SoylentNews

Blackmoore writes:

Mike Masnick over at TechDirt wonders: Can We Create A Public Internet Space Where The First Amendment, Not Private Terms Of Service, Rules?

Over a year ago, Tim Karr had an interesting and important post about openness on the internet. While much of it, quite reasonably, focuses on authoritarian governments trying to stomp out dissent online, he makes an important point towards the end about how the fact that content online is ruled by various "terms of service" from different private entities, rather than things like the First Amendment, can raise serious concerns:

And the threat isn't entirely at the hands of governments. In last week's New Republic, Jeffrey Rosen reported on a cadre of twentysomething "Deciders" employed by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to determine what content is appropriate for those platforms -- and what content should get blocked.

While they seem earnest in their regard for free speech, they often make decisions on issues that are way beyond their depth, affecting people in parts of the world they've never been to.

And they're often just plain wrong, as Facebook demonstrated last week. They blocked a political ad from progressive group CREDO Action that criticized Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's support of the Keystone XL pipeline.

This case is just one of several instances where allegedly well-intentioned social media companies cross the line that separates Internet freedom from Internet repression.

In many ways, it may be even more complicated than Karr and the people he quotes describe. First off, even if you have a company that claims it will respect a right to free expression, it's not their decision alone to make. As we saw, for example, with Wikileaks, when there's strong pressure to silence a site, the downstream providers can get antsy and pull the plug. Upstream hosting firms, data centers and bandwidth providers can all be pressured or even threatened legally, and usually someone somewhere along the line will cave to such threats. In such cases, it doesn't matter how strongly the end service provider believes in free speech; if someone else along the chain can pull things down, then promises of supporting free speech are meaningless.

The other issue is that most sites are pretty much legally compelled to have such terms of use, which provide them greater flexibility in deciding to stifle forms of speech they don't appreciate. In many ways, you have to respect the way the First Amendment is structured so that, even if courts have conveniently chipped away at parts of it at times (while, at other times making it much stronger), there's a clear pillar that all of this is based around. Terms of service are nothing like the Constitution, and can be both inherently wishy-washy and ever-changeable as circumstances warrant.

With both service and hosting providers clearly uninterested in facing off against a government take down, or even a computer generated DCMA request — is there any hope for free speech ?