So, yeah, many of us get a bit worked up when people are kicked off platforms, because they are being silenced, sometimes to the point of being shut out of the modern internet entirely (when their rights to a DNS address are comprehensively removed).
Hate speech and lies are terrible, but they’re not the only thing being silenced.
Why is it bad that were refusing to let something like stormfront operate in polite society? Your free speech absolutism is dangerous.
You can't debate an inherently bad-faith interlocutor, so dealing with Nazis points "out in the open," "in the marketplace of ideas," will not work. It will only legitimize their viewpoint as one worthy of consideration, thus debate. It's cool and good what happened to them.
The problem is this tactic is consistently agaisnt many dissident publications, often on pro-democratic ones by autocratic countries. So what/where do you draw the line for "this speech is unacceptable so we won't propagate DNS entries for it", and who draws it? USA? ICANN? The host country? Each DNS gets to pick and choose?
Going in the other direction, if this speech is so bad, why don't ISP's just ban the IP? We could do like Youtube automated takedowns, only it's a packet blackhole.
At the expense of pushing the satire, what we really need is Deep Packet Free Speech Inspection (tm). All packets are inspected by a blockchain-powered AI in the cloud for acceptibility and lack of Nazi content. All servers which respond to HTTPS must escrow TLS keys to enable Freedom Audits.
If allowing an operator to have DNS records or an IP address "legitimizes" them, then we need some full-blown worldwide consortium which determines the (il)legitimacy of each and every domain. Who has votes in this consortium? What if China wants to put the kabash on some Uyghurs because of "Terrorism" but Netherlands want to keep it up. Sounds like a beaurocratic nightmare.
Twitter et al. are where modern speech happens. They pushed themselves into this position, and thus upholding the human right to free speech also falls upon them.
So long as Twitter is not shut down, then perhaps some government oversight (to the limit of holding Twitter responsible for what and who they censor) is appropriate.
Free speech, in this case, trumps my intense dislike of our current administration.
Applying this to Twitter, Facebook et al. is not that big of a leap.
> completely destroys the business model of several hundred billion dollar businesses
They are not entitled to their business model, especially not at the price of trampling upon something broadly considered to be an inherit human right.
Although virtually none do so in unrestricted fashion. Hate speech, racism, genocide denial and so on aren't protected by free-speech in the overwhelming amount of legislations even in countries with a liberal tradition, and just like any other right free speech is subject to limitations.
Except they are held responsible if they don't curate. Look at laws like SESTA to see how platforms that don't self-curate content that could sexualize minors are legally liable.
I'm not saying SESTA is bad, I'm saying this idea that platforms need to be hands-off towards curation to maintain safe harbor protection is not true.
>Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Where is this in US law? Are you confusing DMCA safe harbor issues with speech?
All platforms take control over content - otherwise they could not remove child porn, PII, etc., and they don't lose DMCA safe harbor exemptions, which only applies to copyrighted items posted by users.
If twitter/facebook is allowed to serve as a primary means for an government organisation/department to serve as the primary way which it communicate it's not to hard to argue that that line have been crossed where it have to act as an "open access" common carirer, from an pragmatic real world stand point.
Putting an purely technical definition as the core of this debate is arguing over how many angels can fit on an pin needle, and not of any real value for deciding what kind of society we want.
If you run a DNS server, you're free to refuse to carry any record you want. And people are free to use or not use your DNS server, based on its policies. (There are various DNS servers that purport to block ads and malware, for instance.)
If you run a blog, you can choose to not allow comments at all, or moderate them as you see fit. If someone wants to reply in a way you don't want to host, they can respond via their own blog.
If you run a hosting company, you can (and should) refuse to host spammers, malware, people launching DDoS attacks, and so on.
If you run an email server, you can choose to reject spam.
Many interesting and desirable policies happen at the meta-level, based on that fundamental principle along with freedom of association. People will choose which servers to use based on the nature and quality of moderation; it's one of the defining aspects of a service.
You're not going to persuade people who are playing that game. They're just going to keep playing the game, and enjoy the fact that they're "winning" (in their own terms). But I think you can make it so that they lose in the battle for hearts and minds.
The first amendment is not a blank check to express anything you want in the U.S.
Okay, give me the keys and Ill do it.
You're effectively calling for some sort of cultural revolution that stamps out anti-Semitism through proper education. Seriously we've tried this with other topics, all they're going to do is say you're indoctrinating children, then you'll inevitably fall into a defensive position where you feel like you have to back it up with numbers and eloquent arguments. Bam, they've won because there will always be a first movers advantage with information: your opponent can now make an outrageous claim that people see, internalize, and then never see your rational follow-up to. You're all so incredibly terrified of censorship when the real terror is right in front of your eyes: a torrent of information, engagement, and half-consumption.
This is so incredibly tedious. I see the same thing that I'm describing here happen with any number of semblance of social progress: homosexuality, trans rights, even marijuana legalization. This cyclic pattern has to be hell, I can't fathom any other possible explanation for such a thoroughly trained helplessness.
Your idea that safe-harbor laws only apply to platforms who don't self-curate is absurd precisely because there is illegal content they, the platforms, can be held liable for instead of the users.
That was literally my entire point. The broader issue is can entity X force entity Y to shut down a service, eg shutting down Stormfront. If one country allows them to stay up, they stay up. This is how the internet is supposed to work. The alternative I pointed out was deliberately dystopian for the point of satire, apparently that was lost.