On March, 25th 2022, business magnate and entrepreneur Elon Musk used his Twitter account to conduct an open survey, which eventually got over two million responses. The question ran as follows: “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?” Seven out of ten respondents thought Twitter did
I have to admit I'm pretty disappointed with this analysis — from a person I take regards himself as a virtue ethicist. Of course free speech is an issue, but what is at issue here is how to construct it. I appreciate the matter of free speech is salient to you given your circumstances, and, at least from what I've seen, I think you have been badly done by.
But all the social media sites began as free speech sites and I expect, other things being equal, would prefer to be that way. But they've been confronted with the dilemma of what speech to allow. Thus the platform you're now on — Gettr — bans porn and just banned a white nationalist — presumably for being a white nationalist.
The hyperconnectivity of the web is posing huge problems for our society of precisely the kind that, it seems to me virtue ethicists have more to say than most people. I've had a go on another subject here https://quillette.com/2019/02/16/polarisation-and-the-case-for-citizens-juries/ though I hope you can see some parallels between what I talked about and your subject here which is how to govern social media platforms.
I have to admit I'm pretty disappointed with this analysis — from a person I take regards himself as a virtue ethicist. Of course free speech is an issue, but what is at issue here is how to construct it. I appreciate the matter of free speech is salient to you given your circumstances, and, at least from what I've seen, I think you have been badly done by.
But all the social media sites began as free speech sites and I expect, other things being equal, would prefer to be that way. But they've been confronted with the dilemma of what speech to allow. Thus the platform you're now on — Gettr — bans porn and just banned a white nationalist — presumably for being a white nationalist.
The hyperconnectivity of the web is posing huge problems for our society of precisely the kind that, it seems to me virtue ethicists have more to say than most people. I've had a go on another subject here https://quillette.com/2019/02/16/polarisation-and-the-case-for-citizens-juries/ though I hope you can see some parallels between what I talked about and your subject here which is how to govern social media platforms.