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mjbale116 | 1 year ago

- "It violates freedom of speech!"

- "This is a free market; if you do not like it use another platform!"

- "I thought $conglomerate" had our back! They had rainbows and all; is that all it took them to fold"?

- "No, this is not a systemic issue; conversation needs to be steered away from attacking the system and rather its a few bad apples! Go after them and stop asking for systemic changes!"

- "Any attempt at regulating companies in an assault on #freedom and must not be tolerated"

discuss

order

ffsm8|1 year ago

I am against almost all kinds of censorship, the only times I personally believe things should be censored if it's inciting violence/death threats to people. And even then I feel like censorship is probably the wrong way to do it.

And from that perspective, these quotes you're currently touting are ripped out of their context, making them sound asinine despite being mostly on point, fundamentally.

Twitter, Facebook, Google etc are private companies. They should be free to censor whatever they decide to censor.

I would personally hate it if they did, and it'd hope we'd get a competing platform that doesn't censor and that that'd become the standard, but it is what it is.

If a government makes the company censor something, then that is a violation of free speech (which I sadly don't have, as I'm not from the USA). And isn't that what happened in the context of Corona/antivax?

vladms|1 year ago

What is censorship for you personally? I don't have a clear definition in mind (because I think is hard), but something along the lines of "the ones with overwhelming power should not be able to impose what ideas are spread".

Why I think is hard it's because multiple rules can be made to make it impossible to spread ideas: talking loudly in the street => you disturb the neighbors; you send mails with pamphlets => it's spam; want to make an add on TV => extremely expensive. And so on.

andrepd|1 year ago

> Twitter, Facebook, Google etc are private companies. They should be free to censor whatever they decide to censor.

Why? Private companies can't dump waste onto a river, can't build buildings not up to code, can't discriminate based on religion or sex, can't prevent their employees from joining a union, can't evade taxes (well these last 2 only in theory I admit)... Meta owns platforms with 3B, 2B, 2B users (fb, insta, whatsapp); why the hell wouldn't it be possible, in principle, to regulate them as public utilities and forbid them by law from censorship or other nefarious practices?

Your phone company can't spy on your conversations and your power company can't shut you off if you are black. Only on a society completely far off the deep end of neoliberal philosophy would people even think to invoke "but it's a private company" like some sort of holy taboo.

dist-epoch|1 year ago

Your internet provider is also a private company. Do you think it should be free to censor you and close your contract if you visit websites they don't agree with?