Comment by nyxxie
8 years ago
I don't like the idea of letting a government body regulate how a communications company how to run their business.
Ignoring the moral implications of holding a gun to a business owner's head and forcing them to run their business the way you want, are we not opening up the doors for legitimate censorship down the line?
If we're concerned about world leaders making official pronouncements on Twitter, why not just dictate that they don't do that and instead utilize a different platform? Something decentralized preferably.
We already do that with phone companies, and up until very recently we almost did that with internet providers (by way of Title II common carrier status).
It wouldn't be that much of a legal stretch to say that the service is acting as a common carrier, and that they can either advertise honestly or be regulated. Twitter wants to have it both ways, where they can advertise as a space for public discussion when it suits them and fall back on the "private company, our back yard" defense when their behavior is questioned. This is the real problem.. there's nothing whatsoever wrong with operating a curated service as long as you are clear that's what you're doing.
As an alternative (and entirely off-the-cuff) legal theory, the communications decency act holds a provider harmless for what their users post, but critically, they lose that protection once they start exercising editorial control.
I'd aay that most large social networks already crossed that line. I also think most companies would ease up on the censorship if they knew that the alternative left them open to suit for libelous etc. content on their service.
Very good comment! Social media companies present themselves as better (technical solutions for) commons. Their identities show this: face book, (bird) tweets...
I don't want to be mean, but the actual situation makes me think that they are sort of new parasites for the commons (seen as an organism), sort of a cymothoa exigua [0] of public speech.
Since a comment like yours is so rare, I tweeted it :) [1] and I plus it with a post [2] I wrote after looking for laws concerning cultural genocide. Because, dramatic or not, that's the reality of the phenomenon, sadly.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymothoa_exigua [1] https://twitter.com/mbuliga/status/969646621981138946 [2] https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2017/11/10/genocide-as...
>I don't like the idea of letting a government body regulate how a communications company how to run their business.
This makes me wonder if phone companies have the right to disconnect customers based on political speech they don't like.
If, say, Verizon decided they didn't want to "facilitate extremism," and decided to cancel the plans of politically unpopular organizations or its members, is that allowed? What if they decide that they don't want to have any of that 'filth' on their network, and disconnect anyone communicating to/from Verizon numbers if they are politically undesirable?
Ideally then those politically unpopular organizations and their members would move to Sprint, ATT, or another carrier who would love to have some new customers.
You should have a look at the list of things the payment processors have disallowed ...
Also note that telecoms companies have the law on their side against "obscene" or "harassing" phone calls, in a way that doesn't seem to apply to other internet communications.