Technology

Yes it solves it. Companies are not required to carry your voice around the world, which is what their platforms do. Stop equating guaranteed amplification with your freedom of speech. It’s wrong and dumb. I’ve lived in countries that actually restrict speech and whatever the Facebook mod did to you is NOTHING. The only reason Americans even fall into this stupid way of thinking is because their speech is so free. When your speech has never truly been restricted you have no idea what that freedom even means.

No person or organization is really suitable to be the arbiter of truth

Courtrooms are arbiters of truth literally all the time. There are plenty of laws for which truth is a defence, and dishonesty is punished.

When battling misinformation, the problem is not that lying on the internet is legal - it is still actionable. Fraud is still illegal. False or misleading advertisements are still illegal. Defamation is still illegal. Perjury is illegal in the criminal law sense, not just torts. Ask Martha Stewart who the "arbiter of truth" is.

The problem is that it's functionally impossible to enforce on the scale of social media. If 50,000 people call you a pedophile because it became a meme even though it was completely untrue, and this costs you your job and you start getting death threats, what are you going to do about that? Sue them all?

So we throw up our hands and let corporations handle it through abuse policies, because the actual law is unworkable - it's "this is illegal but enforcing it is so impractical that it's legal". Twitter and Facebook don't have to deal with that crap so we let them do a vague implementation of the law but without the whole "due process" thing and all the justice they can mete out is bans.

If you disagree, then I've got a Nigerian prince who'd like to get your banking info, and also you're all cannibals.

I think this is an underrated point. A lot of people are quick to say "private companies aren't covered by free speech", but I'm sure everyone agrees legal ≠ moral. We rely on these platforms so much that they've effectively become our public squares. Our government even uses them in official capacities, e.g. the president announcing things on Twitter.

When being censored on a private platform is effectively social and informational murder, I think it's time for us to revisit our centuries-old definitions. Whether you agree or disagree that these instances should be covered by free speech laws, this is becoming an important discussion that I never see brought up, but instead I keep seeing the same bad faith argument that companies are allowed to do this because they're allowed to do it.

There is a key difference here. Social media companies have some liability with what gets shared on the platform. They also have a financial interest in what gets said and how it gets promoted by algorithms. The fact is, these are not public spaces. These are not streets. They're more akin to newspapers, or really the people printing and publishing leaflets. The Internet itself is the street in your analogy.

The Supreme Court is visiting such issues this month. Second block of text:

https://www.scotusblog.com/2023/10/major-second-and-first-amendment-cases-headline-november-sitting/

Anyone in good faith attempting to warn others of any potential harm that they believe to be true to the best of their abilities

But what if their beliefs are verifiably false? I don't mean that in a sense of a religious belief, which cannot be proven and must be taken on faith. I mean that the facts are clear that there are no 5G nanoparticles in the vaccine for cell phone jammers to interfere with in the first place. That isn't even a thing.

It's one thing to allow for tolerance of different opinions in public. It's another thing entirely to misrepent things that can be objectively disproven as true, just because you've tied it to a political movement. Can that really still be considered to be in good faith?

I wrote a comment about this earlier today. People who have been brainwashed to believe total nonsense often act in ways that are rational to them, but irrational to people who see the world through different eyes.

That's fine until it's violent action.

The alcoholic who thinks he's "fine to drive" believes he's perfectly rational. He's drunk all the time and no accidents. That's wonderful until he kills a family some night.