> "Forcing private companies to do what you want them to do, even when they would prefer not to?"
That's exactly the argument that bigots who owned businesses used to refuse service to PoC and oppressed people before the civil rights legislations of the '50s and '60s were passed. Funny to hear old discredited arguments used by far-right conservatives decades ago coming out of the mouths of the left these days. It's almost enough to make one start taking the horseshoe theory seriously.
There is a very bright-line difference in the case of the civil rights-related curbs on private property privilege: Those actually were effective in solving the problem! Because the solution to the problem was very clear: everybody should be able to ride the bus, eat in a restaurant, etc.
The contrast with regulating the media companies couldn't be greater. What, exactly, should these regulations be? I haven't heard anything but the most vague notions--which are so undercooked that they do not rise to the level of any kind of concrete proposal.
In point of fact, no matter what regulations are adopted, there will be media winners and media losers, and the losers will always feel the system is against them. Our media will become even more hyper-politicized than it is now, because its fate would be determined by politicians who can't even agree that it's probably a good idea to pay our debt.
You start off with a very clear solution, but don't explain why that very clear solution doesn't apply
Everyone should be able to use the bus, eat in a restaurant, use a water fountain or a post office bathroom
Everyone should be able to use Twitter, Facebook, Google, Uber, Shopify, Reddit.
It's the same problem in both cases. Why is it different now so we should apply an exclusionary standard?
Great question, which made me think about how they are more similar than I had originally thought. In both cases we're talking about carriers, quasi-utilities, network effects and (alas) real potential for abuse. But wouldn't this very similarity tend to strengthen our intuitions about the need for community standards?
E.g. You are sitting on a bus, and a venerable person comes aboard and launches into paean to Bolshevism, urging the present company to rise up and seize the means of production. Certainly protected speech. You might find it entertaining. You might even feel a pang of nostalgia for a lost world and its simpler problems.
But after a few hours of this, would you really feel like a free speech abuse had happened if the bus driver asks our comrade to give it a rest; or, if he feels honor-bound to continue, would he please go do it on somebody else's bus?
But you asked how I thought they were different, and I do think they are very different, because human attention is limited in a different way than the number of busses, or ISPs are. If you can't fit one more person on a bus without kicking another one off, you can just buy more busses.
Human attention is not like that. No matter how many clones of twitter there are, I can't doom scroll for more than 24 hours a day. If some content is promoted on my feed, that means other content is inevitably excluded from my feed. And isn't this really what people are unhappy about? Not just that their views are not stored in some database somewhere. No, they want people to pay attention to what they are saying.
Can that problem be solved by additional regulations? I really don't think so. No matter what regulations we put on carriers, there will be media winners and media losers. And the losers will always feel like the system is systematically excluding them. And no wonder they feel that way--they are right. They can even go beyond vague complaints of corporate collusion and point to specific line items community standards, or--if we do adopt regulations--to specific regulations which are having the effect of suppressing their speech, perhaps even unconstitutionally suppressing their speech. But the conundrum is that this would be true for any set of regulations. The regulations can change who gets attention and who gets ignored. And they can make a bus ride or a social network more pleasant or less pleasant. But I have a hard time seeing how it can actually solve the problem of people being ignored.
Sure, pretty much everyone except extreme libertarians agrees that there are limits to private property rights that can be overriden in certain circumstances. However, if we (rightly) force businesses not to discriminate on the grounds of race, then it seems logically consistent to also allow businesses to refuse to associate with racists. I am not sure how someone could be ok with government intervention to prevent "whites only" restaurants and yet not ok with the government merely refraining from interfering with businesses that voluntarily choose not to associate with racists.
I'm not saying it's a great policy, but it makes sense to me.
Running a whites-only business overlaps but is different from being racist.
In this scenario, it would be weird to force your business to associate with whites-only businesses. But those are illegal, so you're not forced to do that. You're only forced to work with racists that don't run whites-only businesses.
Yes, I suppose there is a logically consistent space there, but not one that seems either appealing or consistent with the way the legal lines have been drawn in the US. For example, as it is not illegal in the US to express hatred for people of a particular ethnicity, should bakeries therefore be required to bake 'Ethnicity X sucks' cakes? That seems both absurd and inconsistent with the eventual outcome of the Masterpiece Cakeshop case.
My overall point here is that it does not make much sense to object to the freedom of association arguments being made in this thread on the grounds that similar arguments were used to support discrimination against Black Americans prior to the Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act recognized racism as a unique evil that required special legal remedy; it did not recognize racists as requiring special legal protection. So, yes, freedom of association permits you to avoid associating with racists but does not (in all cases) permit you to avoid associating with people of a particular ethnicity.
Unfortunately progressives have been acting like ancaps on these issues for a while. I've long since stopped being surprised to see someone with "socialist" in their bio saying it's a good thing that unelected corporations have de facto control over online political expression, or that employers should be able to threaten people's livelihoods for supporting the wrong party, and acting like it's anathema to suggest regulating a private company in any way. Very short sighted, both forwards and backwards
chuckle I certainly have been lost in wonder that now I'm the one defending corporate power :-)
But, what would a solution to the problem look like, on your view? Would we really be better off having, say, Elon must having to get his decision to remove blocking approved by some media czar in the Ministry of Truth? Would that really stop people from thinking that their views are not being systematically suppressed?
Progressives (like Americans generally) are skeptical of all power, pubic and private, and (like Americans generally) don't want government interference in society unless it might have some hope of actually solving the problem.
But I haven't seen any concrete proposals at all, let alone anything which I would have any confidence that would actually solve the problem. Quite the contrary; no matter what regulations are imposed, surely there will always be those who feel they are being systematically suppressed--and come to think of it, they would be correct in thinking that way.
That's exactly the argument that bigots who owned businesses used to refuse service to PoC and oppressed people before the civil rights legislations of the '50s and '60s were passed. Funny to hear old discredited arguments used by far-right conservatives decades ago coming out of the mouths of the left these days. It's almost enough to make one start taking the horseshoe theory seriously.