this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
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It is nonsense that courts can require an online platform to host content from somebody they don’t agree with, this is compelled speech. And we’re cheering it on because X is seen as a political opponent. It sure will be fun when the shoe is on the other foot and courts are thinking they have some right to force lemmy to host or not host certain kinds of content that doesn’t agree w the new party line or is “misinformation”. “COVID was a lab leak” was misinformation until the world government’s decided it might actually have merit as an idea. Handing the government speech control powers like this is dangerous. Democracy relies on people being able to choose what they say and don’t say and share or not share that information.
What people are allowed to say shouldn't be controlled by a handful of Silicon Valley fat cats running the major social media platforms. If you make a platform for random people to speak on, their speech should not legally become your speech to control. You can't expect people to only speak freely on digital "public property" if there is none.
You're right, and it also shouldn't be controlled by the courts. Imagine a court requiring a newspaper to print an op-ed or a "letter to the editor" the newspaper didn't want to print. Sounds crazy, right? But because it's twitter, people are fine with it for some reason. Look to conservatives in the US who are writing laws in TX to require social media sites to "not censor conservative viewpoints". It's your website, you should be able to set rules for how it's moderated. Let people choose websites based on moderation policies. Twitter is already on its way to being a dead website due to their moderation strategies, we don't need to throw out out free speech rights in the process.
The long-term solution is decentralized networks like Activitypub/Lemmy/mastodon and nostr.
The difference here is that a platform's users have no association with the platform. A newspaper pays its employees and has a hierarchy. It operates as a single entity. A better analogy to what's happening would be if all the public parks and roads were owned by companies like Microsoft and Reddit, and they could ban you from the parks and roads for any reason.
In the newspaper example, these are not newspaper employees having their content rejected, but readers or other random members of the public.
Except that's not the situation. They don't have a monopoly, people can use other platforms (like we're doing right now). And it looks like users and advertisers are abandoning twitter, that free choice mechanism is working.
Reddit had an average of 73.1 million daily active users in late 2023 and all of Lemmy has just under 50,000 monthly active users as of this month. Lemmy is a roadside lemonade stand trying to compete with Minute Maid. Big Tech has a monopoly on social media.