Here’s the proposal:

1. Distinguish between platforms and ideas expressed via those platforms;

2. Platforms are subject to scrutiny as common-carriers;

3. Such scrutiny must ALWAYS be directly susceptible to elections, not to entrenched hard-to-fire bureaucrats;

4. Positive and negative weighting of ideas expressed via platforms must always be adjustable via flexible customization and selection by the platform’s consumers. If I want to view right-wing content, I can; it can’t be banned or shadowbanned. If I want to view left-wing content; I can, it can’t be banned or shadowbanned. Hidden weighting and centrally-controlled selection ought to be illegal for platform owners.

5. Only one form of content-preference-weighting can be offered as a “default” by the unelected decision-makers in a private company that owns a platform; namely, the ENTIRELY UNWEIGHTED content of the platform. When I first join Facebook (or whatever), I should just see everything. To the extent that I, through my own conscious voluntary decisions, apply filters to my experience, those decisions are mine alone.

6. The privacy of a persons selections of content-weighting, as well as their identity and history and other personally-identifiable information, ought to be protected through regulations similar to the GDPR privacy regulations. My employer, my government, my coworkers, my friends, and advertisers cannot access information about my platform-customization without my consent, and I can revoke that consent at will.

That’s my proposal. It’s intentionally vague, intending to hint at a plausible legal doctrine and laws to support it, without my actually trying to write them.

I’m curious what Neo and others think about it.

I say “sadly” because it’d be significantly easier on all our brains if there were a hard-and-fast line. And also because my libertarian leanings normally incline me to say: “Private company; it can do what it wants.”

But we can’t deny there is a problem here.

It is a problem which undermines our whole system of self-governance and our theory of the validity of government authority.

To see where the problem lies, let’s run through how that system works, briefly:

1. Natural Rights of Self-Defense, Association, Hiring, Delegation: We as human persons intrinsically have just authority (Natural Rights) to use proportionate force to defend innocent persons (both ourselves and others) against wrongful attacks on their life, liberty, property, and anything else touching on their basic dignity as persons (e.g. privacy in certain ways). We also have a Natural Right to form political associations so as to coordinate our joint efforts towards achieving the common good (defined in Burkean/Thomistic terms; i.e., referencing only goods which are maintained or increased, not diminished or consumed, in being widely shared). And, we have a Natural Right, either as individuals or working in politically-associated groups, to hire employees and delegate to them the exercise of any just authority which we ourselves have. (A delegator cannot, however, delegate to another an authority which the delegator lacks.)

2. Delegated Use-Of-Force: We The People employ police and military. We authorize them (by delegation) to exercise, on our behalf, our own just authority to defend innocent persons by force. But this concentrates the training and tools of force-using into a subset of our population, which is risky. Therefore these forces must be subdivided in direct-command-authority, procedurally constrained, and well-regulated.

3. Delegated Lawmaking: We The People employ various kinds of representatives (construed broadly to include judges) to create and maintain a system of laws which serve to direct and constrain the use-of-force by the military and the police. (E.g., we outlaw murder so that the police DO go ’round arresting murderers; we don’t outlaw Seventh Day Adventism so that the police DON’T go ’round arresting Seventh Day Adventists.)

4. Elections: We use elections to directly and indirectly hire and fire our creators and maintainers of laws.

5. Voter Decisions: We use our knowledge and ideas to decide for whom we should vote in those elections.

6. The “Marketplace Of Ideas”: In public and private fora, we engage in wide-ranging dissemination and critical examination of knowledge and ideas. This is called the “Marketplace of Ideas.” To the extent we know the truth and are not misled, and to the extent we can examine and discard bad ideas while examining and approving good ones, we will be able to vote informedly and thereby govern ourselves wisely, through the intermediary agency of our employees, the Government. Systemic protections of this “Marketplace of Ideas” (e.g. our First Amendment protections on the Press, on Religious Exercise, and on Assembly) exist to prevent our system of government from being undermined by denying relevant information/ideas to the decision-makers (the voters).

That’s our system.

Note that Natural Rights are fundamental in ONE sense; so I started the description there. But widespread dissemination/discussion of knowledge and ideas is also fundamental to the system, in a DIFFERENT sense. The just authority to set the whole thing up is a matter of Natural Rights; but the plausibility of the whole thing working requires the Marketplace of Ideas.

So the question is:

GIVEN that the Marketplace of Ideas is fundamental to our system;

GIVEN that the Marketplace of Ideas has now been largely relocated from barrooms and town-hall assemblies to Internet platforms owned by private corporations; and,

GIVEN that the Marketplace of Ideas is now threatened by unaccountable (i.e., unelected, unaudited, unscrutinized) decision-makers in those private companies using a mix of obvious bans and much-harder-to-detect weighting algorithms to selectively deny certain kinds of knowledge and ideas to the electorate;

…given all THAT, how will we preserve our system?

On this particular blog (and most blogs), trolls get banned because I (or the blogger, whoever it might be) decide to ban them. That’s the criteria. The decision is not a democratic one.

For the sake of accuracy, Google bot has arrived at the record.

Physics’ response is shortly below that.

Please, go through at least an undergrad 4 years of physics, so at best you have an inkling of understanding of what you are talking about.-P

One of the justifications the Left used for getting rid of Alex J, is that he was reporting fake news, or lying, or coming up with conspiracy theories. He needed re-education, but absent re-education camps Ayers/Alinsky style, banning him is the best they can do as a consensus agreement. When Alex Jones begins to have an inkling of understanding, then perhaps they can unban him.

Physics is one person here. Once it becomes the consensus of most people here, including the power of the blog and behind the blog, then this consensus has the ability to make the same choice as Google and FB. This is why trolls get banned/ignored. There is a consensus about them. That does not mean the consensus view is correct. It does not mean it is incorrect either. It just means there is the power to do so if people determine by consensus that this is justifiable.

The Leftist alliance got to the way they are because people let them get away with thinking like that without pointing out the logical and ethical problems. That is because if anyone, such as me, that did point it out, the least vague response I would get is that “I don’t understand what I am talking about”, from the Leftist point of view. That is because the Leftist point of view does not include me in their consensus. But is that due to a lack of understanding on my part or due to a misunderstanding on the part of the hive social complex of consensus agreement?

There’s a difference between thinking an idea is a bad “idea” and disagreeing with the premise of that idea, and censoring the expression of that idea. A distinction which you do not seem to understand.

There’s a lot of things which you seem to think I do not understand. About the vast majority, 99%, of those things are a result of your misconception and human jump to erroneous judgments.

When you knee jerk reject the idea without considering it, and start labeling people with whatever convenient label you think is good, you somehow don’t see that this is the same as Leftists using the racist label to rationalize any and all anti Left positions. They don’t need to consider the idea when they can prejudge it. You think your prejudices are rational or right, because others agree with you. So does the Left consider their own judgments rational and right. Human thought is a kind of make believe game people play with each other.

The primary reason you put this as Either Or between two false dichotomies is because it benefits your position. The choice is not between suppression and believing an idea is bad. The choice is between considering other people’s position without knee jerk labels that lead to self righteous beliefs based on scientific tribalism or any other kind of tribalism, vs the choice of not considering fundamentally exclusive positions via labels and consensus agreements to exclude.

The Left agreed upon consensus to get rid of Alex J, as his information was getting too dangerous for America. They did not do so before because they lacked consensus. Their choice was not to consider Alex Jones or ban him. The choice they made was one which you physics did not conveniently consider as something people could do in an Either Or dichotomy. That is because once you did consider it, you would find that they bear too much of a similarity to your tribal and personal thinking, and we can’t have that kind of double think going on.

That is true. It is also true that capitalism produces the funds and social tension required for socialism and marxism to invade, hijack, and infect the host body. The Tsar of Russia abolished serfdom, which was pro capitalism, but that in itself was merely the weakness that a viral invasion exploited. Capitalism produces and nurtures a figure like Zucker boy, while socialism maintains the status quo of a Zucker boy to keep out all his competitors: which is everybody else that wants to be another Zucker or Amazon.

Socialism inevitably leads to centralized Marxism which is one step further on dystopia which is another step further on totalitarian control. Deep State wins again.

And they did it by selling you all entertainment from Hollywood and from Google. And Americans ate it right up. Ate that rat poison right up.

The public primarily blames DC because they know in some hidden part of their heart of hearts, that because they have abdicated the power of a free people, DC is their master. When something goes wrong, just go to the Master and complain. It’s not like you are allowed to do anything about the Massa’s property.

Facebook and Google made money from advertisements which were based upon user created content. Google did not create content, just a convenient way to find other people’s content. As a result, they became gatekeepers, because the American people did to them what people did to the “free press”. They gatewayed it with a special few “elite” that were supposed to be human “experts” with “credentials” and “Authorities” that peons and others like me are supposed to Obey.

Heh. Quite the national stupidity system going on there, America.

The free press was supposed to be about everybody’s ability to own a press and use it to publish. Then somehow Americans got sold and bought the con that this was a “free press” that is only available to licensed White House pedophiles and Leftist agents like Chomsky. Oops.

Too late.

Then they did the same mistake again with the internet giants. They were just so useful. That rat poison just smells so good. Then Americans fell for it again and gave voluntarily their power over, now they want it back?

Too late. Getting banned by the Left is a good thing. It forces people to realize that they don’t need the MSM telling them what to think or to be working for FB without compensation. Pain is how Leftists and Red people learn.

Americans desire Congress to do their job and “fix problems”. Then when the fix is in, they complain that the fix needs to be removed, so they desire Congress to be even more powerful. This cycle eventually turns a democracy into an oligarchy and then a totalitarian wonder land.

“Of course, the social-media companies aren’t government entities. They can silence whomever they like without violating the First Amendment. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

The power of social-media platforms is enormous. They are, for all intents and purposes, the public square. Facebook affects the fate of publishers with every change to its algorithms, and has demonstrated again and again the ability to make media entities march to its beat.

This suggests that these companies have a responsibility, in keeping with their outsize role in the public debate, to give the widest possible latitude to free speech. They certainly shouldn’t make sweeping decisions, like the swift, collective action against Jones, in an arbitrary manner.

Everyone has known about Jones for years. It can’t be that suddenly, after propagating stupid lies for a couple of decades, he was discovered to be grossly violating the guidelines of almost every important social-media platform at exactly the same moment.
…
The lonely dissenter to the social-media moves against Jones is Jack Dorsey of Twitter, who stipulated that Jones didn’t violate the rules of his platform. He said that it’s important to stand by straightforward principles, impartially enforced, lest “we become a service that’s constructed by our personal views that can swing in any direction.”

For this, he is getting eviscerated. Dorsey’s other offense is saying that journalists should refute the likes of Jones “so people can form their own opinions.” This is what used to be a liberal chestnut, that the best way to combat speech is with other speech.

It is now considered a hateful, retrograde point of view. An illiberal wind is blowing. We won’t miss Alex Jones when he’s gone, but the banning almost certainly won’t end with him.”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1358363/Steve-Jobs-Mark-Zuckerberg-meet-President-Obama-technology-summit.html
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Old news, but a solid tell up there with “I’ll have more flexibility after the election.”

Looks kind of like, oh, I don’t know, collusion?