Joining other failing dot-com 3.0 failing concerns, Google has now demonstrated its bias in favor of politically correct censorship by banning the “Ban Sharia” online group, which was a middle-right opposition to Islamic immigration to the West.
We live in a time when almost all public spaces are owned by large corporations to whom ideas like the First Amendment do not technically apply; after all, they own the computers and wires through which the content passes, and they are made legally liable for some content, so they have the “right” to remove offensive content.
This does not address the fact that public spaces are a function of a civilization, and are needed as places for open expression regardless of who “owns” the particular content. The Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon of today are the public houses and central commons of yesteryear, at least as far as digital communications go. Ownership is not the right paradigm here.
An intelligent approach to these spaces, then, would be to limit nothing but illegal activity (child porn, doxxing, piracy) while allowing each person to find their own corner of the commons with the group that attracts them. These would then find others like them and be able to socialize and exclude others, and be excluded by them, in the perpetual sorting process that is the growth of civilizations.
Naturally, no one will endorse such a logical solution, or the notion that a user both owns his or her words and, if offered a service, is given the reasonable assumption that the service will continue to host those words unless they are illegal. Instead, as usual, the forces of Control are using manipulation to achieve their goal of power without accountability.
Tags: ban sharia, censorship, commons, google