Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

FWIW, the BBC World Service podcast "The Compass" [1] has an excellent series on free speech by the veteran BBC journalist Robin Lustig. I highly recommend it. He covers tech companies, universities, blasphemy laws, etc.

[1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p035w97h/episodes/downloads

For me, free speech is fundamentally about trying to rectify the injustice of an imbalance of power between those in authority and the ordinary citizen. During the Enlightenment, the authorities were monarchs, but even before that, the origins of free speech can be seen in the Reformation, the authorities being the established Church and the battles being eg the right to a Bible in your own language or the right to worship without priests.

In modern times, authorities can be just straightforward, well, authoritarian. Global leaders & business people who tweet or post on FB carry an authority ex officio that make their proclamations much more acceptable to the neutral reader. That in itself is a dangerous situation and Twitter or FB absolutely need to take control. If these companies want us to take them seriously as champions of free speech, they have to play their role to help restore that balance of power, by being far more stringent about fact-checking the tweets of those global leaders than they would be for ordinary posters.

Those right-wingers who love to proclaim themselves champions of free speech are really objecting to the Tyranny of the Majority. That is not an authority that requires a rebalance of power. It is just an established opinion.

> Those right-wingers who love to proclaim themselves champions of free speech are really objecting to the Tyranny of the Majority. That is not an authority that requires a rebalancing of power. It is just an established opinion.

A tyranny of the majority—which you appear not to understand is a bad thing[0]—is a disaster and precisely what modern democratic institutions seek to avoid. It always leads to the repression of minorities, whether that's ethnic minorities, religious minorities, or political minorities. I doubt you would be much in favor of tyranny by a majority of a different political persuasion.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

It's pretty ironic but you miss the fact that the the ones in authority right now are indeed google, twitter, facebook etc. They are in control of the information you see and can curate what you call an "established opinion". Global leaders tweet don't carry any authority if you don't support their view, it is the perception of general opinion those tech companies create with their algorithm that creates this authority. Certainly, assigning CNN as the Washington Post as "fact checkers" is not a good start or stringent, it is simply touting an opinion which is not going to change anything because no Trump supporter takes the CNN seriously.

You're right that I worded it wrong. I was trying to say that they see it as a tyranny of the majority, whereas it is it is just a majority opinion.

>In modern times, authorities can be just straightforward, well, authoritarian.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves with the current political climate. Everyone forgets the Y axis on the political compass! This is why people who understand that both parties are authoritarian could see past the Russiagate and other bullshits but most of the country couldn't.

If one is still falling for the left/right paradigm one won't be able to understand the bigger picture at play. It's much more about authoritarianism vs libertarianism.

> If these companies want us to take them seriously as champions of free speech, they have to play their role to help restore that balance of power, by being far more stringent about fact-checking the tweets of those global leaders than they would be for ordinary posters.

What about the executive and majority stockowners of these companies, and how they might abuse their power?

I would rather prefer a federated structure like email. Anybody can choose their own clients to generate their own biased/unbiased feeds, and with plugins for fact checking.

Elizabeth Warren had a position on making the big tech companies open platforms. That was along the same lines, and would provide a far better solution than handing off the power to control people off to FB and Twitter execs

If you think the BBC is an arbiter of free speech, I have a bridge to sell.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lLcpcytUnWU

> FWIW, the BBC World Service podcast

The BBC is the last place I'd look to understand free speech. There is a reason why orwell based the ministry of truth on the bbc.

The platforms themselves are an established authority. Giving them power over what the media and politicians can say should be recognised as a real transfer of power. Objecting to such a concentration of power in the hands of three unelected American tech companies (Google, Twitter, and Facebook) who have billions of users and whose products cannot be avoided without significant difficulty is not exclusively right wing and has nothing to do with tyranny of the majority.

Weren’t newspapers and major TV networks in the same position of unelected power as recently as a decade ago?

There has never been “unbiased” media in the USA. Even PBS, NPR, and in other countries the CBC and BBC have been (often quite rightly) accused of bias.

I’m not sure what the ultimate answer to “fair public discourse” is, but “government regulated media” surely isn’t the answer we want.

Yes, the media were and are in a similar position of power, and despite some bumps in the road they've turned out to be a very good thing.

I don't object to a good-faith defense of Twitter etc. as arbiters of truth, because it's entirely possible they'll do a good job and become a responsible authority. I do object to the idea that only the political right would have a problem with them, and that the only problem anyone could have is tyranny of the majority. I'm more worried about tyranny of Jack Dorsey than tyranny of the majority.

If you listened to the podcasts, you'll be gratified to hear his conclusions then.