Realistically either a federal court needs to step in or some sort of legislation needs to be passed/updated regarding speech on the internet. A handful of private companies control a huge amount of public communication on the internet. Essentially the internet is the “modern town square” and if you get deplatformed from Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter, your ability to communicate is massively impacted. Unless you’re already an established name by the time you get deplatformed (Like Trump or Alex Jones), being deplatformed basically makes it impossible to have a voice online.
People don’t care for now because the only people being deplatformed are “right wing extremists” but as time passes the definition for what is and isn’t acceptable on major sites will keep getting more and more strict. Even in the beginning it was a pretty grey area where these private companies were removing “misinformation” and citing government entities as the “correct” source. And shortly after the Biden administration became known to work directly with companies like Facebook to remove what they consider harmful information. At what point do we cross the line from “private companies doing what they want” to “the government directing private companies to remove information that hurts them”? For all the people who support these companies censoring topics under the direction of the Biden administration, how will you feel when the next Republican administration does it?
I unfortunately don’t see a way this ends that benefits Americans. Both parties have shown that they want to control speech/information on the internet, since 2019 it’s not only become tolerated, but actually expected. And for the first time ever a majority of Americans support the US government restricting speech online. That scares the shit out of me personally. Congress isn’t going to do shit, the FCC isn’t gonna do shit, and the supreme court certainly isn’t gonna do shit. I don’t want to imagine how the internet is gonna look in 10 years.
We should have never allowed it to get to this point. The endless mergers of tech and media companies that resulted in a handful of companies effectively controlling the internet should have caused riots in the streets. The second companies started “fact checking” posts and removing what they consider false information should have set off tons of alarm bells. And the second the US government started directing tech companies toward posts they needed to take down there should have been riots in the streets. But nobody seems to care because we’re all too busy defending powerful corporations and an authoritarian government because apparently authoritarianism isn’t bad when it only hurts your political opponents.
This argument itself got politicized and associated with the “right wing”. People in general have lost faith in the “marketplace of ideas” concept and instead are leaning towards this totalitarian approach of “let only good information exist”, forgetting that the process to get to good information requires unhindered critique of bad information. Ultimately it’s this unfounded faith that arbitrary centralized players (media, social media, government, whatever) wouldn’t adhere to, or enforce, any incorrect doctrine of truth, which is a pretty dumb concept considering the number of things society doesn’t even fully understand in the first place.
Ultimately it’s this unfounded faith that arbitrary centralized players (media, social media, government, whatever) wouldn’t adhere to, or enforce, any incorrect doctrine of truth
Everyone on earth (Especially in America) should be forced to understand this. Corporations in America are legally obligated to act in the interest of their shareholders. Ethics don’t fucking matter to them unless a law says they have to, and as we established, most of our laws regulating corporations aren’t even being enforced in the first place.
