Quote:
Originally Posted by pylon
I think I've made my position pretty clear. If it is criminal ie: Child Porn, Murder Ideation, Organizing Riots that cause Millions in property damage.... of course, I am not talking the extreme elements. And I have made that clear.
However, if you want to use extremes, so can I.
If given two choices.
A) Moderated and censored speech at the whim of a governing body.
B) Unadulterated, no holds barred free speech.
I'm taking B every time.
I am not worried about, and have the capacity to ignore the minority of nut jobs. I am not personally going to stand on roof stops spewing hate and racism. I will continue wondering through life just treating everyone as an equal, on their merits of being a human being. What others do is not my responsibility. Nor should I have my rights limited, because there are people that choose to not install a filter.
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I think it's important to remember the history of laws around the internet, as that puts the current climate into a bit of context.
Social media companies are generally exempted from the responsibilities that traditional publishers have in terms of what they disseminate. The idea being, the chilling effect on free speech that would result from making social media companies liable for what users post would cause more harm than the benefit it might provide (less illegal content, less hate speech, etc.).
Like, if a newspaper published the things that get posted every day on social media, they'd be sued into bankruptcy. Look at Alex Jones. He was civilly liable for spreading lies, and that's not cancel culture or political correctness gone too far; that's straight up slander/libel. But there are innumerable posts on social media saying the exact same things, but the companies aren't held responsible because they're exempted from liability.
But the corollary of that exemption is the sort of tacit expectation that these companies will make a good faith attempt to moderate their content in a relatively neutral way to avoid straying into that territory. So when a social media company wants to get away from that, to a large degree they're trying to have it both ways. They want to provide unadulterated free speech, but then they also want the legal protection from the liability of what that results in.