We Have Selective Hearing with Censorship.
And it’s making us overly sensitive idiots.
Photo by Tyler Menezes
So many people are up in arms about Trump being banned on social media and for Parlor being dumped by Apple and Amazon. “What does this mean for our freedom of speech?This is against the Constitution!”. Except it’s not. The Constitution defines how the government does and does not intervene in your life at a high level, but it does not give you an inalienable right to participate in a private sector business, such as social media. There have been laws that prohibit discrimination for certain protected classes, but inciting a riot and orchestrating misinformation unfortunately does not fall under any protected class.
What people forget is that especially in tech and social media, you are at the mercy of their rules. Remember those annoying terms and conditions you have to agree to? Probably not. Well, those essentially tell you exactly what you can and can’t do with a company’s technology. They also define what power they have to remove you. Short answer? They can do whatever they want because YOU agreed to it. Many forget that and think that the technology is something they have some sort of ownership in and have a right to. It’s not. You’re are there renting digital space, and if you don’t comply with their rules, they can evict you.
People’s next concern is that companies like Amazon and Apple serve as massive gatekeepers to a market of apps and tech infrastructure. But their decision to not play with Parlor or anyone else is not illegal, nor should it be surprising. Once again, we don’t have a constitutional right to run a business or to have others do business with us. So if you think the snuffing out of Trump and Parlor is censorship, you’re absolutely right, but it’s not illegal. Your speech is not being threatened by the government. So if you are being censored, what can you do to retain your digital voice? Well you do what companies did before they relied on 3 monoliths for all their tech stack, buy your own servers. Build your own infrastructure, host a public web based platform not on Apple’s private store. Is it annoying and more expensive? Absolutely, but you can do it. Hell, you can pass our flyers if you want, but the point is that you can still speak.
Another point people often forget is that ALL media and information has a form of censorship to it. Do you think TV and Netflix executives just let anyone throw content into their platform? Hell no. Media companies exist to curate and censor content. If they didn’t, Pornhub and Netflix wouldn’t need to be 2 different companies. Wouldn’t that be fun. The point is, censorship is rampant in every slice of content you see from commercials, news, movies, TV shows, and especially politics. You are always seeing what someone wants you to see either for purposes of taking your money or taking your vote. The solution to this is not more government intervention by telling Twitter they can’t censor their own platform. The solution is much simpler, learn some critical thinking skills, do some research on information from many perspectives, and stop assuming there are only two possible answers to every problem. Censorship is a part of life everywhere, the only way around it is by using your brain and by not allowing people to tell you what to believe and care about.
There is definitely a valid debate to be had under all this, and that is the role of tech as a public good; however we have already identified things that probably should be public goods that are not really treated as such. Take healthcare for example, you have a right to emergency life saving treatment, but not full and free treatment for any chronic disease, and either way you pay through the nose. Relate that life saving intervention to the passing out flyers example above. You can technically get by, but you just don’t get the full works. So if we are to have this argument about tech being a public good that everyone has a right to, then we likely have more important examples to solve that pose the same question.
Do I want Social Media to censor me? Not really. But I am not pretending to live in a world where I didn’t exicitlt agree to it. If we want to change how and when private companies can censor us, then we should intelligently work through the potential solutions to that problem that balance the very important need for a free flow of information with the spread of toxic material that is ultimately worse for society as a whole. I do know this will take some time to figure out, the solution will not be black and white, and the solution will by definition never make everyone happy.