Apple TV Was Making a Show About Gawker. Then Tim Cook Found Out
I believe the following statements are simultaneously true, yet rarely simultaneously acknowledged:<p>1) The First Amendment says nothing about which content companies must produce, promote, or allow with their resources and on their platforms.<p>2) The principle of free speech extends beyond the First Amendment or government censorship: our society has a considerable interest in the open exchange of ideas and information, <i>especially</i> by the least popular among us, so that we may conduct the difficult conversations which are the prerequisite for progress, and possess the freedoms of thought and communication which are the prerequisites for enlightenment.<p>3) The increasing centralization of control over new media in a handful of large technology companies (mainly Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter) poses an intense threat to the aforementioned open exchange of ideas, especially where such ideas may threaten business interests of those companies, or merely taint them by association with something or someone unpopular.<p>4) The lack of collective immunity to viral forms of political disinformation on new media platforms, the speed with which such disinformation spreads, and the active, asymmetric promotion of that disinformation by certain political actors, poses a paradox of tolerance of a sort, threatening the continuation of the open society on which everything good depends.<p>These four truths form a tangled knot which must be cut, but to do so, we must first see its whole, and not merely one or two of its threads.