They way you formulate your reply, I can do nothing but agree...
But: what companies should or shouldn't do is not in any condition part of what they ARE ALREADY doing... Or formulated differently: not what is conceived of as proper from an abstract prescriptive ethical perspective should guide considerations about censorship etc but what companies etc are doing that can and does in fact become the basis for any ethics whatsoever...
In this respect, companies are part of the process that creates ethical prescriptions because they do first what is then considered "proper"... That means, if we don't want democratic freedom to cease to exist, it is inevitable to consider non-governmental organization (commercial or non-commercial) as a vital and inevitable part of the chain of legislation...
Even as a retailer they DO influence ethics that means that in this respect, they ARE the street corner as far as censorship is concerned... And this is actually what I was pointing out in the first place: being part of a mechanism of censorship they DO perform censorship (or as you would put it, editorial control, something that is part of censorship to a varyin extent, depending on the overall influence of an orgnization)...
What I was trying to show was that it is impossible to tell where censorship begin because there simply cannot exist a clear dividing line... Amazon of course may or may not want to sell products of such and such a flavor but it is wrong to say that they do that without any consequences because it has nothing to do with censorship by a definition that does not contain this connection...
(ethically this of course implies that Amazon's behavior should be inquired according to standards applied when inquiring censorship, what follows from that is another matter: laws might force companies to censor but that does not mean that it's not censorship anymore)...
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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
They aren't.
The news media are colloquially referred to as the "fourth branch of government" in the US. That does not mean that news media are obligated to eschew any and all editorial controls, or that retailers are obligated to carry every piece of content available.
Corporations do not have any obligations to promulgate any ideas or content.
Nor is there any viable mechanism to ensure that all viewpoints are given 100% equal media or retailer attention. What should we do -- supply bookstores with an equal number of books by Noam Chomsky, William F. Buckley and Stephen King? Force retailers to carry incest erotica, and then force people to buy it?
Incorrect.
It's clear Amazon, Apple, Walmart, Fox and numerous other companies have an influence. That is not the point.
Retailers have the legal and moral right to exercise editorial controls -- even if it does so in a manner that someone (usually the aggrieved party) regards as "unfair." To require Amazon to publish anything and everything is not only highly unusual, it deprives them of their rights to exercise editorial control over their own business.
You, as an individual, have the right to say what you want. But the right to free speech does not, in any way shape or form, guarantee you access to a specific platform for your views or content. If I do not want to distribute your ideas, I am not obligated to do so -- no matter how influential I am.
Amazon is a retailer. They are not a utility, an ISP or a street corner. I suggest you learn the difference.
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