this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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There is a wave of censorship and McCarthyist witch hunting against Pro Palestinian voices happening in the West. It is profoundly disturbing and shows how hollow the West's claims to championing personal liberty is.
This is the sort of thing that freedom of speech is supposed to protect, but that idea has become so completely destroyed by Western people that I don't see any hope for people like that poor influencer.
He'll have to make his own website, or move to PixelFed or something.
No government censored him, capitalism did
At what point will you be considering big corps=government in the U.S.? We all know big oil has tremendous lobby, we all have evidence the military industry that works for profit more than anything else is responsible for most American wars in the last several decades. We all know what manchild is ruining everything he touches and shakes hands with government officials. We all know that Facebook and Cambridge Analytica manipulation machine.
Corporates and capitalism might not directly do legislation or have the executive power, but the U.S. government at least is a for-profit organization for a long while now, and evidently profits are not made with showing oppressed people suffering when you are gaining shitloads of money by selling weapons/investing in the oppressor.
If freedom of speech can't protect you against corporate censorship then it's meaningless.
That's the biggest load of horse shit I've read today.
Have fun on your authoritarian, heavily censored Reddit clone of an instance, then. The rest of the fediverse will re-embrace rights and move on without you.
Any website owner has the right to decide if he wants to remove certain content on his website. That is not an infringement of free speech.
Yeah, not in today's world where they are sock puppets for the government.
It doesn't matter because no one else can just infringe on your rights either. Rights are not about just protecting you from government, they're there to protect you from other people.
It is an infringement of free speech as a concept.
It is not an infringement of US law as the relevant protections are limited in scope to governmental actions.
Obviously US law and even more so the supreme court's interpretations of them are flawed, both on a moral level (big corps should also not be allowed to censor speech) and a logical level (censoring speech is free speech, corps are entitled to human rights).
Except if you have a de facto monopoly on social media which is the digital equivalent of a public forum then you have the ability to effectively curtail free speech.
So you're all for the "marketplace of ideas" then eh? If corporations aren't allowed to censor and edit as they please, that means that Nazis are going to be front and center on every social media platform.
Uhh.. Why is that?
Are you saying in a vacuum those ideas are the most palatable or something? Because that’s what it sounds like
I really worry about the future when people just throw their hands up in the air and say “well, fuck it, either we become totalitarians or we let nazis take over”. That’s not much of a choice
Right. This sucks, but it's not an infringement on free speech.
It falls into a place never envisioned by those writing the amendments. When you have defacto monopolization of the public media, or even a major portion of it under your control, then preventing commentary is functionally censorship equal to if the government outright banned it.
On the other end you have the desire to prevent harmful transmissions to the public space as well. Incitements to violence and propagation of blatant lies serves no good purpose.
Balancing the two has been the subject of countless lawsuits. The only justification I could see here, given the visual nature of Instagram, would be the potential for gore and violence content. Sometimes showing the ugly reality is needed to let people know the reality rather than a polished sanitized version. Instagram might not be the place for that though given the audience it has.
By comparison a tame subject, but the case involving George Carlin still holds some sway on matters of what's appropriate for public broadcast.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_v._Pacifica_Foundation