The market didn't decide anything, it's not like any stock prices are reacting to this speech being allowed by these corporations or not. These decisions are made by a handful of unaccountable, anonymous people in closed rooms, hiding by the institutions they work for.
> Much like gay wedding cakes or nazi cupcakes, you cannot force a company to host your content if they choose not to.
Elane Photography paid thousands and thousands of dollars in fines for choosing not to work a lesbian wedding at a time when lesbian weddings were not legal in New Mexico. They never got their money back. It's not as cut and dried as you imply.
> you cannot force a company to host your content if they choose not to.
Thats actually not true. There are numerous businesses that are absolutely forced to distribute your content, even if they don't like it.
The obvious example is the phone network, and other common carriers. There are a whole set of laws that do indeed force these companies to distribute your content.
What we call carriers or other monopoly service providers (think power and water, possibly ISP).
Are you going to take the next step and consider AWS, Twitter, and Facebook monopoly carriers or service providers? Under their current definitions they are not and can cut ties with you for what ever reason they want (barring protected class issues I assume).
I think the problem for me is the monopoly status this all reveals about the companies involved (Twitter, Amazon, etc.).
If you step back a bit too, there's another issue I have, which is that it seems to me these companies are coming down hard against the idea of free speech. Let's look at it this way: some group believes the Big Social Media Companies are being politically biased in a way they disagree with, in part because of active moderation that reflects decisions by that company about what's "correct" or "incorrect". So they say "hey we're going to start a new social media platform that we don't moderate." This gets used by violent extremists.
Then some other Big Tech companies tell this new company, predicated on unmoderated speech, to moderate their speech too or they will cut resources.
As others have noted, plenty of violent behavior has been organized on Twitter or Facebook, and it hasn't received the same sort of punishment and ostracism. So why Parler? Because some groups on it are supportive of Trump? Because it's the US government? It's hard for me to take appeals to quashing violent behavior seriously when they're so arbitrary in their application at some level.
At some level, it doesn't matter to me, because there's another argument, which is that the platforms should be very removed from the content on them, like a phone company. They could be promoting that, and instead they're going hard in the other direction, which is to support heavy "moderation" by monopolies. I don't want big business "moderating" speech, or having that much power to do so.
My political inclinations are very different from Trump or anything in these insurrections but I don't like the way it's headed, and I don't see the gay wedding cakes as remotely the same.
If there were three wedding cake companies in the entire English-speaking world, and wedding cakes were a universal requirement for getting married, I might feel the same. In fact, in some ways I do feel the same, but I also would say maybe there should be a lot more wedding cake companies.
> plenty of violent behavior has been organized on Twitter or Facebook
Twitter and Facebook made a concerted efforts around 1st-party paid employees that are responsible for macro-moderation across their platforms. Parler instead just replied "our volunteer moderators will handle it". Even reddit has 1st-party moderation, despite their large volunteer moderator community.
Why would they need to be accountable? They aren’t breaking any laws and they aren’t elected officials...
Sure the government could interfere and make more laws and regulate but the typical conservative position would not be in favor of government meddling....
That is how the market works. Nothing in capitalism says 'you must be transparent in how you conduct business'... in fact, it's literally the opposite! Most things must be kept secret if you don't want your business to get outcompeted.
Businesses are almost as big as state governments, but are undemocratic. They are run like dictatorships. If you don't like this, you don't like markets.
Yeah by the fact that the free market created these platforms and gave them power.
Us on the left have been fucking telling everyone for years that these companies are dangerous but everyone else embraced them.
These companies yanked the plug on many leftist communities and dozens of social media networks for sex workers. To this day VISA and Mastercard don't allow payments to come in if the website is mainly sex related.
Where the hell was the outrage then? We begged people to support us and tell these companies to back off but no one did.
The inaction of everyone has lead to this. Welcome to how "free market capitalism" actually just means dozens of small unaccountable governments with more power than hundreds of countries combined. You asked for this. Take it.
My only quibble with this is that “the left” is a bit broad — SESTA/FOSTA was bipartisan legislation unfortunately spearheaded by my Democratic representative, Carolyn Maloney.
Other than that, this is spot on. Conservatives have been happy to tell everyone to let the free market decide, only to cry foul when the market makes a decision they don’t like. Turns out you can’t have it both ways.
As a big proponent of the free market, I think the problem stems from "sometimes free market."
Also, it seems that these moves by tech companies are acting in unison (Apple, Google, Amazon) to the satisfaction of one political party (that just happens to have won 2 branches of the federal government).
It’s possible that that they’re trying to get in the good graces of the incoming administration. It’s also possible that they’ve wanted to do this all along, but feared legal retaliation from the outgoing one. (The latter feels kinda gross, as they could certainly weather the retaliation better than the people they’re trying to protect now).
It’s also possible that this truly just happened to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Regardless, my general inclination with regard to these companies is that we should have a free market but break up any one that gets large enough such that getting kicked off presents a moral issue. VPS is highly commoditized, so I don’t really care that they got kicked off AWS, but Facebook and Twitter are a bit thornier.
Hopefully condemnation of violence and the removal of digital systems that enable violence is bipartisan?
If it isn’t then morally they should side with the party who is against violence.
If it isn’t then financially it is prudent to side with the side that will keep the advertiser dollars flowing. (Biden won 70% of the economy and the majority of the people, especially the wealthy and well educated)
> the free market created these platforms and gave them power.
I'm pretty sure our tax dollars fund DARPA. [+] A substantial portion of the technology we're talking about here was funded by Public money.
[++] So when making all these fine points about discretion of private companies regarding the use of their platforms, it must be remembered that none of FANGs would even exists without technology and both military contracted private and academic research that were funded by American taxpayers' money.
This is pretty lackluster reasoning, it would follow that since Benjamin Franklin was the discoverer of electricity and DARPA Net came from that so....
Taxpayer funding has no bearing on the commercialization of products down the road. It is not a special case of intellectual property...
I'll return the favor and consider your reply as a strawman. But even then, let's compare Ben Franklin's capital outlay vs the Federal government's in DARPA.
Issue is not IP. Did I mention IP? There are extant congressional records of discussions in Congress regarding gifting this technology to "business" in service of the American public (one presumes). There is an implicit social contract at work here.
DARPAnet is as far from
Twitter as the Wright Brothers Flyer is from a 747. There is no implicit social or legal contract. A gift is well a gift. No backsies.
>Where the hell was the outrage then? We begged people to support us and tell these companies to back off but no one did.
>The inaction of everyone has lead to this. Welcome to how "free market capitalism" actually just means dozens of small unaccountable governments with more power than hundreds of countries combined. You asked for this. Take it.
There was no inaction. The inactivity was intentional. Things were going great. Bank balances were going up, everything was centralizing, everyone else putting off the difficulty of learning to actually make something and keep it free.
The last 4 years has injected more jade into my worldview than the rest of the years of my life combined.
