I feel this piece, like a lot of moderation/censorship rhetoric, starts from a disingenuous place.
Free speech, moderation, editing, censorship, propaganda, and such do not have clear definitions. The terms have a history. Social media is new, and most of the nuance needs to be invented/debated. There aren't a priori definitions.
This article is defining censorship as X and moderation as Y... Actually, it provides 2 unrelated definitions.
Definition 1 seems to be that moderation is "normal business activity" and censorship is "abnormal, people-in-power activity" on behalf of "3rd parties," mostly governments.
Definition 2, the article's "moderation MVP" implies that opt-out filters represent "moderation" while outright content removal is, presumably, censorship.
IMO this is completely ridiculous, especially the China example. China's censorship already does, work like this article's "moderation MVP". Internet users can, with some additional effort, view "banned content" by using a VPN. In practice, most people use the default, firewalled internet most of the time.
Youtube's censorship is, similarly, built of the same stuff. Content can be age-gated, demonetized or buried. Sure, there is some space between banned and penalized... but no one is going to see it and posting it is bad for your youtuber career to post it. This discourages most of it.
IMO, the difference between censorship and moderation is power, and power alone. A small web forum can do whatever it likes and it's moderation. If a government, medium monopoly, cartel, cabal or whatnot do it.... it is censorship. If a book is banned from a book stall, that's moderation. If it is banned from amazon... that's censorship.
If amazon have a settings toggle where you can unhide banned books does not change anything that matters. A book that amazon won't sell is a book that probably won't be printed in the first place. That's how censorship actually works. It's not just about filtering bad content. It's about disincentivizing it's existence entirely. Toggles work just fine for that.
I find it problematic when the prerogative to speak entails a necessary monetary cost to be paid by someone else for amplification and discovery, and that money is private money. Engineers aren’t plentiful or cheap.
If hypothetically every metaphorical YouTube should close for business because perhaps governments shut down ad funding, or if YouTube starts charging money, is my prerogative of speech in peril?
And if AT&T and all the other phone companies converge on the position that I must pay big bucks to talk to people, is that censorship? It’s not like I can easily find a free version of AT&T.
If I am enormously underpowered that I cannot bid for speaking time on TV, is that censorship? I’m basically an incompetent David bidding against Goliaths.
“Right to Speech” does not equal “Right to Distribution”.
You are free to say what you want without going to jail, physical punishment, or fines (unless your speech is part of committing some other criminal behavior—such as fraud—or civil tort).
But nobody is obligated to provide you the means of distributing your speech.
Thats not to say that there aren’t asymmetric means of disseminating ideas or messages over third-party distribution channels. But you’ve got to be savvy enough to do that, or separately powerful enough to buy your own distribution.
Even owning distribution is pointless if you can’t communicate your ideas in a way that attracts listeners. “Right to Speak” doesn’t equal “Right to be heard”.
>If hypothetically every metaphorical YouTube should close for business because perhaps governments shut down ad funding, or if YouTube starts charging money, is my prerogative of speech in peril?
No because it's not related to your specific content.
Even if you were to make the argument that X content doesn't make money and costs too much, if someone pulls the trigger without giving you recourse to resolve issues, then it is violation of free speech.
In your example, if AT&T tells you that you must pay more money to say certain topics, then it's a violation.
If it costs money, it costs money, nothing wrong with that. The issue is intent.
The counterpoint to this is that putting in a barrier that only some people can pass can work as censorship. If you raise the price very high, then only people with lots of money can use it. This means all (or at the vast majority of) of the content is that which is desirable by the very rich. So by raising the price to a high level you are censoring content that is of interest to the poor but not the rich.
This is actually exactly how big media/big politics operates.
Why does specificity of intent matter? If the government on mere whim decided that I can't use the phone, is that somehow not a violation of free speech? In this scenario, is it any less of a violation just because the government acted on a whim as opposed to any specific intent to manipulate conversation?
So this is kind of what I mean by "no a priori definition."
Social media is new. The "right" to broadcast was almost theoretical before the internet. It wasn't what free speech was about.
IMO, we don't have free speech at all on fb/youtube/etc... currently They can close your account and take away your right. They don't need a court and it's all up to them. You have individual speech on those sites.
One day I'll have to write a thing about freedom of speech vs freedom of reach: what right to people have if any to machine distribution or algorithmic suggestion to other people?
Look... IMO, these tend to go the wrong way from the first sentence. Almost any polemic on this topic starts by assuming or implying that Freedom of Speech means X or that censorship means Y.
The reality is that Freedom of Reach means something totally different than it did 25 years ago. Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Speech didn't use to be the same thing.
We can't keep going to the past and pretend that early republican politicians, early liberal philosophers or early modern lawyers have the answer for everything rights-related. It's ridiculous to extrapolate what Free Speech means in the era of TWitter and Youtube from the early modern era's thoughts on pony mail and leafleting.
What Freedoms we have, or should have, now that technology enables them, is a question for people of now to decide.
> We can't keep going to the past and pretend that early republican politicians, early liberal philosophers or early modern lawyers have the answer for everything rights-related
Indeed. But people like those things, and use them as anchors for their own political views. Ninteenth-century views of freedom of speech excluded huge areas of material under "obscenity", much of which simply isn't obscene now in the west. Such as "information about contraception".
I think that approach overemphasises and embeds the power of these platforms.
Twitter (let’s face it we’re talking about Twitter) is not the world. It’s certainly a popular place for people to yell at each other and increase the general level of aggravation in the world. But it isn’t the world. If someone is moderated off twitter, their ability to speak is impacted, but only to one audience and in one way. Their ability to speak to me is unaffected entirely because I think Twitter is a giant waste of everyone’s time and energy. They can speak elsewhere, other platforms can serve their needs, and if they are popular enough then they’ll take the users and the attention from Twitter. Regulation here would only entrench the platform.
Twitter it not the public square, it’s some private company’s arguing arena.
>> Twitter (let’s face it we’re talking about Twitter) is not the world
Twitter is popular with journalists, politicians and such. Hence all the attention. For most people, facebook and youtube are the important part.
IMO, youtube is the most important medium today. It's effectively the free-to-air TV of the internet. It has a terrible, clunky, disrespectful and illiberal approach to content moderation. In fact, it's pretty similar to state censorship methods... ambiguous rules, selective enforcement, whipping boys. Makes Twitter look good.
>It's not a public commons if it's owned by a private individual or company...
>Yes it's popular and yes there's a lot of people on it and using it, but that doesn't make it a public commons, its ownership does.
Exactly. Folks who complain about the (lack of) moderation on some corporation's platform are, for the most part, certainly welcome to do so.
However, those corporate platforms (unlike public platforms) have no responsibility to host anything they don't want to host.
They are not your government. They are not your friends. They are not a public square. They are businesses whose goal is profit. And that goal isn't necessarily a bad goal either.
However, the business models of those corporate platforms are dependent on showing ads to those who use those platforms. That creates a variety of perverse incentives, including (but not limited to) boosting engagement by pushing outrage and fear buttons to keep folks on the platform, watching the ads.
And so I ask, does the above sound like a public square? It certainly doesn't to me. Rather, it sounds like a bunch of corporate actors taking whatever steps (regardless of impact on discourse) to maximize profit.
Again, that's not inherently a bad thing. But it doesn't (and never will) fit the bill for a "public square."
I genuinely don't think it is. At the risk of paraphrasing one of the replies below, and probably to repeat myself - it's more of an arena showing ads, in which the contestants are encouraged by onlookers and the organiser to argue and aggravate, to express thoughts in such short-form that nuance and understanding are lost, to create spectacle. For profit.
Regardless of moderation or censorship, a public square would/should operate quite differently.
Free speech, moderation, editing, censorship, propaganda, and such do not have clear definitions. The terms have a history. Social media is new, and most of the nuance needs to be invented/debated. There aren't a priori definitions.
This article is defining censorship as X and moderation as Y... Actually, it provides 2 unrelated definitions.
Definition 1 seems to be that moderation is "normal business activity" and censorship is "abnormal, people-in-power activity" on behalf of "3rd parties," mostly governments.
Definition 2, the article's "moderation MVP" implies that opt-out filters represent "moderation" while outright content removal is, presumably, censorship.
IMO this is completely ridiculous, especially the China example. China's censorship already does, work like this article's "moderation MVP". Internet users can, with some additional effort, view "banned content" by using a VPN. In practice, most people use the default, firewalled internet most of the time.
Youtube's censorship is, similarly, built of the same stuff. Content can be age-gated, demonetized or buried. Sure, there is some space between banned and penalized... but no one is going to see it and posting it is bad for your youtuber career to post it. This discourages most of it.
IMO, the difference between censorship and moderation is power, and power alone. A small web forum can do whatever it likes and it's moderation. If a government, medium monopoly, cartel, cabal or whatnot do it.... it is censorship. If a book is banned from a book stall, that's moderation. If it is banned from amazon... that's censorship.
If amazon have a settings toggle where you can unhide banned books does not change anything that matters. A book that amazon won't sell is a book that probably won't be printed in the first place. That's how censorship actually works. It's not just about filtering bad content. It's about disincentivizing it's existence entirely. Toggles work just fine for that.