Even if you had freedom from legal coercion it doesn't imply a platform ought to use that freedom to help poisonous crap spread. Lets give an obvious example there was a lady spreading nonsense about how you could cure your autistic kid by giving them bleach anally. She is encouraging dumb people to torture their vulnerable mentally challenged children.
Whether the government ought to let her spread her malicious lies is an entirely different question from whether for example amazon ought to carry her book or google ought to index her site. If your absolutist free speech position doesn't allow you to admit to the idea of the government censoring her I understand. However if you think that amazon and google ought to be morally obligated to help her spread her poison I don't understand your position at all.
A rational person can tell the difference between a grey area obvious nonsense and pretending that there aren't plenty of trivially definable black and white situations in which not carrying poison makes the world a better place is complete nonsense as is the idea that ANY editorial discretion magically leads to 1984. Life is literally the finding a balance point and I think we can reasonably discover a point of homeostasis between free heroin on every corner and constantly strip searching everyone for drugs.
If you don't think so you haven't considered the problem very deeply.
I thought we were speaking mostly about governments in this discussion, but quite frankly, the amount of power that Google and Facebook combined have over the average internet user's information intake puts them in a similar place. I believe the "moral obligation" is to act like the common carriers they play at being when it's expedient to do so, keep their hands off, and allow the government apparatus equipped to handle incitement to violence to do its job.
The problem at the end of the day is that we're not talking about extreme, contrived examples like the one just mentioned. We're talking about ideological things that rational people can disagree about in good faith, and there is no downside for tech companies to boost their preferred ideologies/candidates/etc and suppress their non-preferred ones.
That is a huge problem with, just like the governments, unlimited abuse potential... except it's more insidious. Government suppression of speech comes at the point of a gun, tech suppression of speech happens passively, in that you won't know it's happening unless you know to look for it, or its application is exceedingly blunt.
It's handwaved because many people find the list of boosting and suppressing targets acceptable.
Where do you derive the moral obligation for facebook or google have to act as neutral carriers of information? I'll do one. A restaurant has an established duty of care to maintain a minimum standard of cleanliness so as to provide sustenance and not illness. This duty is established in law and custom, maintained by inspection and certification. It's a duty whose exact performance and rules has changed over time but which goes back in custom over thousands of years.
This duty rendered real and specific by law and inspection is based on the most basic of rights the right to retain your life and health. It is trivially to suppose that someone ought to respect your desire to remain alive by not doing their job so poorly that filling your stomach once leads to you filling a hole in the ground.
Tech companies which so far as I can see have no duty of neutrality beyond what is required to keep our business are in fact very very circumspect about blocking things. Facebook happily left the groups up that I and others reported in the days leading up to the Jan 6 insurrection where they were planning to overthrow our government and it wasn't that long ago that reddit decided to remove communities like jailbait and subreddits in which the people who used to use lynching as social gatherings would have been quite comfortable.
When people talk about the problem with insidious blocking by tech companies I suspect the person is either an idealist or one of the deplorables. I'll do you the credit of assuming your in the former basket because so far as I'm aware the only people at present negatively effected by google and facebook are all in the latter basket.
>Where do you derive the moral obligation for facebook or google have to act as neutral carriers of information?
It's interesting that you mention restaurants. Restaurants have standards that go beyond the casual cook in a home kitchen because the restaurant, owing to its scale, can multiply the effect of a problem with food safety and injure/kill very many people very easily.
To briefly answer your question: Big scale means errors are magnified means different rules apply.
Facebook by itself is the single largest website in the world outside of China. I find it outrageous to suggest that a company in that position (Google too) should get to just do whatever they please regarding the information input of a massive chunk of the global population.
Pretending that power doesn't exist does not nullify its effects or its abuse potential.
>because so far as I'm aware the only people at present negatively effected by google and facebook are all in the latter basket.
Your unwarranted personal attack aside, this is precisely what I meant about those handwaving the establishment of an abusable power structure simply because they're generally okay with the decisions that structure is making.
What about when you're not so okay with those decisions anymore? You mentioned the Capitol insurrection, I assume then, that you think Facebook should clamp down on such groups? Their answer to you is the same as their answer to me: "Our back yard, our rules."
I think we can do better than that. And to preempt the inevitable argument that the first amendment allows them to operate free of oversight in this way.. that's true. It would be a lot easier to tie their freedom from liability for the libelous, terroristic, etc. content their users post to some additional duties, transparency, and so forth.
Whether the government ought to let her spread her malicious lies is an entirely different question from whether for example amazon ought to carry her book or google ought to index her site. If your absolutist free speech position doesn't allow you to admit to the idea of the government censoring her I understand. However if you think that amazon and google ought to be morally obligated to help her spread her poison I don't understand your position at all.
A rational person can tell the difference between a grey area obvious nonsense and pretending that there aren't plenty of trivially definable black and white situations in which not carrying poison makes the world a better place is complete nonsense as is the idea that ANY editorial discretion magically leads to 1984. Life is literally the finding a balance point and I think we can reasonably discover a point of homeostasis between free heroin on every corner and constantly strip searching everyone for drugs.
If you don't think so you haven't considered the problem very deeply.