If you allow one party to say whatever they want but don’t apply the same standard to the other it’s wrong.Are they really applying the standards differently for different "sides"? Minimus thinks so, and says it's "wrong", but other folks disagree.
Yes, they are. But is a bit trickier than that. If they define a standard as "no hate speech" - what does that effectively mean? The concept of "hate speech" is not compatible with the first amendment. I think they key here is that the standards that they are uniformly applying are, in themselves, political. For example, if there is a policy (applied across the board) that you must respect the "gender preference" of other posters, then officially you have banned posts on this topic from anyone that has a different view of gender / sex - this is a political and cultural issue.
These companies need to be held responsible.By whom? By what authority?
It is not about regulating in an affirmative manner. It is recognizing that these tech companies market themselves to the world as "platforms" in the sense of 230. They declare themselves to be a place where free speech is important, and under that guise the take the immunity against liability that 230 grants to them. They simply wouldn't exist without this government protection. But the government protection comes at a cost: conduct yourselves like platforms.
If someone says "I don't think there are 70 genders - there are only two" and that is "hate speech" that gets taken down, that is the behavior of a publisher.
Note: It is not the act of taking down content that indicates publisher-like behavior. It is the unobjective basis on which it is taken down. And it is not the uniformity of the application, it is also the rules by which the application is applied. (i.e. - Am I allowed to say Black Lives Matter, but Blue Lives Matter gets taken down)
If you don't like what the New York times prints, buy the New York Post. If you don't like Stephen King's novels, don't read them. If you don't like Twitter's policies, don't support them.
This is conflating a few things. First, the NYT is a publisher. They can be a publisher. But if (somehow) the NYT publishes defamatory or illegal information, they are liable. They don't get the immunity. Since that is their designation (as a publisher), they have complete control of their paper. They can publish communist propaganda all day long, and nobody can force them to do otherwise. But they are responsible for the content.
Twitter, on the other hand, has declared itself to be a platform. And with that, they have grabbed the governments immunity against the content on their platform. But the rules of a platform are different. They don't have to worry about liability, but you can't also start to engage in publisher-like behavior.
Simon has no obligation to post pro-JW screeds on this site in the interest of "fairness". It's his site. He can do what he wants.
Yeah, its not about forcing someone to post information on the other side. That is not the issue here.
Twitter is a private company with certain policies and standards.
Yeah, and they can have those. No problem. Unless....(next sentence)
They choose to allow or prohibit certain users and content.
Nope, they are a platform, right? They have to have an objective criteria for kicking someone off. For example, a telephone company can terminate your service if you don't pay for it. It doesn't matter if you are white, black, brown, asian, Democrat, Republican, communist, bald, hairy, etc. You don't pay, your service gets shut off. See what I mean? In exchange for that type of platform behavior, if you happen to be coordinating a bank robbery over their service, they aren't held responsible in any way.
What law obligates them to do so according to something other than their own determination?
It is important to note: There is no obligation here. If you want to be a publisher, great! But you shouldn't get the immunity of a platform.