Thread by @doctorow

Thanks for another thought-provoking, fascinating episode, @onthemedia! @Bobosphere, I listened especially carefully to the segment on Twitter, free speech, censorship, etc (it's always a treat when @karaswisher is on).

wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/s…

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I wanted to call your attention to a nuance that often gets lost in this discussion, which is that while there is no First Amendment interest in platforms' moderation/censorship policies, there is certainly a free expression interest there.

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That is, 1A protection - safeguarding you from state censorship - is the baseline, the floor on free expression. A town with only one radio/TV station, one newspaper and one ISP, all owned by the same family, exercising strict content controls, has a free speech problem.

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And that free speech problem is something that - as members of the press and advocates for free expression - we should be attuned to, even if there is no nexus with state censorship.

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But the story is more complex with Twitter - and with the hypothetical small town - because tech companies' centrality to our discourse is not an accident, and it didn't occur in a vacuum of state action.

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The concentration of the online world into "five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four," was only possible because of the affirmative choice of successive administrations not to enforce black letter US antitrust law.

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

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And while that doesn't mean that True Believers in the Holy Writ of Robert Bork violated our First Amendment rights by nerfing antitrust enforcement, there's still some nexus with state action here.

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By failing to maintain a competitive environment for communications platforms even though it was in their power to do so, multiple Attorneys General have figured out how to substantially abridge our free expression without violating our First Amendment rights.

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I say this as someone who is glad to see Twitter taking some halting steps to hold Trump to account (notwithstanding that I was briefly collateral damage in the moderation wars: techdirt.com/articles/20200…).

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To me, the most important part of your segment was when Swisher called for regulation that weakened the grip that Big Tech has on our discourse - that is the absolute crux here.

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It's why I disagreed sharply with Bob's characterization of CDA230 as a means of avoiding expensive moderation. It's true that most platforms couldn't afford that expense, but the biggest ones certainly could (provided they didn't care about dolphins in their tuna nets).

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As I wrote for the @nytimes last year, if you think Big Tech is indifferent to the public good now, give 'em a decades in a market where table stakes are $500m/yr in content moderation and no competitors are on the horizon and see how you like 'em.

nytimes.com/2019/06/24/opi…

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We can either fix the internet - by restoring pluralism, diversity and technological self-determination - or we can (try to) fix the platforms, by deputizing them to perform state-like duties that foreclose on the possibility of making them smaller.

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The Bell System is instructive here: in '56, the DoJ decided NOT to press on with breakups because the Pentagon told them they couldn't fight the Korean War without AT&T.

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Being a de facto arm of the state may be onerous, but it shields you from state action (AT&T wasn't broken up for nearly 30 more years!).

Which is all to say: the enemy of your enemy is not your friend!

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You can deplore the power of Big Tech without welcoming CDA230 "reforms" that superficially punish the platforms while enshrining them as permanent internet overlords.

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And you can point out the distinction between public and private censorship in light of the First Amendment without erasing the free speech implications of dominant communications platforms' moderation policies.

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If you're still hanging in there on my long-ass thread and somehow still want more, here's an editorial I wrote about this:

locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-d…

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And thanks - as always - for another fantastic, thought-provoking Saturday morning with my podcatcher. I listened while chopping and roasting a huge lot of Japanese yams, onions and garlic, which is fun to have done, but not that fun to do.

eof/