Megaterio Llamas wrote: ↑Wed Jun 03, 2020 8:48 pm
Twitter about to pay for censoring Trump's tweets
OK, I’ve only bothered to watch the first five minutes, and Jimmy Dore (whoever that is) is already wrong on several counts.
First of all, his comparisson to a bookstore. Fine. Now is a bookstore required by law to carry any book anyone has written?
No, they’re not. They carry the books they want to carry, and no author can sue them for not selling his/her book.
Secondly, if we start treating social media like publishers, you cannot sue them for censoring what you wrote, as Jimmy Dore suggests. That is not how it works. A publisher decides what they want to publish. They do not have an obligation to publish things they do not want to publish. They can, however, be sued for publishing things that are unlawful, like eg slander or hate speech or instigating crime. This means they would have to police everything posted, and in case of doubt better censor than risk litigation.
This would mean social media would stop function the way we are used to and expect it to.
Thirdly, the president can’t really change this by executive order. It’s a legislative matter and must be handled by congress.
Finally, Twitter or Facebook censoring what you write on their platforms is
not a violation of free speech. When you signed up to their platform you agreed to a set of terms, that you read very carefully and then agreed to. Including that they can remove content you post, and that if you violate their rules they can close your account. If you want to say things that do not meet their criteria, you are free to do so elsewhere.
In theory, treating social media platforms like publishers, is actually not a bad idea. There are many benefits, and we would get rid of a lot of fake news, slander and rumour mongering.
In practice it won’t work though. There are like 300,000 new posts per minute on facebook. If all should be vetted before being published..... it just isn’t doable.
A simple solution for Twitter, Facebook, etc, would be to move their operation overseas though, so that they would no longer be subject to US laws. I’m sure Sweden would be happy to host them, and our freedom of information, freedom of press and freedom of speech acts that go back to 1766 are pretty strong.
In fact, Facebook, Google and Microsoft already have a lot of their servers here.
We have cheap electricity and the climate reduces the need for cooling.
