I never thought I would see the day where someone pretended with a straight face that Zuckerberg or Facebook in general was somehow some kind of bastion for free speech against censorship. Nothing could be further from the case - people have been banned or shadowbanned from the platform for years, in an increasingly automated way, for any number of reasons.

As usual, you may not like what some people have to say, but the very purpose of free speech is to ensure they have the right to say it. This is a value that is totally lost on some people; I could easily imagine employing a privilege-style narrative against such a person, who has been in the incredible position of never once experiencing "badthink", who has never said anything other than what is on the absolute bleeding edge of politically correct speech. Gavet is such a person, no doubt.

> Whatever information, true or false, it distributes, Facebook is de facto directing three billion people around the world what to believe and what not. If Facebook won’t change its algorithms, it then needs to be a defender of the facts.

What are the facts, Ms. Gavet? The entire discourse over the last decade has cemented the idea that people operate with "different sets of facts". What are the 'facts' about Coronavirus? What are the 'facts' about race relations, or inequality, or anything else? There are no 'facts', there is merely a gigantic pile of anecdotes mixed in with the occasional piece of information worthy of being called data. No, there are no facts, there are only officially endorsed narratives; and so Gavet is essentially calling for more of that, and more compliance with it, and more conformity to a worldview where you cannot and must not dare think anything which hasn't gotten an official stamp of approval by some arbitrary authority.

> Facebook’s “neutrality” (“The algorithm made us do it . . .”) is a magic trick to make us believe that the company can’t be held responsible for anything happening on its platform.

Why does Facebook have to be responsible for this? The whole point of Section 230 is to actually make them less responsible in order to ensure a space for free speech on the Internet. If I log onto Facebook and I see something that fills me with rage, why would I blame Facebook itself for that? It would be like blaming a truck for hitting me instead of its driver; it's a facile worldview that I don't even believe Gavet holds herself.

> “You are asking to end free speech.” Let’s start with the fact that, at least in the United States, private companies don’t have to protect freedom of speech. The government does that job for them.

The government is not doing that job, because nobody is doing a damn thing to enforce free speech on these platforms, nobody is providing an appeal process to reverse bans, nobody is getting any transparency into what you actually can and cannot say - it's all arbitrary, it's all decided based on some combination of feelings and marketing, and it's ridiculous to present that the government is doing anything at all about it or even intends to, Trump tweets aside.

This whole meme of

> private companies don’t have to protect freedom of speech

is extremely tiresome, and bizarrely ironic when you hear it uttered by people who otherwise make pretense of having left-wing political views or at least sympathy for such. Granting megacorporations control over what we can see and read (and in turn, what we can say and think) is somehow a talking point of these people at the same time as making pretense to egalitarian values. It's a baffling level of doublethink that can only exist in a sane mind when it is held in a non-genuine way: these people actually have no respect for your rights, they don't want the common person to be their equal, they don't want a normal person to be able to issue their thoughts and opinions on a topic without some form of control over how far they're able to spread their message.

Private companies that do business on the public internet and occupy monopoly-like positions should absolutely have to protect the rights citizens have in the countries they choose to do business in. End of story. Let's not forget that the infrastructure was built with an awful lot of public money, especially the original DARPA project; leaving aside the usual "Facebook is the public square now" argument, which does actually hold some merit.

Of course, there's plenty of debate to be had - people want to have smaller spaces to discuss topics without interference, people want high-quality discussion, people want moderators to enforce community standards. Of course. But there's a difference in scale between a community and a platform, just as there's a difference between a publisher and a platform.

She provides a convenient thought that works here:

> What about starting with the posts of people and entities that have, let’s say, one million followers, or more than one million likes/shares in a month?

What about starting with social networks that have, let's say, one million users, or more than one million views in a month, and insist upon the protection of our hard-won rights in these places? Within those networks, there's obviously room for people to form communities that desire some amount of topic or content control; but it is the network as a whole that Gavet wants control over, and the exclusion of anyone who disagrees from that entire public space.

> These terms of service codify the company’s commitment to police what is being published on its platform. At some point in time, Facebook leadership thought these terms were good things to stand up for and protect. Somehow, over the past few years, they decided to ignore them while still standing on their mission soapbox.

I don't think they're being ignored; as I said, you can still get banned in a hot minute if you post something that triggers their systems. No, rather, Ms. Gavet and her ilk have moved the goalposts, and now they want to censor public figures - _elected_ figures - because they don't toe some arbitrary line which has been established separately by unelected bodies. It would be foolish to presume that someone with such powers would have absolutely no political interests of their own.

> Would you have helped Stalin advocate gulags as a way to boost industrialization in the USSR?

You, Ms. Gavet, are helping some decentralized aggregation of forces advocate for thought control as a way to boost social cohesion. At least it's conceivable (in a sick mind) that a work camp could have some ill-gained industrial output; but some 1984-style Ministry of Truth is not going to bring us together as a people and heal our societal differences.

> Hate speech and false news have been escalating for years.
...
> When you have achieved the size and the power that you have, why not stand for unifying rather than dividing people?

While free speech is a specifically protected thing in America, hate speech is not a thing, unlike in my own country. Americans have an absolute right to free speech, and they should defend that, because it is the right underpinning all other rights. The moment that government (or worse, arbitrary unelected corporate) control over speech becomes the norm is the moment that your freedom dies. As usual, you might not like what people say; but not reading it is significantly easier and healthier than exerting the kind of brutal force necessary to make other people not think it.

Very ironic to pretend that censorship and the exclusion of ideas that you don't like from the dialogue is somehow supposed to be the thing that unifies people.