> people not be allowed to communicate with each other
People should not be allowed to communicate certain things which lead to harm to other people, no. I don't understand why this gets turned into "people not be allowed to communicate" (implying "at all"?).
The picture I was trying to paint, albeit not very well, was that there was no group that we could trust to decide which things people should be allowed to say, and which things they shouldn't be. (I didn't get the point across very well, so we ran in to a race condition after I decided to retract it. Sorry.)
If we think that Facebook should decide what's permissible, then that's US culture being the global nanny. If we let the local government decide what's permissible, then you better watch out because every single genocide in history has involved demonizing the victims as the real danger (so, their speech would be pointed at as "harmful" and banned, the perpetrators would be painted as organizing a just revolution). The worst genocides were conducted with state support, and wouldn't be stopped if local national governments were moderating Facebook. Forming a special panel to decide which groups deserve to get their message out seems like a very dangerous and poorly motivated concentration of power. I can't think of any other ways to decide which speech is dangerous and ban it, therefore I conclude we're stuck with not doing it.
Outside of human based moderation the real issue is that Facebook is deciding what will people see on the feed all the time. People somehow try to liken Facebook to post office, or whatever, like it's some dumb pipe. It is not.
Facebook shows you from the feeds of your "friends" whatever the company decided. Probably based on some algorithms, but it could be millions of cats rolling over the keyboards for it's not public what Facebook really does.
Third parties analyze and weaponize this behavior for many things from comercial interests, to justifying murder, to incitement to violence.
Facebook needs to be held responsible for its algorithms. Somehow. Stupid autonomous car makers will eventually be held accountable for their algorithms too. It's not like they can put some crap in their EULA and be done with it.
PS: Add to it that Facebook is the internet in some places. It's not just one of the websites.
There's one thing I don't understand when people say things like this. Who would enforce this? Well governments would. And so you want our government to have the overt right to spy on people and punish them for private speech that the government will be the final arbiters of deciding right versus wrong on? I mean think about this. History has shown that it's not a question of if but when bad actors take over governments. And even when the actors are not overtly malicious this would be a dubious idea.
Many people today wish we had a more open world, myself among them. Do you know we didn't used to even have passports? There was no 'schengen zone.' You could freely travel between nations as a human. But as a "temporary war measure" passports began to be required in WW1. And once governments had that new level of power and control, they of course not only did not relinquish it but expanded it magnitudes over. In the US income tax was another "temporary war measure." Government is not your enemy, but it is also not your friend. Beware of the implications of granting power to an authority who does not, or at some time will not, necessarily have your best interests in mind.
Traditionally libel/slander are the obvious examples, but modern examples include identity theft (A takes out a loan from B in the name of C => harm to C), security breaches (A leaks C's password from B's website), "revenge porn", outing people's sexuality without their consent (can get people killed), terrorist radicalisation (A convinces B to murder C), and so on.
"Well, which one? Some communications are harmful to third parties."
A recent example of this are the ability for conspiracy theorists to communicate news stories after these mass shootings that these attacks were staged or the victims are "Fake". This further pushes harmful propaganda that there is not a real threat to students in schools, and the "third party" children are the ones who suffer from this communication.
