i think all private companies should be allowed to control their own content.

a right to free speech does NOT include the requirement that others to publish it.

you can say what you like. i can tell you to get out of my house for doing so. https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-to-sign-executive-order-targeting-social-media-11590681930

there is no requirement that i ever repeat what you said or publish it in my newspaper or on my website.

a right to speech is a negative right. it is a right not to be interfered with by the state.

it confers no right to be platformed or even listened to.

BUT (and this is a HUGE but) the gov't has never agreed with this. as many have just discovered about what they presumed was their right to leave their home, the gov't views it as a privilege.

social media has been exempt from responsibility for user content under section 230

this is often called "the 26 words that created the internet."

but this is NOT based in rights. it's based in regulation. it's a specific carve out that differentiates net providers from newspapers and broadcasters who exercise editorial control and thus are liable for content

and it makes sense.

there is just no way a site can review all the content that is put there.

it's literally impossible to watch youtube uploads in real time.

they cannot edit, so they are not editorially responsible.

that's been the deal.

see where this is going?

once net firms start exercising editorial control and "fact checking" or censoring views, they have stepped into a different legal realm.

worse, they have stepped into the political arena.

the law currently protects them. laws can be changed.

the idea that there is some "right" to social media may be absolutely true ethically, but like your right to leave home, it has no inherent legal basis

section 230 can be altered or removed at any time.

it's just a subsection of a bill whose actual purpose was to regulate porn.

politics is perhaps the most brutal and disgusting business in the US and it's been getting more and more so as partisan tribalism has mounted. what were once weapons of last resort now fly in the first volley

everything from chicken sandwiches to pharmaceuticals is political

and jack just walked into the middle of it.

if you step in that ring, you're not kidding around anymore. this is no holds or weapons barred combat.

remove sec 230, and twitter is gone overnight in an infinitely dense singularity or lawsuits.

this would be a tragedy.

the damage it would do to the internet is unspeakable and the near term disruption would be outlandish

the high functioning internet has been the result of of a sort of mutually assured destruction driving detente.

it's a stable system as long as everyone sees it for what it is

but, as @jack 's increasingly muscular and opinionated censors are showing, it's NOT a stable system overall.

either side can decide to take the cold war hot and blow up the world.

this is the cuban missile crisis of social media.

we can walk it back or it can go REALLY bad.

zuckerberg waded into this pool a bit, got a look at the monsters that live there, and rapidly decided these were NOT waters he wanted to swim in.

the "destruction" part of mutually assured destruction is very real.

@jack and his underlings would do well to learn from this.

and then they should realize that the current model of centralized, walled gardens of social media cannot survive.

it MUST evolve.

to stay free and escape the yoke of political oversight, it has to become massively distributed.

there cannot be a switch to turn off.

the data has to be stored everywhere

the data has to be encrypted

if you have a company that is spared from instant heat death by lawsuit only by regulatory fiat, how free can that company ever be?

to truly make internet speech a right, internet speech has to become individual

so long as it isn't, it's going to depend upon political forbearance.

this is like living in mom and dad's house.

if we want to keep our freedom, it's time figure out how to get our own place.