imagine electric companies stood up for progressive values by cutting off power to homes with pro-Trump yard signs. Even staunch supporters of free markets would likely object to these restrictions on expression by privately owned enterprises. When we examine why power companies shouldn’t be able to make service contingent on not violating political sensibilities, we see that analogous arguments should stop social media giants from exiling political dissidents.
. . .if an electric utility decided to just exclude a few customers, it would be extremely costly for a competing power company to sell energy to those people and the former customers would likely go unpowered.
Similarly, he argues that if your speech is cut off by Facebook, no competitor is going to jump in and offer you equivalent service. The network effect gives Facebook monopoly power.
My thoughts:
1. What Google or Facebook can take away from you is your ability to easily reach certain audiences. That does not interfere with your right to free speech. Just because you have a right to free speech does not mean that you are entitled to the listeners you may desire.
2. I think it is the wrong business model for Google or Facebook to shut people down. I think it would be better to allow each listener to decide who he or she wants to hear. If I had sufficient control over my Facebook account, I would not see anybody’s political posts. (As it is, the best I can do is unfollow somebody who goes overboard with political posts. I done that.)
3. If I were in charge of Facebook, I would run it very differently. As I’ve said on a number of occasions, I would aim toward a subscription model, not an advertising model. This in turn would facilitate another major difference, which is that instead of having what you see determined by a secret algorithm, I would give you tools to set your own priorities.
4. Assigning Facebook or Google the status of utilities would only serve to entrench them, making it less likely that my ideas in (3) or any other major innovations will ever be seen.
point 1. is a strawman
the argument is that G or F should leave it to the users to decide who to listen to and not decide it for them based on their own staff and management political preferences.
this is not an argument for a right to listeners
no one is demanding that traffic be directed to their their page just that the companies don’t erase or block it.
3. if FB moved to subscription only they would lose the network
am I wrong?
3) +1….I have never understood if you were running Facebook why it would move to subscription model. I think it is really odd that global Social Media settled on near Monopoly market but somehow it did. (At this point it stay ahead with hiring the best tech workers, etc.)
The main question I have is Facebook was subscription wouldn’t their revenue (and power) go down? Their business model is lots of traffic and subscription would kill that. I bet with subscription they would lose 50% of users overnight as people would hate to pay for it. (And most global citizens have limited disposable income.)
(TBH I think the power of secret algorithm is over-rated and it ain’t that hard to what you are looking for on the internet.)
Do you think that utility status is what Facebook wants?
It’s certainly possible. Regulation increases the cost of entering the market, so it could serve to cement Facebook in place as the dominant platform. In addition, there have been lawsuit threats against the platforms for “promoting” hate speech. Regulation may push at least some of the responsibility off onto the government regulators.
Perhaps in an ideal, Gary Becker sort of world, the market would deliver irrational discriminators their just desserts and folks with unpopular viewpoints could accept non-intervention with equanimity.
But it is not.
And people are dissatisfied.
Why are people dissatisfied?
Herzberg’s hygiene factors theory of dissatisfaction might help explain. In the workplace, for example, if an employee attending is told not to talk at all while everyone else around the table got a turn to say what was on their mind, the employee would likely feel dissatisfaction due to feeling of being of lesser value and not being an equal member of the team. That treatment would be considered a dissatisfier.
What James Miller appears to be pointing out is that silencing certain groups or individuals in a social media setting is also a dissatisfier.
A huge legal industry has developed to monetize the grievances of select identity, the left-behind groups naturally are dissatisfied.
A social media platform that silenced people based on sexual orientation would rightly be condemned. For example, the Colorado cake baker was hauled to court twice and had to go to the Supreme Court to avoid being forced to do work he disagreed with. But social media platforms get a free pass when they refuse service to cisgenders, white males, people who express doubts about standard academic doctrines denying xy and xx chromosomes, etc. etc.
Google “#mayocide twitter” to get an idea of how certain kinds of hate speech are widely promoted and accepted on social media platforms that silence much less toxic speech from their political opponents.
There is no easy answer.
On one hand, we don’t address the dissatisfaction by simply saying shut up and go away. On the other hand, we decry the resulting polarization and ugliness of political life in the US.
In the end, I suppose the best we can hope for is to harness the dissatisfaction to achieve useful ends such as the dissolution of the inefficient and unsustainable United States into a couple hundred more efficient, sustainable, and politically cohesive smaller countries which would compete with each other to achieve optimal regulation of viewpoint discrimination.
I really think the fault lines are strating to emerge between rival camps of the non-progressive public intellectuals, which includes conservative and libertarians.
The question that frames this split is: “Is Woke Capital a big enough problem that it warrants state intervention?” Another way to frame it would be in terms of thresholds – at what tipping point (e.g., of manifest bias and one-sidedness of the application of ‘private’ discretion) would one flip and favor such intervention?
It’s a hard choice, but not a false choice. There are the “proceduralist anti-statists” on the one hand, who are going be oppose state action and defend private discrimination (but only if it’s against nasty right wing people, of course) no matter what.
On the other hand will be those are trying to Optimize Liberty Under Social Constraints (maybe “Anti-Progressive Effective-Libertists” – ‘effective liberty’ currently used mostly by progressives for mirrored reasons) and who are neither allergic to, nor see any better alternative to, organizing politically to use state authority as a countervailing power to make the country safe for non-woke heretic dissidents, which it increasingly is not.
Remember, the Woke Capital / deplatforming problem isn’t just about speech and audienecs. Being booted off a social media service means you can’t receive certain messages either, not even if you are willing to pay, and not even in a library. Or interact with the financial transaction processing system through Chase bank, Paypal, GoFundMe, etc. At one point do enough pips squeak loudly enough?
You know, for those of us that follow military matters, a common complaint is that the military culture and organization habits and instincts (and statutory / process requirements) are headquartered in DC, heavily influenced by the great executive bureaucracy, and not easily made compatible with the Silicon Valley style of doing business, the products and services of which DoD will come to rely upon on more and more in the coming years. A lot of military officers never hang out in the Bay Area, and “don’t get it”, using the DC experience as a bad model for how things generally work everywhere. Perhaps similar things could probably be said for people who work in the money-and-credit parts of the executive (“GreenGov”) and the culture of finance centered around NYC – though revolving door / ‘detailee’ rotations of top executives probably helps narrow the gap and promote convergence in that instance.
But there is a similar trouble with the way the largely Northeast (and particularly DC)-based non-progressive commentariat doesn’t get Bay Area culture. Here in DC, intellectual, political, and ideological diverstiy looks relatively safe and healthy, even ‘robust’. “What, me worry? Circumspice!”
But it’s not like that our there, not even close. The right edge of the Overton Window out there consists of formerly radical progressives who let their subscriptions to Pravda lapse and so are just two or three years slow in catching up to the latest goodthink: it’s like forgetting to turn on automatic updates for the latest software patches. If you’re a whole four years slow like Andrew Sullivan (of all people!), you’re out of luck.
Commercial monopoly is not the problem. Ideological monopoly at the Commanding Heights is the problem. And that’s what it’s like out there. This is especially bad when it is of a sort that puts at least half the country in the deplorable category and the Rubicon of morally compulsory actionability has been crossed. Breaking up Facebook or Google into a million pieces would mean nothing so long as the culture of all those descendants is still steeped in the SV worldview, and Silicon Valley and its mini-me satellites have a monopoly on the kind of “tech” we’re talking about.
My proposal has been to simply extend existing anti-discrimination protections and common carrier requirements to large companies holding themselves out as serving the general public.
Chase bank should be perfectly able to decline to serve people who have engaged in non-expressive bad behaviors which relate directly to maintaining the integrity of their line of business. Bank fraud, armed robbery, bad checks, money laundering, cracking open ATMs, and so forth – sure. Notice all of those are state-recognize causes of action as either crimes or torts, which makes for an excellent standard. Chase should no be able to discriminate and boot people for expressing opinions not related to Chase, for instance, their religious convictions regarding sexual matters.
This is the usual place for someone to point out that freedom to express political ideas without fear of being excommunicated from normal modern life is a very special and ‘primary’ kind of liberty because without it … well, we all know how the argument goes by now. I hope.
Again, the question is at what point on one’s political model do these non-discrimination requirements (and I don’t hear many Libertarians conspicuously advocating for the abolition of all the other non-discrimination rules) become justifiable as the least worst option in order to preserve a social situation in which most people can exercise actual liberty without fear of the modern, soft equivalent of exile to Siberia?
What are the alternatives? Well, the quickest way to end a way is unqualified surrender and letting the enemy tanks just roll through unopposed, so there’s always that. (Effective-Libertists are likely to view the Procedural-Anti-Statists as something akin to dangerously naive Pacifist Appeasers in the face of a horde of salivating ogres, laughing in near-disbelief at their good luck of getting to win without a fight).
There is also the proposal for non-progressives to build separate but equal alternatives and competitng platforms (and banks, and gyms, and in truth in the clear implication of the logic of deplatforming – an entire economy), segregated and discriminatory against progressives and leftists. Even if that ‘advice’ wasn’t hopelessly impractical (and again, dependent on professionals inhabiting the opposing ideological monoculture), or if one instead proposes the related alternative of organizing the non-woke community for massive counter-boycotts and protests and so forth, and other, more Latin American (or drug / prison gang) forms of credibly threatened retaliation to generate a permamnt balance of terror, this seems like ‘epistemic closure’ on ultra-steroids, and a pretty bad social development for anyone that prefers any chance of a harmonious, civil, and integrated society with some sense of general goodwill and solidarity.
If the choice is between laws de-woking corporate America and Permanent Prison Gang Politics, then the dogma that some principle forbidding the former and compelling us to accept the later deserves to be questioned.
I mean, if we’re still allowed to question it: let me go check today’s Pravda.
The problem which we have not yet been able to negotiate in the age of mass internet communication is this: speech calling for hate and violence are given an unprecendented level of access to millions of potential actors which, upon hearing these messages, are poised with a kinetic hatred to do harmful acts. Whereas pre-internet, these people would be bound by social forces around them, which isolate their extreme views and actions in a way that experiencing diminishing returns(shame based methods).
By connecting the isolated speaker with the isolated recipient, they take on a completely different role with respect to their views and their place in society. This was not nearly as possible in the analogue days of letters and even phones. The neo-fascist can now supercede the normal community moral forces which keep the potential fascist in check, and connect them to an online community not bound by geographical location. So, now Facebook and Google have to take on the role of the social and community moral girders by shaming the speaker with silence. Is this ultimately the most effective way to promote good societal morals and to discourage hate? Well that is a moot point because thus far we have not produced a viable alternative.
Let’s try that shoe on the other foot. Suppose both the isolated speaker and the isolated recipient were people you happen to sympathize with. How then would feel about preventing their interacting?
The elephant in the room: this is all about control, and nothing else. There is a natural tension between a free society and a controlled one. I for one would like to see more freedom, and that means not nearly so much control as certain people want.
The other elephant in the room: everyone wants control, but no one wants to be controlled. This is why no one can be trusted with that kind of power. No one. Of any political leaning.
You raise a good point about control. My point was that we have not really addressed the tension which you pointed about in the age of internet communities. One thing I keep returning to is the paradox of tolerance. An tolerant society will become intolerant if it tolerates too much intolerance. That is a tongue twister, but true to the premise of the paradox.
Finding the balance between tolerating a certain level of hate and violence in speech and removing that speech is very difficult in a free society. What I want to reiterate is that FB and Google have been thrust into a position which a corporation has not experienced before, or at least on this scale. Their accountants would certainly prefer that they not become the arbiters of free speech, but that no longer is in question. These companies also have their own cultures and morals which their boards direct them to live by. Presumably they would like everyone to get along and not threaten violence against people who did not agree with them, but here we are.
What then, will replace these arbiters of free speech, and who gets to decide how much to tolerate? The mechanisms of the electorate don’t apply here; we can’t simply vote FB out of office.
Right. The key thing is that if you tolerate people that are very intolerant of some other small group of people, then you are basically allowing them to have free reign to push that other small group of society.
I.e. If you have a high tolerance for people expressing racist and sexist beleifs, you’re going to end up making society very uncomfortable for women and minorities. You’re essentially saying that tolerance forces you to let racists control who is welcome in society. That a “free” society is one where racists can make it impossible for black people to purchase a home. That’s not freedom for the black person. (Similar for women, a society where men can collude to prevent women from getting certain kinds of jobs isn’t “free” for women.)
The correct solution has to be that, at best, the racists/sexists/whatever are tolerated only up to the point that they can’t effectively exclude whatever group they are intolerant toward. I.e. they can be included but they’re not going to be allowed to control who else is included.
The question is at what point does free expression impinge upon the limits of tolerance. Let’s reemphasize we’re talking about private actors on private platforms here. Facebook is saying that they want to regulate speech on their platform to, first, make their platform a space that is tolerant towards minority groups, and second promote social tolerance towards minority groups in society at large. They’re basically saying “We’re not going to let hate groups use our software to coordinate activities that promote intolerance toward ethnic minorities.”
Good response. I want to add that I may be in the minority here when I say that Facebook is doing a decent job at navigating these treacherous waters. I would never want to be the arbiter of speech on that scale, it seems like a genuine nightmare for me.
That said, there may be limits to what they can actually policy on their own platform. Certainly after Nashville and the tiki torch parade, people of color felt less welcome than before. Did FB help those people facilitate the march? I would say definitely yes, but I also don’t think FB should be in the position of forecasting the outcomes of events which are being organized on their platform. It’s just yucky situation for both FB and anyone who values free speech.
Yes, it has to be extremely labor intensive. They essentially have a piece of software which largely works autonomously, and which automates the process of people finding and connecting and socializing with each other. It would be impossible to have enough staff to actively monitor every facebook group, so they have to rely on reports of abuse or algorithms catching certain phrases or words. That’s essentially going to mean both false positives and false negatives. If they tighten the algorithm against “hate speech” there will be more false positives, and if they loosen it there will be more false negatives (i.e. more underground hate groups operating on Facebook). They’re a private actor though and it’s up to them to adjust that knob. I can’t see this being something the government should be involved in.
So has there been a case where racists or sexists facebook posts or groups prevented a black person or woman from buying a home or getting a job?
I have heard of a case where person was fired after he was connected to a white supremacy march by his facebook account.
Not that I am aware of. However, it’s entirely possible that online racists could be harassing, doxxing, and cyberstalking individual black people online. (They probably are.) Or even organizing violence against minorities in real life. I have friends who have online “stalkers” (people that follow them from website to website, or comment on their twitter feed under different names), and have even had one or two myself at times.
IIRC, the guy in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting was involved in online hate groups, which spurred him into action.
If you take into account things like doxxings, there’s a pretty direct line between online hate speech and real violence against anyone that some political extremist takes a disliking towards in real life.
Yes, no one wants to be controlled. Including the minority groups which are exposed to the social constraints imposed by prejudice and discrimination. IMO, the lack of freedom imposed upon ethnic minorities due to coordinated prejudice is more of a problem than the lack of freedom imposed upon the isolated speaker and listener in the example above. In other words, if Facebook, a private entity, wants to disrupt the social networks of hate groups on their platform, in order to make society at large a more free place for ethnic minorities, then I have no objection to that activity.
Is PragerU a coordinated hate network? LiveAction (is the pro-life position automatically hateful?)? How about criticism of Islam? Is is hate speech to dispute questionable statistics on the incidence of sexual assault on college campuses? Or to criticize giving hormone treatment to children to alter their gender? Because these are all things that have been censored. None of them seem to me to be fairly considered outside the realm of what it should be acceptable to discuss.
But all this is clearly just about trying to protect minorities from the klan, and enforcing surely political conformity has nothing to do with it.
PragerU hasn’t been censored. They just aren’t being allowed to generate ad revenue on their videos. They haven’t even been “deplatformed”. People having a counter demonstration and setting up a “safe space” isn’t censorship either, however silly it is.
A related issue is that, in a connected world in which millions of people are vying to be heard, saying outrageous things gets attention. So, the platform encourages people to push boundaries. Trump and AOC are both expert at staying in the national spotlight by manipulating social media in exactly this way. I’m not looking forward to a time when only the people saying and doing the most outrageous things can get elected.
That must be why we’ve seen such a rise in political violence since the inception of the Internet. (Sarcasm)
No, this is a solution in search of a problem. We are not awash in neofascist agitators any more than the 2008 election brought us to to the brink of communism. This attitude strikes me as borderline hysterical. It’s clear that this has nothing to do with protecting people from nonexistent throngs of violent right wingers waiting to be triggered. It’s aboutmaking political views they disagree with – however peacefully expressed – socially unacceptable.
Also, it’s nothing short of astonishing that some people are still trying to act as though censorship is remotely limited to ‘hate speech.’ Has enough evidence not piled up of censorship of not remotely hateful opinions that just happen to be on the wrong side of the political tracks, and systematic overlooking of thoroughly hateful speech on the right side of those tracks? Attempts to keep trying to frame it as being about whether or not to censor racism just defy credibility now.
I don’t know, can you give me some examples of attempts to censor speech that was not at least considered racist or sexist (or homophobic or whatever) in some sense?
Yes. The cure here may be worse than the disease.
I see little evidence that allowing free speech (including so-called hate speech) creates actual violence.
As an optimist, I believe that if we just banned banning, the marketplace of ideas would marginalize loud voices of stupidity. Instead, we mute voices — which rewards the loudest. Do we really want louder voices?
“What Google or Facebook can take away from you is your ability to easily reach certain audiences. That does not interfere with your right to free speech. Just because you have a right to free speech does not mean that you are entitled to the listeners you may desire.”
Imagine that the phone company (before mobile phones were available) took away your line for political reasons. That wouldn’t interfere with your right to free speech either — it would just cut you off from listeners over the phone network. But you could send mail and organize in-person meetings (by mail), so it wouldn’t be a problem, right?
I guess the question to what extent is Facebook the equivalent of the phone company? It’s not a full monopoly as ‘Ma Bell’ used to be, but at the same time, being kicked off Facebook may have a big impact. It might disconnect somebody from their social network (it’s not just that the targeted person has to be willing to find another provider, but they have to persuade their friends and acquaintances to use the alternative too. A tall order. Or de-platforming a business might cut them off from existing and potential customers who expect to find a Facebook page.
And the other thing is that network effects mean there are generally only a handful of alternatives that have enough reach to be even potentially useful. But this handful of big companies are marching in something close to lockstep when it comes to de-platforming. So a user kicked off Facebook, is likely to be given the boot from Twitter and YouTube as well for the same political reasons.
I don’t think the utility model is right, but I do think size and network effects make this a genuine problem, not to be taken lightly.
Imagine that you couldn’t find a place to eat on a long road trip, because none of the restaurants in the towns nearby would serve black people.
People seem to forget that there are a lot of black people still alive who lived in places and times where this occurred.
Yeah. As I’m fond of pointing out this conversation is so often a bunch of white people discussing amongst themselves whether they should tolerate the annoying racist guy, without considering the impact that would have on black people who are somehow not part of the conversation. And literally within living memory there are times when black people were actively excluded from society in ways far more impactful than not being able to have a facebook page.
A question for you: since you’re sympathetic to public accommodation laws, do you think refusal to serve (people you designate as) racists is morally justified/necessary, and should be legal without limits? If the water, electric, and cable companies all refuse to serve him, nor restaurants or grocery stores, is this fair, and should it be legal?
In anticipation of the ‘but being black isn’t a choice, so it’s not comparable’ argument: I’m guessing you don’t believe in the unlimited right to discriminate based on mutable or chosen characteristics as well, e.g. a gay couple who choose to get married, a Muslim or religious Jew who choose to keep to their religion. So the general question is, what then is the limiting principle regarding who can be excluded to the point of ruining their life? Is it just ‘people I like get some positive rights at the expense of some negative rights of people I don’t? I really don’t see why the case for outlawing viewpoint discrimination against conservatives is any weaker than the case for outlawing religious discrimination against Muslims or Jews, or gay couples, or janitors. (I think all such cases are fairly weak, of course).
The distinction is that the “viewpoints” of racists are harmful to other people in a way that religious beliefs, or being gay, or being a janitor, generally are not. Religious beliefs generally do not, as a matter of principle, hold that some other class of people is inferior and should be treated as such. Practicing one’s religion usually does not involve mistreating other people.
If there was a religious belief that held that (for instance) harassing atheists was a religious obligation, and they existed in sufficient numbers to have a measurable impact on the lives of atheists, then it would fall in the same class as racism.
I’ll expand that a little bit. If you have a viewpoint that holds that a particular group of people is in some way inferior, then even if it doesn’t explicitly mandate that those people be mistreated, if it’s widespread enough to result in the systemic mistreatment or exclusion of that group, then it should be suppressed in the same way as racism. Because it’s directed at people it causes harms that don’t exist for other kinds of beliefs.
I.e. Just being a “conservative” shouldn’t make someone a social outcast. Social exclusion should be reserved for people who (a) actively want to exclude others and (b) exist in sufficient numbers to do so, if allowed to coordinate freely.
Literally nobody has forgotten this?
Which is illegal, and has been since 1964. It’s not clear what your point is, Hazel Meade. The post is not about bringing back segregation in any way, shape, or form. The post is about whether certain tech behemoths have attained sufficient power that they should be treated as Standard Oil (broken up), or treated like the power company (and lack the ability to deny certain basic services to willing customers). I’m not sure we’re there yet, but I can certainly see the argument. But either way your reference to segregation is rather puzzling to me.
My comment seems to have gotten stuck in a spam filter.
I’m not talking about segregation, which was law imposed by the state. I’m talking about private discrimination at levels sufficient to make it impossible for people to obtain food or accommodations.
Many libertarians oppose public accommodation laws on property rights grounds. But if you have a sufficiently small market, it’s entirely possible, were discrimination legal, for every hotel or restaurant in a small town to refuse service to some group. That’s directly analagous to the argument that Facebook/Twitter/etc are sufficiently large market-dominant entities that they have the power to shut down speech.
So if you are going to make the argument that Facebook/Twitter/etc need to be regulated like utilities to stop them from shutting down speech of certain disfavored groups, you then have to reconcile that belief with your opposition to public accommodation laws (if you oppose them), which is doing precisely the same thing – preventing private entities from denying service to disfavored groups.
In other words, you can’t be in favor of regulating Facebook, and simultaneously against public accommodation laws – that would be hypocritical.
Hazel Meade,
Your argument is then directed against the hypothetical “many libertarians” who both a) call for repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but b) also call for heightened regulation of Google and Facebook? I’m not sure who that would be–perhaps you could point them out–and in any event I think that’s a small enough group that the argument from inconsistency directed to that group has very limited applicability.
My own view (for what it’s worth), is that freedom of association for private actors is an important value that should only be countermanded when certain specific circumstances so warrant. Those circumstances include: a) when said freedom is being coordinated against a specific group, with devastating consequences (i.e., the Jim Crow South), and b) when a private actor has attained sufficient power that its choices relative to other private actors can have similarly devastating consequences (i.e, the power company turning off your electricity in winter because the CEO didn’t like your last blog post).
I can see an argument–although I’m not entirely persuaded yet–that Google, Facebook et al. have grown big enough to warrant regulation under the second category above. I actually see a stronger argument for regulation of Paypal, major banks and credit cards, and other financial “chokepoints” whose refusal to deal with a citizen can place that citizen in something like social exile (and besides, it will be a long time after the 2008 bailouts before I can listen to “free market” arguments from the financial sector). Anyway, that’s how I approach the issue.
And if by “public accommodation laws” you mean not the prohibition of Jim Crow, but the ongoing effort in some states to force a handful of bakers and florists to support marriages with which they disagree, then at this point I don’t see the position of those bakers and florists as having anything remotely like the consequences or market power needed to warrant what’s being done to them (i.e, there are plenty of other bakeries and florists). You can disagree on that point, but if you believe that the choices of (say) a small-town one-woman florist’s shop can be controlled by the State, then I can’t see how the tech monopolies can escape such control.
You don’t necessarily have to call for the repeal of the entire Civil Rights Act to have a stated opposition to public accommodations laws, which is a common libertarian position. This exact situation happened to Rand Paul not to many years ago and his suggestion was that private discrimination be legal, but people should boycott their businesses. In other words, that racism should be controlled by private sector social norms – by the social exclusion of racists. Which, ironically, is exactly what Facebook is doing.
I would also say that being banned from Facebook is far, FAR less of an infringement on a person’s liberty than being unable to find a place to eat or sleep. (or being unable to get a job, etc. due to private discrimination). In other words, the kind of social ostracism faced by black within living memory was orders of magnitude worse than anything faced by conservatives today. And yet this strong reluctance to infringe on the property rights of private entities seems to have evaporated in the context of Facebook/Twitter and conservatives purported “free speech” rights. Why is that?
An important point I think you’re missing is that this isn’t what Facebook eat al. are doing. Many, perhaps most, of the people being censored aren’t doing anything racist, and many people who say racist things get a pass as long as they’re racist against the right races.
It annoys me to no end that people keep trying to falsely reframe the debate as being strictly about the banning of racists. One has to have one’s head in the sand to persist in believing that censorship is restricted to racism and the like. It’s just not a tenable thing to claim anymore.
As I said upthread, Facebook is probably (almost certainly) relying on some sort of automatic algorithm which detects suspect phrases or words. That means they are going to be false positives. So sometimes conservatives (or others) who aren’t expressing particularly offensive viewpoints are going to get caught in the algorithm filter. Which I’m not sure is really biased against conservatives as some seem to think. I had a friend who got a temporary 3 day ban recently for making a comment with the words “men are pigs” in it.
Hazel Meade,
I don’t want to beat this point to death, but I remain quite unpersuaded that all or most of the people advocating for regulation of tech are simultaneously advocating for the legalization of racial discrimination. Said legalization is not, so far as I am aware, anything like a “common libertarian position,” (the folks at Reason would run from that position as fast as they could), and many libertarians oppose the regulation of tech in any event (again, see Reason). And the fact that your comments seem to attribute this alleged hypocritical position interchangeably to “conservatives” and “libertarians” as if they were the same thing shows–to me–that you really don’t know who these people are.
And yes, if you go back to 2010 Rand Paul did make some comments in an interview that he walked away from pretty fast, hasn’t repeated, has certainly never tried to act on during his time in the Senate, and have never been echoed by any of his colleagues. This doesn’t prove that the Republican Party or any other significant group constituting the “right” is trying to simultaneously regulate tech and legalize Jim Crow–you know full well that there is not a single public figure of note in either party who would ever advocate the latter position.
So let’s discuss regulation of tech on the merits–there are reasons for and against–instead of arguing that “conservatives” or “libertarians” permanently lost the right to have an opinion on the subject given Barry Goldwater’s campaign platform in 1964.
Where is this happening in the USA Today? What % of black people realistically encounter this in 2019?
I’m guessing 0.X%.
Yea, aafd and I disagree on a lot with the state of minorities in this nation but really how many African-Americans or other minorities been refused service the last 40 years? This stuff is not happening with any regularity and if a company did refuse service to minority it be all other social media and backlash would be huge.
For instance, a small Indiana gym with a new owner decided not to support pride month and low and behold 50% of the employees and 30% of customers left. The market can wicked in retribution.
There is a part of me that actually believe we could remove the private portions of Civil Rights and race relations would improve. (And I am as Clintonesque as you can get.)
I used to think this a few years ago, but the rise of the alt-right and the election of Donald Trump convinced me that if public accommodation laws were repealed there probably would still be significant numbers of businesses that would refuse to serve blacks.
Yes, there would be a public backlash – and exactly the same people would complain that the public backlash was suppressing people’s free association rights and was terribly wrong and intolerant towards racists. And everyone who boycotted a racist’s business would be labeled a SJW busybody.
It’s sort of hypocritical to say that racists would never get away with being racist in a free market because everyone would refuse to deal with them, and then turn around and complain about how oppressive and wrong it is to refuse to host the websites of people with racist views.
Perhaps, but not for long. Remember how quickly ChickFilA had folded for a less radioactive violation of the progressive code?
Two points: first, if you seriously think this, you’re living in cloud cuckoo land. Trump may survive unsubstantiated allegations of racism because he’s Trump, hicks and proles may survive them because they don’t have much farther to fall, but nobody in the huge middle can. It is true that social consequences are backstopped by legal threats, but even if public accommodation laws were repealed, there are a lot of other legal avenues to pursue. And if you’re imagining repealing all anti-segregation laws and regulations, that’s coup-complete and/or entails a splitting up of the country. Second, under the current dispensation, any such backlash would have no effect whatsoever. Labeling someone a SJW may hurt a presidential or a Federal Reserve chairman candidate, but we have already seen that congressional candidates can brush off such labels and even glory in them. There is a little bit of residual reluctance about accepting the “socialist” label, because there are still many boomer voters around and there’s Venezuela, but it’s nothing compared to such labels as “fascist” and “racist”. Krugman wrote a hilarious NYT op-ed yesterday bemoaning the fact that the label “socialist” can be thrown around much more freely than “fascist”, a textbook case of projection if there ever was any. I mean, what about Bushitler? And NYT itself has published op-eds such as “Is Donald Trump a Fascist?” and “A Perfume called Fascism” and “If You’re Not Scared About Fascism in the U.S., You Should Be”.
I think that more and more politicians on both the left and the right are discovering the joys of the regulatory state:
1. To control a business, they don’t have to expropriate it, which would anger the company’s owners and stock and bond holders.
2. They don’t have to raise taxes to “do something” about a problem or perceived problem – just mandate that industry handles it.
3. They don’t have to raise taxes to implement their “solutions.”
4. They’re not responsible if things go wrong; it’s the fault of the regulatory agency or, better, the companies that have been forced to implement the regulations.
5. They don’t need to go through the work of convincing either the public or 51% of House and Senate members. Instead, they just need control of the White House.
Ownership is a legal abstraction. Control is a real thing. As are externalities.
It’s a stealthy from of expropriation.
As best I can tell, Facebook’s revenue is about $2 per user per month. That gives us some idea what a subscription would have to cost.
Rather than trying to treat them as a utility, it is probably more appropriate to treat them as a common carrier.
I think Derrick’s analysis is off. I assume since this is an economics blog, that there is some agreement that corporations, while clearly affected by some political bias as all people are, are driven primarily by profit motives. I doubt that Facebook sees itself as needing to reinject normal community moral forces. They are more likely acting in the way that they perceive will maintain their maximum audience. They likely don’t care as much about individual rights as they do profits.
A social media company does not want its platform to devolve into a space its consumers are repelled from. It is also a form of control to demand that they take no steps to prevent their platform content from becoming less appealing to their audience.
All of this operates on a good faith system that has never been particularly reliable. There have always been multiple chokepoints of control and that control has always been applied. The difference is today that the edges are being contested in a public and vigorous way we haven’t seen before. The tools for exploiting those edges are far more powerful than before, and the good faith center that could make it work seems like a far off fantasy.
I think Apple beats them with AppleID. AppleID allows micro-pricing of content, a better version of subscription service.
They could allow people to choose between paying a fee to subscribe or granting them access to their data for ad revenue. For all the handwringing over Facebook’s use of user data, I suspect most people would prefer to sacrifice it to avoid paying the fee. Facebook likely estimated that most users wouldn’t be willing to pay the cost of the foregone ad revenue, and I think that assessment would be right.
Seems to me it is a property rights problem. People enter into the Facebook or Google plantations and start to sharecrop advertising. Google owns the land and the user doesn’t even have rights to finish the growing season. If the user displeases the lords of the manor, they can be thrown off the land and all their improvements either confiscated, burned or thrown off with them.
Sharecropping is a crappy way of life, but if it is all you got, you make the best of it. But people seem to have lost sight of the fact they have no enforceable property rights. They live by the leave and the whim of the landowners. And the landowners or the personal guard and retainers have decided they don’t want certain people, who think differently, on their land.
This is from a May 2016 interview with journalist Greg Ferenstein at AEI Ideas blog:
“I found crucial to what is distinct between libertarians and valley folk that Silicon Valley’s ideology is pro-market but it is not pro-liberty. Liberty is not a value. They are highly, highly, collectivist. They believe that every single person has a positive obligation to society and the government can help people or coerce people or incentive into making a unique contribution.”
That a feudalistic attitude and it is now being pushed in the open.
Nothing is stopping anyone from setting up their own website with their own domain name, or even from setting up their own server in their own basement to host that website. There is literally unlimited free “land” on the internet – you just have to develop it yourself. If you’re “sharecropping” on Facebook’s “land”, you’re either lazy or not smart enough to put up your own fences and dig your own irrigation ditches.
The internet is not a walled garden. You’re allowed to host your own web pages.
“Just put up your own webserver…”
Oh, puh-leeeze, not that canard. It is now a decade at least since that was a serious option. No American will ever find or visit a little (or even a fairly big) independent website unless it is linked in Google search results or from one of the commanding-heights sites like Facebook. The only exceptions to this rule are sites which offer illegal services to small numbers of desperate punters.
1. [Your right to free speech does not obligate Google or Facebook to host you]
Does it matter whether they are “the only game in town?” Seriously, the libertarian distinction between government and private enterprise seems unsatisfactory when the private enterprise is a transnational monopoly with deep and broad linkage to politics and government.
2. I think it is the wrong business model for Google or Facebook to shut people down. I think it would be better… [blah, blah].
Well, that’s nice. Do the managers of Google or Facebook agree with you? No? So why should we base our ideas of how to cope with Google or Facebook on your ideas of how to run them, when you don’t run them?
3. If I were in charge of Facebook, I would run it very differently. [blah, blah]
So what? Refer to #2 immediately above.
4. Assigning Facebook or Google the status of utilities would only serve to entrench them, making it less likely that my ideas in (3) or any other major innovations will ever be seen.
Based on what I think you mean by the term “utilities” I think you are right. However, one can imagine regulation short of making the target firm into a “utility.”
I think part of the trouble here is that free market types understand that if you give ’em an inch, they’ll take a mile. Conceding that some intervention might be warranted in the case of these particular companies could open the door to surrendering in the face of all kinds of crazy and harmful regulations and interference across all industries.
The way one tries to deal with this problem in the law is to attempt to draw some meaningful distinction that serves as a limiting principle. “Yes, you are right about government intervention in the market in general, however, this is a very special case, and the reasoning would only be used in the future to apply to similar, special cases, and not to all firms in general.”
One example could be distinguishing between ‘utilities’ and regular companies. Regulated monopoly utilities especially start to take on something like a ‘state-like’ character, and so one could make the argument they should be constrained by the same limitations on state action. Do we really want the phone companies to be able to deny people access to telephone service because of what they might say over the lines? Or for electric or water companies to cut people off because of their ideas?
My position is that certain market-dominant internet functions such as Social Media and Search are indeed special in terms of preventing them from engaging in ideological and political discrimination, precisely because their control over information and capacity to highlight on the one hand and censor on the other (and in an obscure, invisible manner), gives the power to manipulate general perceptions of reality and Aumann common knowledge about social beliefs throughout a society.
If one thinks about the way the Chinese Communist Party is successfully engaging in precisely this kind of manipulation via baidu, WeChat, QQ, and Weibo, one starts to realize the potential danger of such power to control such services poses, and the special threat of ideological discrimination to serve the interests of those in control.
Having that power in a Private Progressive Party (i.e., the ideological monopoly among elites in the tech and media sectors) is just as dangerous to the goal of maintaining a genuinely free society as having it in the hands of the state.
It’s notable that, with Net Neutrality, the progressives obsessed about exactly the kind of power to censor speech through control of internet service – even though the internet service providers have shown zero inclination to do any such thing – but the progressives actively support such censorship by monopolistic internet platform providers like Google, Facebook and Twitter – and even complain that Facebook does not do enough content censorship (which failure supposedly deprived the world of the manifold blessings of a Hillary Clinton presidency).