
Can “Free Speech” Be “Moderated”? Yes - Tomte
https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/can-free-speech-be-moderated-yes-15700db2b7ab#.52r9v0b6n
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DarkKomunalec
"From a user perspective we should be careful in talking about “right to use”
a particular service because none of us really want to see a service viewed as
some sort of “essential facility” by the legal system (that’s a specific word
I learned from the DOJ and EU). We want services to be insanely useful, but
not regulated like other insanely useful privileges."

He has it backwards. We don't want unregulated services to become "essential
facilities" in the first place. Otherwise, when some services so embedded into
daily life that it's nearly impossible to do without (e.g. banks, ISPs, in
some contexts MS Windows, etc.), refuses to do business with you, you're
screwed.

"However, we can vote with our accounts and we can be vocal through many means
about what we think as individual users. We can use our marketplace influence
to inform and change what we don’t agree with. Product teams can and should be
tuned into and act on this feedback. We want the marketplace to work and to
respond.

[...]

As a whole our industry tends towards self-determinism and self-regulation yet
we find ourselves today with a number of incredibly important platforms that
are not keeping up with the basic test of “know it when we see it”."

So he's saying moderation is okay because people can always choose platforms
with the kind of moderation they like... but there should be no 'important'
platforms that fail to ban the things he doesn't like?

And that 'platforms', i.e. multinational corporations, should all moderate
their users, but if a government should moderate (i.e. regulate) _them_ ,
well, that's a no-no!

"The free market works."

Sometimes, until it doesn't, and you have the choice of 2 ISPs, both of which
sell your data to advertisers, or you get blacklisted by one bank, and the
blacklist is shared, so suddenly you can use none. Or both desktop CPU
manufacturers include hardware backdoors (called management engines).

The best I can gather from this meandering rant is that speech should be
moderated, but only by corporations, who should never be held accountable for
how they moderate it.

