A good piece of writing by journalist Ross Barkan; an excerpt:
Many on the left cheered Trump’s banishment from social media and the quick move by Amazon to dump Parler, the right-wing Twitter-like app, from its cloud computing services. Greg Bensinger, a member of the New York Times editorial board, praised the decisions from Facebook and Twitter, calling for “more direct, human moderation of high-profile accounts; more prominent warning labels; software that can delay posts so that they can be reviewed before going out to the masses, especially during moments of high tension; and a far greater willingness to suspend or even completely block dangerous accounts like Mr. Trump’s.”
This was general consensus. The problem wasn’t that the ban had come—it was that it had come so late. Trump, of course, had four years to incite violence and hatred from his Twitter account. Imagine what would have happened if the tech elites in Silicon Valley decided to neuter him back in 2017. Imagine the weakness of that presidency....
Now, the public square is, quite literally, held in the hands of a few billionaires with no background in news. They have all the power to silence the ideas and voices they do not like. Today, there is cheering because the target of their titanic clout is Trump and his mass of fools. Who’s next? Already, Google and Facebook have been quietly suppressing news on the socialist and hard left. Facebook and Twitter teamed up to slash traffic to a New York Post report on Hunter Biden with dubious sourcing, though it was later revealed the son of the future president was, indeed, under federal investigation. There is nothing illegal about this, no violation of the First Amendment. These are private companies evicting tenants from their turf. The trouble is the turf does not just extend to their property line; it is more like one or three landlords own every apartment on Earth, and they’ve collectively decided to evict you. Before social media, matters of speech were debated in open court, with appellate review. Speakers could argue why their speech should remain protected, courts had to follow precedents, and the rules were largely created by the public, by elected officials or by appointed or elected judges.
None of that is present here. Facebook and Twitter and Google and Amazon do not deliberate in public. The courts have no say. The standards do not reside in case law or precedent. The answer to this state of affairs is to crush tech monopolies through existing anti-trust law and the creation of new, regulated business models, a worthy long-term project that is far more useful for the future of democracy than begging Zuckerberg and Bezos to play hall monitor in perpetuity. They are not fit for any editorial task; they are businessmen out to safeguard their own interests.
(Thanks to Howard Berman for the pointer.)
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