Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

> distribute hate speech, dangerously factually incorrect information and harassment

Until everyone can agree on a universal arbiter for what those things mean in a concrete way, there will always be demographics who strongly disagree.

The reason free speech exists as a concept is because of a historic understanding that there fundamentally cannot be an unbiased arbiter for 'good' or 'bad' speech.

On the other side of this, the internet is increasingly controlled by a particular demographic with a particular definition of what things like 'hate speech' mean. Which suppresses and censors a wide range of topics that the other demographics do want to discuss. When the entire internet makes it impossible to express certain views, we can't claim to have free speech anymore. It's not good enough to say 'well if you don't like it then you can go and shout your views out on the street instead'.

The weapon against 'incorrect information' is education, not censorship. Censorship has never worked to actually quash 'wrongthink', it only marginalises and energises demographics who are censored, and drives them to eventually revolt. See: trump winning presidency.

Moderation of non-state-managed platforms is not censorship. In fact, it would be a violation of free speech to limit private parties ability to moderate.

This is where it gets tricky. Because 99.9% of the popular internet is 'non state-managed platforms'.

There doesn't exist an avenue to meaningfully exercise free speech on the internet. You can make your own blog, but it will never go viral. Because the only means for something to go viral is that 99.9% composed of privately censored platforms. We've gotten into a situation where censorship has changed shape from 'one is prevented from expressing a view' to 'a view is prevented from reaching an audience'. Which is far worse than old school Stalin era censorship.

This is not an easy question, but it is clearly a case of the law needing to be updated in light of how technology has evolved. We can't claim to have free speech if there's de-facto no way to exercise it on the primary communication channel of our time.

Concrete example: it has recently come out that youtube has been silently censoring a wide array of comments that express anti-china views. Like most users, I was completely unaware that this is going on. Youtube distorted my perception of reality by suppressing an entire class of opinions from being visible. They didn't tell anyone that they're doing it, there was no transparency, and when they were caught, they said 'whoops it was a bug sorry lol'. That's crazy. What else are they suppressing? I do want laws to stop that even if it exposes me to comments I don't like.

Or consider the degenerate case: Imagine Facebook takes over the entire internet. They buy Google, they buy Twitter, they buy pretty much everything than an average user will ever see. And Zucc comes along and says, from now on any mention of a certain political view on any of these platforms will be censored. This is ok by the rules you're proposing, but it's clearly not ok in terms of the spirit of free speech laws.

I think you are wrong it saying that there doesn’t exist an avenue to excercise free speech on the internet. The internet in and of itself is arguably the best tool ever developed for expression of free speech. It’s the distribution to a mass audience that becomes tricky, but any and every media/medium before the internet had the same challenges to the individual.

>The reason free speech exists as a concept is because of a historic understanding that there fundamentally cannot be an unbiased arbiter for 'good' or 'bad' speech.

I thought it was to protect citizens' rights to hold their governments accountable.

>On the other side of this, the internet is increasingly controlled by a particular demographic with a particular definition of what things like 'hate speech' mean.

Hilariously, I agree with the wording but am willing to bet we disagree on who the controlling demographic is. Everyone remembers the stronger emotional reactions.

On today's modern internet, you can express just about anything you want.

The issue is that if you express 'wrongthink', then the 99.9% of platforms will prevent your idea from spreading, even if it would have otherwise spread or become popular.

This is how censorship has changed form. It's no longer about stopping someone form saying something, it's about preventing certain views/ideas from ever being allowed to spread or become viral or reach a wide audience.

Twitter is notorious for soft-censoring posts, where only connections 1-2 hops away from the author can see them, and then they don't exist. Those posts, no matter how much they resonate with people, can never spread to a large audience.

If we backport it to the real world, it's a bit like saying, sure we still have freedom of speech. You are welcome to go and say anything you want inside this soundproof box with room for only 1 person.

Free speech and its protection predates the modern concept of governments. Free speech is about ensuring that there's a broad pool of ideas in society so that it doesn't stagnate into a degenerate vertical of narrow beliefs.

> bet we disagree on who the controlling demographic is

I don't have a horse in the race. All I'm saying is that there is a bias due to the existence of a controlling demographic, and this undermines free speech when that demographic is able to censor what's visible to the average internet user. As a proponent of free speech, I'll fight for it even if it means that it unleashes views that I disagree with - that's the exact purpose of it. The most terrifying part about accepting censorship because you happen to agree with the censors, is that the censors will change over time and you will eventually find yourself on the receiving end.

Free speech's western society roots come from ancient Greece. The whole point now and then is to protect people from political persecution by the government.

I feel most people arguing for "free speech" applied universally to governments and private parties don't really understand the classical nature of it very well and how it functions as a pillar of democracy. If they did they would understand the paradox it would create when the restrictions placed on government are applied to private parties..

> Free speech and its protection predates the modern concept of governments.

But it doesn't predate the concept of government or the idea of government’s accountability to it's citizens; it appears to have emerged directly attached to that concept in Athenian democracy.

> Free speech is about ensuring that there's a broad pool of ideas in society so that it doesn't stagnate into a degenerate vertical of narrow beliefs.

No, it's really about preserving the proper subject relation of the government to the citizenry, as opposed to the inverse.

It's not against coalescing around consensus ideas, it's against the state dictating where that consensus will fall. There's obviously situations where nominally private institutions are de facto arms of the state, so you can't simply ignore formally private institutions, but just because a private actor has a powerful voice doesn't mean they stop being a free participant in the marketplace of ideas and must be constrained in order to preserve an artificial absence of consensus.