Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

Leaderboard

Popular Content

Showing content with the highest reputation on 03/18/21 in all areas

  1. To my mind, a platform is something different from, say, a magazine. If you have a set of ideas that you would like to promote, a magazine is more appropriate: you can solicit submissions (either from the general public or only from specific people), evaluate them, and publish only the ones you like. You can also write stuff yourself and publish it in your magazine. I suppose two examples would be Marc Da Cunha running Capitalism Magazine, and Craig Biddle running The Objective Standard. When you decide to create a platform instead, you are creating something different. It's the Internet equivalent of opening a bar or a speakeasy, where people can come and talk with other people, and all you do is provide the facility. While you might advertise an affiliation with certain ideas in the hope of attracting people who want to talk about those ideas, you can't really control the details of what they say. If you want that level of control, then you need to run a magazine instead. Sometimes when you run a bar or a speakeasy, some people can get rowdy and disruptive, or do inappropriate things, and it's proper in those cases to ask them to leave. If people are disruptive repeatedly, they can even be asked to leave permanently. However, I think it would be inappropriate for the owner of a bar to listen in to people's conversations and kick out well-behaved people merely because, as the owner, he doesn't like or agree with what they are taking about. The bar owner is within his rights -- it's his bar, after all -- but I wouldn't want to go to a bar like that. (What would you think of an auditorium owner inviting a bunch of people over for a "debate" with him, and then when they start to win the argument against him, using logic and evidence, he asks them to leave? ...) I also think it would be inappropriate for the phone company to listen in on people's calls and cancel their service if they say anything the phone company disapproves of. The company may be within their rights, but it's doesn't seem to be a good thing to do. I think the law should (and sometimes does) recognize that, by default, the person who visits a bar or a (legal) speakeasy, or who uses a telephone, has a right to expect that he or other people would not be kicked out or disconnected because of his or their expressed views -- and on the other hand, the bar or speakeasy owner, or phone company, wouldn't be liable for what his customers say. This is why such things as "common carrier status" are supposed to exist. It is common for laws to recognize that certain situations are commonly assumed by default. You are still free to run things in the non-default way, but you would have to inform people if you are doing so. (To do otherwise could be interpreted as fraud.) An example of such default assumptions is weights and measures: if two people enter into a contract, and the contract specifies "kilograms," they have to agree on what a kilogram is. If the contract doesn't specify otherwise, then it can be assumed that the standard kilogram is being used. There are other examples, though, including, for example, if someone buys food, it should be safe to assume that the food is safe to eat, or that if it's unsafe, both parties to the contract know about that characteristic and agree to it. If you run the sort of bar that kicks people out for enunciating certain views, then you'd probably have to post a sign so that people know that, and what the objectionable views are, before they come in. Ideally, if you choose to exercise editorial control over what people say, then you also assume liability for it, but if you don't exercise the control, you shouldn't have the liability. I think that's what Section 230 was supposed to do, but apparently it isn't working right, because there are now too many companies who are exercising editorial control while claiming that they are absolved from any liability for that control. So what standards should you use to ban someone or delete a post? Do it only if they are making the service unusable (the way rowdy people fighting in a bar would make it unusable for the regular customers). If you want editorial control, start a magazine.
    1 point
×
×
  • Create New...