Gresham’s Law of the Internet
The “chief policy officer” of Parler, the social media platform that recently got kicked off of Amazon’s servers after it was exposed as a hotbed of planning for the January 6 insurrection, has been going around peddling a lot of nonsense about “censorship” and “surveillance.”
What she describes as “censorship” is pressure on social media platforms “to moderate, as they call it, content on their platforms, but that would require 24-hour surveillance, and we don’t think that is consistent with the principles of America.”
What she describes in skeptical tones as what “they” call moderation is, in fact, moderation. “Moderation” is the proper, technical legal term for what happens when the host of a forum decides what is and is not allowed to appear on that forum. Not only is this moderation the exact opposite of censorship—private hosts making the decisions instead of government—it is also an essential function platforms serve that has helped build the modern Internet.
Read the rest at The Bulwark.