On the other hand, a privately owned shopping mall is legally a "public square" in a number of states in the US, with the justification that it is explicitly a place for people to gather and interact, just like the main street of a town in the 19th century.
Which of these cases is Youtube more like? It's already hard to tell, and it's continuing to change. I expect the legal status of online forums to evolve over the next several decades, just like the legal status of brick-and-mortar spaces has evolved over time.
>On the other hand, a privately owned shopping mall is legally a "public square" in a number of states
Even then, it does not mean that those malls should allow anyone to sell wares. What it means it allows people to visit without discrimination on basis of legally protected classes like gender and race. YouTube banning a channel does not ban individual from watching videos, it prevents them from uploading videos which is akin to setting up stores.
> What it means it allows people to visit without discrimination on basis of legally protected classes like gender and race
No, the "public square" designation specifically allows people to do things like come to the mall and set up political protests and whatnot. It's not about _access_ to the mall; it's about speech protections.
Is uploading videos more akin to setting up a store at the mall, or more akin to standing on a soapbox at the mall and giving a political speech? It probably really depends on the video, on whether the video is being monetized, etc.
In particular, I feel there is an important distinction between demonetization and removal here, from an ethical/moral perspective. I can't speak to the legal perspective; I am not a lawyer.
Not just between demonetization (totally fine with me) and removal (don't really like it). Promotion is also a tricky one, since those algorithms are fully under Google's control and thus responsibility for its results. But do you still participate in this "public square" if only your followers will find your message? But Google will have to decide what videos are shown anyhow...
For a mall comparison, that would be like them only allowing the demonstration to exist in the basement behind the door that says "beware of the leopard".
If a mall did that they likely be accused of discrimination. The demonstrators don't demand to be promoted, but simply be treated as anyone else.
One flaw in the analogy is that physical space is limited and difficult for a person to move around in. The digital space is effectively infinite, and switching is as easy as typing in a new url (compared to the physical challenge of moving to another state/region).
There are all sorts of flaws in the analogies here; that's why they're analogies, not identities.
That said, I'm not quite sure I understand your point. A speaker in physical space can pretty easily take their speech elsewhere; most obviously to the nearest public street corner. So moving away from a private venue typically does not require anything nearly as drastic as "moving to another state/region".
I'd really like to understand your point and how it applies to both the mall and youtube situations, though, and would appreciate you explaining it if you have the time.
The crux is that digital space is infinite -- anyone can create a space for their own speech. In the physical world, people own very little space, and free speech almost always needs to impose on someone else's property. I think because of that, any comparisons between online speech and IRL speech are inherently flawed and not very useful.
I think there's a difference between "you can speak" and "you can speak in such a way that interested people can hear". The former is not very useful in terms of the right people usually think of as "freedom of speech"; the limiting case of it in the physical world is "you can speak, but only in your own home". So what, if anything, makes for an online version of the public square, where one can go to present speech for consideration by others?
Also, I think online speech is more similar to physical-world speech than you make it out to be. You can't speak online without "imposing" on your hosting provider, their ISP, etc. If you self-host, you "impose" on your own ISP (and probably violate their ToS, if you have a residential connection). You "impose" on your domain registrar. These are all private entities, so you have the same sorts of issues as you allude to for the physical world. And these private entities have been known to restrict the speech of people relying on their services, so this is not a hypothetical risk.
Telling a silenced victim that they can easily move to somewhere else in digital space is of little comfort when their complaint is that they are being denied access to a public audience who are habitually congregating in an existing location.
The extent to which someone is entitled to an audience is of course more difficult to judge.
I disagree with your last sentence; I don't think anyone is entitled to an audience, so it's not a very difficult situation to judge. Free speech means you can shout in the wind all day long.
The original poster was referring to the Pruneyard rule, which is not about characteristics of shoppers (public accommodation), but about using the shopping mall's premises specifically to engage in speech directed to other shoppers.
I assure you that if you were to set up a booth in a shopping mall and start screaming slurs and lecturing about how gays and blacks and Jews are undermining the foundations of the superior white civilization, you would very quickly be removed from the mall.
What if you set up a booth in a shopping mall in the spring of 2016 in California or Massachusetts and gave away pro-Trump stickers? I assure you there are plenty of people out there in both states, many of them likely working on YouTube, who view that as equivalent to your hypothetical. I know a number of them personally.
Trust me, I'm not a fan of the sort of rhetoric you describe. But I also don't like slippery slopes with no guardrails. I expect we'll end up with guardrails here in the end, after a few decades and a bunch of court cases, but it's going to take a while.
A literal reading of their new restrictions as quoted in the article would in fact make a bunch of Trump's campaign speeches fall under the restrictions. And while I'd much rather he had not made those speeches or that people had not listened, or both, it's not clear to me that refusing to broadcast them would have been the right call either.
Now very likely Youtube plans to do extremely selective enforcement. I'm not sure that over-broad rules with ensuing very selective enforcement, applied only against the powerless and unpopular, is the right direction to head in, but that's what I see going on here.
I don't have a problem with people pushing bigoted fear mongering narratives for attention being powerless and unpopular.
I think the truth is that big platforms that are conceivably open to anyone eventually become abused, unevenly enforced, and end up being a gamble when it comes to business. YouTube, Google play, Apple's app store and many more are all examples of this.
I think you have the causality backwards. What I said is that in practice only the powerless and unpopular will get silenced, not that silencing will make people powerless and unpopular. That is, in practice this will likely get applied against all sorts of minority viewpoints that fall under the rules, but not applied to sufficiently powerful/popular/near-majority-viewpoint rules violators.
Also, I couldn't care less whether things are a gamble when it comes to business. I do care about public discourse and control thereof.
Youtube runs on the back of publicly-funded infrastructure and, as a natural monopoly in the space, it has a position of privilege that needs to be regulated.
We need an Internet Bill of Rights to ensure free speech on any platform of this scale. Yes, that means speech you don't like; may I suggest not watching it?
Interesting question. US culture has a rather long history of censoring sexual content, but other nations has other areas which they prefer to censor. Historically in Sweden, we had about as restrictive ban on violence as the US had on sex. As an example, we had sexual education for teens on national broadcast and allowed movies which got banned in the states. On the other hand we banned Darkwing Duck as it "taught children how to use physical violence against each other".
Following more modern censoring in Sweden, should Youtube allow videos that include tobacco, alcohol and gambling? if not why not?
Interesting question. Of course, being of sound mind, I don't consider pornography to be the same thing as political speech, and don't really seem to have any issue drawing a line between the two. It should certainly be just as easy to NOT see either thing, if you don't want to; but presently it's much harder to get a platform for the speech than it is for the porn. Funny, that.
Anyone can put video on the internet. How is YouTube a monopoly? It isn't a human right to have a certain number of people stumble on to your video through algorithm recommendations.
Do any of those places host a substantial portion of the public political debate? If any of those places banned people, would that significantly reduce the ability of those people to meaningfully participated in the public political debate?
Probably not, but then I don't think it's a like to like comparison, youtube is more of a broadcast system than anything, it's closer to TV or Newspapers were pre youtube and nobody has the automatic right to TV airtime or to be printed in a newspaper.
It's not close to TV, in any way shape or form other than the fact that it's a video on a screen. Regular people don't put things on TV. That has always been a privilege for the very rich, or for local governments in the case of public access TV. Either way, not something regular people have access to.
It's closer to pamphlets than newspapers, in that regular people can make and distribute pamphlets, whereas regular people have never been able to put whatever they want in newspapers. We would be rightly upset if either the government or common carriers refused service to political groups distributing pamphlets.
Then using your analagy I could see a compromise here, youtube could host whatever content as you desire but it wouldn't necessarily surface it in seach or anywhere else on the site. It would only be accessible by direct link. That would satisfy the common carrier aspect as you could simply email the links out to your existing audience.
Because to use your analagy, to send out your pamphlets you must know your audience already.
>That would satisfy the common carrier aspect as you could simply email the links out to your existing audience.
Yes, but the analogy with traditional delivery services breaks down because people don't ask the delivery service to find new content for them. Preferring certain people's videos in search and recommendations based upon their political content is a deliberate reduction in the ability of the penalized people to meaningfully participate in the political conversation, which is what we should be trying to prevent. It's dangerous. Less dangerous than banning them altogether, perhaps, but still dangerous.
Google and Facebook et al built very successful products that a lot of people enjoy using. But I don't think very many people think that should entitle them to shape the political conversation. The people being shut out to varying degrees will certainly not see it that way.
Then I think there's a core distinction between hosting content and as you put it "finding new content for them". Hosting may fall under some common carrier scenario, but recommendations/search fall under curation and curation is very much back in the realm of TV/newspapers where the proprieter exercises control. I think that does entitle them to shape the political conversation, although I could see some argument for a great deal of transparency in exactly what they're doing in that regard.
>Then I think there's a core distinction between hosting content and as you put it "finding new content for them".
Yes of course those two things are different, but YouTube does both of them and both of them are necessary for meaningful participation in the public political debate.
>but recommendations/search fall under curation and curation is very much back in the realm of TV/newspapers where the proprieter exercises control.
When users search somewhere like YouTube or Google, or look at their recommendations, they are typically not expecting to get content ranked by how well it falls in line with the proprietor's political outlook. They're trying to get content that matches what they searched for, or in the case of recommendations looking for content the service thinks they might be interested in, not content that the proprietor thinks they should be seeing to further their own political goals. Search, and to an extent recommendations, fall under discovery. People don't go to YouTube or Google or Facebook or Twitter to see content curated by those companies. If they want curated content, they go to a specific channel or page or account, or to a website like the NYT.
>I think that does entitle them to shape the political conversation, although I could see some argument for a great deal of transparency in exactly what they're doing in that regard.
I'm curious if you would you say that if they were hiding content you agree with and promoting content you disagree with, or what you would say if there was an election coming up and they were hiding content in favor of your preferred candidate and pushing content in favor of the opponent.
I think google will largely remove content at the edges that it deems to be offensive or dangerous both to its audience and to its reputation, much the same way reddit went through a recent cleanup of similar "communities". So long as they are transparent with what they're removing, I really don't have a problem. I distinctly believe that a right to free speech is not a right to have an audience provided to you. If you want to build such a community on your own site then by all means, that's your prerogative and that's the freedom the web gives you.
>I think google will largely remove content at the edges that it deems to be offensive or dangerous
And do you think they remove that content without any regard for their own political leanings? That their opinion of what is "offensive" or "dangerous" is not influenced by their own political ideology?
>I distinctly believe that a right to free speech is not a right to have an audience provided to you.
What is the point in free speech, in your opinion? Why is it something we should care to guarantee?
>If you want to build such a community on your own site then by all means, that's your prerogative and that's the freedom the web gives you.
A) The actual fact of the matter is that the majority of the public political debate which normal people engage in on the internet occurs on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, and perhaps a couple of other giant corporate-owned web properties that all have essentially identical policies. Telling people to go elsewhere is essentially telling them to go piss up a rope. It's not a real alternative.
The main legal benefit is §230 of the Communications Decency Act, which has never required platforms to refrain from exercising editorial control in order to receive immunity (in fact, one motivation for this law was to encourage platforms to engage in exercising editorial control without incurring liability for doing this).
(I can see political pressure now and in the future to say that some platforms should have some kind of neutrality and/or transparency obligation in order to get this immunity -- but under current U.S. law, they don't.)
Well, social media is heavily based on network effects, so it's not like consumers can just leave one platform for another and reach the same people.
If your cell company prevented you from calling your crazy uncle on Christmas eve because he believed aliens built the pyramids, that would be considered a violation of your right to free speech AND free association, and it would be very creepy.
There's already a SCOTUS ruling on the books where the government cannot deny convicted sex offenders their access to Facebook because it is the public square. It's literally in the ruling.
The public square argument at this point isn't deniable, it's more about what the company that maintains that public square gets to define as trash.
I think a key insight in discussions like this is realising that “public square” is as more of a function rather than a state of ownership.
IMO if your company becomes big enough to obtain the function as a public square, you should be prepared to be required to act as one.
Legislation isn’t there yet, but just like privacy and data-ownership is getting more legislative attention these days, I wouldn’t be surprised if things like this are subject to regulation within 5-10 years.
As this infinitely repeated discussion shows, it’s clearly a problem which needs to be solved.
Youtube, Facebook, have to decide whether they're communication infrastructure, like telephone companies, or publishers. In the first case, they have to publish everything that doesn't violate a state law; in the second case, they get to choose, but they accept liability for everything that is published on their platform.
This is wrong. The law very explicitly states that companies are not liable for content uploaded by users and are also legally able to moderate their platform as they see fit. Google section 230.
It's a place the public visit not a piece of public infrastructure. Repeating "public square" over and over again does not make it so.