Private companies are not required to provide you with freedom of speech. If you don’t like the way they run things go to myspace although from what i’ve seen they are pretty ban happy over there also…. I guess you could start your own site.

You do have the freedom to choose to use it or not after all.

dave_in_atl doesn’t see the bigger perspective, about how things like “get all your medical records in one place” will just yield more of this stuff like “you don’t” exist.

An apocryphal story about a man who was declared dead to some computer and they couldn’t get the computer to accept the idea that the guy wasn’t so.

The art part? I can’t find the story on-line right now — maybe it never will be so — but I read an SF story about a man who got a library overdue notice about his borrowing a copy of Stevenson’s _Kidnapped_. Through successive messages, in a computer version of the “telephone game”, it turns into an arrest and conviction for kidnapping a boy named Robert Stevenson, and the guy is executed when even the governor can’t access the computer to issue a pardon.

I won’t argue that a private company ought have the ability to conduct its business as it sees fit. I would of course not desire to be forced to publish via my business views I regard as highly disturbing or dangerous.

My argument then is that it is in the best interests of facebook to embrace one of two policies: 1, an outright ban on all political content or 2, an attitude as close to laissez-faire as is possible. Certainly, there need to be some ground rules – no threats, abhorrent language, etc. But beyond this, anything goes.

One’s facebook friends are self-selectors. No one has to read anyone else’s posts. If a friend bothers another, the offended can defriend the offender. Or, should he desire to keep him a friend, yet not see his political content, he can easily filter such content.

facebook is a large entity, in its membership. Those members inhabit a large spectrum of philosophies. It is not in facebook’s best interests to censor a large swath of its members’ content. there are alternatives to facebook waiting in the wings for such missteps.

remain. that is a current problem is that Facebook won’t ban those groups “in the interest of free speech” but will block them in countries where such groups are against the law.

Basically, Facebook has a code of conduct that they apply arbitrarily. They can have a code of conduct as a private company, but they need to apply it consisently. Once can also make the argument they are a place of public accomodation so they can regulat but not ban using discrminatory means.