wouldn't that violate free speech though? forcing a company to keep something up/take something down is entirely up to them no?
Free speech does not cover scams and fraud, something that happens on their platform. Society doesn't take any action against them for publishing illegal content, scams, libel, fraud, because they aren't a newspaper. They're more like a newspaper printing house.
In my opinion they should probably be losing those protections and should suffer legal consequences for the content their users post. The moderation has reached a point where they ate defacto editorialising content.
An alternative to that could be opting in to some kind of third party moderation arbitration process.
Aha, now this is an interesting distinction. I'm not an expert in this, as you might imagine, but what counts as editorialising?
To my naive eyes, having an algorithm that re-arranges posts, or injects new subjects seems like editorialising to me.
For practical reasons I think those algorithms are absolutely necessary. We need spam filters. A good line to draw would be "bring your own algorithm". A technical challenge to be sure, bit breaking up social media backend providers and content filtering seems like one of the only safe ways to allow these massive platforms to exist.
The algorithm can be just "Dan filters out spam".
At first, its just unsolicited commercial crap.
Then its non-corporate allowed unsolicited commercial crap.
Then its 'hide commercial crap in posts to deceive'.
Then its 'fuck over screen readers by aligning everything weird like FB to prevent finding commercial crap'
Then its "hey we can add these other non-spam categories (like Palestine) to silence them".
It's nothing new; the entire point of §230 is to provide protection to platforms that editorialize their content. Without editorializing, you have immunity anyway.
That's hilariously impractical. Just because you want to and can moderate some things doesn't mean you can guarantee rapid moderation of illegal stuff. When your platform is nominally open to everyone, and has millions of users, that just doesn't work out well.
Hi. You seem to be confused or uninformed. Check out this link[0]. IT should help.
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
Personal opinion, not legal opinion.
>Personal opinion, not legal opinion.
Fair enough. But not very charitable (or helpful/useful to freedom of speech) to anyone who doesn't have billions in cash on hand to fight the hundreds/thousands of lawsuits anyone who doesn't like what the thoughts of others that you (or I) choose to host on our platforms, whether they be web sites, mailing lists or video comment sections.
Section 230 protects the little guy much more than it does Meta, Alphabet, Musk, etc. As they have the deep pockets to fight those lawsuits. Do you? I don't.
just take away safe harbour as a whole. we dont need to subsidize the existence of Facebook and AWS and ISPs.
Free speech can mean two things:
(1) The general philosophical postulate, that society is better when there is a high level of freedom in the exchange of ideas and critique of other's ideas.
(2) One aspect of the above is that government should not censor speech. Like the 1st amendment in USA.
But if most public discourse takes place on forums owned by companies, and the companies start to practice high levels of censorship, then we might formally satisfy (2) but still won't get the cultural benefits of (1).
It's balancing the company's freedom of association against the individual's freedom of speech.
Look, the world criticised Facebook for facilitating a genocide in Burma [1]. There is a moral argument for American social media companies policing their speech to some degree. But that doesn't mean there shouldn't also be a process of appeal, data offloading, et cetera.
[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Corporations are creations of the state and treating them as strictly private, especially when they're trampling rights, is illiberal horse-shit, and is straight up insulting when done under the guise of defending liberalism. And there's plenty of room for nuance, we don't have to (and already do not) regulate family businesses or 50-employee enterprises like we do transnational mega corporations with more capital than many entire countries.
Giant unaccountable companies privatizing the public square harms free speech. Forcing them to at least reveal why something was censored would help free speech more than it would harm it. Unless you subscribe to the myopic legalistic 1st amendment position that "free speech" is maximized when companies can act with the least restrictions, no matter how unable to speak or be heard that makes individuals, so long as it wasn't the government that silenced them.
Which is why OP describes the U.S. enacting legislation creating a statutory right.
Well, that depends on who says you don't. If the government says so, they are wrong, because you do have a constitutional right enforceable against the government to post on Facebook.
The idea of saying "you don't have a constitutional right to post on Facebook" is that you don't have such a right enforceable against Facebook.
Which is true. But under current US law, you do have a civil right enforceable against any public accommodation to be offered the same service that they offer to the public generally.
Amazing how certain people do their best to ignore this, every single time.
Talk of what's in the constitution doesn't really matter. This person may seem not protected but a different government could go after meta for foreign influence.
It's also a lesson not to trust companies who have a global presence because they are as good as who they do business with.
A corporate charter is granted at the BEHEST of the People and the Government.
They are at best an artificial entity, and should be an extension of the laws binding government.
Frankly, the current situation of "You can say whatever you want legally (well, not really), but your job will fire you for it and youll end up in a homeless encampment". Yeah, thats real freedom.
So basically its real freedom for the Musks and Trumps of the world to sieg heil on stage, but fuck the citizenry for their attempt at speaking out.
There is a valuable discussion about whether those rules should be there. But as long as they are, enforcing them on all platform users is the just thing to do
oh, right, free speech. everyones allowed to do anything because they use their VOICE to INCITE harm and that's enough abstraction that others can't see the facade???
bull shit.
It's all "they're a private company, they can ban anyone they want" right up until they ban someone who promoters of that idea don't like. Then they're suddenly horrible people for being a private company that bans anyone they want.
> Then they're suddenly horrible people for being a private company that bans anyone they want.
with twitter, people did exactly what is intended - if you dont like it, make your own. now there is truth social and blue sky and threads.
people say twitter is run by horrible people, but nobody is restricting musk's rights to have a vanity project. its a right to speech, not to be liked
If they are NOT acting as an impartial aggregator and only censoring/deleting when the law demands, then they should NOT be covered under Section 230.
Thats quite simple.
the current law allows for impartial and biased/focused platforms to exist, so customers can access a variety of platforms and discussion fora.
in your proposal, something like banjo hangout couldnt exist as a platform focused on banjo picking, frailing, and building, because posts debating sailing vs rowing arent allowed
America has since decided to essentially forget about January 6th but there was a brief period of time where pretty much everyone figured Trump was toast. Impeached, removed, and probably set to be put on trial for serious crimes against the USA. I know the guy has a knack for escaping consequences but it came really close to happening.
He is a convicted felon and that’s despite these multiple criminal inquiries being scrapped due to his 2024 election win.
If he had lost the election, there is a high chance he could have been serving some kind of criminal sentence.
You also can’t wave the “free speech” thing around without understanding what the first amendment is about. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences, it’s freedom from the government controlling speech and the government giving you consequences for your protected speech.
That specifically includes the government not being allowed to police social networks on who they decide to ban or allow on platforms.
Facebook is legally allowed to be a liberals/conservatives-only social media platform if they want to be that. I’m even allowed to discriminate on hiring employees based on their political beliefs, it’s not a protected class.
The real problem is the Constitutional framing of our rights in a negative manner that does not lend itself to judgements based on equitable weighing of parties' interests. The comment you're responding to tries to lay out refinements to our legal implementation of freedom of speech that at least tries to mitigate some of these problems. Fixing these problems (ie neutering the governmental power of corpos) would be a step in the right direction.
Only americans believe that, this is almost as dumb as when they try to use dollars in Europe, "but it is valid tender I tell you!" or when they believe their TSA precheck works in China
https://immigration.ca/americans-frequently-caught-bringing-...
1: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/as-canadian-visits-to-t...
Everyone has a story about being stuck behind an irate American who can't understand why their currency isn't accepted abroad.
I've seen it in the UK - when a tourist tried to leave a tip in dollars for a bemused waiter.
It is very convenient for Americans. Depending on the parts of the world you've traveled it is easy to get the impression that the US dollar is a sort of universal currency.
Which isn't to excuse the people in your story. It is pretty easy to find out if US currency works where you are traveling.
That's quite different from trying to pay a bill (invoice) in USD in those countries.
Sometimes you could even pay with it even if it wasn't officially accepted. Getting some money and then exchanging it yourself into the national currency (so that the accounting books are in order) is better than getting no money. And if it's a fuss, just charge a big extra, there's no need to make a big deal out of it.
That might be why they didn't get more attention.
Then again I also don’t think any company should have the reach any of the major media companies do these days. But antitrust and media-diversity regulations and laws have been out of fashion since the ‘70s.
Do not underestimate Meta for being purely immoral. I'm pretty sure they would assisted russians with persecution if they wouldn't be sure now about potential backlash.
They are considered a terrorist organization by most countries, including their host country of Egypt.
That's not the point.
The point is they supported it, knowing full well what they were supporting.
Muslim Brotherhood is a coherent organisation, so we can meaningfully talk about its beliefs. Asking whether "Zionists" are fascist is as incohrent as asking if Antifa "believes" in anything. These aren't coherent organisations, just loose collections of aligned folks.
Fundamentally, nothing about Zionism strikes me as requiring fascism or religious supremacy (though it does require religious segregation).
Yeah, there aren't any coherent organisations that claim to be Zionist. There's no state in the Middle East born from this ideology. There aren't political organisations that bribe US politicians to influence US government. There aren't organisations that hose real estate meetings in Synagogues to sell illegal lands for people to make Aliyah.
Definitely just a loose collection of aligned folks. Yep.
That you have to put up straw men sort of proves my point.
Yes, there are coherent Zionist organisations (including political parties and lobbying groups). Some (perhaps many, hell, maybe even most) of these are fascist and ethno-religious supremacist. We can make meaningful statements about them because, as you said, they're "coherent organisations that claim to be Zionist".
Trying to expand that to "Zionists" in general isn't meaningful unless you're constructing a totem to pillory.
I wonder what the underlying ideology of Zionism is that makes these Zionist organisations all act in the same way, for the same cause.
It seems you don't know what Zionism is, or just purposely deflecting because you do know what it is, but carrying out Hasbara here.
Nobody argued "there aren't any coherent organisations that claim to be Zionist." That's literally how straw men work.
> makes these Zionist organisations all act in the same way
I haven't seen this level of coherence. But I also haven't seen anyone argue this properly. Instead it's always this "I have secret knowledge" nonsense.
> seems you don't know what Zionism is
Quite possibly. I've read the Wikipedia and have discussed it with Egyptian, Jordanian and Israeli acquaintances in America and Europe. I haven't seen anything to suggest it can be considered a philosophically, methodologically or politically unified movement in anything but its aim of establishing a Jewish nation-state, a goal which isn't inherently fascist or religious supremacist (but which is, again, inherently segregationist, though so is arguably an nation-building exercise).
Again, I think the analogy to folks who rail against Antifa as if it's a coherent ideology and organisation is apt. If you press any of those people for an explanation, you get similar 'you don't know what Antifa is' and 'you're probably Antifa' deflections. (Note: I'm not attacking you per se. I'm attacking the rhetoric. I'm engaging because I have a hint of a sense that you know something interesting that I'd like to learn.)
You literally said "These aren't coherent organisations, just loose collections of aligned folks."
The Israeli government isn't a 'loose collection of aligned folks'
AIPAC isn't a 'loose collection of aligned folks'
Jewish National Fund isn't a 'loose collection of aligned folks'
> I haven't seen this. But I also haven't seen anyone argue this properly. Instead it's always this "I have secret knowledge" nonsense.
You might be out of your depth here, then. I'd suggest you do some reading before trying to argue your points here, because you're not doing a good job of it.
> in anything but its aim of establishing a Jewish nation-state
And what does it take for a peoples to establish their own 'Jewish nation-state' on a bit of land that had people living there already? Hint: you could quote David Ben-Gurion's own words. I'll start it off for you:
"The Arabs will need to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war" - David Ben-Gurion, writing to his son, 1937
"In internal discussions, in instructions to his people, the 'Old Man' demonstrated a clear stand: it was better that the smallest possible number of Arabs remain within the area of the state" - Michael Bar-Zohar, biographer of David Ben-Gurion
"I am for compulsory transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it." - David Ben-Gurion to the Jewish Agency Executive, June 1938.
"Every attack has to end with occupation, destruction and expulsion." - David Ben-Gurion.
- -
"I don't understand your optimism," Ben-Gurion declared. "Why should the Arabs make peace? if I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations' time, but for the moment there is no chance. So it's simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there. Otherwise the Arabs will wipe us out."
- The Jewish Paradox by Nahum Goldmann
Sure. These are coherent organisations. Talking about them is meaningful. Talking about "Zionists" is nonsense.
> what does it take for a peoples to establish their own 'Jewish nation-state' on a bit of land that had people living there already?
Lots of options! Ben-Gurion's was a supremacist one. (I wouldn't argue it was fascist.)
Look, you're making a good argument the people and groups you're citing have elements of these traits. Again, that's meaningful. Being trope-y and going off about Zionists will appeal to people who already agree with you, and that's fine, ra ra-ing is fun, but it isn't intellectually honest or particulalry productive other than for stroking the egos of folks who turned this into their pet discussion topic.
You can try and intellectually criss cross all you want, but the reality is always there: Zionism is a supremacist ideology that used violence to achieve its aims.
> Lots of options!
See, you couldn't even be intellectually honest and state the option Zionists did use!
It's not me being trope-y, it's just you trying to deflect and defend this horrid ideology.
> stroking the egos of folks who turned this into their pet discussion topic
I'm sorry that talking about, and advocating for, people that are being massacred today is a 'pet discussion topic'.
Again, we can meaningfully talk about the choices Ben-Gurion, Israel and Netanyahu make. Broadening that to “Zionists” is sloganeering, not advocacy or discussion.
> talking about, and advocating for
Going off on a rant isn’t advocating for anything. It isn’t useless. But rallying a base needs an end to be productive. Otherwise it’s self serving.
My pet war is Ukraine. The folks who go off on rants about all Russians being monsters through and through absolutely undermine the cause of the people they purport to help. (I’ve done it. It’s emotionally satisfying when you’re angry and it feels like nobody cares.)
All I can find which isn't enough (at least for me), to have an educated conclusion is the following:
Tweet re-tweeting Ahmed Shihab-Eldin:
"After weeks of trying to regain access to my @instagram account, which was temporarily suspended by @accessnow while I was wrongfully detained, I FINALLY got a backup code which allowed me to login only to receive this prompt that my account has been permanently disabled"
Access Now - that I can understand works for human rights. https://www.accessnow.org/about-us/
English Wikipedia:
"On March 3, 2026, Shihab-Eldin was detained by Kuwaiti authorities for resharing news articles about the Iran war;[13][17] the previous day, he had posted images of a U.S. fighter jet crashing over the country.[18] The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported that he had not been seen publicly in Kuwait, where he was visiting family, since March 2, and that he was under arrest over accusations of "spreading false information," "harming national security" and "misusing his mobile phone;"[13][19] the incident occurred as part of a wider wave of crackdowns targeting journalists across different Gulf states amid the war."
Then mentioning his Kuwaiti citizenship was revoked on 29th of April 2026 and earlier some implicit hint? he was released. (though he's American born so I can assume he also has a US Citizenship unless he gave it away at some point)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Shihab-Eldin
https://www.ahmedshihabeldin.com/
I see he has been a journalist and activist over the years within context of the Middle East.
But if someone have more details about why he was blocked it would be much more helpful to understand this story.
I think it's fair to say the chances of Kuwait acting decisively against Zuckerberg, Musk or Cook is far higher than the EU.
So now there's no power, no money. Hence the attempts at message control. I don't think it's for Meta to soften their fall.
Kuwait's sovereign fund has about 1 trillion under management. A couple of phone calls about disposals and its surprising what changes.
However, its my understanding that this page was promoting/representing the Muslim Brotherhood.
Whatever happened to just calling a country an ally? "Vassal state in the American hegemony" does sound a lot cooler I guess.
Bad stuff. I know.
The US would "bow" to the requests of Kuwait, too. Because it's less "bowing" than that they don't care about you, and Kuwait now owes them a favor.
> if Elon or Bezos make a request, they'd get ignored
Not a chance. Elon and Bezos could probably tell Kuwait to kill somebody and they would.
[1] Really they're Meta's standards - it wasn't "the community" that wrote them.
Have you read them? they are acutally quite good. its a shame they are not enforced evenly.
And if they're so good, then Meta can take credit for them and call them "Meta's Standards", instead of gaslighting us into thinking there is some shared "community" that encompasses Kuwait and California and Belarus, and that this community has agreed on a single set of standards to be imposed on everyone across the globe.
I see this all the time in such cases - deflections about the legality of censorship, to avoid the issue that they want to keep the censorship itself, or the source of it, secret. "They" in this case being Meta, unless they produce a legal order compelling them to deceive us.