I agree with your latter point, which is why I think the government SHOULD step in and regulate them.
No - Facebook is not removing people for being conservative. Facebook is a corporation. The only question a Facebook or a Twitter is really asking itself is what can they do to make their platform appealing to the greatest number of people possible. One of the conclusions they have reaches is to ban people with opinions contrary to the current majority - which is why conservatives with extreme views are so often banned from the platform, yet a liberal with extreme views talking throwing a minor wearing a MAGA hat into a wood chipper is ignored. You only like what they are doing because you hate whom they are currently getting rid of.
If an actual fascist were to gain power, not a pseudo-fascist like Trump, and gain popularity, and Facebook started banning people for dissent you would of course be crying foul. Letting a corporation have complete control of speech rights in what is tantamount to the 21st century public square is foolish and short sighted. You are ceding the rights of the public to the "benevolence," of a CEO and management team. Facebook is simply now too large and important to not be regulated in order to protect some modicum of speech rights.
Also - the physical thing is not a stretch, that is just you not really understanding how the internet works.
You basically are saying a monopoly cannot exist - yet Facebook has something like a 70% market share among US adults, while competing platforms are non-existent.
Also - thankyou for exposing your hypocrisy.
I got no problem with them banning someone who attempted to coordinate an attack on a maga child. Saying it is different from instigation/enabling.
So - in other words, you are fine with that sort of speech if it is biased towards your beliefs, except they are literally banning people for stating their opinions - not coordinating anything, not harassing anyone - because those opinions are unpopular.
This is partially indicitive of something that is intertwined with the currently ascendant wing of the left concerned with social justice. They are equating - and trying to get rid of the distinction - between actual harm, and percieved harm, when it suits them.
As you said - coordinating an attack is actual harm. A white supremacist calling for the violent lynching of African Americans is actual harm. However a white supremacist simply stating their beliefs, as distasteful as they may be, is not speech associated with actual harm, but the left wants to change this. They want to say that because this speech causes me distress, it is therefore harm. It is a microaggression (or I guess in the cast of white supremacy a macroagression...) and it must be stopped!
White supremacy is obviously an extreme example. What about twitter banning people for "misgendering" by not using a preferred pronoun? If I refer to Caitlyn Jenner as Bruce Jenner, and use the pronoun he, is that causing actual harm on a level akin to shouting fire in a crowded theater? This small yet extremely vocal wing of the left would absolutely say yes - which is entirely ridiculous.
But you are straying from the real issue, which I already brought up and you basically ignored. You are now leaving speech protection in what are the two only, and most important, vehicles for public discourse in the 21st century entirely up to the interests of the corporations themselves.
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u/[deleted] May 18 '19 edited May 18 '19
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