Reply With Quote
It's pretty incredible how the people who autistic screech about the Bill Of Rights the most are also the ones who blatantly have no clue what it is those amendments actually protect.
In the aftermath of tech companies (facebook, godaddy, twitter, paypal etc) refusing to be platforms for speech and/or behavior they deem offensive, I'm seeing the same old bull arguments by so-called "freedom of speech" defenders, believing this to be censorship and an attack on 1st amendment rights.
No. What actually would be a violation of 1st amendment rights (and the concept of private property) is if the companies in question were somehow forced to patronage views they find abhorrent. A quick analogy. Think of facebook as your home. If a person you invited to your home starts behaving in ways you find inappropriate, you can freely "censor" him by showing him the door, as facebook has done with a few alt-right luminaries.
What the first amendment protects is your right to say inappropriate things without fear of arrest or other forms of government intervention. The ACLU themselves defended the alt-right's rights to protest in Charlottesville, for instance.
As a soft-libertarian this warms my heart. Customers complained to these companies they were no longer comfortable with them providing a voice for idiots, and the companies responded (in an effort to make their customers happy and protect their bottom line) in kind. Free market at work. If Andrew Anglin, Richard Spencer, and the rest of those mouth breathers don't like it, they are perfectly free to create web hosting services, social media platforms, and online money transfer sites. That ain't going to happen, of course, because the lot of them doesn't have two brain cells to rub together.
It's pretty incredible how the people who autistic screech about the Bill Of Rights the most are also the ones who blatantly have no clue what it is those amendments actually protect.
What a strange coincidence these are also the people who think they should be able to march their entire armed-to-the-teeth militia into any Arby's becausemuh 2nd Amendment
As long as your social media company isn't a monopoly, I agree with the OP.
They just want trump gone
The nazis will be allowed back once Trump is out
CNN will go back to broadcasting about wars in the ME, congress disagreements and amusement park accidents
The nazis will be allowed back once trump is gone and noone will give a
But this is oh so important right now
Is that John McAfee in the middle?
You do more damage to Nazis by letting them expose themselves, not censoring them.
It's not a First Amendment issue, but people are still totally en led to criticize a private en y for choosing to censor something/someone.
Not saying these companies are wrong at all for telling the alt-right to off... just pointing out that in other cases, private censorship can be cons utional and still wrong.
That very well may be. I'm just illuminating the fact that this is not an attack on the 1st amendment like the "victims" are making it out to be.
I get it and I tend to agree.
One thing I do find interesting in your post:
"No. What actually would be a violation of 1st amendment rights (and the concept of private property) is if the companies in question were somehow forced to patronage views they find abhorrent."
What if a company was forced to provide a service to someone that held views they felt were abhorrent?
Definitely. There's 20 or so million people in the US who will march lockstep with Trump into . Majority of them probably have facebook, since they all love sharing those "triggering" memes so much. They should choose to boycott facebook, twitter, paypal en masse to show solidarity for their alt-right heroes who are being "unfairly" targeted and maybe put pressure on these companies to relent. Facebook wouldn't like what a 20 million (not to mention all the mouth breathing ethnonationalists in Europe) mass exodus would do their bottom line. Don't think they're that committed. Sharing memes is to fun
Can private censorship really ever be "wrong?" I agree it can be illogical and silly (i.e. an SJW telling me to leave their house because I showed up wearing a Cleveland Indians hat), but I don't think choosing which people and ideas you choose to patronize in your residence, place of business, etc can ever be wrong in a moral sense.
They would be well within their legal rights.
Race, sex, religion, gender, age, orientation, nationality.
Wearing a Nazi shirt into a cake store isn't protected.
Edit: Read your post wrong. I read it as what if they refused.
What about a police uniform?
1st Amendment applies only to govt
As far as I understand it, that's technically legal, they're just probably not going to stay in business very long.
I could be wrong.
Like if the government drafted a bill that made it illegal for companies to privately censor.
Not sure I get the last question? Are you talking about a situation like a private hospital being forced to render emergency services on someone like a Neo-Nazi? In that case the Nazi's human rights supersedes (morally and legally) a company's right to refuse rights.
Wel, obviously, a life and death situation goes beyond free speech.
I'm talking about internet censorship.
No such thing exists.
There's always an alternative if you don't like the way a specific company on the Internet is treating you, i.e, most of post on here instead of inside hoops because we can call each other gots, bean3rs, gooks, etc without fearing of banishment.
Now if the Internet becomes a public utility, then it would be a violation of the 1st amendment.
Some platforms are pretty much there.
I'm pretty sure Facebook finds Trump's tweets abhorrent, but they're not about to deactivate that account.
But, hey, at least they shut down Milo.
Which is absolutely flabbergasting.
If so (I don't doubt it), the internet is simply the foundation, like the water (a public utility) a restaurant boils to make a dish. The WWW is actually not the "internet," it's the restaurant, and a restaurant does have the right to refuse.
Here's an email sent by CEO that terminated service to Daily Storm
Team:
Earlier today Cloudflare terminated the account of the Daily Stormer. We’ve stopped proxying their traffic and stopped answering DNS requests for their sites. We’ve taken measures to ensure that they cannot sign up for Cloudflare’s services again.
This was my decision. Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. My rationale for making this decision was simple: the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes and I’d had enough.
Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company.
Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous. I’ll be posting something on our blog later today. Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.
[Cloudflare employee’s name redacted] asked after I told him what we were going to do: “Is this the day the Internet dies?” He was half joking, but I actually think it’s an important question. It’s important that what we did today not set a precedent. The right answer is for us to be consistently content neutral. But we need to have a conversation about who and how the content online is controlled. We couldn’t have that conversation while the Daily Stormer site was using us. Now, hopefully, we can.
I’ll be publishing a blog post with all our thoughts on this issue in a few hours. Until then, I’d ask that you not talk about this externally.
—-
Matthew Prince
Co-founder & CEO
I should rephrase. For Internet censorship to become a 1st amendment violation, the world wide web would have to become the public utility. It's actually impossible to "censor" anything on the Internet since the Internet is simply a network of computer-to-computer connections that can't communicate information on its own without a program (i.e., in the old days, it was BBSes, now, it's the WWW). And web-hosting services, web-pages, etc are privately owned. So if the Internet did become a public utility, a person who felt censored by the facebooks and godaddys could still set up their own webpages and web hosting services, or find laxer alternatives.
We often conflate the Internet with the WWW. It's kind of like confusing electricity (Internet) and Lights (WWW).
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
