> While I'm a big advocator for free speech (I think companies should act like Signal and wash their hands of it), there's a difference between a government censoring an event and a public entity
This used to be true but is no longer true, I'm afraid. Government and Public Entities are now colluding in suppression and censorship. There are no checks and balances, this is a government taking a stance, promoting a narrative, and companies attempting to garner social standing or the opposite, which is to garner social standing by non-involvement. Sometimes these companies are looking out for their own legal responsibilities and associations in the given government too.
My generation thought it was a good idea for companies to take moral stances on stuff. In a way we asked companies to regulate morality because the government could or would not. Deplatforming became a word propagated by activists for use against their perceived enemies at the time, which were largely the "intellectual dark web". Those tactics took shape, were refined, and are now being used by social media companies, the government, and law enforcement in what appears to be almost cooperation agreements to suppress and censor in the name of fighting misinformation "for the public good".
The juicy note here is that the same infrastructure that fights misinformation "for the public good" is nearly the same infrastructure that autocratic rulers and governments install to control narratives, beliefs, and the spread of ideas. Americans, much less the world, should be watching on now. What is the public good, who decides it, and what are the repercussions for being wrong? The last part I think is the most important, we cannot let the people who propagated these ideas and cemented them as a solution walk away unscathed in history.
This used to be true but is no longer true, I'm afraid. Government and Public Entities are now colluding in suppression and censorship. There are no checks and balances, this is a government taking a stance, promoting a narrative, and companies attempting to garner social standing or the opposite, which is to garner social standing by non-involvement. Sometimes these companies are looking out for their own legal responsibilities and associations in the given government too.
My generation thought it was a good idea for companies to take moral stances on stuff. In a way we asked companies to regulate morality because the government could or would not. Deplatforming became a word propagated by activists for use against their perceived enemies at the time, which were largely the "intellectual dark web". Those tactics took shape, were refined, and are now being used by social media companies, the government, and law enforcement in what appears to be almost cooperation agreements to suppress and censor in the name of fighting misinformation "for the public good".
The juicy note here is that the same infrastructure that fights misinformation "for the public good" is nearly the same infrastructure that autocratic rulers and governments install to control narratives, beliefs, and the spread of ideas. Americans, much less the world, should be watching on now. What is the public good, who decides it, and what are the repercussions for being wrong? The last part I think is the most important, we cannot let the people who propagated these ideas and cemented them as a solution walk away unscathed in history.