Social media posts inciting hate and division have “real world consequences” and there is a responsibility to regulate content, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, insisted on Friday, following Meta’s decision to end its fact-checking programme in the United States.
This isn’t about free speech. This is about amplification and publication of speech.
You can say whatever you want, but we shouldn’t guarantee you a megaphone to say it.
The platform isn’t the megaphone. That’s the algorithm.
If you’re wanting their access to platforms limited, I’d like the know where you draw the line. Are they allowed to text hate speech to each other? Publish their own email or print newsletters? Should we ban them from access to printers (or printing press while we’re at it)? Should they be allowed to have hateful conversations with large groups of each other?
That’s up to the owner of the megaphone.
If the megaphone owner doesn’t want you to use it, create your own.
Barriers to entry and the first-mover advantage make that impossible.
Only if you have a profit motive. Otherwise Lemmy wouldn’t work
And there’s the expected bootlicking. You went from complaining about who gets access to the megaphone, to openly praising government censorship coordination.
Maybe if you want more censorship so bad, you should take your own advice and start your own platform.
Sorry, I was busy gagging on a boot or I would’ve responded sooner.
The rise of fascism across the United States is partially because they’ve been allowed to coordinate, and are public and loud with their normalization of hate.
Free speech absolutionists quickly run up against the paradox of tolerance. And at that point you get to choose. Do you want the most tolerance society or do you want full freedom of speech?
If you think you want full freedom of speech, then you don’t understand how people will abuse that to take it away from you anyway.
No, fascism is on the rise to power because it has the financial backing of capitalists who are trying to counter the rise of leftism in the broader population. And you are being a “useful idiot” by helping them to establish the political and systemic tools to snuff out contrary speech under the guise of fighting the fascism they are in reality entrenching with those powers.
If you think you can hand the rich & powerful the power to limit speech, and that it will be used by them to limit the very speech they are funding, you are seriously not paying any attention.
A social media site is not a publisher.
Why not?
They do not curate the content that’s posted there. Just because someone wrote something on Facebook does not mean Facebook endorses their opinion, just like sending someone an e-mail does not mean that your e-mail host endorses whatever you sent.
So they’re an Amazon level publisher. No curation. Just publish.