I should also mention I have a long history of working "free speech." My buddy and I started an underground newspaper in our high school. It was good enough the administrators thought it was composed by teachers. Nope. It was us. We took submissions from other students and published what we thought was worthwhile. I was 16.
In 1985, my sister-in-law and I published a tech-oriented magazine in Berkeley CA. If we'd gotten some funding, it could have gone somewhere. But it was free speech at its most humble; we distributed it for free at Codys Books etc.
I started my blog oftwominds.com in 2005 with no idea beyond the desire to write short posts about whatever I found interesting. That's still the goal. Free speech enabled by paying for space on a server, and then for a dedicated server to handle the traffic. That's $191 a month. "Free" speech, well, I'm not so sure that anything is actually "free."
As Thomas Sowell famously said, "There are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs." You want free speech, you have to work at it. At least that's my experience.
As one of my old friends recently observed, "You're the only guy I know who's been called in by the FBI." Yup. Nothing is free, there's only tradeoffs. Sowell is a wise soul.
BJ, you make an important point: corporations / monopolies co-exist with the state, each uses the other to serve its own interests. Absent a stable government, then Warlordism is an interesting combination of corporation and state, as Warlords act as enterprises and fiefdoms. warm regards, charles
I think it's worth emphasizing that no private enterprise is obligated by "free speech" to give anyone who wants to share their opinion an opportunity to do so at their expense. Just as I am not obligated to give every reader access to my audience, neither are FB, X or Google. (Recall that FB owns Instagram and Google owns YouTube, Blogspot, etc.) So these enterprises can do whatever they want with "community standards," it's their right to do so. There is nothing remotely "free speech" about social media, YouTube. etc.
"Free speech" is simply this: the government cannot restrict public expression and peaceful gatherings. Private enterprises have zero obligation to offer "free speech," so they don't. As I said in the post, "free speech" means you either stand on the street corner and say what you want to say or you pay to publish what you want to say in print or online via your own server. That's our right. Everything else--posting on social media, etc.--is a privilege granted by the private enterprise that owns the platform / forum / site / blog / etc.
To limit private censorship, the best approach would be to 1) ban the collection of any data on users, the use of such data for any purpose and the sale of such data, 2) ban the use of algorithmic prioritizing of search and social media posts / content, and 3) require that "community standards" be clearly defined and publicly available to every user. Aren't these merely common-sense?
Substantial, thoughtful comments, thank you Kevin and Dee. I share your concerns and like Kevin's idea of users approving of community standards. Here are my concerns, which are sticky problems for any platform that allows anonymity.
Back in the pre--social media days (early 2000s), Yahoo groups were the place to find vibrant online communities. My experience was a really good group, informative and positive, would slowly be destroyed by a few anonymous trolls. Literally 2% of the users might be destructive trolls, but those few have the potential to ruin it for everyone. The same can be said of evil people who post sick photos of torture, abuse, etc. The system has to weed those few out, and FB has been using low-paid workers in developing world countries to do this terrible scutwork. Maybe AI can do a good job, that's a work in progress. My point is "freedom of speech" is abused by toxic trolls and evil people that ruin it for everyone.
Secondly, I have doubts that corporations serving shareholders by profit-maximizing surveillance and addiction are the best choices for operating anything, much less what amounts to the Commons of Media (social media). This was the point of Bruce's essay, which I recommend.
Serving the Common Good and maximizing profits via surveillance and addiction are at fundamental cross purposes. I would rather have a Craigslist or ICANN type organization controlling social media, i.e. an organization that isn't seeking to exploit users' data and "engagement" to maximize private gains, an opaque corporation, which as Dee points out, has no incentive to reveal, much less give up, their secret controls behind the simulacrum of "an open forum." (There is nothing "open" about any of these digital monopolies. Everything they do is gamed by algorithms that are constantly being tweaked to maximize data profiteering and addiction.)
It's hard to read about the mental health damage to teens done by social media as the result of the single-minded drive to maximize surveillance and addiction and not view the entire arrangement as Anti-Progress.
It's important to distinguish the difference between private monopolies and the government: citizens have zero input or control over monopolies, while the basic idea of government is the citizens have a say. Yes, Big Players buy influence, but citizens also surrender their say by being passive. If a government agency shadow-bans me, I have some recourse, including the judiciary. I have no recourse against digital monopolies--none.
Yes, the government is imperfect, but there are avenues for citizens to have a say. I consider it self-evident that monopolies / cartels in any sector are toxic to what's left of "free enterprise " and economic vitality.
I don’t think we want government regulating the marketplace of ideas. Sounds like a slide to Pravda. I feel like already the media is very politically biased and that messages are groomed/trimmed by their advertisers. Sometimes the viewers don’t realize this bias exists, and they falsely believe the “fact” tellers. Sounds like deceptive marketing to me.
During Covid, Team Biden pressured/coerced Facebook to censor inconvenient but factual information. Outright nationalization or stringent regulation would be degrees worse. So much corruption everywhere.
The problem with the current censorship online is that the platforms don’t disclose broadly what is being censored, especially thinking of shadow banning here. The invisible electronic wizardry of our times makes a lot of suppression invisible to most people. The flat earthers never hear from the round earthers. The rounders getting the word out to the flatters in this era relies on the same velocity of communication, not the snail pace of print media. Unfortunately, too, our “experts” are flat earthers and self-righteous ones at that.
If the person on the street handing out pamphlets gets punched in the face or thrown in the gutter, someone will see it and possibly also the pamphlet, but it won’t be seen by that many. The event could be reported online (!) and reach a broad audience (or NOT if it is censored because the identity of the perpetrator runs counter to preferred government narratives).
I already don’t trust the media and the government to give me the unbiased truth. What happens when we have no way to express ourselves? I think we see that happening now, and the tension is palpable. I feel like there is so much division precisely because ideas are not debated broadly enough of the time. To have debates happen, you have to be able to exchange facts and ideas freely.
Dee, I agree. Government should stay out of the marketplace of ideas... and education...and medicine...and building construction...and road construction...and funeral regulations...and birthing regulations...and pretty much everything except courts, defense, and protecting our liberties.
CHS - I appreciate all your good work in the "free speech" domain. I see free speech not so much as a literary phenomenon, or a genre, but as an important check on those people in power (along the lines of the First Amendment). If we the people cannot criticize, complain, demonstrate, and agitate for a change, then the people have no power whatsoever. As long as the government fails to use the published revelations of journalists, as reason to investigate, prosecute, and incarcerate the wrongdoers, the expression of free speech is inconsequential. Many laws do not give individuals a "private right of action" where we individuals can sue those in power individually. The action must be brought by an attorney general or some government agency. Recently, there are many cases where the attorneys general or the government in general have remarkably sat on their hands, and failed to use the published revelations of journalists. They have in many cases, however, seized the research materials of the journalists. This is demoralizing for those who would want a society where the law actually means something, where there is some semblance of justice. Those in power seem to wish us to have such a reaction and give up the fight. Don't give up the fight.
Free speech means everyone is free to say whatever they want to say, or write, or put on video, or sky write above town. Free speech means speaking freely. It isn't a cost. I hate people who say, "Free speech isn't free" or "Freedom isn't free." These are bullshit phrases and slogans. Idiots say this crap.
I think the Utilities mechanism is the better of the two proposed solutions. I will note that much of what I write here is my opinion of the way I see it. It may or may not be actually factual, but I don't want to keep typing phrases throughout that keep saying that I'm stating an opinion.
I'm doing my thinking as I'm typing this, so this will not be a completely formulated plan. But I would start that the idea of "community standards" has to be something that is voted upon by ALL the users; ie, Facebook can't establish community standards that they want to impose upon their users without each user (including new users) having a vote. As it is, they try to walk a fine thread between being a publisher and a platform, trying to pick and choose the better-for-them way of handling specific cases.
One issue that really caused a problem was the Communications Decency Act of 1996, where Congress tried to make a law that directly infringed upon the freedom of the speech. By judicial review, this is a law that should never have been able to withstand Supreme Court scrutiny. But it created that two-tier operating system for digital platforms.
While I make good use of the comments sections when the content creator permits them, I think I make the best effort to address the article and will sometimes offer a different viewpoint on the subject, I don't try to be rude about what I say. So far, I have never been thrown off any discussion board for violating the creator's rules, although I have inspired some angry replies. The target for most of my angry comments is usually the government or some petty official within the government.
Back to the free speech solution. The CDA should be repealed in full, since it specifically addresses one area of American life that Congress is forbidden. As such, no "platform" should be permitted to rely upon the CDA for defending their actions related to any posts, because this is an area beyond the scope of their mission. Social media platforms are not publishers in any sense; they do not create original content, but they freely use what others have created. The idea of the newspaper publisher being able to reject letters from publication made sense when the printed page was more expensive and page management was a major function at the printing press. But digital storage is much less expensive, and the incremental cost of extra words in digital space is much less significant. The modern platform is very similar to the satellite dish in my backyard for communications; it delivers everything in a consistent signal without adding anything of value to the content stream. Their role should be limited to establishing common requirements for the incoming signal so that it can be processed into an outgoing signal for the end user. This does not require any editorial action, and there should be no legal defense for imposing any type of content requirements.
As most of us are aware, the government used the various platforms to do its censorship for it during the hysteria. By the standards of the USSC that makes them whats known as "state actors". Which means they are bound by the same rules as government (waits for the laughter to subside...) but as we all know, the law means what ever those in government say that it means,when they say it. Absent governments power, corporations wouldn't even exist in their current forms. Neither would the various monopolies. Free enterprise can't be free, if mixed with government power.
I should also mention I have a long history of working "free speech." My buddy and I started an underground newspaper in our high school. It was good enough the administrators thought it was composed by teachers. Nope. It was us. We took submissions from other students and published what we thought was worthwhile. I was 16.
In 1985, my sister-in-law and I published a tech-oriented magazine in Berkeley CA. If we'd gotten some funding, it could have gone somewhere. But it was free speech at its most humble; we distributed it for free at Codys Books etc.
I started my blog oftwominds.com in 2005 with no idea beyond the desire to write short posts about whatever I found interesting. That's still the goal. Free speech enabled by paying for space on a server, and then for a dedicated server to handle the traffic. That's $191 a month. "Free" speech, well, I'm not so sure that anything is actually "free."
As Thomas Sowell famously said, "There are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs." You want free speech, you have to work at it. At least that's my experience.
As one of my old friends recently observed, "You're the only guy I know who's been called in by the FBI." Yup. Nothing is free, there's only tradeoffs. Sowell is a wise soul.
warm regards, charles
BJ, you make an important point: corporations / monopolies co-exist with the state, each uses the other to serve its own interests. Absent a stable government, then Warlordism is an interesting combination of corporation and state, as Warlords act as enterprises and fiefdoms. warm regards, charles
I think it's worth emphasizing that no private enterprise is obligated by "free speech" to give anyone who wants to share their opinion an opportunity to do so at their expense. Just as I am not obligated to give every reader access to my audience, neither are FB, X or Google. (Recall that FB owns Instagram and Google owns YouTube, Blogspot, etc.) So these enterprises can do whatever they want with "community standards," it's their right to do so. There is nothing remotely "free speech" about social media, YouTube. etc.
"Free speech" is simply this: the government cannot restrict public expression and peaceful gatherings. Private enterprises have zero obligation to offer "free speech," so they don't. As I said in the post, "free speech" means you either stand on the street corner and say what you want to say or you pay to publish what you want to say in print or online via your own server. That's our right. Everything else--posting on social media, etc.--is a privilege granted by the private enterprise that owns the platform / forum / site / blog / etc.
To limit private censorship, the best approach would be to 1) ban the collection of any data on users, the use of such data for any purpose and the sale of such data, 2) ban the use of algorithmic prioritizing of search and social media posts / content, and 3) require that "community standards" be clearly defined and publicly available to every user. Aren't these merely common-sense?
warm regards, charles
Substantial, thoughtful comments, thank you Kevin and Dee. I share your concerns and like Kevin's idea of users approving of community standards. Here are my concerns, which are sticky problems for any platform that allows anonymity.
Back in the pre--social media days (early 2000s), Yahoo groups were the place to find vibrant online communities. My experience was a really good group, informative and positive, would slowly be destroyed by a few anonymous trolls. Literally 2% of the users might be destructive trolls, but those few have the potential to ruin it for everyone. The same can be said of evil people who post sick photos of torture, abuse, etc. The system has to weed those few out, and FB has been using low-paid workers in developing world countries to do this terrible scutwork. Maybe AI can do a good job, that's a work in progress. My point is "freedom of speech" is abused by toxic trolls and evil people that ruin it for everyone.
Secondly, I have doubts that corporations serving shareholders by profit-maximizing surveillance and addiction are the best choices for operating anything, much less what amounts to the Commons of Media (social media). This was the point of Bruce's essay, which I recommend.
Serving the Common Good and maximizing profits via surveillance and addiction are at fundamental cross purposes. I would rather have a Craigslist or ICANN type organization controlling social media, i.e. an organization that isn't seeking to exploit users' data and "engagement" to maximize private gains, an opaque corporation, which as Dee points out, has no incentive to reveal, much less give up, their secret controls behind the simulacrum of "an open forum." (There is nothing "open" about any of these digital monopolies. Everything they do is gamed by algorithms that are constantly being tweaked to maximize data profiteering and addiction.)
It's hard to read about the mental health damage to teens done by social media as the result of the single-minded drive to maximize surveillance and addiction and not view the entire arrangement as Anti-Progress.
It's important to distinguish the difference between private monopolies and the government: citizens have zero input or control over monopolies, while the basic idea of government is the citizens have a say. Yes, Big Players buy influence, but citizens also surrender their say by being passive. If a government agency shadow-bans me, I have some recourse, including the judiciary. I have no recourse against digital monopolies--none.
Yes, the government is imperfect, but there are avenues for citizens to have a say. I consider it self-evident that monopolies / cartels in any sector are toxic to what's left of "free enterprise " and economic vitality.
warm regards, charles
I don’t think we want government regulating the marketplace of ideas. Sounds like a slide to Pravda. I feel like already the media is very politically biased and that messages are groomed/trimmed by their advertisers. Sometimes the viewers don’t realize this bias exists, and they falsely believe the “fact” tellers. Sounds like deceptive marketing to me.
During Covid, Team Biden pressured/coerced Facebook to censor inconvenient but factual information. Outright nationalization or stringent regulation would be degrees worse. So much corruption everywhere.
The problem with the current censorship online is that the platforms don’t disclose broadly what is being censored, especially thinking of shadow banning here. The invisible electronic wizardry of our times makes a lot of suppression invisible to most people. The flat earthers never hear from the round earthers. The rounders getting the word out to the flatters in this era relies on the same velocity of communication, not the snail pace of print media. Unfortunately, too, our “experts” are flat earthers and self-righteous ones at that.
If the person on the street handing out pamphlets gets punched in the face or thrown in the gutter, someone will see it and possibly also the pamphlet, but it won’t be seen by that many. The event could be reported online (!) and reach a broad audience (or NOT if it is censored because the identity of the perpetrator runs counter to preferred government narratives).
I already don’t trust the media and the government to give me the unbiased truth. What happens when we have no way to express ourselves? I think we see that happening now, and the tension is palpable. I feel like there is so much division precisely because ideas are not debated broadly enough of the time. To have debates happen, you have to be able to exchange facts and ideas freely.
Dee, I agree. Government should stay out of the marketplace of ideas... and education...and medicine...and building construction...and road construction...and funeral regulations...and birthing regulations...and pretty much everything except courts, defense, and protecting our liberties.
CHS - I appreciate all your good work in the "free speech" domain. I see free speech not so much as a literary phenomenon, or a genre, but as an important check on those people in power (along the lines of the First Amendment). If we the people cannot criticize, complain, demonstrate, and agitate for a change, then the people have no power whatsoever. As long as the government fails to use the published revelations of journalists, as reason to investigate, prosecute, and incarcerate the wrongdoers, the expression of free speech is inconsequential. Many laws do not give individuals a "private right of action" where we individuals can sue those in power individually. The action must be brought by an attorney general or some government agency. Recently, there are many cases where the attorneys general or the government in general have remarkably sat on their hands, and failed to use the published revelations of journalists. They have in many cases, however, seized the research materials of the journalists. This is demoralizing for those who would want a society where the law actually means something, where there is some semblance of justice. Those in power seem to wish us to have such a reaction and give up the fight. Don't give up the fight.
Free speech means everyone is free to say whatever they want to say, or write, or put on video, or sky write above town. Free speech means speaking freely. It isn't a cost. I hate people who say, "Free speech isn't free" or "Freedom isn't free." These are bullshit phrases and slogans. Idiots say this crap.
I think the Utilities mechanism is the better of the two proposed solutions. I will note that much of what I write here is my opinion of the way I see it. It may or may not be actually factual, but I don't want to keep typing phrases throughout that keep saying that I'm stating an opinion.
I'm doing my thinking as I'm typing this, so this will not be a completely formulated plan. But I would start that the idea of "community standards" has to be something that is voted upon by ALL the users; ie, Facebook can't establish community standards that they want to impose upon their users without each user (including new users) having a vote. As it is, they try to walk a fine thread between being a publisher and a platform, trying to pick and choose the better-for-them way of handling specific cases.
One issue that really caused a problem was the Communications Decency Act of 1996, where Congress tried to make a law that directly infringed upon the freedom of the speech. By judicial review, this is a law that should never have been able to withstand Supreme Court scrutiny. But it created that two-tier operating system for digital platforms.
While I make good use of the comments sections when the content creator permits them, I think I make the best effort to address the article and will sometimes offer a different viewpoint on the subject, I don't try to be rude about what I say. So far, I have never been thrown off any discussion board for violating the creator's rules, although I have inspired some angry replies. The target for most of my angry comments is usually the government or some petty official within the government.
Back to the free speech solution. The CDA should be repealed in full, since it specifically addresses one area of American life that Congress is forbidden. As such, no "platform" should be permitted to rely upon the CDA for defending their actions related to any posts, because this is an area beyond the scope of their mission. Social media platforms are not publishers in any sense; they do not create original content, but they freely use what others have created. The idea of the newspaper publisher being able to reject letters from publication made sense when the printed page was more expensive and page management was a major function at the printing press. But digital storage is much less expensive, and the incremental cost of extra words in digital space is much less significant. The modern platform is very similar to the satellite dish in my backyard for communications; it delivers everything in a consistent signal without adding anything of value to the content stream. Their role should be limited to establishing common requirements for the incoming signal so that it can be processed into an outgoing signal for the end user. This does not require any editorial action, and there should be no legal defense for imposing any type of content requirements.
Kevin, You lost me at "community standards."
As most of us are aware, the government used the various platforms to do its censorship for it during the hysteria. By the standards of the USSC that makes them whats known as "state actors". Which means they are bound by the same rules as government (waits for the laughter to subside...) but as we all know, the law means what ever those in government say that it means,when they say it. Absent governments power, corporations wouldn't even exist in their current forms. Neither would the various monopolies. Free enterprise can't be free, if mixed with government power.
BJ, I agree with you, especially your last sentence.