#SocialMedia#ContentModeration#Censorship#FreedomOfSpeech#Authoritarianism: "I worry that liberals and some on the left routinely downplay the threat to speech that these platforms and the prospect of government control over them present. This is in part because there are few staunch defenders of free speech among their ranks these days. It’s not hard to see why this is. The bad faith invocation of free speech has been used by some heinous characters to defend online harassment, doxxing, and surveillance-based micro-targeting. Moreover, the past two decades have witnessed the gauche instrumentation of the First Amendment to argue for corporations’ rights to do whatever the fuck they want, including the tech industry’s brandishing the constitution to defend their metastatic business model.
It’s true, there is a lot of disingenuous nonsense when it comes to free speech discourse. But this doesn’t mean we should confuse these essential rights with the actors who speciously invoke them — something we often see in the liberal tendency to deny that centralized platform control of speech is a significant problem. The real problem, much liberal policy implies, is too little control of speech — too little monitoring, surveillance, and age-gating; too little trust, and too little safety; too many criminals hiding in shadows with not enough national security oversight; and too little U.S. ownership and “control.” The all-too-commonly proffered solution to the harms that flow from platform surveillance practices and business models is to ensure that they are wisely governed by upstanding people applying appropriate norms and standards. The fight, in other words, is aimed at expanding power over these platforms to governments and sometimes NGOs. With the counterfactual vision of an ordered and just state standing in for any critical thinking about who will actually exercise such power, and how." https://lpeproject.org/blog/social-media-authoritarianism-and-the-world-as-it-is/
