If censorship and battles over permissible speech were already in play three decades ago, why all the sudden interest now and the focus on social media platforms?
The answer is that the technological limitations of the early Internet led to a decentralized and fragmented landscape of control in which early content-moderation efforts were extremely limited in their effects. Today, by contrast, just a handful of companies largely decides what constitutes permissible speech. Just a few companies control the plumbing of the Internet. Just two decide what is permissible on mobile phones in most of the world. Uber and Lyft account for 98% of the U.S. ridesharing market. Airbnb constitutes 20% of domestic lodging expenditures. Amazon accounts for 72% of new adult book sales. All have rules about what their users are permitted to see and say, and these mammoth corporations aggressively silence users with whom they disagree. They also increasingly move in lockstep, banishing users from the digital world. Even free-speech bastions Parler and Truth Social have been forced to partially adopt Silicon Valley’s speech rules as the cost of participating in today’s web. …
In the end, today’s existential battles over free speech online owe in no small part to the centralization of the Internet’s speech rules in the hands of a few authoritarian-minded companies. Returning to the web’s decentralized past might create enough of an off-ramp to allow the web to accommodate an increasingly diverse global community.
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