; isn't deplatforming bad actors actually the arm of democracy in action?
More broadly, can't a government act as a moderator to preserve civil society? Isn't a democracy acting that way in its own defense preferable to collapsing into a dictatorship at the whim of a viral/populist movement that would immediately go further?
Example: an extremist government comes into power in the US and orders all social media and traditional media companies to censor a certain type of speech. They could very well have popular support if there has been a war or a depression or some other crisis, it was only 75 years ago that we had a literal Office of Censorship, were putting Japanese-Americans in internment camps etc. US media is very concentrated today, the government only needs to go around to a handful of companies to censor the vast majority of outlets Americans get their news from.
Sure someone can set up a server somewhere and publish whatever they want but if no one reads it it won't really matter. Most people won't change where they get their news overnight even if the government does impose censorship. That's why federated social media is so valuable, widespread use of it ASAP is a benefit to society. It can de-concentrate the ownership of media distribution, decentralize control and make the next Office of Censorship's job much harder.
i dont know who you are speaking for, but agreed that the need for reduced autonomy for any agency of that size.
In general, conservatives believe in markets, and if they happen to grow to a particular size with these constraints, so be it.
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> If you look at the actual speech that is being disincentivized this looks objectively terrible in our present context.
I'll give one example to see what the reaction ought to be.
A private citizen makes an otherwise legal speech at a political meeting - and youtube and all media wipe it out of the internet last week.
Regardless of the private citizen being Trump and the party being Republicans, a liberal ( as the word used to mean before) should have been up against such censorship.
'Moderation' does not come into play in this example, but there is nothing specific to moderate really in what is essentially a semi-private meeting of free people.
My problem is that the government has found a sweet spot where it can regulate speech and surveil without limits through dependent proxies. It has no need to mandate moderation guidelines.
But the key in my comment is the precondition the government is truly "of and for the people", and thus any moderation they did benefited "the people", and not the government which likely holds more power than the people.
What happened with Trump was that he convinced his followers that it was OK to only get their information from the places that agreed with him, de facto making anything he says the only trusted source of information. This is the essence of political censorship. By taking away competing sources of information, you can basically write your own rule book, because those that only hear from you couldn't fathom a different reality.
Information needs to survive the competitive landscape and emerge as valid. Information that isn't put through the wringer should not be trusted.
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