It’s not just about facts: Democrats and Republicans have sharply different attitudes about removing misinformation from social media::One person’s content moderation is another’s censorship when it comes to Democrats’ and Republicans’ views on handling misinformation.
I’m not necessarily in favor of “guaranteed amplification”, as you put it. Anyone is free to yell whatever ideas they have on a street corner. Barring some specific exceptions, that is free speech. I understand why a for-profit company might not want to amplify any means everything someone decides to spew out. We’ve designed an un-free capitalist system though where some people do have guaranteed amplifiers, and others do not. That’s the problem I’m more interested in solving. It’s not forcing any one company to be forced to amplify any specific idea, but rather to make sure that centralized authorities, be they governments, social media companies, etc can’t in unison stamp out those ideas. I think decentralized platforms like this are somewhat key to that goal, even with individual instances having full moderation and federation control.
“designed an un-free capitalist system though where some people do have guaranteed amplifiers, and others do not.”
This is simply bullshit. Facebook has the same rules for everybody.
I don’t get why people like you don’t seem to understand that if you use someone else’s system that has rules you have to follow those rules.
No you don’t have free speech on fb. No it is not the same thing as “yelling on a corner”.
You people have made up a concept of what you think free speech is that isn’t reflected in reality in any way.
No one owes you an unfettered voice on any platform.
If you want to talk about corporate ownership of media, and how corporate media platforms are so powerful that they become the only thing that matters, there’s plenty to rail against there. It just doesn’t have anything to do with free speech. Here we are discussing how important it is not to let institutions squash ideas. Again, totally not even in the offing. The reality is that social media simply wants to moderate nazi hatred, while conservatives cry “free speech!”
There’s plenty of free media out there, including this platform we’re talking on. There’s no freedom of speech issue here. In my day we just said fuck the mods. We didn’t clutch our pearls and presume we had a god given right to say whatever we want wherever we want.
You can’t walk into Davies Symphony Hall and cry freedom of speech because you want to be heard by the crowd that came for the orchestra.