Verizon suspends advertising on Facebook, joins growing boycott

You make some great points and I mostly agree with you.

I think my take is that Verizon taking this stance (on Facebook advertising) does not maximize their own financials. I think they're operating in the fog of (political) war and are giving more weight to this campaign against Facebook than they should. In doing so, they're likely alienating customers who are center-left, centrist, or conservative. Will those users switch away to a different provider? Realistically they won't do so in large numbers. But my gut tells me an even smaller number of customers would adopt Verizon specifically because they took a position on this issue, so they aren't really going to gain anything from this either. Unless of course, the play here is to weaken Facebook so that Verizon has a better shot at being a content provider themselves - in which case this is a wholly selfish move.

As for the regulation of companies' speech. I think I agree with you except in the case where companies become too big. I see Facebook, Twitter, Google (particularly with YouTube), and Amazon as being too big. These companies control so much of information flow in our societies that they are the new town square. Enough of societal discourse takes place on their platform that their acts of censorship are as problematic as governmental acts of censorship. I'd be OK with a solution that retains companies' speech but with revised/enforced anti-trust laws that breaks up big tech. I also think there's a reasonable argument to treat some of these companies as utilities and hold them to a standard of neutrality we'd expect from public agencies.

The last such law in France was just cancelled for being unconstitutional.

And in practice they are impossible to enforce for a platform like Facebook, since in the end it's a judge who has to decide what is, and what is not hate speech.

In practice, enforcement is selective and the sentences are never formally enforced since it would create de-facto political prisoners, which gives a bad image to a democratic country.

So I'm not sure they're a good example.

Accusing Facebook in that it’s like accusing sugar companies in diabetes. Not saying the problem doesn’t exist, but maybe they just abuse Facebook? I’m spending around 10 minutes a week in my fb account, checking on friends and family, that’s mostly enough. What stops you from doing the same?

"You're portraying this as some kind of whim that changes with people's moods, but that's a complete, total, 100% straw man."

This is completely false.

The popular definition of what people think FB ought to take down literally changes week by week.

It is absolutely a 'whim' that changes over time.

The issue with FB is not, for the most part the 'legal' definition 'hate speech' - it's 'speech which people consider harmful'.

If FB were to focus very intently on removing that which would 'legally' be considered, technically 'hate speech' - which I believe they do - the populism against them would be just the same.

Ironically - it's your argument that is the 'straw man' - by holding up a pragmatically fictitious standard (i.e. 'legal hate speech') as the standard by which FB would be measured.

And FYI FB's platform already doesn't allow hate speech by their own interpretation, and a whole host of other forms of speech as well, i.e. their bar is at least theoretically already higher than that.

This issue is Greyer than Grey, those who see this in Black and White I believe are not looking closely enough. It's messy.

EDIT: FYI 'hate speech' has legal definitions outside of the US.

I would also like to point out the very problematic implied assumption that American popular social framework is somehow relevant anywhere else in the world.

I'm from the US. We surely covered WWII. I don't recall triangles at all. That doesn't mean it wasn't covered, I do remember the star of David looking badges to mark Jews, which is technically two triangles.

I could be wrong, but Trump doesn't strike me as the kind of person watching a lot of the history channel. Or reading history books. Or reading anything at all really.

I feel like I'm being asked to believe that the guy who spent two years bragging about how great black people were doing economically, bragging about funding HBCUs more than any other administration, creating opportunity zones, and implementing criminal justice reform is a secret Nazi. Sure, he's loudly doing all these tangible good things for black people and won't shut up about it, but he's quietly letting the Nazis know he's really one of them.