Mark Zuckerberg Is an Arbiter of Truth–Whether He Likes It or Not

Let’s also ask if they will do it to other big authoritarian countries on the east side

In the realm of corporate censorship, I still believe that politics is much less important to companies than profits. My takeaway from censorship on YouTube and other social media is that it's levied at content that could reflect poorly on advertisers. Inconvenient and controversial content more so than any specific political views. Granted, controversial does overlap with politic and especially fringe politics.

Personally I'm much more worried about infrastructure becoming closed off than any specific sites. I don't know whether companies' moderation is effective or not. I trust the market to sort that out. What would be really concerning, though, is if the underlying infrastructure starts conducting censorship of their own.

We've already witnessed this to a degree with 8chan being effectively wiped off the face of the internet for the better part of a year. Square and other payment providers have started refusing to do business with certain people and groups. I'm less concerned of a world where Facebook censors its content, and much more concerned with a world where someone can't even run their own personal website because DNS providers, payment providers, and hosting services have blacklisted them.

> People fail to understand that nothing is static. One minute you’re in, the other minute you’re out.

This is why Free Speech is so important. Regardless of how inappropriate someone's speech is, or may seem in the present context, they should be allowed to express it as long as they are not directly inciting violence/hate. Not all countries have this Right so let's take a second to appreciate that.

No.

Today's world is vastly more complex than it was in our ancestral environment, and that makes assessing truth very hard. It's not possible for anyone to directly access all primary sources, so we have no choice but to set up some kind of division of labor in the assessment of truth. Scientific peer review is one example of such a division of labor. We trust peer reviewed publications not because peer review is flawless, but because we have to do something to triage the myriad firehoses of information that exist in today's world, and peer review is the best we've been able to come up with so far.

Handing over the arbitration of truth to unaccountable private corporations is, like peer review, far from optimal. But we have to do something or those who are out to deliberately deceive to advance their political agendas will win. It is always easier to destroy than to create, and it is easier to promulgate a well-crafted lie than the truth. Those are the facts on the ground that we as a society have to grapple with. It's a hard problem and none of the solutions that have been proposed are optimal. But that's no excuse not to try to do something. If we don't, society will descend into chaos and authoritarianism. Fact checking by social media platforms is far from optimal, but it's a hell of a lot more likely to advance democracy than survival of the fittest con man.

> I still believe that tech companies should focus on building tech

You missed the whole point of the article, which is that "building tech" at that scale is inseparable from widespread political implications.