tl;dr
we haven’t had free speech for decades so don’t pretend this is anything more than culture war tribalism
all companies, including big tech, are within their rights to censor arbitrarily…
…but only if they’re not partially run/funded by the government
section 230 protections aren’t as important as you think
the onus is on you to constantly migrate to better sites with better tech
The Constitution says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” You're fucking kidding yourself if you think that law is respected at all in the first place. Look at this shit. Right off the bat you got the FCC shutting down pirate radio stations. Think about that. Governments claim control of the air and the radio frequencies in it too.
Be honest: did you know “fighting words” are exempt from first amendment protection? These are defined as word that are “as a matter of common knowledge, inherently likely to provoke a violent reaction.” It's been illegal to say nigger in America since 1942. It gets weirder the more you think about it: black people collectively intimidating everyone else into saying “n-word” through occasional violent action is what gave it protected legal status. No one looks over their shoulder before calling someone a racist, kike, chink, or fag because no one expects whites, Jews, Asians, or gays to throw a punch after being called a mean name. How about we stop this bigotry of low expectations and not assume every black person is a violent thug? It's only then that we can legally say nigger again.
The most ironic violation of free speech on that list is the first one, “incitement to violence.” Last I checked America only exists in the first place because some rich guys incited normal people to violence against the British monarchy. Those people still chose to do the violence. Juxtapose that with incitement to suicide because it involves taking advantage of a disabled person.
Sure, people do not often sue citing any of these exceptions as precedent for ignoring the Constitution. Not being able to say nigger on facebook sucks but the real problem with censorship arises when the government uses these silly technicalities to justify their budget with a makework project, or worse, squash anti-establishment rhetoric. Remember that time Aaron Swartz was incited to suicide by the FBI threatening him with life in prison for the crime of providing free access to speech commercially owned by others? And America is one of the better countries.
I haven't even touched intellectual property and copyright. All this stuff was passed into law by the supreme court, not congress, so it has that added layer of constitutionality. The notion that free speech was some sacred right before big tech and the president took it away is nothing but the payoff of quality propaganda. Around the same time the Cold War was reaching its peak and communist ideas were taking hold, the CIA ramped up their propaganda campaigns on the American people. In 2012 Obomber actually made it legal to do this although this was a mere formality.
That brings us back to big tech. The CIA technically started working with big tech in 2009, though it took til Gamergate catalyzed the cultural rift in 2014 for The Powers That Be (don't call them “elites”) to start taking the internet seriously. I think that's because the commoners also didn't take social media seriously after the dotcom bubble burst. On top of that it was still too complicated to use for the average retard.
When smartphones entered the zeitgeist, no one knew what to do with them except social media. Social media adoption was hitting a critical mass and was completely unfiltered. 8chan was peaking. All the online subcultures that are part of the scenery now were congealing into their larval forms. People were still naive enough to think something like Arab Spring could never happen here.
By 2014, it became possible for people to make shitposting into a career. That money attracted people and more people made it attract more money. By 2016, it was clear that an organized, intelligent, driven group of autists online can change the fate of the nation with the election of Trump. By 2018, Ajit threw away net neutrality which set the table for the federal (the shadow government's contract hackers count as federal) takedown of 8chan, the self-professed last bastion of free speech. By 2020, popular anti-establishment voices were throttled on youtube/facebook/twitter/etc and free speech became another culture war arena.
In the left corner, they say big tech can set whatever rules they want especially when those businesses give away their product to you for free. You have the right to misgender someone, just not on specifically on twitter You have the right to share the Hunter Biden story, just not specifically on facebook.
In the right corner, they say big tech is censoring political opinions, suppressing them in the algorithm, and generally not playing fair. These big tech cartels have a monopoly on the public square, no different than what the communist party does in China.
Look, I really don't have a dog in this fight because I'm not on either side. I'm a dog of war who abandoned the pack; like Big Boss from the Metal Gear series. I hope you receive enough of my thoughts to see the evidence of this yourself.
But don't give me that “iT's A pUbLic SqUaRe” bullshit. A public square is a finite (and pretty small) space. The net is infinite. You can go to anywhere else on the net for nothing or create your own new square for negligible. Accessing a website is akin to entering a business. Accessing the internet as a whole is akin to entering the public square. The most cringest part is when someone like Steven Crowder makes a ton of money because of big tech and still thinks he has the moral high ground in his lawsuit. Youtube has never claimed to be about free speech.
So long as ISPs continue abiding by net neutrality without explicit legislation coercing them to, the net is still one of the most free communication methods. On the other hand, social media companies aren't government organizations so it's impossible for them to infringe on your first amendment rights.
Right?
Well, no. Google, facebook, and twitter ARE arms of the state. We know the federal government pumps tons of money into big tech via the NSA and other shadowy organizations. In return they receive the metadata of not just US citizens, but users of big tech from all over the world. The Snowden and Project Veritas leaks proved that... if it wasn't already obvious from big tech's actions during the 2020 election. The CIA doesn't even try that hard to keep this a secret.
One of the main problems in this cultural conundrum is how no other platform can compete because most contemporary ubiquitous tech companies were propped up with Uncle Sam's checkbook for their first 5 years. Apparently this connection alone blows some people's mind so chew on it for a while and we'll come back to this.
There's another facet of this problem intrinsic to everything in the universe: entropy. At first it's easy for a company to do good, or rather, it's hard for a company to do bad. The invisible hand of the free market isn't total bullshit. Most people will avoid doing business with a small, weak company if they assume that company will rip them off. What's the incentive? At least the price would be cheap or the quality would be good were it a more powerful company. It certainly works for Apple. All organizations have this natural tendency to acquire power and consequently become corrupt.
Every one of the social media megacorps have many competitors that still have free speech. Either no one uses them due to the network resilience problem or they quickly become populated with the most extreme exiles from dominant networks. The simplest solution is mass migration to other platforms. It'd need to be coordinated via some sort of consumers' union or a long, aggressive marketing campaign because it's clearly not happening now.
A ton of people are trying to create new social media that utilizes the blockchain. Most of them create some proprietary token which can theoretically be exchanged for usable money, but no one does because none of them provide features superior to what's already being offered. There are a million ways to beat the network resilience problem which I'll cover in a later article.
Section 230 is often touted as the solution the Free Speech issue. It states: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Basically it means that, in America, a website owner can't be sued for content users uploads so long as they make a good-enough effort to delete speech that is already illegal like insider trading, child porn, threats to the president, or data you don't have a license to use.
It was only deemed necessary in the first place because our forefathers saw how much damage could be done through yellow journalism. They had to legally reign in publishers. Back when the net was a quirky hobby and not what 90% of the country does 10 hours a day, online forums were more like a New York bathroom wall than the New York Times newspaper. After Trump won it became undeniable that random assholes through social media could wield as much power over society as megacorps themselves.
Some people are under the impression allowing people to sue big tech by removing these section 230 protections will make speech more free. Wrong. Whoever sues might get rich and put a tech giant out of business, but fear of lawsuits is one of the fastest ways to make speech (or anything really) less free. Big tech will have even better justification for censorship if there are threats of lawsuits.
So I say go the other way: section 230 for all. Why were publishers being sued for something their employee wrote anyway? A publisher is a platform that pays the people who use it. Why continue gatekeeping the ability to share ideas? There should never be a punishment for providing a soapbox and bullhorn for someone else. If that writer writes something real court or mob-court deems illegal he should be the one sued or harassed.
Neither publisher nor platform are their employee's or user's dad. Consider the axiom “guns don’t kill people, people do” then replace people with writers and guns with publishers. People use guns to kill people. Writers use publishers to make money and publishers often use writers to push a narrative. But even with all the deadlines it's not like the writers have a gun fixed on them. In fact, pushing a destructive narrative purely for money kinda seems worse.
Because we're in the middle of biggest culture war we've seen in 60 years there always needs to be an opposing position. Lucky for you, I've already provided it: section 230 protections get removed for any social media platform that receives dark money from the federal government. If they're gonna use our tax dollars to spy on us, the least they can do is let us freely express ourselves. The threshold for when to enforce the free speech mandate couldn't be based on the size of userbase given all the fake accounts and metric inflation. Knowing exactly how much tax money the shadow government is using to spy on us seems to me like one of the few positions where pragmatism could outweigh tribalism.
Some of the free speech absolutists might be wondering why anyone wants the government to regulate any speech at all. Everything I mentioned earlier is exploiting a loophole in the Constitution and ideally the precedent set by those court cases ought to be stricken. After all the schoolyard rhyme goes, a stone when thrown is legally classified as battery but words will never hurt me.
I might be wondering why they're retarded. Most laws that restrict free speech were enacted by our forefathers cause they discovered pretty quickly you can do wayyyy more damage with a few well placed memes than you can with a few well placed bullets. A lot of this knowledge was formalized by the US and USSR in published research. You don't need to go that far to see proof of what I'm saying though.
Democratizing technology is always a gamechanger. Guns gave commoners lethal combat ability with practically no combat training. It took til color television for news journalists to successfully convey the horrors of war so that young men were no longer willing to shoot each other en masse every few decades. Exporting culture via movies and shows were how America won the Cold War. Now every DVD you buy starts with an unskippable federal threat and it's trivial for any famous person to sue for “defamation”.
If TPTB knows the pen is mightier than the sword, why would they regulate violence-democratizing tools more than information-democratizing tools? Today, even the most psychotic rightists are okay with some infringement of the 2nd amendment e.g. it's fine to take away the firearms of people who get arrested who are black.
With an uninfringed 1st amendment, a single competent person can control where ALL those firearms get pointed. Next time you're playing an FPS in a pub server try experimenting with strategic lies, actual strategy, simply commanding an enemy to shoot his teammate works often enough to give you an advantage in games with deep mechanics. Moreover, meme warfare is still in its infancy. Letting anyone say whatever they want is as irresponsible as letting a kid play with a pipegun.
Anyone who thinks absolute free speech is a reasonable demand clearly has never been been a mod for an online community. Censorship will always be required to some degree because curation/editorializing is necessary for it to be a community worth being part of. It could just as simple as deleting what appears like spam. But imagine if the early cryptocurrency chatrooms censored everyone who spammed “HODL2MOON” it'd be considered unfair. It's inevitable there will be some context where some form of censorship is justified. There have been many, many attempts at online communities with absolute free speech and not a single one ends up keeping the policy forever.
Because of this, if big tech megacorps weren't getting UBI from the deep state they would still need to put limits on free speech. When you demand absolute free speech from the government, it disincentivizes passing more government regulations on speech. Then they throw their hands up and leave it to the megacorps to figure out. Is that unaccountable “supreme court of facebook” really where you want this shit to go? I doubt it. We're stuck between a rock and a hard place until you remember that our regulations cut both ways.
If there are to be limits on speech or weapons, they must to be enforced on government employees as well. Fox News and facebook would be free to continue propagating lies with no penalty. But imagine if we held the sources of those lies accountable. I'd be a hypocrite if I recommended running for office yourself cause I'd never do it. Instead, beg a senator you elect to cut the CIA's budget as punishment for illegaly lying us into a 20-year war. In some cases they're infringing on the spirit of the law while remaining technically legal, like Obama legalizing propaganda against US citizens. It's not really feasible to hold a former president accountable. Fortunately it's pretty easy to track down the main sponsor of the 2012 NDAA and punish him. He's on death's door but he's a mormon with a big family so we can make his whole family pay for years to come. Isn't coming together to get retribution against smug assholes what cancel culture is supposed to be all about?