So you don’t see the analogy between taking your means of production because the masses lack their own means of production, and taking your means of spreading opinions because the masses lack their own means of spreading opinion? Strange, but nothing I can do about it.
There is one more way in which this is a parallel to communism: the problem that some people are poor and don’t have equal access to food is real and cannot be denied. The “solution” to just make the rich give up their riches is one that is controversial at best and considered tyranny by many people. But that’s why there are compromises between capitalism and communism. Many different options exist on that scale, as well.
Enter their business and sell their own product? Sure, that’s different.
I just don’t see how that applies to a platform provider being expected not to censor speech based on their opinion. It’s more like a bus driver being required to provide service to everyone, even if they might be going to a political rally that the bus driver disagrees with.
But it might be cause for the people of the town to find a way to get another venue built near town. Because having one rich person decide what music the town gets to listen to just because they are rich is a problem, even if the rich person is perfectly within their rights.
See also the recent Google ban on cryptocurrency ads. While I agree that this might really be a good thing, it is scary to know that a privately-owned American company now has more actual power over what ads people in my country get to see than my own country’s elected government.
And in the end, free speech is not primarily about what I get to say. It’s about what I get to hear. In a free society, I am confronted with a wide range of opinions, and I get to choose something that represents my opinion at the polling booth. In a not-so-free society, my options are pre-filtered, and I might not even notice that I am making my choice based on skewed information.
Ben Shapiro calls all trans people mentally ill. This is of course at variance with all current science and the World Health Organization.
If Ben Shapiro were to say all Jewish people were mentally ill and then call himself anti Semitic- I would be hard pressed to challenge his self assessment.
I know exactly what it takes to make your own platform on the Internet:
An ISP that doesn’t have silly rules about servers.
A free domain from no-ip, or buy one.
A Raspberry Pi 3 and junk.
A terabyte hard drive.
Free software and expertise to set it up.
I can’t say that my site is big traffic, but that’s not what I was aiming at: I’m trolling search engines. (Off of the high coverage topics on Scientology, e.g. Tom Cruise, it’ll probably be in the top four pages on Google.) If traffic was was my aim, I’d have advertising and be working to boot strap my setup.
P.S. No free speech here. My server, my rules – or I’ll pull the plug.
