There was much celebration last week among online progressives when Facebook gave the boot to some racist cretins: the straightforwardly monikered Aryan Strikeforce, both the Wolves and Soldiers of Odin, the Canadian Nationalist Front, and Faith Goldy, the gormless ideological hobo who seems to have parked her bindle for good on white nationalism.
What’s alarming is just how mainstream the idea suddenly seems to have become that governments should step in to regulate social media companies, to force them to take actions like these sooner, to more aggressively weed out everything from neo-Nazi propaganda to garden-variety “fake news.
“Citizens have really shifted their perspective on this away from what was ultimately a very American-style notion of free speech, that was absolutist, to something a little bit different and closer to our national norms, regulations and laws,” McGill professor Taylor Owen told CBC Radio’s Anna Maria Tremonti.First of all, though many Canadians clearly believe otherwise, very-nearly-unfettered free speech isn’t just an American idea.
Case in point:
Twitter admits they can and do ban people for posting legal speech, if it's the 'wrong' politics. Imagine if any other company did the same. Social media needs to be regulated to protect free speech.
I might agree if social media had not positioned themselves as the public square and excepted benefit from the government for their free and open unbiased platform