There are, though. There are ideas that are harmful.
The idea that the Jewish population was responsible for the harms and ills of pre-WWII Germany was a devastatingly harmful idea.
> 2) that there is an authority that can certify some ideas as _safe_ vs _harmful_.
It's obvious to me that there cannot be a singular authority that makes such determinations.
But it does seem totally plausible to have a distributed network of actors, each making their own determinations, and each influencing each other about which ideas are harmful, and which they will tolerate within their sphere. After all, that's the basic concept behind the "marketplace of ideas".
You can sell into the marketplace, but YouTube doesn't have to buy what everyone is selling.
I think it's just as totalitarian to tell a private entity that they must host content they disagree with, as it is to tell a private entity that they cannot speak about a specific topic to others. It's the antithesis of the marketplace of ideas.
I think the actual underlying issue is that YouTube, and a few other select entities, have an absolutely massive spheres of influence and feel like monopolies within. That's what kills the marketplace.
So, I do think private entities are completely within their rights to restrict their platforms however they see fit. I think doing so is even necessary for an effective marketplace of ideas that seeks truth. But I think we should also look at anti-trust laws that prevent individual private entities from having such a dominant position over an entire space.
> The idea that the Jewish population was responsible for the harms and ills of pre-WWII Germany was a devastatingly harmful idea.
Come to think of it ... If the pre-WWII harms and ills of Germany did not exist, would the scapegoating have existed? So, is it the idea that one could keep the peace by utterly destroying the enemy _after_ they lost that ought to have been banned?
Fast-forwarding a little bit, even after those particular manifestations had been banned, some Germans continued to kill people whom they considered to be of "inferior" races. Do you attribute the literal roasting of Turks to the idea that luxury on the one side and communism on the other side could magically wash away responsibility for the genocides committed by their ancestors?
I am curious because once we go down the path of blaming "ideas" instead of specific people for specific actions, it all gets pretty funky pretty fast.
It wasn't like the Nazi party was never banned in Germany. Do you take the survival of those ideas despite the various bans since 1923 as proof that banning ideas don't change anything about the people who'll do horrible things?
> So, is it the idea that one could keep the peace by utterly destroying the enemy _after_ they lost that ought to have been banned?
I wasn't advocating for banning any ideas, but rather than private entities should have the freedom to moderate their platforms. That private entities and persons should be allowed to say: "I won't share this idea".
One of the points asserted was that this requires us to agree to the point that "some ideas are harmful".
So, I was defending the claim that 'some ideas are harmful'. That is absolutely not the same as defending the claim that 'some ideas should be banned'.
Most of the rest of your comment deals with that latter claim, which I don't support and don't claim to.
My point wasn't that the idea should've been banned, but rather that the idea was harmful.
> but rather than private entities should have the freedom to moderate their platforms.
Do you think the Nazis were able to publish their positions in _Die Rote Fahne_?
> One of the points asserted was that this requires us to agree to the point that "some ideas are harmful".
Ideas are ideas. Ideas by themselves cannot be harmful. Actions have the ability to cause harm.
Well, OK, the idea that large corporations merging their power with the political authority to insulate the population from harmful ideas, well, that idea is definitely harmful because it cannot exist separately from the action of chilling free exchange of ideas.
With an actual private, for-profit business, consumers have the power of taking their money and spending elsewhere.
In this case, there is a dominant communication medium that is not subject to the discipline which the rest of us can impose on it by spending our money elsewhere because the "business" does not rely on our spending. So, bringing up the massive potential harms that can be visited on a society where the dominant communication channels all the do the bidding of political power centers is the only thing we can do. Maybe sufficient numbers of people will be convinced by this.
My point is that the actual harms of YouTube and others are from an anti-trust and monopoly perspective.
The problem isn't a private entity moderating their platform. The problem is a private entity that has so much power that moderating their platform amounts to a society-wide stifling of speech.
The solution isn't to restrict how the entities are allowed to moderate their platforms—it's to prevent and disallow them from being that powerful in the first place!
We may agree philosophically, but you are either not aware of how enmeshed political power is with a few large communications platforms or you are purposefully distracting from that point.
> it's to prevent and disallow them from being that powerful in the first place!
That ship has sailed. The here and now is the fact that we have a communication, tracking, and employment oligopoly in cahoots with the current centers of political power interested in preventing competition to both.
It hasn't. Monopolies have become powerful, then been disassembled before, and it can happen again.
Standard Oil was broken up, as was Bell Systems.
With some new legislation and lawsuits, we could absolutely reduce the power of Google/YouTube and Facebook over online communications.
I agree that those entities have already become far too powerful, but we can remove their power, and shred them into smaller pieces if we had the will to.
I agree that we may not have the will.
But I disagree that the solution is to put more constraints on the speech rights of private entities. You don't fight censorship with compelled speech. You fight monopolies with aggressive anti-trust legislation and action.
Your first argument is essentially that if the general public believe an organization to be bad, they can remove their support for that organization.
Why is YouTube any different? People can and do go to other platforms. You’re differentiating between giving value in the form of dollars versus giving value in the form of time & attention.
There are, though. There are ideas that are harmful.
The idea that the Jewish population was responsible for the harms and ills of pre-WWII Germany was a devastatingly harmful idea.
> 2) that there is an authority that can certify some ideas as _safe_ vs _harmful_.
It's obvious to me that there cannot be a singular authority that makes such determinations.
But it does seem totally plausible to have a distributed network of actors, each making their own determinations, and each influencing each other about which ideas are harmful, and which they will tolerate within their sphere. After all, that's the basic concept behind the "marketplace of ideas".
You can sell into the marketplace, but YouTube doesn't have to buy what everyone is selling.
I think it's just as totalitarian to tell a private entity that they must host content they disagree with, as it is to tell a private entity that they cannot speak about a specific topic to others. It's the antithesis of the marketplace of ideas.
I think the actual underlying issue is that YouTube, and a few other select entities, have an absolutely massive spheres of influence and feel like monopolies within. That's what kills the marketplace.
So, I do think private entities are completely within their rights to restrict their platforms however they see fit. I think doing so is even necessary for an effective marketplace of ideas that seeks truth. But I think we should also look at anti-trust laws that prevent individual private entities from having such a dominant position over an entire space.