SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Caitlin Johnstone writes in a blog post over at Medium that corporate censorship is ramping up while people are distracted by the menace of government censorship.
It is true that it is the most controversial and repulsive speech which is most severely in need of protection, and that a government which is granted the power to silence Nazis can be expected to use that power to silence political dissent. But there is no danger of this ever happening in the United States, because corporate censorship can be used to silence anti-establishment voices with far less pushback.
Egged on by the resurfacing of obnoxious and sometimes illegal groups, more groups are pushing for, and sometimes getting, full online silence from other voices. Those in power will have corporations do any of the dirty work that might generate push back.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @09:21PM (2 children)
Actually, in order to take advantage of the DMCA Safe Harbor provisions which make hosts immune to direct legal threat they must not editorialize content.
If the hosts are editorializing some content, esp. on political basis (not just removing illegal content such as child pornography), then they can not take advantage of the DMCA Safe Harbor which allows sites like this one and others to operate.
If you host user generated content / comments then you can be held directly liable for the content hosted UNLESS you do not editorialize that content, such as to exclude certain political views.
So, while it is true that private corporations do not have to host anything they don't want to, if they are shown to be curating content above the level set forth by DMCA Safe Harbor provision then they can not claim immunity from infringement under said provision and can be held liable for all the user generated content they redistribute. If you notice, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others have employed teams to police content including Feminist Frequency's Anita Sarkeesian, and the notoriously trigger happy Anti-Defamation League (who regularly lists non PC sites as "hate groups").
The ideological slant of Silicon Valley may be its downfall as there are alternatives springing up daily.
I would also note, however, that given the very close ties between sites like Facebook (being listed as #1 ally by FBI) and Google, that a case could be made that they are now acting as extensions of government enforced oligopoly / monopoly. There are rumors that corporate espionage is carried out sometimes to squash competition, esp. that which doesn't pay lip service to radical left ideologically. Some allege that police and other government resources are employed to do so. Given the apparent corruption of California's police, [archive.is] and political parties (as seen in DNC email leaks), I wouldn't dismiss the possibility. Perhaps that is why such private enterprises are so emboldened?
The whole situation is a powder keg, and with the economic bubble readying itself to pop this may not bode well for tech giants.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @09:46PM
Considering those alternatives can be DDOS'd (in some cases quite a few times), and their employees and their families harassed and threatened, and the corporations themselves are in the process of having copyright law rewritten to put a tighter stranglehold around the little people (and probably put a few provisions for themselves into the DMCA to let them edit as they please), this may not be the case, unfortunately.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday August 17 2017, @04:25PM
The subtlety in what platforms do lies in not editorializing content, but rather TOS-excluding people who create such content, then removing posts deemed inappropriate by other users.
QED: Got my DMCA safe harbor, but not the negative aspects of free speech.