My city has a public square and a privately owned mall. Just short of being violent you are allowed to do and say as you wish in the public square. But most people prefer to go to the much cleaner, privately owned mall. Where our values and polite society are reaffirmed.
We choose moderation constantly in our lives, intentionally.
> My city has a public square and a privately owned mall
Interesting that you bring up that example, because private malls are absolutely required to follow certain public accommodations laws, depending on the jurisdiction.
So, just like private malls are forced to do certain things by the government, people are saying that a similar set of public accommodations, that we already force malls to do, should be extended to other platforms.
This rule is almost certainly applicable to California. Most mall protests that I've seen happen near the mall or in front of the mall, rarely inside the plaza. And usually with the agreement of the owners.
Do you ask the Chamber of Commerce which malls and stores to frequent whenever you want to shop? I think that would be a great way to avoid the bad areas with all the hobos and sketchy businesses that are probably fronts for drug dealers anyway.
You can "choose moderation" by not viewing Twitter accounts and conversations you don't care about and muting words you dislike.
> You can "choose moderation" by not viewing Twitter accounts and conversations you don't care about and muting words you dislike.
In that case however I would also like the possibility to turn off any algorithms that recommend stuff to me. I want to see only things i put on my whitelist, otherwise i will have to constantly moderate and it will take up loads of my time.
As long as that doesn't happen I am more than happy to let others do the moderation based on some frameworks that I agreed on (ToS in Twitters case).
If you think a ToS can capture every bigotry, propaganda technique, and misinformation campaign in perpetuity, I am impressed and hope for success in installing it on every centralized internet platform. Otherwise we would need individual humans at a corporation owned by rich men interpreting a vague set of principles about what "hate" and "misinfo" means, which is a different discussion...
Newspapers are an influential platform, but most people aren't reading them. It's not that big of a deal if the government decided to censor them, agreed?
On the contrary, the question I was asking is unclear: if, for a given platform, the only reason the wrong political speech shouldn’t be censored by rich and powerful men is because it’s too populous, what’s the difference if the government’s men decide what is too hateful/misinfo for Twitter and newspapers, versus the owners of those? This isn’t a rhetorical question either, I am curious for an answer!
I guess a common answer would be “you can move off Twitter, but you can’t leave your country” which is odd two ways: first, if you say you want hate and misinfo banned from Twitter (whatever those mean) shouldn’t you want that for all other big platforms? And it’s very possible to move abroad while not spreading hate and fake facts in the meantime, isn’t it?
