“Deplatforming” is anti-freedom. It violates the free speech of the speaker, it violates freedom of assembly for the listeners, and it violates freedom of association for all of the parties involved.
Showing up to shout someone down who had people voluntarily show up to hear them speak because you feel like you are empowered to unilaterally decide and enforce through aggression who is “allowed” to speak in your city or on your campus, is inherently an act against freedom of speech. It’s also the ultimate act of “entitlement”, getting away with it is the ultimate act of “privilege” to be allowed to so utterly disrespect another person’s rights.
There is no other way to color this and very little nuance here. “Platforms” in the virtual space have more leeway as they’re mostly privately owned and extended as a privilege of access, not a right. Shouting down speakers in public (or paid and invited) venues though is unequivocally against freedom of speech.
> “Deplatforming” is anti-freedom. It violates the free speech of the speaker, it violates freedom of assembly for the listeners, and it violates freedom of association for all of the parties involved.
Is it though? And to what extent? We don't have unlimited freedom of speech in the US constitution because we agreed that there are limits and realize that words do mean things (like a threat).
But on a platform let's be nuanced. Some people believe that saying a racist word and having their comment removed is deplatforming. Some think they can promote violence. Others think getting down voted is deplatforming. There's a lot of people getting grouped together here and many making claims of being deplatformed are not acting in good faith.
So unfortunately we need to define what deplatforming means otherwise we'll just be arguing and making assumptions because many people will be working off of many different definitions pretending that we all agree on the definition (or that we hold the true definition and others are dumb).
"Censoring future speech" seems like a decent working definition.
I.e. anything that restrains an individual's ability to make future speech in a manner equal to that of their peers
Another useful distinction in the argument would be between "commons platforms" and smaller ones.
It feels like past time that we recognized market realities and codified them into law to distinguish rights and regulations. If you are Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, Snap, or ByteDance (or any subsequent arising entity with a large enough market share in some public/social market) then you the public should have different access rights to your platforms, on the sole basis of their public ubiquity.
So you clarify, you are okay with down voting and removing comments but are not okay withbanning accounts? Bans, even temporary, are crossing the line?
My feelings on the above are likely contingent of the nuances of implementation. Do downvotes ultimately censor posts? Are votes equal weight? Etc.
From a higher level, I'd grant that (a) platforms have a fundamental right to try to realize their vision, which may include promoting and demoting various types of content & (b) spam and astroturfing is a constant reality in any social platform (and users are better served by less of both).
So I think there are justifiable reasons for censoring, or at least decreasing visibility. I've been on forums long enough and have too low an opinion of the average internet denizen to think otherwise. :-)
Hence, to me, the emphasis on ad vs post hoc restraint.
If I allow you to make speech, and then, on the basis of that piece of speech and NOT on your identity as its speaker, decrease its virality in a way that's still fair (e.g. yank it from feed promotion but still allow direct linking) and then (in rare cases) absolutely censor it, that feels fair. To me.
If I proactively identify you, godelski, as someone likely to say *ist things and consequently ban you or pre-censor everything you post, irregardless of the individual pieces of content, that does not feel fair. To me.
As well, and I should have punched this more in my comment, as emphasizing "individual." Which is to say "1 human person, 1 share of public speech rights."
IMHO, if free speech is a right that flows from our existence as sentient beings then it's difficult to get from there to "you deserve more / less free speech than I do."
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And finally, because I know I'll get this response eventually, yes, I know playing whack-a-mole with bad actors on a public platform is a nigh impossible task. I've done it. Maybe actually impossible.
Tough.
Uber skirted labor laws in pursuit of profit. Social media platforms are doing the exact same in terms of nuanced moderation in pursuit of profit. "It's difficult" or "It costs a lot to employ and train the headcount required to do it" isn't an acceptable defense, and we shouldn't accept it.
I'd grant that (a) platforms have a fundamental right to try to realize their vision, which may include promoting and demoting various types of content & (b) spam and astroturfing is a constant reality in any social platform (and users are better served by less of both).
I don't think that platforms should have any such fundamental right wrt user produced content. I think that platforms should work as either publishers (where they produce and are responsible for all the content), or as common carriers (where they are forbidden by law from interfering with legal content). I think that platforms should have to explicitly choose one model once they reach a certain number of participants or when they incorporate.
I am all for shielding platforms from liability for user content if they act like a common carrier and limit themselves to removing illegal content. However I don't see why we as a society should shield companies from liability when they selectively pick and choose which user content to promote and which to suppress, according to their own preferences.
I wonder if you've thought this through properly. I suspect that, if your vision were to be enacted, there would be no more forums. No more Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News, niche PHP forums, comment sections, etc, etc. Why? Because they'd devolve into spam and/or people arguing past each other. For example, given your current definition I believe it would be acceptable for someone to write a script to post useless replies to every single Hacker News post and comment, effectively rendering the board useless.
Right now, HN has the right to delete those. If it was a common carrier, it would presumably not. Arguably they're spam, but I cannot imagine a way you can define "spam" that is narrow enough to not be redefined by everyone as "things I disagree with", but broad enough to capture someone posting excessively to a forum. Note that this wouldn't violate the CAN-SPAM act because it's not advertising anything commercial.
I have thought that through and considered putting that in my post, but I didn't want to dilute the original thought.
Of course I support the idea of "off topic", but it is something that needs a lot of consideration and however one writes such a restriction, it's liable for abuse and probably has a zillion edge cases. E.g. is it off topic if I post "<your favorite politician> hates cat videos" onto a cat video forum? What if I am a moderator with <other side> political views, and I allow those posts if they come from people that agree with me and disallow them if they come from people who agree with you? What if I divide my site into multiple sub-fora, one of which is "politics of cat videos"? What if de facto use of my forum or a sub-forum becomes political discussion, but that everyone attaches a cat video to each post?
In other words, yes, I have thought a lot about it, but this warrants its own separate discussion.
That's a very reasonable response. I'd add another thought: A site (e.g., Twitter) could define "off-topic" as anything that goes against its Terms of Service or Code of Conduct (CoC), which would probably result in exactly where we are now. Same problem with a lot of similar ideas - "Spam? Anything that violates our CoC is spam"; "Degrades the experience for the user? We feel that violating our CoC degrades the user experience"; and so on. Not a problem easily (or even able to be, IMO) solved.
This position means that if I create a forum for fans of a band, neither I nor anyone else should have the right to remove comments trying to sell hair products or discussing cooking recipes. Not to mention sharing (legal) pornographic images.
I am ok with downvoting, if I have the ability to change my settings so that I can view downvoted comments. However, I think that downvoting is a less desirable than individual-centric controls.
I strongly prefer to have have the individual ability to block/mute/suppress any comment or commenter, and I am ok delegating that ability to someone or something else as long as I can withdraw my delegation and undo any changes that were made. To put it differently- I might decide that I trust some organization or individual to build block/filter lists and I might consume those lists (as I do for spam blocking, ad blocking, etc.), as long as I can observe what they're doing and opt out at any time. It seems social media is long overdue for that.
I am NOT ok with anyone (or anything) else doing these for me without my explicit opt-in, especially if I don't have any way to see what decisions they made on my behalf or to reverse those decisions.
Do you think accounts that post nothing but spam content (so, a twitter account that posts an advertisement in response to every public tweet on the platform), or blatant scams, should not be allowed to be restricted in any way (for future speech)?
Deplatforming does not violate freedom of association for all parties: you seem to be forgetting that the platform also has the right to freedom of association, and would be exercising that right by refusing to associate with the individual(s) being deplatformed.
I'm yet to see a convincing argument that broadly, one person's free speech right always trumps other's freedom of association when the other doesn't like your speech, for any reason.
Because one party is human (the individual) and the other party is corporate (the platform).
Individuals are inherently endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Corporations are explicitly allowed whatever rights we choose to afford them, in pursuit of profit and maximizing their ability to put capital to productive ends.
Saying "an individual speaks" is very different than saying "Facebook speaks."
What opinions would Facebook have? And what fundamental desires would Facebook's opinions stem from?
...and yet the Citizens United and Hobby Lobby rulings are a thing.
There is no basis (or case law) to say biological people's free speech rights overrides legal people's freedom of association right everytime - but I've seen the "free speech absolutists" take this as a given.
So in your ideal world, all you have to do to avoid "deplatforming" is to find one other person who shares your viewpoint and form a group? Isn't that literally how it already is regardless of your "first principles"? Or am I misunderstanding?
So if I talk to my neighbor and we agree on something and form a group of two, suddenly we deserve less free speech rights because technically that is a platform somehow? I can't understand what you mean here, please clarify.
If you're trying to say businesses should be required to file with the government and get subject to business regulation, they already are?
If you and one neighbor form a group, why should your group-of-two be entitled to any more free speech rights than those the two of you possessed before forming a group, and still individually possess after forming the group?
Groups are entitled to greater-than-zero rights, in order to support their accomplishing their purpose in an efficient manner, but I'm curious why they should be owed person-equivalent rights?
>why should your group-of-two be entitled to any more free speech rights than those the two of you possessed before forming a group, and still individually possess after forming the group?
It's not? If I throw my own party I can decide to uninvite the other bad neighbor down the block who always gets drunk and trashes everything. If I form up with my other neighbor and throw a block party, we can also decide to uninvite that same drunk neighbor. Are you saying that because it's a block party and not my personal birthday party, we should be forced to invite this person and have the party trashed, because uninviting them is a person-equivalent right? Or maybe I'm not allowed to do this at a personal birthday party either, because my wife and brother and I all formed a group to plan it? Please help me understand here, maybe this is a bad analogy.
> Are you saying that because it's a block party and not my personal birthday party, we should be forced to invite this person and have the party trashed, because uninviting them is a person-equivalent right?
To use this analogy, yes.
Or perhaps better, the block party shouldn't automatically have a right to not invite them, because a block party is not a personal party, and the right of the block party to not invite them should be weighed against other rights before being granted.
Because, as you noted, equating block party group rights with your personal rights ultimately leads to "just form a group."
Which, in US law, also clashes with the fact that some core rights we give legal groups (in corporate form) to allow them to operate efficiently are limited liability (with respect to their members as individuals) and limited transparency (with regards to their internal workings and ownership).
Doesn't this infringe on my individual right to enforce my own boundaries?
If I dislike someone, and I host an event, it's by definition a "group" thing, there's no real way to distinguish a personal gathering from a group gathering. But under your proposed system, I, an individual, can't exclude any person from a group gathering. Being unable to choose who I associate with is a fundamental infringement on my right of association. If I'm forced to associate with everyone, I'm not free.
Ok, to me what you've proposed just means that nobody in my neighborhood will throw block parties anymore because they don't want to get stuck with the bill when drunk guy breaks a window and urinates on the upholstery.
Edit just to respond to something:
>Because, as you noted, equating block party group rights with your personal rights ultimately leads to "just form a group."
I don't know how you got that, this seems to be very backwards. The group was formed before the rights were even considered.
A group of two is not necessarily entitled to more rights than individuals, but I don’t see why they should entitled to fewer rights. The idea that groups and associations of various forms can have the same rights as individuals has been a legal principle going back to the Middle Ages at least in the west, and even further in some other cultures. I see no good reason to change that.
It seems to me that any scheme for depriving people of the ability to exercise their rights in various contexts, for example because they are trying to do so as part of a specific group, could be subject to serious abuse.
I am a free speech absolutist. I believe anything else would be decadence living in a first world nation. My country still does restrict speech and did so for centuries now, has spawned multiple dictatorships and still believes it to be a working concept. But that is another topic.
Platforms that promote certain content are absolutely free to do so and should not be forced to do anything else. But it should be understood that this is their motivation and their choice. They do not practice freedom of speech or freedom of opinion. They advertise for something and it is not about any intellectual discourse and probably more about advertising.
Ok, so what if a platform was owned by just one person... it would be totally fine for that one person to refuse to allow certain people to post their thoughts on it?
If you accept that, then what about a company that is owned by two people? Or three? Ten? 100?
How many people have to own a company before the owners are no longer allowed to decide who they allow to use their platform to espouse their views?
> you seem to be forgetting that the platform also has the right to freedom of association
In the cases I'm mostly referring to in my comment, the "platform" was perfectly fine with the speaker, and invited them (or accepted their money in exchange for use of the venue), so, yes, their freedom of association is /also/ being violated when someone comes in to shout down the speaker.
As the saying goes "Your right to swing your arms ends where my nose begins." Shouting someone down who is speaking to an audience that explicitly came to listen to them in a venue they arranged for isn't "freedom of speech", it's disruptive and a form of trespass. It's also made worse by the fact most of the things being shouted when this happens is arguably slander.
What I don’t understand is the nuance between freedom of speech in public spaces versus privately owned spaces. If the US government had a public social network, then people would have the right to shout ZYX. It is not the same on Facebook or TikTok right? Those are privately owned spaces. That would be like you coming into my property to shout XYS and I could remove you from my land. Am I understanding this correctly?
There are privately owned spaces (shopping malls, some towns) that have been treated as public spaces for free speech purposes in US court cases, as I understand it.
Basically, if a privately owned space is promoted as a "commons" and acts as one, some of the rules about speech start changing.
In making this argument, you should clarify that you think it's important to not limit "freedom of speech" to its legal definition. Currently, you only make an allusion to that distinction.
To fully make your argument, you need to convince people that the overall philosophical point of "free speech" is worth societal value even beyond that which we have accorded it via law (assuming you're in the US).
Coming from someone who doesn't agree with you, but who doesn't agree with your opponents either.
The First Amendment doesn't grant a right to free speech as such; such a right is assumed to be pre-existing and inalienable (whether one roots such rights in religious belief or secular humanism). Rather: the First Amendment restricts what laws Congress may pass, which might infringe on that right.
I half-agree: many who lean libertarian like to contrast "positive rights" with "negative rights"; and while it's an interesting academic distinction, in my view a purely negative right is indistinguishable from not having a right at all. Perhaps the state cannot proactively ensure my survival with 100% certainty, but a "right to life" is meaningless without some kind of proactive deterrent against violence.
Where I disagree is the "legal" qualifier: while legal protections have an important role to play, so do civil institutions and social norms. Many forms of suppressing free expression are entirely compatible with the First Amendment (economic and social sanctions), and instead have to be defended in civil society, and the court of public opinion.
I see where you're coming from. I just think that if we have to resort to civil institutions beyond courts to enforce something, it's not really a "right". It's some other kind of good or value. So maybe my definition of "right" is too narrow or legalistic--but it is ofc widespread.
I don't disagree, my position here is "yes, and". However one construes "rights" (it's a thorny topic both morally and empirically!), in my view, legal defenses and civil defenses are each necessary, but not sufficient.
The Constitution uses "inalienable rights" for a reason. An individual (and c.f. Citizens United and Hobby Lobby, corporations) is accorded all rights not explicitly circumscribed by a higher form of federal government
That phrase is from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.
The way the Constitution works is that the Federal government only has those powers it is granted, which are limited by items such as the First Amendment, which does not generally restrict individuals (including corporations--there is no "cf" here; corporations are simply people, though they are not 'natural persons", where that distinction matters).
> In making this argument, you should clarify that you think it's important to not limit "freedom of speech" to its legal definition
More specifically, to shrink “free speech” smaller than it's legal definition, and erase both part of what is legally protected and the fundamental premise of the legal protection, in that you want it prohibit private exercise of free speech rights essential to forcing ideas to complete in the marketplace of ideas by compelling private actors to actively participate in relaying speech that they find repugnant.
Showing up to shout someone down who had people voluntarily show up to hear them speak because you feel like you are empowered to unilaterally decide and enforce through aggression who is “allowed” to speak in your city or on your campus, is inherently an act against freedom of speech. It’s also the ultimate act of “entitlement”, getting away with it is the ultimate act of “privilege” to be allowed to so utterly disrespect another person’s rights.
There is no other way to color this and very little nuance here. “Platforms” in the virtual space have more leeway as they’re mostly privately owned and extended as a privilege of access, not a right. Shouting down speakers in public (or paid and invited) venues though is unequivocally against freedom of speech.