Protests on the social platform have entered a new phase, with users shirking the platform’s NSFW content rules en masse. The development has some media buyers on high alert, experts say.
Protests on the social platform have entered a new phase, with users shirking the platform’s NSFW content rules en masse. The development has some media buyers on high alert, experts say.
Who is talking about it being illegal?
Well, this comment chain started with:
Which implies that companies need a “justification,” which further implies that companies “fiddling with speech” needs to be “justified,” as though “unjustified fiddling with speech by companies” is, or should be, disallowed.
Later, you said:
That might be colloquially accurate, but it’s misleading in the context of private companies acting as platforms for speech, in the US (I know I have beat that drum plenty, but it’s necessary).
Infringement of freedoms is met with legal consequences. Since private entities are not oblligated to be a platform for any speech, whether that’s a forum on the internet or other people’s signs in your front yard, there are no legal consequences when those private entities curb the speech in the space they provide for speech. The discussions around this situation generally carry a subtext of “something should be done about this,” and because of the conflation of colloquial vs legal “free speech,” it’s easy for that “something” to feel like “companies shouldn’t be able to do that,” with legal consequences.
People rightly recognize that there is a problem with the diminishing ability for people to express themselves, and conversations about that usually misidentify the problem as being with the operators of private spaces where so much speech is today exercised. Any solution which grants and protects individual rights is necessarily a legal solution. So, while maybe nobody is saying the words “It should be illegal for companies to curb speech on the platforms they operate,” the discussion is about a legal remedy.
I was trying to describe that the problem is more likely the degradation of the public commons. The relative absence of public spaces in which speech can be effectively transmitted drives people’s speech to private spaces, and those private spaces come with much greater limitations on speech. While I don’t have a specific solution to offer for that problem, I have to think it must include creating or reinvigorating public commons.