Laura Loomer is pushing the narrative that last week's school shooting was a false flag operation, and that the students were actors paid for by left-wing agitators. That is 100% disinformation.
Sure, but the title is "can no longer spread disinformation", not "have been sanctioned for spreading disinformation" - the term "disinformation" is being used to refer to the general classification, rather than specific incident(s).
As such, the only reason that [some members of one team of the political industry] can "no longer spread disinformation" is that they have been "prevented" from spreading all information. So directing the focus towards their inability to spread disinformation directs it away from the underlying action of broad person-based censorship, and is thus itself disinformation.
Addendum: You've referenced her narrative for the assumption that I, or most everybody, will casually disregard it as nonsense. I do, and agree that it is a valid assumption... Which implies that broad-sweeping heavy-handed measures are nowhere near necessary for suppressing it, and thus we should be loudly condemning said measures rather than implicitly condoning them.
Don't think its honest to label conservatives we don't like as alt-right just to ban them. If they are pushing violence, ban them under the TOS for violence.
Your suggestion is literally what Medium did. From the article:
> The “Hate Speech” section has been significantly expanded […], disallowing posts that “glorify, celebrate, downplay, or trivialize violence, suffering, abuse, or deaths of individuals or groups,” including “the use of scientific or pseudoscientific claims to pathologize, dehumanize, or disempower others.” Also prohibited: “calls for intolerance, exclusion, or segregation based on protected characteristics, nor do we allow the glorification of groups which do any of the above” and “hateful text, images, symbols, or other content in your username, profile, or bio.”
>“We do not allow posts or accounts that engage in on-platform, off-platform, or cross-platform campaigns of targeting, harassment, hate speech, violence, or disinformation. We may consider off-platform actions in assessing a Medium account, and restrict access or availability to that account.”
Can you cite the instances where the individuals in question were calling for violence on Medium, even considering off-platform communications which apparently they're now policing?
Personally, I wish that leftists would stop wearing liberal's clothing. Free speech is free speech. "Disinformation" is a weasel word, and so is "hate speech."
Is calling for violence really the only limitation you'd accept? What about calling for segregation? Or calling all Islamic people savages? Those are things Laura Loomer has done.
I'm about as far right as you can get economically and I wouldn't give her a platform in spite of fully supporting her right to spew nonsense. The freedom of association carries with it the freedom to not associate.
That's entirely their right to police their own platform as they wish, even if they're not honest about it (which seems to be the case here.)
The line for me, personally, is the line that the Supreme Court of the United States has held time and time again, which is realistic threats of violence, if I were to run a platform like Medium.
That's her right to be a jackass. It's beautiful. You can point and laugh at her rambling if you wish, if the content were still available.
Your opinions on mean words are just opinions. It's just virtue signalling to be offended for someone else and go so far as to give them the power and satisfaction of being a martyr. This has done nothing but give the "alt-right" ammo, in that context, it certainly has not stopped any violence.
Not that there was any violence inspired by any of the prominent writings mentioned in the article, in the first place.
Except in this case it requires the platform owner to spend real resources in order to make sure "mean words" are promoted. If it is causing you real, measurable harm in that it costs you money, it's not simply virtue signaling.
The right for free speech only applies to the government being prohibited from banning speech. There is no constitutional right for a person to say what they want on someone else's platform.
Yeah, there is. It's called the spirit of free speech.
Utilizing your rights to the fullest extent allowed by law to protect your users, no matter their opinions.
And make no mistake, these users were banned for opinions. There were no calls to violence. Medium has made martyrs of them, and given them more power than they had before by attempting to silence them.
I'm sure the absolute flood of subscriptions after banning some obscure bloggers will be worth the loss of integrity as a publishing medium.
You might want to look into Marsh v. Alabama. The more a private entity opens itself and invites others to use their property, the more their rights are circumscribed by the constitutional rights of those they invite onto their property.
But it sounds like it's time to stop using Medium. Updating their ToS to say that they can pull your content at will, for no reason beyond someone there not liking something you did or said that isn't even on their platform? Like, it could literally be something said in person that was overheard by someone who works there.
A blog is a long term thing, it's not a set of tweets. The content should last for years. Medium have clearly gone full blown Valley SJW and the people who thought freedom of speech mattered have either been shouted down or changed. Who knows what Medium considers to be "disinformation"? Anything that criticizes Hillary Clinton?
I personally have a hard time faulting a private platform for not wanting to promote ideas like racial segregation in taxi services. I was going to say religious segregation, but I can't imagine how she was able to discern someone's religion by their Uber/Lyft profile.
I'm sure she has a bunch of ideas that offend lots of people. Seems like a distraction.
Yes, obviously Medium can do a bait-and-switch in which they attract people by claiming to value free speech and then abandoning those ideals after people have built up followers and PageRank using their service. They can do what they like.
However, the problem with picking sides like this, as Medium and Twitter are doing, is that it inevitably leads to gross and shameful hypocrisy.
Just based on a quick search, here are some shockingly hateful quotes that quite obviously violate their new policies, but which I don't believe for one second will lead to account bans:
I drink from a coffee mug that says “Male Tears.” Female friends sign off emails to me with “ban men” or “kill all men.”
But let’s be honest: the more time you spend thinking about the patriarchy, the more you’re genuinely like UGH DUDES AMIRITE. Because the thing is, patriarchal culture actively trains men to be awful
I do think the concept of “manliness” needs to be taken out and shot.
It goes on and on like that. Clearly, anything Loomer has said about Muslims is matched by anything Jess Zimmerman has said about men.
I'm happy to get on board with you regarding pointing out the shameful hypocrisy. I'm less cynical about the apparent bait and switch, it seems to me that a lot of people were either naive about the realities of running an "open" platform, and/or are just caught up in this new age of hysteria. It seems like almost everyone has lost the concept of nuance.
Clearly, anything Loomer has said about Muslims is matched by anything Jess Zimmerman has said about men.
No, because one of these things is deliberately ironic, as it says repeatedly throughout the thing you linked and quoted. How did you miss that detail?
I do not believe it's ironic. Yes, after stating repeatedly how much she hates men and manliness she says words to the effect of, "oh guyzzz I don't REALLY want to kill you all! Chill out!" and then goes back to hateful rhetoric.
At any rate, that particular article is just one example I used to illustrate my point. Do you really believe Medium's moderation will be completely fair and politically unbiased, given their new policy? I would find it quite naive.
I think you may have misinterpreted their statement about the "How I Would Run for Congress" article. I think they were praising that as an example of the sort of article they want to have on their service. Note the fact that the referred to the removal of that specific article as "unfortunate."
Trivialize abuse? If I say getting pushed by someone is no big deal because you couldn't dress/act/whatever however you wanted because you could have avoided it (assuming the other group said it would be a reprocussion) I guess I would get banned? If I say your suffering is less severe than mine because of XYZ, will I get banned? I'm going to guess yes if I'm a white male and no if I'm anything else.
What is a protected characteristic? The historical legal set including Vietnam service status, race, religion, etc, or are there newer ones?
From what I can tell, Voat was intended to be an alternative to Reddit. It wasn't supposed to be aimed at any particular group of people. Then Reddit banned Coontown, and many white supremacists and other bigots switched to Voat. As a result of the influx, Voat now features a shocking amount of bigoted content. I don't think this was the intention of the creator of Voat, but it's what they're stuck with now.
If you really care about free speech, and you make a clone of Medium to allow any kind of speech, this is a probable enough scenario:
1. The non-bigots will be split. Many of them will just stick with Medium, but some die-hard free speech supporters will come to your site.
2. Unfortunately you'll probably get a sizable majority of the bigots, because they think Medium is waging war against them. They don't actually care about free speech, they just want a place where they can spew hatred and slander.
3. These bigots will post a large amount of bigoted content to your service.
4. Eventually the free speech supporters who are non-bigots will get tired of fighting it, and they'll go back to Medium
5. Now you own and operate a site that is pretty much just bigotry, which probably isn't something you want your name associated with.
6. Some site will ban a couple of bigots, and a person will recommend building a free-speech centered clone of it, and some idiot will tell you that it's a bad idea because of Voat.
Well, unimpeded, unless you make the mistake of using Google's DNS services and they decide to steal your domain name for the greater good.
Or someone decides to impede your right to speech with DoS attacks (see: Quillette) and you made the mistake of using Cloudflare to protect yourself.
At this point to reliably be able to express opinions that are based in science but offend some minority subgroup you would have to avoid basically all firms based in Silicon Valley. Note the quote from the new medium.com policy:
But it is now more detailed and focused, disallowing posts ... including “the use of scientific or pseudoscientific claims to pathologize, dehumanize, or disempower others.”
So basically an anti-Damore clause. If you state something based in scientific studies, but someone claims to feel "disempowered", you can't use Medium. I wonder how long before other Valley firms adopt similar usage policies.
This reminds me of the quote by Urs Hoezle:
As engineers, we're trained to pay attention to the details, think logically, challenge assumptions that may be incorrect (or just fuzzy), and so on. These are all excellent tools for technical discussions. But they can be terrible tools for discussion around race, discrimination, justice, and so on, because these discussions touch topics with a high cultural and emotional content. That's because questioning the exact details can easily be perceived as questioning the overall validity of the effort, or the veracity of the historical context.
An entire subculture founded in the advancement of science is systematically turning its back on science, in case it 'offends' someone. A milestone in the (d)evolution of the Valley.
So go start a site that guarantees free expression of "science-backed" arguments. Again: see what it becomes. Your right to science-backed arguments will be unimpeded.
There are good reasons why we don't want to consider these sorts of pseudo-scientific claims for employment or other important matters.
Let's say we live in a society with mandatory DNA testing with publicly available results. Your DNA shows that you have a genetic marker which indicates a tendency towards anti-social behavior. It's fine though; despite the increased risk, you're actually a very level-headed and agreeable person.
You go apply for a job, and I apply for the same job. Perhaps your résumé is slightly stronger than mine, but the employer worries that you'll be difficult to get along with based not on your interview, but on your DNA test. I don't have the DNA markers for anti-social behavior that you have, though it turns out that I'm a bit of a jerk (not far-fetched; check my HN post history).
This would be wildly unfair to you. While the DNA marker means there's an increased chance that you don't get along well with other people, it does not define you. You've just been denied a job based on a thing that you didn't choose, there's nothing you can do to change it, and is actually incorrect in your specific case.
The good news is that we don't live in a world with mandatory public DNA testing. The bad news is that many minorities kind of do live in that world. They can't hide their ethnicity or sex. Just like how a DNA marker doesn't mean you're a jerk, it also doesn't mean you're less capable of being a good engineer. To make hiring decisions based on that kind of information would be horrifyingly immoral.
Granted, Marsh has not been very relevant in First Amendment jurisprudence of late, but it is standing precedent, and it could very well be extended to cyberspace.
Also, private actors are not exempt from legislation restricting the use of censorship. There is a First Amendment right to not be made to speak, but if you're a common carrier you're considered to not be speaking when carrying others' speech; social media could well be classified as common carriers or some similar (new) classification with similar effect. Given this it is a fair question as to what the appropriate public policy is as to censorship on private platforms. You might say that no public policy is appropriate on that question other than "hands off", but then again, since Congress has the relevant power to legislate, others could reasonably propose limits on censorship by privately-owned social media.
"Start your own" is good advice, but "lobby Congress" and "file suit" are also available avenues, and for some those are more realistic than the first.
I suspect that before long we will find out if Marsh applies to social media. I'd love to read legal analyses of that matter.
"Marsh v Alabama" applying to Medium is somewhat undercut by "1996 cyberlaw case, Cyber Promotions v. America Online, 948 F. Supp. 436, 442 (E.D. Pa. 1996).", no?
Can't they just stop the spread of false information in general? I feel like by saying it's targeting the alt-right leaders, it's doing precisely what those groups want - to attack the Press because it's singling them out.
They did target false information specifically. Third paragraph of the article:
> By far the biggest change made by Medium is the addition of a section called “Related Content,” which reads “We do not allow posts or accounts that engage in on-platform, off-platform, or cross-platform campaigns of targeting, harassment, hate speech, violence, or disinformation. We may consider off-platform actions in assessing a Medium account, and restrict access or availability to that account.” (Emphasis ours.)
Claiming that last week's school shooting was a false flag operation isn't a conservative stance; it is a lunatic stance. I know conservatives, and I even have conservative positions on a number of topics. I don't know a single serious conservative who thinks it is acceptable to slander recently murdered children.
I'm completely cool with this, because
-All platforms have the right to exercise editorial discretion, and
-Those people are awful, and
-This will only drive the adoption of censorship resistance platforms, which I'm generally in favor of.
Free speech is important, but people too often forget about the freedom of association, and its inverse the freedom of non-association. And Medium should have the freedom to not associate with the alt-right any other conspiracy theorists if it chooses to.
While it doesn't violate your argument (freedom of association) I'm less happy about how this isn't specifically about what's published in Medium: the criteria is specific individuals:
"We do not allow posts or accounts that engage in on-platform, off-platform"
It's the "off-platform" part that bothers me about such policies.
Thought experiment: Would Medium ban Henry Kissinger, were he to open an account?
I am completely, 100% cool with banning people based on "off platform" activity.
I know that making Nazi comparisons is cliché, but would you allow a Nazi on your platform even if he only did Nazi stuff off your platform? I wouldn't.
There a larger number of people I can amicably disagree with. I'd be unable to function professionally or socially if that weren't the case. But there are limits, and that's fine and good.
This has nothing to do with people's free speech rights. The constitutional right to free speech only applies to the government not being allowed to take away that tight - not a private company.
Also quasi-government entities. Like a private town with public areas[0].
If all the "public" "digital town squares" are private, does Marsh v. Alabama apply? The only obvious answer is that that is for the Court to decide -- or Congress, via legislation. Related question: what is the best policy as to social media and censorship thereof by its owners: to regulate or not?
I'm against most regulation when it comes to technology. The only time I think the government should step in would be in cases where there is a natural monopoly.
For instance, internet service providers like cable companies have a natural monopoly or duopoly at most. The financial and legal restrictions (establishing right of ways) makes it nearly impossible to compete in delivering internet to the last mile.
Mobile carriers should also not be allowed to merge. There are only limited frequencies conducive to wireless transmissions -- a new carrier can't really come in if all of the frequencies are licensed.
You're underestimating the problem here. For those of us who have awakened to the fact that mainstream media is a giant shitshow that is literally used to brainwash the masses into agendas of unelected powers, this is a major, major issue.
The reason this planet is waking up now is that the media can't be controlled as they used to. People share on facebook, other social media, Medium, youtube - there's no stopping ALL information from coming out!
In the past, if you had control of the media, you would control what people were thinking. It's that simple! All media is owned by 6 entities which have very close ties to each other, so it's really just one entity for all purposes.
You are falling for an illusion when you think that media is in any way independent or impartial.
Media mind control tells you what to think about. You get 2 or 3 prefab opinions that you can have about it, but they control what you're thinking about. You don't get to think about anything else. You don't get to think about things they don't want you to think about. Because they get you up in arms about whatever, they create a grand circus of different opinions, one against another - while you shout at your neighbor, or loudly complain how stupid NRA supporters are, they are doing whatever the hell they want behind the scenes, and nobody even thinks about questioning it.
They start entire wars where millions die, while they have you talk about a staged shooting! It's absurd!
So Medium going the way of censorship means they have joined the masses, the mainstream, and they are going to be controlled, just like anyone else. There's simply a myriad ways to control the feed once censorship has been established. It's sold to you with images of child molesters and nazis, but it's actually for one purpose only: To control your thinking.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 215 ms ] threadThat is, unless they've perfected a test for what actually constitutes disinformation.
As such, the only reason that [some members of one team of the political industry] can "no longer spread disinformation" is that they have been "prevented" from spreading all information. So directing the focus towards their inability to spread disinformation directs it away from the underlying action of broad person-based censorship, and is thus itself disinformation.
Addendum: You've referenced her narrative for the assumption that I, or most everybody, will casually disregard it as nonsense. I do, and agree that it is a valid assumption... Which implies that broad-sweeping heavy-handed measures are nowhere near necessary for suppressing it, and thus we should be loudly condemning said measures rather than implicitly condoning them.
> The “Hate Speech” section has been significantly expanded […], disallowing posts that “glorify, celebrate, downplay, or trivialize violence, suffering, abuse, or deaths of individuals or groups,” including “the use of scientific or pseudoscientific claims to pathologize, dehumanize, or disempower others.” Also prohibited: “calls for intolerance, exclusion, or segregation based on protected characteristics, nor do we allow the glorification of groups which do any of the above” and “hateful text, images, symbols, or other content in your username, profile, or bio.”
Can you cite the instances where the individuals in question were calling for violence on Medium, even considering off-platform communications which apparently they're now policing?
Personally, I wish that leftists would stop wearing liberal's clothing. Free speech is free speech. "Disinformation" is a weasel word, and so is "hate speech."
I'm about as far right as you can get economically and I wouldn't give her a platform in spite of fully supporting her right to spew nonsense. The freedom of association carries with it the freedom to not associate.
The line for me, personally, is the line that the Supreme Court of the United States has held time and time again, which is realistic threats of violence, if I were to run a platform like Medium.
That's her right to be a jackass. It's beautiful. You can point and laugh at her rambling if you wish, if the content were still available.
Your opinions on mean words are just opinions. It's just virtue signalling to be offended for someone else and go so far as to give them the power and satisfaction of being a martyr. This has done nothing but give the "alt-right" ammo, in that context, it certainly has not stopped any violence.
Not that there was any violence inspired by any of the prominent writings mentioned in the article, in the first place.
Utilizing your rights to the fullest extent allowed by law to protect your users, no matter their opinions.
And make no mistake, these users were banned for opinions. There were no calls to violence. Medium has made martyrs of them, and given them more power than they had before by attempting to silence them.
I'm sure the absolute flood of subscriptions after banning some obscure bloggers will be worth the loss of integrity as a publishing medium.
Nothing gives you the right to say what you want on someone else's platform or property.
I went and found a cached copy of the "How I'd run for Congress" article it talks about:
http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=How+I+Would+Run+for+Congres...
Looks fine to me.
But it sounds like it's time to stop using Medium. Updating their ToS to say that they can pull your content at will, for no reason beyond someone there not liking something you did or said that isn't even on their platform? Like, it could literally be something said in person that was overheard by someone who works there.
A blog is a long term thing, it's not a set of tweets. The content should last for years. Medium have clearly gone full blown Valley SJW and the people who thought freedom of speech mattered have either been shouted down or changed. Who knows what Medium considers to be "disinformation"? Anything that criticizes Hillary Clinton?
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Laura_Loomer
I personally have a hard time faulting a private platform for not wanting to promote ideas like racial segregation in taxi services. I was going to say religious segregation, but I can't imagine how she was able to discern someone's religion by their Uber/Lyft profile.
Yes, obviously Medium can do a bait-and-switch in which they attract people by claiming to value free speech and then abandoning those ideals after people have built up followers and PageRank using their service. They can do what they like.
However, the problem with picking sides like this, as Medium and Twitter are doing, is that it inevitably leads to gross and shameful hypocrisy.
Just based on a quick search, here are some shockingly hateful quotes that quite obviously violate their new policies, but which I don't believe for one second will lead to account bans:
https://medium.com/the-archipelago/men-get-on-board-with-mis...
I drink from a coffee mug that says “Male Tears.” Female friends sign off emails to me with “ban men” or “kill all men.”
But let’s be honest: the more time you spend thinking about the patriarchy, the more you’re genuinely like UGH DUDES AMIRITE. Because the thing is, patriarchal culture actively trains men to be awful
I do think the concept of “manliness” needs to be taken out and shot.
It goes on and on like that. Clearly, anything Loomer has said about Muslims is matched by anything Jess Zimmerman has said about men.
No, because one of these things is deliberately ironic, as it says repeatedly throughout the thing you linked and quoted. How did you miss that detail?
At any rate, that particular article is just one example I used to illustrate my point. Do you really believe Medium's moderation will be completely fair and politically unbiased, given their new policy? I would find it quite naive.
Trivialize abuse? If I say getting pushed by someone is no big deal because you couldn't dress/act/whatever however you wanted because you could have avoided it (assuming the other group said it would be a reprocussion) I guess I would get banned? If I say your suffering is less severe than mine because of XYZ, will I get banned? I'm going to guess yes if I'm a white male and no if I'm anything else.
What is a protected characteristic? The historical legal set including Vietnam service status, race, religion, etc, or are there newer ones?
I want more speech, not less. Even speech I don't like, like yours in this case.
How about just a platform that prides itself in free speech?
From what I can tell, Voat was intended to be an alternative to Reddit. It wasn't supposed to be aimed at any particular group of people. Then Reddit banned Coontown, and many white supremacists and other bigots switched to Voat. As a result of the influx, Voat now features a shocking amount of bigoted content. I don't think this was the intention of the creator of Voat, but it's what they're stuck with now.
If you really care about free speech, and you make a clone of Medium to allow any kind of speech, this is a probable enough scenario:
1. The non-bigots will be split. Many of them will just stick with Medium, but some die-hard free speech supporters will come to your site.
2. Unfortunately you'll probably get a sizable majority of the bigots, because they think Medium is waging war against them. They don't actually care about free speech, they just want a place where they can spew hatred and slander.
3. These bigots will post a large amount of bigoted content to your service.
4. Eventually the free speech supporters who are non-bigots will get tired of fighting it, and they'll go back to Medium
5. Now you own and operate a site that is pretty much just bigotry, which probably isn't something you want your name associated with.
6. Some site will ban a couple of bigots, and a person will recommend building a free-speech centered clone of it, and some idiot will tell you that it's a bad idea because of Voat.
Or someone decides to impede your right to speech with DoS attacks (see: Quillette) and you made the mistake of using Cloudflare to protect yourself.
At this point to reliably be able to express opinions that are based in science but offend some minority subgroup you would have to avoid basically all firms based in Silicon Valley. Note the quote from the new medium.com policy:
But it is now more detailed and focused, disallowing posts ... including “the use of scientific or pseudoscientific claims to pathologize, dehumanize, or disempower others.”
So basically an anti-Damore clause. If you state something based in scientific studies, but someone claims to feel "disempowered", you can't use Medium. I wonder how long before other Valley firms adopt similar usage policies.
This reminds me of the quote by Urs Hoezle:
As engineers, we're trained to pay attention to the details, think logically, challenge assumptions that may be incorrect (or just fuzzy), and so on. These are all excellent tools for technical discussions. But they can be terrible tools for discussion around race, discrimination, justice, and so on, because these discussions touch topics with a high cultural and emotional content. That's because questioning the exact details can easily be perceived as questioning the overall validity of the effort, or the veracity of the historical context.
An entire subculture founded in the advancement of science is systematically turning its back on science, in case it 'offends' someone. A milestone in the (d)evolution of the Valley.
Let's say we live in a society with mandatory DNA testing with publicly available results. Your DNA shows that you have a genetic marker which indicates a tendency towards anti-social behavior. It's fine though; despite the increased risk, you're actually a very level-headed and agreeable person.
You go apply for a job, and I apply for the same job. Perhaps your résumé is slightly stronger than mine, but the employer worries that you'll be difficult to get along with based not on your interview, but on your DNA test. I don't have the DNA markers for anti-social behavior that you have, though it turns out that I'm a bit of a jerk (not far-fetched; check my HN post history).
This would be wildly unfair to you. While the DNA marker means there's an increased chance that you don't get along well with other people, it does not define you. You've just been denied a job based on a thing that you didn't choose, there's nothing you can do to change it, and is actually incorrect in your specific case.
The good news is that we don't live in a world with mandatory public DNA testing. The bad news is that many minorities kind of do live in that world. They can't hide their ethnicity or sex. Just like how a DNA marker doesn't mean you're a jerk, it also doesn't mean you're less capable of being a good engineer. To make hiring decisions based on that kind of information would be horrifyingly immoral.
Granted, Marsh has not been very relevant in First Amendment jurisprudence of late, but it is standing precedent, and it could very well be extended to cyberspace.
Also, private actors are not exempt from legislation restricting the use of censorship. There is a First Amendment right to not be made to speak, but if you're a common carrier you're considered to not be speaking when carrying others' speech; social media could well be classified as common carriers or some similar (new) classification with similar effect. Given this it is a fair question as to what the appropriate public policy is as to censorship on private platforms. You might say that no public policy is appropriate on that question other than "hands off", but then again, since Congress has the relevant power to legislate, others could reasonably propose limits on censorship by privately-owned social media.
"Start your own" is good advice, but "lobby Congress" and "file suit" are also available avenues, and for some those are more realistic than the first.
I suspect that before long we will find out if Marsh applies to social media. I'd love to read legal analyses of that matter.
(The comment to which this is a response originally included a link to a recent Russia Today story suggesting Twitter was purging conservatives).
> By far the biggest change made by Medium is the addition of a section called “Related Content,” which reads “We do not allow posts or accounts that engage in on-platform, off-platform, or cross-platform campaigns of targeting, harassment, hate speech, violence, or disinformation. We may consider off-platform actions in assessing a Medium account, and restrict access or availability to that account.” (Emphasis ours.)
Free speech is important, but people too often forget about the freedom of association, and its inverse the freedom of non-association. And Medium should have the freedom to not associate with the alt-right any other conspiracy theorists if it chooses to.
"We do not allow posts or accounts that engage in on-platform, off-platform"
It's the "off-platform" part that bothers me about such policies.
Thought experiment: Would Medium ban Henry Kissinger, were he to open an account?
I know that making Nazi comparisons is cliché, but would you allow a Nazi on your platform even if he only did Nazi stuff off your platform? I wouldn't.
There a larger number of people I can amicably disagree with. I'd be unable to function professionally or socially if that weren't the case. But there are limits, and that's fine and good.
If all the "public" "digital town squares" are private, does Marsh v. Alabama apply? The only obvious answer is that that is for the Court to decide -- or Congress, via legislation. Related question: what is the best policy as to social media and censorship thereof by its owners: to regulate or not?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
For instance, internet service providers like cable companies have a natural monopoly or duopoly at most. The financial and legal restrictions (establishing right of ways) makes it nearly impossible to compete in delivering internet to the last mile.
Mobile carriers should also not be allowed to merge. There are only limited frequencies conducive to wireless transmissions -- a new carrier can't really come in if all of the frequencies are licensed.
The reason this planet is waking up now is that the media can't be controlled as they used to. People share on facebook, other social media, Medium, youtube - there's no stopping ALL information from coming out!
In the past, if you had control of the media, you would control what people were thinking. It's that simple! All media is owned by 6 entities which have very close ties to each other, so it's really just one entity for all purposes.
You are falling for an illusion when you think that media is in any way independent or impartial.
Media mind control tells you what to think about. You get 2 or 3 prefab opinions that you can have about it, but they control what you're thinking about. You don't get to think about anything else. You don't get to think about things they don't want you to think about. Because they get you up in arms about whatever, they create a grand circus of different opinions, one against another - while you shout at your neighbor, or loudly complain how stupid NRA supporters are, they are doing whatever the hell they want behind the scenes, and nobody even thinks about questioning it.
They start entire wars where millions die, while they have you talk about a staged shooting! It's absurd!
So Medium going the way of censorship means they have joined the masses, the mainstream, and they are going to be controlled, just like anyone else. There's simply a myriad ways to control the feed once censorship has been established. It's sold to you with images of child molesters and nazis, but it's actually for one purpose only: To control your thinking.
Have a good day :)