Comment on What If Free Speech Means Banning TikTok?
Mickey7@lemmy.world 1 week ago***> “we make speech free by restricting speech” ***
I agree. This is obviously contradictory. But we see it throughout all social media always along the lines of , “we need to censor the opinions that you have that conflict with our’s to protect free speech”
sylver_dragon@lemmy.world 1 week ago
What a privately owned site does isn’t really a matter of free speech, online whining about it be damned. This is about government restrictions on speech. The whole point of the First Amendment was that the government should not get to the be arbiter of what speech is allowed and what is not. This has it’s limits (all rights do), and people can be held to account for the repercussions their speech has (libel, calls to violence, etc.). But, the government should not be in the position of deciding what speech is acceptable and what isn’t unless there is a very compelling reason. Stop and ask yourself, do you really want the incoming administration to get to decide what speech is OK and what isn’t?
JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee 1 week ago
The EU is right on this though, if they’re big enough to be gatekeepers through the network effect, they should be held to higher standards than some random site with 1000 users.
sylver_dragon@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I would step back and ask if we would be considering such regulation, were this a newspaper? Should the government be allowed to regulate the speech of a newspaper, if it’s readership becomes large enough? That is essentially what is being argued for. That, once a form of media reaches some critical mass of influence, the government now gets to control what that media source publishes. That seems awful dangerous to me. The whole point of Free Speech as a concept is that people should be free to engage in speech which the government does not like.
Just because speech is online, doesn’t mean it should receive less protection from government control.
JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I mean that they shouldn’t be allowed to arbitrarily censor stuff once they’re big enough, not that the government should be able to enforce censor lists.