An emergent ethical concern keeps bugging me in these situations. Of course, private companies reserve the right to refuse business and services to whomever they want. In a healthy society this is no problem. But if we slide towards a dystopian future where Big Tech is basically an oligarchy governing important chunks of society without due process and the democratic checks and balances we would expect from a governi…
I'm not so worried about the free speech aspects of that...there's always somewhere to spew whatever opinion you have. I do agree, though, that Google and others wield a lot of power by being able to permaban a whole account/person for an alleged incident on just one of their platforms. Where "banned on YouTube" means, for example, that your Android phone no longer works.
You know, this is a really interesting observation. Oftentimes in these debates about moderation, people argue that you can't do it because these platforms are already de-facto public platforms. Meanwhile, in this thread's conversation, the main argument seems to be that pushing people off mainstream platforms won't work because they'll enjoy the exact same opportunities at another platform.
That doesn't imply a contradiction from any particular person, as long as they only embrace one argument or the other. But both have been used in defense of Not Moderating Trolls, and both can't be right.