
Facebook Restricts Free Speech by Popular Demand - mancerayder
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/facebook-restricts-free-speech-popular-demand/598462/
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nitwit005
Strangely praises Google for "defining responsible rules", while condemning
Facebook for setting up a more formal process for deciding what's okay to take
down.

Can't help but think that may relate to having worked on this while at Google
(former associate general counsel to Google).

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deogeo
The author sums up the core of the issue very concisely towards the end of the
article:

> Treating platforms like governments—encouraging their control, but
> constraining them with flimsy versions of democratic input or due process—is
> not part of democracies’ usual playbook when companies gain too much power,
> or when their businesses cause harm. Market forces and competition are
> supposed to keep private commercial power in check. When those fail to do
> so, the next line of defense is to enforce competition law, not to establish
> new quasi-governmental rules for companies. [..]

> But we aren’t following the usual playbook, in which government sets the
> rules and companies follow them. We can’t—not as long as we want platforms
> to block speech that the U.S. government, following the First Amendment, has
> no power to restrict. Bypassing the First Amendment requires putting power
> in private hands. And that in turn means giving up on real democratic input,
> due process, Supreme Court review, or any of the other tools we use to
> constrain actual governments.

~~~
bobthepanda
If you wanted to make normal market forces work, the easiest way to do that
would be to make web platforms liable for hosted content, and let the
litigious American adversarial legal system take care of the rest.

Of course, this would be a major disruption to how the Internet currently
works and has a whole separate host of issues.

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djohnston
Daphne really trying to cash in those Google RSUs

