The Internet's "Nazi Purge" Shows Who Really Controls Our Online Speech
I'm not so worried about companies censoring Nazis, but I am worried about the implications it has for everyone else. I'm worried about the unelected bros of Silicon Valley being the judge and jury, and thinking that mere censorship solves the problem. I'm worried that, just like Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince woke up one morning and decided he'd had enough of the Daily Stormer, some other CEO might wake up and do the same for Black Lives Matter or antifa. I'm worried that we're not thinking about this problem holistically.
This piece from Buzzfeed News (another doesn't-happen-very-often) raises a serious question about the internet, the First Amendment, the meaning of life and the holistically hypeability of the Great American Solar Eclipse, namely. who runs the internet and why and what are we going to do about it.
EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which styles itself the ACLU of the internet, published a piece the other day making many of the same points as Buzzfeed's, while ProPublica seems to take the opposite view in this article called Despite Disavowals, Leading Tech Companies Help Extremist Sites Monetize Hate.
You can name your poison here: I tend to favor EFF's formulation although First Amendment wonks insist it only applies to government censorship and not fooling around by Twitter (still network neutrality suggests all information should be handled the same way). But the Southern Poverty Law Center invoked by ProPublica is highly respected on this issue.
The bottom line is this, IMO: We should spend less energy screeching at each other about things that happened in the past and start paying more serious attention to how things are gonna be. Because gonna-be is where we'll all end up.
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