After the capitol riots, Trump was removed from social media by tech monopolies, effectively silencing the President of the United States. Then when supporters tried to set up their own sites, the sites themselves were removed by another tech monopoly. These tech monopolies have dramatically demonstrated they have more power than the leader of the free world.
Trump's words and actions are seditious, and words intended to promote insurrection are and should be illegal. But these tech monopolies go much further and suppress conservative views simply because they deem them to be false, by standards they themselves create.
Section 230 is part of a federal law which provides immunity for website publishers from third-party content. The law is broken. If a publisher gets to edit content (other than as required by law) then they are responsible for content.
It is not hard to imagine a future in which the laws governing tech monopolies are written by the monopolies themselves and any objections to this arrangement would be simply silenced.
On its face, the First Amendment only applies to the government, but it is the government's responsibility to protect the people from abusive monopolies. The constitution was designed to protect the people from tyranny. A rogue government is not the only possible threat to our liberty.
We are seeing a fight between those who would overthrow our democracy and those who would overthrow the First Amendment. The rest of us are caught in between.
In other news, OpenAI has made its GPT-3 software available as web service to software companies without providing the source code. This software is capable of generating text on any subject virtually indistinguishable from that produced by humans. The company was founded on open principles, among which is the premise that closed source AI research is dangerous to humanity. But they found it impossible to financially support their work and in 2019 sold out to Microsoft and went closed source. Now the users of their software are carefully selected in order to prevent nefarious uses, among other criteria.
If this stuff doesn't scare you, you are not paying attention.
