Dr. Dipwad
Experienced
@ProfEmerald:
You say,
I'm about to write a lot. (Sorry. I do that. If you don't like long posts, just skip this one.)
"Free Speech" means at minimum not being compelled-to-silence at gunpoint, either by government or criminal men. When you say "[n]othing to do with free speech," @ProfEmerald, you are appealing to that minimum.
But in human societies, "Free Speech" doesn't exist for its own sake; it exists because human minds and communication have, in themselves, a purpose (what the Greeks called a telos); namely, to socially exchange ideas and arrive at truth and mutual understanding. Consequently one prerequisite for "Free Speech" is the existence and openness of public spaces for interchange, in which the "Free Speech" right is exercised. Such public spaces, when they involve telecommunications, are typically subject to a section of the law known as "Common Carrier" law. BUT: Being a "Common Carrier" meant you couldn't exclude anyone, just as being a "Public Accommodation" (e.g. a hotel or restaurant) meant you couldn't refuse business just because the buyer was black. The existence of the "Common Carrier" gives functionality to your freedom-of-speech, just as your right to an attorney or public defender gives functionality to your right to a fair trial.
(BTW, the same is true of all the other "free" rights: One doesn't functionally have free exercise of religion in a country where one is forbidden from quietly giving thanks for one's meal in a restaurant, or reading a Bible on a park bench, or if building permits for churches or synagogues are routinely denied. One doesn't functionally have freedom of "peaceable assembly" if the only permitted location for protests is a ten-square-foot patch in the middle of a polluted quarry seventeen miles outside town. And so on....)
Now, we are a civilization in which certain companies (Alphabet, owner of Google Search, Google Ads, and YouTube being foremost, but also Twitter, and Facebook through Facebook and Instagram, and Amazon and eBay and Etsy, various payment gateway providers, firms like GoFundMe, most of the major banks, and a variety of cloud-hosting/e-mail-hosting platforms most people have never heard of) have become simultaneously providers of content (or, service providers for those whose "free speech" consists in generating content) and also platforms for content distribution. Traditionally in the laws of the Anglosphere, providers of content could be held liable for bad content; e.g. libel or incitement to violence. Meanwhile, platforms for content distribution -- like the telephone system -- could not be sued over the content they conveyed; only the original content-creators were held liable, even if they used that platform for distributing it. That was one of the benefits of being a "Common Carrier."
The big tech companies have, in recent years, had the best of both worlds: Their rapid growth to near-monopoly status in each sphere (e.g. YouTube for video publishing) was not purely market-driven, but the result of a virtual government subsidy: They were allowed to behave as content providers for the purpose of creating exclusive content, filtering content published on their platform according to their own tastes, and reaping ad revenue as co-creators. BUT, they were offered the special legal protections normally accorded only to neutral distribution platforms ("Common Carriers"): They could not be sued over content published using their platforms. When suits were brought, THEN they changed their tune and said, "Hey, don't blame us, we're just a neutral platform; blame the content publisher."
In short, they have all the benefits of being a "Common Carrier" without any of the legal obligations that go with it. They exempt themselves at will from carrying whatever part of the "commons" they disapprove of. And of course they have all the usual influence with lawmakers that one would expect from trillion-dollar companies perfectly positioned to filter their customers' worldviews through various kinds of content suppression (e.g. "shadowbanning" and "demonetizing"). Can anyone get elected in the state of California, any more, without kissing the rings of the tech oligarchs? Perhaps...but probably only in local offices so humble that the oligarchs can't be bothered to care.
For "functional free speech" to exist in a technological society, there need to be accessible "Common Carriers" for that speech. The tech companies that demonetize heretics (yes, I think the religious analogy is perfectly fitting, here) are acting as Common Carriers only when it suits them.
Perhaps you will answer: "Okay, fine. They don't want to be Common Carriers; so, let them officially designate themselves as private walled-gardens of content, which they can curate as exclusively as they wish."
I'm sympathetic to that view.
But that would leave a problem: Now that these platforms, benefitting from their strange legal privileges, have grown to a point of destroying most competition, what will happen if they are officially declared Not Common Carriers? Well, they will become private "walled gardens" instead of Public Accommodations. Their right to exclude heretics will remain intact...but whatever universally-accessible Common Carrier network we would have had, if it hadn't been for their strange legal privilege, was never built, and doesn't exist. Where, then, will the public find the public space for the Marketplace of Ideas?
I don't know the answer to this. It's an imperfect world; there's no perfect answer.
But the desired outcome is something like:
@ProfEmerald, do you agree with me that that outcome is desirable? Isn't it rather freer than our current cultural moment?
If so, then isn't it an oversimplification to hold that certain firms deplatforming heretics is "nothing to do with free speech?"
And at least, wouldn't treating those firms consistently as either Common Carriers or Walled Gardens, according to their behavior, be better for free speech overall? (At least, it would require them to give us Truth-In-Advertising, wouldn't it?)
In fact, isn't the reflex instinct to memory-hole whatever's uncomfortable a large part of the problem we're discussing?
You say,
I think -- and since you're a professor I'm willing to get into the weeds here -- we have to make a distinction between free speech simpliciter and free speech secundum quid, or "functional free speech."The government did not pull the products, the Company did. That is how a market economy works. Nothing to do with free speech.
I'm about to write a lot. (Sorry. I do that. If you don't like long posts, just skip this one.)
"Free Speech" means at minimum not being compelled-to-silence at gunpoint, either by government or criminal men. When you say "[n]othing to do with free speech," @ProfEmerald, you are appealing to that minimum.
But in human societies, "Free Speech" doesn't exist for its own sake; it exists because human minds and communication have, in themselves, a purpose (what the Greeks called a telos); namely, to socially exchange ideas and arrive at truth and mutual understanding. Consequently one prerequisite for "Free Speech" is the existence and openness of public spaces for interchange, in which the "Free Speech" right is exercised. Such public spaces, when they involve telecommunications, are typically subject to a section of the law known as "Common Carrier" law. BUT: Being a "Common Carrier" meant you couldn't exclude anyone, just as being a "Public Accommodation" (e.g. a hotel or restaurant) meant you couldn't refuse business just because the buyer was black. The existence of the "Common Carrier" gives functionality to your freedom-of-speech, just as your right to an attorney or public defender gives functionality to your right to a fair trial.
(BTW, the same is true of all the other "free" rights: One doesn't functionally have free exercise of religion in a country where one is forbidden from quietly giving thanks for one's meal in a restaurant, or reading a Bible on a park bench, or if building permits for churches or synagogues are routinely denied. One doesn't functionally have freedom of "peaceable assembly" if the only permitted location for protests is a ten-square-foot patch in the middle of a polluted quarry seventeen miles outside town. And so on....)
Now, we are a civilization in which certain companies (Alphabet, owner of Google Search, Google Ads, and YouTube being foremost, but also Twitter, and Facebook through Facebook and Instagram, and Amazon and eBay and Etsy, various payment gateway providers, firms like GoFundMe, most of the major banks, and a variety of cloud-hosting/e-mail-hosting platforms most people have never heard of) have become simultaneously providers of content (or, service providers for those whose "free speech" consists in generating content) and also platforms for content distribution. Traditionally in the laws of the Anglosphere, providers of content could be held liable for bad content; e.g. libel or incitement to violence. Meanwhile, platforms for content distribution -- like the telephone system -- could not be sued over the content they conveyed; only the original content-creators were held liable, even if they used that platform for distributing it. That was one of the benefits of being a "Common Carrier."
The big tech companies have, in recent years, had the best of both worlds: Their rapid growth to near-monopoly status in each sphere (e.g. YouTube for video publishing) was not purely market-driven, but the result of a virtual government subsidy: They were allowed to behave as content providers for the purpose of creating exclusive content, filtering content published on their platform according to their own tastes, and reaping ad revenue as co-creators. BUT, they were offered the special legal protections normally accorded only to neutral distribution platforms ("Common Carriers"): They could not be sued over content published using their platforms. When suits were brought, THEN they changed their tune and said, "Hey, don't blame us, we're just a neutral platform; blame the content publisher."
In short, they have all the benefits of being a "Common Carrier" without any of the legal obligations that go with it. They exempt themselves at will from carrying whatever part of the "commons" they disapprove of. And of course they have all the usual influence with lawmakers that one would expect from trillion-dollar companies perfectly positioned to filter their customers' worldviews through various kinds of content suppression (e.g. "shadowbanning" and "demonetizing"). Can anyone get elected in the state of California, any more, without kissing the rings of the tech oligarchs? Perhaps...but probably only in local offices so humble that the oligarchs can't be bothered to care.
For "functional free speech" to exist in a technological society, there need to be accessible "Common Carriers" for that speech. The tech companies that demonetize heretics (yes, I think the religious analogy is perfectly fitting, here) are acting as Common Carriers only when it suits them.
Perhaps you will answer: "Okay, fine. They don't want to be Common Carriers; so, let them officially designate themselves as private walled-gardens of content, which they can curate as exclusively as they wish."
I'm sympathetic to that view.
But that would leave a problem: Now that these platforms, benefitting from their strange legal privileges, have grown to a point of destroying most competition, what will happen if they are officially declared Not Common Carriers? Well, they will become private "walled gardens" instead of Public Accommodations. Their right to exclude heretics will remain intact...but whatever universally-accessible Common Carrier network we would have had, if it hadn't been for their strange legal privilege, was never built, and doesn't exist. Where, then, will the public find the public space for the Marketplace of Ideas?
I don't know the answer to this. It's an imperfect world; there's no perfect answer.
But the desired outcome is something like:
- If you want to live in a bubble consisting only of certain opinions, you may select from one of several competing Walled Gardens, sign up, and live in that bubble.
- If you don't want to live in a filtered bubble, you may also participate in a Common Carrier platform where all ideas (including some you probably find distasteful) will be found.
- If you want to publish opinions that are unacceptable to one Walled Garden, you can join another that finds your views acceptable, and publish them there. But you can also publish them on a Common Carrier, and anyone who participates in that platform will have access to them.
- The banks, the hosting platforms, the payment gateways, should have a status parallel to that of Common Carriers for the purpose of rejecting customers: Provided the customer is neither violating someone's rights to life, liberty, property, privacy, etc., nor unambiguously advocating for mobs to do so, their access to taking credit cards or receiving GoFundMe payments ought not be infringed.
@ProfEmerald, do you agree with me that that outcome is desirable? Isn't it rather freer than our current cultural moment?
If so, then isn't it an oversimplification to hold that certain firms deplatforming heretics is "nothing to do with free speech?"
And at least, wouldn't treating those firms consistently as either Common Carriers or Walled Gardens, according to their behavior, be better for free speech overall? (At least, it would require them to give us Truth-In-Advertising, wouldn't it?)
Hmmm. That's your opinion. Is it open to discussion?Rant over, This whole section of this thread should be flagged and removed.
In fact, isn't the reflex instinct to memory-hole whatever's uncomfortable a large part of the problem we're discussing?
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