Your insinuation doesn’t even apply. Ideas are complex and black and white views, don’t accurately depict the colorful world we live in. As someone who is very pro-Union, remind me what unions have to do with social media recommendation algorithms? Actually, I don’t even know what you’re trying to say. Nevermind.
I’m not being semantic or trying to ignore an issue. I think corporations should have the ability to determine what content or ideas they want to promote or host on their platforms. And it has nothing to do with morality of majority, as much as I personally despise Fox News and specifically Rupert Murdock, they’ve created an identity that caters to people with a certain viewpoint. They’ve gone further and actually shaped it, but anything less than creative control over what appears on their platform is effectively forcing corporations to share viewpoints they might not agree with. And legal speech clauses, etc have nothing to do with corporations. The notion of legal/free speech only comes from the federal government, as free and legal speech is only applicable to interactions between citizens and the government, not citizens and corporations, or citizens and citizens. And I’m not familiar with the town square concept as it relates to laws. If I set up a social media company with the ideals that black people have a safe space, an actual black twitter for example, I should be able to remove people who want to share views that are antithetical to a safe space for black people. I shouldn’t be forced to platform anti black ideas simply because my platform has a large user base. Ideas as simple as “black people don’t know science or math” are legal ideas to hold, but that doesn’t mean they should be welcome if I deem them harmful. Town square or not.
There’s no such thing as corporate censorship. That’s largely been manufactured from some who have a persecution complex. The only way corporations can censor someone is if that person is accessing property or platforms that the corporation owns. At which point, they have freedom to do what they please when it comes to who they will host. That would be like saying your neighbor is censoring you because they won’t let you on their property or use their things. They can’t legally do anything more than remove you or deny you access to things they operate. The government censorship is a logically real thing in that they have the power to create laws that affect you regardless of property/object ownership
I appreciate your response. And I recognize how much control the news media have throughout the U.S. which has the realm I am speaking from. But even with artists and media, asking them to pay an artist for content they don’t fully support is unreasonable. And I understand how that power can be wielded, but I believe if your ideas aren’t fully welcomed by an entity, it’s the wrong partnership to begin with, unless you’re strategically leveraging them for a better platform in the future.
I think I would love the idea of public social media, as far as it relates to ownership, but I doubt that that would ever happen, because the ideas we’re discussing now is a huge non-starter. No one will want to be responsible for hosting content, without being able to define policies and behavior. I think the Fediverse is the closest we’ll get to public social media.