I haven't seen that. Where do you see conservatives arguing to ban liberal opinions? You appear to be straw manning them.
Despite that, I do believe there's a pretty clear need to regulate to protect conservative speech. There's a clear problem with liberals taking over companies that were once neutral and systematically attacking conservatives online. They are much more aggressive about speech control than the other way around.
I thought the conservative school of thought was to let the market solve the problem? It’s amazing that the same conservatives who think the market can take of care of healthcare even though there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, aren’t capable of doing something much easier like creating a forum. If conservatives don’t like the companies out there they are free to create their own social media companies where they can voice their opinions.
Heck, even anarcho-capitalists recognise some limited role of government in contract enforcement. But anarcho-capitalism isn't mainstream.
aren’t capable of doing something much easier like creating a forum.
Where did you get that idea? There are conservative forums. They are constantly being attacked by liberals who don't recognise their right to exist at all, with these attacks varying in form but generally falling under the heading of "no platforming". Where do you see conservatives doing the reverse? I've never seen it.
they are free to create their own social media companies where they can voice their opinions
Yes, you can do that, as long as you don't mind any infrastructure that has liberal owners from trying to no-platform you to death, including things like blocking mobile apps, depeering ISPs and trying to get you blocked from credit card networks.
You're making it out like conservatives just have to make some popular websites. They have done, and what we see is liberals viciously attacking anyone who associates with them in any way, including even linking to them. That includes nasty personal attacks on anyone who reads them. I've seen this first hand: someone tried to get me in trouble at work for merely linking to an article on a conservative news website.
There's also the workforce to contend with. If you look at the recent story about Kickstarter, their workforce has now unionised because management asked them to take down a project that was raising money to encourage violence against conservatives. That project violated their own ToS so it should have been a no-brainer, but the company became a victim of its own employee's hatred.
I worked at Google in the early years and there was a strongly libertarian streak to the firm, as was true of many tech firms back then. Trying to manipulate or control the userbase was an unspeakable taboo. Not tampering with the "organic" output of the algorithms was a strongly held value. But the company didn't try to hire people who shared those values: anyone who could pass a coding test would do and the old timers slowly moved on. The culture war had a clear loser in that case and it wasn't the side that respected the userbase or valued free speech. So it's not enough to merely create a popular website and grow, despite infrastructure firms trying to extinguish you.
To create a social media firm that doesn't befall the same fate, you're going to have to take a clear pro-free speech stance from day one, and that will result in being very much slandered and attacked by liberals who see you as an evil to be extinguished. It's wildly extreme and it's well past the point of "free to create your own websites". That freedom is very much hanging by a thread at this point. A major role of government is to stop people within its jurisdiction attacking each other and implementing mob rule. That isn't happening in this case.
Aren’t conservatives also pro Gun? I thought the reason they were running around in the woods pretending to be a “militia” was to protect themselves from the government? You mean now they want “big government” to step in?
As far as mobile, I have yet to hear with Apple or Google block any website on their devices. Do you really need an app to create a forum?
And if liberals attack and verbally say bad things, is that really going to hurt you? I thought it was the conservatives that owned all of the guns, what they are afraid that the skinny jean wearing liberals are going to attack you with their flyers made of recycled paper?
Where did guns come from? I didn't mention those. I'm not American and no, "conservatives" do not see the solution as shooting people. What a non-sequitur.
You're doing what liberals always seem to do in these situations: justify attacks, censorship and discrimination on the grounds that if you aren't a liberal you must be an anarchist who deserves whatever they get. That's a straw man argument.
I'm curious if you have a link for that latter claim. I'm not saying you're wrong, it sounds like the kind of thing he would say, but I can't find any reference to him saying that with a few obvious search queries. Claims that supporters said it maybe, but in a population of 350 million you can find "supporters" who say anything. Bernie supporters have also made such claims, it didn't really affect my view of him as a person.
At any rate Trump is not exactly a model conservative. He is uninterested in any sort of fiscal conservatism, he's in favour of trade wars and his social policy stops at "illegal immigration is bad" which is practically a tautology for the head of a government (i.e. breaking the law is always considered bad).
In fact there's really very little about him that's conservative at all, by traditional measures. Pretending the average conservative has much in common with Trump is like pretending the average Democrat voter has much in common with Lenin.
One doesn't have to be conservative to see an issue with world-straddling tech companies flexing their ability to shape public discourse.
People use Facebook/Whatsapp/Twitter/Reddit for many of the same things they used to use email and personal blogs to do in 2005. But with centralized control and the ability to shape what messages get broadcast to whom, it's far too great of a concentration of power.
Google is probably the most extreme. Consider the "Evil Larry" thought experiment. If Larry Page woke up one day in 2016 while he was still CEO and decided to use Google and YouTube purely to further his own goals, how many national elections could he tilt while maintaining plausible deniability from the outside?
My guess is, it would be quite a few. It wouldn't have to look that different. Counter-narrative results would still show up in search. They'd just be down-regulated. Links and videos supporting EL's preferred candidates and positions would be up-regulated and be shown up perhaps 10% more often than previously. With plausible deniability, election after election could be tipped by a few percentage points. That's often enough to change the outcome.
There are almost certainly some internal company safeguards that would have made this kind of crime a difficult, uncertain proposition and I do NOT think the real Larry Page would ever have done this. But being completely unconcerned would be a grave mistake. Giant tech companies already lobby extensively in nations all over the world and do not have goals perfectly aligned with each of those nations—e.g., Free Basics in India.
It's naive to dismiss concerns about such extreme concentrations of power being wielded to suppress speech along political lines simply because we're currently benefactors of the action.
Companies have always supported candidates and political parties of their liking with political contributions. What's different now is that these companies can now contribute not just with money, but by influencing the online discussion we see and the search results we get.
Yes. I see the current tech giants as analogous to a Standard Oil that also owned the New York Times and one of the top two or three papers in every other city of the country.
I'm old, so I remember the media consolidation of the 80s. FCC rules about ownership of newspapers and radio/TV stations, and number of stations in a given market went away. Soon after, the fairness doctrine did too. This lead directly to conservative radio. All objections got waved off and laughed away: the free market has spoken.
Now we have a situation where the same conservatives are getting cut out, and it's no longer the free market speaking, and the government is supposed to step in to protect and affirm a particular set of opinions.
I don't think this is a particularly consistent viewpoint, and it makes me wonder how much the free market had to do with ditching the fairness doctrine and the less conservative radio and TV voices.
Yet they don't support network neutrality. Hahaha.
They don't seem to be interested in keeping 230 protections so companies can host content without having to be immediately responsible for every word they host.
They are either incompetent defenseless dolts. Or maliciously picking at platforms. They certainly aren't doing anything to safeguard & protect hosting speech online.
It’s almost like modern conservatism doesn’t actually believe in free markets and personal freedom considering this and their stance on things like gay marriage, cannabis legalization.
I kind of have to agree with you. A true conservative perspective would seek to avoid creating mechanisms that control speech.
I'd be interested in stopping the "shaping" problem. Where, by algorithm, people only see things said to their specific demographic slice. Let everyone see what you're saying to everyone else, and let your speech be judged and argued against.
You can fool all of the people, most of the time, if they're always divided into "some of the people" all of the time.
This looks like the paradox of tolerance, in the mirror form of how it's usually invoked.
A key tenet of conservatism is free speech. All together competing in the market of ideas. The first amendment came from this tradition and implicitly makes the assumption that only governments are big and powerful enough to control speech. It dates from a time when pamphlets and newsletters were the dominant form of political communication. That assumption is no longer valid.
What happens if your opponents systematically attack anyone who speaks ideas they don't like in an organised way, but they aren't the government? Then they win because they aren't forced backwards to pamphlets and paper newsletters. Being tolerant of this kind of intolerance means losing.
The simplest fix is probably to extend the first amendment to large, dominant providers of communication services. But that's unsatisfying because it's so unclear what a dominant service is, and anyway, can't fundamentally force providers to do things they don't want to do.
The core problem is the culture war itself, in which the extreme left see the right as an evil to be wiped out by whatever means necessary. Fixing that will require a much more complex set of legislative and cultural changes. These companies didn't used to be in the grip of leftist hated. Google and Twitter both used to have strong free speech cultures, which degraded over time.
>The first amendment came from this tradition and implicitly makes the assumption that only governments are big and powerful enough to control speech.
On the contrary, the First Amendment makes the opposite assumption, that only the Federal government should be prohibited from controlling speech, implying that the power to do so organically devolves (as do all powers not explicitly granted to the Federal government by the Constitution) to the states, the people, and by extension any private enterprise created by the people.
>What happens if your opponents systematically attack anyone who speaks ideas they don't like in an organised way, but they aren't the government?
That's what free speech is. If you don't like that, fair enough, but people being able to organize and oppose ideas they don't like, as well as exercising their freedom of association both to choose with whom they will and will not associate, is the way a marketplace of ideas in a democracy is supposed to work.
By "attack" here I didn't mean, respond with an argument agains their ideas. I meant retaliate in ways unrelated to the topic being discussed using free speech: banning people, trying to get them fired, etc. There's no legal, constitutional or philosophical tradition of this sort of thing that needs to be protected.
Venues have rules, so they're allowed to ban people. You don't have a right to do business in an establishment, regardless of your conduct. That's a traditionally conservative principle.
A lot of the content you're including in "banned behavior" doesn't come from mainstream conservatives simply expressing their political views, but from egregious behavior defended as being conservative in order to strengthen the narrative of liberal media persecution. Roseanne Barr, for instance (literally because it's early and she's first example I can come up with off the top of my head) wasn't banned merely for being conservative but for going on a racist tirade on Twitter.
Gab and 8Chan weren't deplatformed for expressing conservative views, but because their cultures encouraged and exploited racial violence for entertainment. You can disagree with the validity of that versus those sites' free speech rights, or their responsibilities for the second-order effect of their "memes," but the fact remains they weren't a victim of anti-conservative persecution. T_D's treatment isn't due to their conservative views, but their violations of Reddit's TOS.
Even the case of Carpe Donktum in the article appears to have been banned due to violent threats, not merely conservative views.
Yet conservatives refuse to even concede that the courtship by the Republican party and NRA of the extremist right and the shifting of the Overton Window of conservative activism in the direction of neo-reactionary hatred post Trumpism is even a problem, much less a relevant factor in this specific debate. The only thing conservatives seem willing to do is state that exactly the same phenomenon exists on the left, then proceed to ignore the issue completely, as if somehow they were proving "the left" hypocritical, and thus invalid. But even if the left were hypocritical, being hypocritical doesn't make them wrong... conservatism has a problem with its lunatic fringe regardless, and in most cases, an unwillingness to clean their own house is why they're getting banned, deplatformed, etc.
As far as trying to get people fired goes, employment in the US has almost always been at the sole discretion of the employer. That is due to conservative efforts and conservative belief in the free market, and they have fought tooth and nail against unions, labor rights, minimum wage increases, maternity leave, protected classes, environmental regulations, anything that would prove an encumbrance to employers' ability to fire at will or do business as they choose. I'm sorry but I have to play the world's tiniest violin for them in this case.
The premise that "conservatives will cease to exist online" is FUD and hyperbole. It's a conspiracy theory. It's not true. I have plenty of social media accounts, and I see plenty of conservative speech online. The typical conservative answer to this problem, if it exists, should be the free market - if it is the case that most or all conservative speech is under threat, then that presents a clear market opportunity for platforms to serve conservative speech.
And in fact, that's been done. And those platforms tend to fail because they're unnecessary, and because they get brigaded by Nazis and trolls. The marketplace of ideas has decided that it doesn't want to tolerate the sort of views that conservatives refuse to disassociate themselves from.
But why is this the minority opinion at a conservative conference:
I can't believe I'm doing this, because I'm here to convince you at a conservative conference that government shouldn't regulate speech,"