If a steel mill is on a railroad spur that is owned by one railroad, should the railroad be allowed to cut off service to the mill for any or no reason?
Yes, and the owners of the 2nd mill should be sued by their investors for not providing better access to their factory.
If someone constantly drives drunk should they be allowed to continuing using public roads?
I mean it wouldnât be legal for the railroad to unilaterally cut off service, it would be subject to the judgement of the Surface Transportation Board.
https://twitter.com/jtemperton/status/1350455399426756611
Competing analyses. One says no parler users. One says this. I guess weâll never know the real answer.
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If there were ten thousand individual railroad lines crossing the country, your analogy might start to become slightly relevant.
For $5 anyone can set themselves up on the internet and say almost anything they want, certainly not subject to Facebook, Twitter et al.
No people arenât guaranteed the right to directly reach all of a companyâs other customers without qualification,
By the way the companies who throttled Parler were not Facebook, twitter, Snapchat etc.
I understand it desirably to reach the most brain washed idiots when trying to grift (hi gg) so that makes Facebookâs user base desirable. But nobody is owed access to it.
Come to think of it I am going to demand substack publish my UP posts and make them of the same profile of all their other âwritersâ.
To some extent I donât really get the argument here, itâs uncontroversial that parler was taken down by private companies that de facto control a lot of important infrastructure, we saw it happen. Itâs perhaps not a free speech issue in the classic sense, there are options for the people affected. But itâs obvious that if the companies want to they can exert unregulated control on what gets easily communicated, and I donât see how to deny that what is communicated easily has a tremendous advantage. If anything I think that advantage has gotten larger in the internet age.
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All true, but itâs not soon to be former Presidents and their cohorts that are actually affected by this. Nor is there any legitimate reason to widely distribute the recruitment and coordination activities of violent extremists. And we should reject bad faith slippery slope arguments that are used to advance their causes.
That these social companies can ban the President shows their power, but that does not mean that we are required to advocate that they allow their power to be used by transparently malicious bad actors. You donât like that there is no 100% objective criteria for determining who is a bad actor and who isnât? Well thatâs precious, snowflake, I donât like my city being turned into a militarized zone with a mountain of credible terrorist threats directed at it because you are afraid of making a slam dunk judgment call.
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Because the horse was already out of the barn when they took it down, banned Trump, etc., and Parler is not the only way for them to communicate?
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Ok, and thatâs why a big part of this issue is that it only gets discussed in the context of bans of high profile morons. Making sure our communications infrastructure is safe for everyone to use (in a well regulated manner, fine) is important, it doesnât have to be argued for in a way that involves accepting violence, but if we just pretend that in fact we have not handed over important control to private corporations that weâd be insane to think have our interests in mind, then that pretence always needs to be pointed out.
When they ban a right wing moron, shouldnât the argument be that they have always had this power and are only just using it now⌠and also here is this list of examples I have showing how they abused the power against marginalized people?
You canât download pokerstars or onlyfans on the app stores yet both managed incredible booms.
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So the argument is that you think itâs fine to give private companies this power? Mine is that it isnât sensible, I donât think itâs important to go case by case.
Nobody âgaveâ them this power. Facebook has the same levers of power as UP and MySpace. If we banned Trump, nobody cares.
Conservatives just play the umpires more. If the argument is that in the world series you change the rules because the game means more, thats dumb.
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They have taken this power whether I like it or not, and just joining the chorus when right wing morons complain about being banned is lazy and does nothing to change that. Just hands the right wing morons the ability to harness the power for themselves.
As Keed is correctly pointing out we used to think this sort of thing was worth regulating. The regulations on the neutrality of postal services were once very important pieces of legislation and I think fairly ubiquitous in the West. In any case why not start now?
You can in Canada.
What isnât working with the regulations that are in place now? What are you proposing, that the government forces a company to do business with someone? Does this become more palatable because weâre dealing with more than a few bakers?
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Well, the first thing to say is that I donât have complex regulation ready to go. Also it seems weâve moved from people saying itâs a good thing that google et al can take this sort of action, to saying itâs an inevitable fact of life. My posts were intended to try and point out it is not a good thing, Iâm far less certain that we can exert control now.
That said I think thereâs at least two areas itâs worth thinking about. Firstly they have their power through effective monopolies, and monopolies already are something we try and exert control over. Clearly somethingâs gone wrong there, probably to do with the multi-national nature of the companies, their political influence via their money and the fact it has to do with new technology that havenât been properly considered. So we probably need to take seriously international co-operation in monopoly legislation, start caring about how companies can fund political candidates and see what needs updating in existing statutes.
Secondly if there are effective monopolies that itâs best to remain in place given where we are, then we would need legislation analagous to what we previously had for other communication. So if there is privately owned infrastructure that, de facto, any sizeable operation would need to use, then the rules by which people should get access to it should be something that is publicly regulated, at minimum.
As for whatâs not working, then letâs not make it too complicated. I donât argue that stopping Trump tweeting or Parler existing are bad things for the world, theyâre not. But that private companies can take such decisions on their ownâeffectively cutting off the Presidentâs direct line of communication with the country or deciding that at a stroke another company should cease to existâitâs a problem worth caring about.
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Hey look whoâs back!
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Nobody cut off the President from communicating with the world. When Biden is President, we wonât give a shit about his Twitter account. Nobody cares what Merkel or Trudeau tweet. When they have actual important news they have a press release that gets covered.
Conservatives just attack twitter and Facebook because they are on it. Snapchat and Instagram are pretty close for users and are growing faster, are you regulating those? Tiktok? Thats an app style thatâs already failed several times.
The thing most âwrongâ with facebook and Twitter was that they were so scared of conservatives that they let qanon, pizzagate etc stuff get so bad in the first place.
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