Would Facebook be better if they implemented a "no political content" rule and paid users who flagged political material?

@Fired That's not censorship though.

There's all kinds of accepted censorship. If you showed porn or called for violence in public, you'd be arrested. Both of these happen frequently on political posts on Facebook, leading to real world violence

@plungesponge @Ynotisay Expressing a political opinion is a lot different to promoting violence or showing pornographic material, we shouldn’t take away people’s freedom of expression because of the actions of the few, the majority of people don’t resort to violence over politics.

@Fired Private companies can share whatever they want or don't want. That's not censorship. Censorship by the government is unconstitutional. Offering a political opinion as an individual, within the confines with the law, is an entirely different matter.

@Ynotisay It isn’t that black and white unfortunately.

@Fired Yes. Yes it is. The word "censorship" is on of the most frequently misused words out there. For obvious reasons. But it doesn't change what it means. If Facebook decided to delete all posts by people named "Steve" they're well within their rights to do that.

@Ynotisay It highlights the issue of how important things like social media is in modern times, as mentioned before, it can easily be used as a tool to incite violence and so forth.

Censorship needs to be adapted to cover these vital services as well, as large corporations like Facebook, are extremely powerful, and they could easily orchestrate movements through controlling their platform in a certain way.

It isn’t that it isn’t censorship, it is that the old protections are outdated, as corporate manipulation is a more common danger in these modern times than government interference.

@Ynotisay When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power.