When it comes to content moderation (or “censorship”, if you prefer) by social media websites, misinformed (or dishonest) folks online have adopted a false dichotomy as an axiom. It’s attractively simple, but entirely wrong.
These people will assert, as though it were universal cosmic truth, that social media sites must be exactly one of two things. They must be either a (neutral) “platform”, or, if they censor user content at all (or “too much”), they must be a “publisher” that should be treated exactly like a newspaper when it comes to liability for any defamatory content they host.
This is a stupid false dichotomy, and claims that the law does (or should) codify it is stupid. The vast majority businesses are neither “platforms” nor “publishers”. This stupidity has been debunked, mostly from a legal perspective, by journalists, lawyers, and scholars more famous and learned than I am.
Alas, such debunking tends to be less than fully persuasive, since the false dichotomy is very truthy. Because the debunking typically focuses on the law, believers in the false dichotomy will often retreat from their mistaken belief that the law imposes the dichotomy, and adopt a position like “the law was intended to impose the dichotomy”, or “the law ought to impose the dichotomy.” They’ll typically do this without acknowledging that they wrong, and try to gaslight by claiming that they had been talking about what the law should be the whole time.
Clearly, what’s needed is an easily digestable analogy that will shatter the false idol of publisher-vs-platform. So, after thinking about for what must’ve been at least five whole minutes, I found one.
Surely, this will snap them out of it…
Social media sites today operate more like bars than they do either phone companies or newspapers. Like bars, social media sites provide a venue for guests to socialize. Social interaction is the draw - the reason people show up. Both venues are private property, and it’s generally legal for the proprietor to make any rules they like. A cantankerous bar owner might forbid his patrons from saying any unkind words about the Red Sox, or any kind ones about the Yankees. An attentive bar owner might notice a patron annoying a group of regulars, and have the bouncer eject the troublesome drunk. A bar owner can overtly support a local political candidate, and refuse entry to anyone wearing a T-Shirt that supports her opponent.
Unless the proprietor is ejecting folks because of their membership in a protected class, he’s legally entitled to be as arbitrary and tyrannical in how he polices his pub. This is America; we have property rights.
It might be the only bar in a small town. It even might be the primary venue where the townsfolk gather and socialize, preferring it as they do over the perfectly serviceable town square (which the bar actually abuts).
Here’s the thing: even if the proprietor is a world-champion censor, ejecting people left and right at the first hint of wrongspeech, he still isn’t liable if one of his patrons slanders the Mayor, the Priest, or the hermit who lives on the hill at the edge of town. Deciding what does and doesn’t pass as acceptable discourse in his establishment doesn’t transform “Judgey O’Pinion’s Pub” into the “Centerville Tribune”.