I have no idea what happened during the early 2010s. I grew up during the late 90s (born in late 80s) learning about the internet and its philosophies. Allowing Free speech still is the hill I'd like to die on. But the new generation of people, even here on HN and the internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship that I don't believe I'm in a proper reality/timeline anymore.
New technologies brought new challenges. There was no social network in the 2000s and before. No retweet button, no "curated" timeline that showed you what you "like". YouTube did not try to push more videos like the ones you watched previously until the mid 2010s.
Free speech does not have the same meaning as before. Before it just meant that you could say whatever you wanted. Now people use it implicitly to mean that they can say whatever they want, but also that they are entitled to have their thoughts broadcasted at large using the amplification mechanisms I mentioned above.
While I believe free speech is a good thing, I believe free amplification is terrible.
If you think about it, before social networks, amplification was done through TV and newspapers, and those have editorial boards that filters the content they share. If a newspaper's staff is pro-environment, they can prevent any columnist writing anything that denies climate change, and it's not controversial.
However the problem is how do we decide who can get free amplification and who can't? Based on what?
My preference would be that no one is, and we go back to uncurated things and to an internet where you have to look for the things you want to read/watch, versus getting content pushed onto you.
I agree wholeheartedly: the "right to free speech" is not the same as a "right to be heard", but we have managed to conflate the two with all of this "free amplification", as you describe; there is a big difference between someone getting to say something to their followers and that content being broadcast and even recommended by Twitter to random people. I personally believe that if a website has a recommendation algorithm that should be considered an editorial decision they are making and they should be liable for the content they recommend (and much more so than they are today: the same level of standard we hold a newspaper to should apply); but, if a user merely posts something and people have to actively choose to follow the poster, then that's on them (as the website is acting as a utility connecting consenting parties). Doing it like this (which might even be the status quo of the law if Section 230 is repealed, btw) changes what kinds of apps can be built and what businesses models are viable "at scale", but almost certainly for the better: apps that work like how Instagram used to--where you just saw content from exactly who you followed in the order they posted it... something many (if not maybe even most) users preferred but which was clearly less profitable for Facebook--seem like they should be fine and you should get to post whatever you want to the people who opted in to hear what you had to say. People who generally like recommendation systems try to defend all of their algorithmic amplification, and then the sometimes-arbitrary-feeling censorship seemingly required to make them universally viable, but here we see Twitter taking the ridiculously extreme position to even block private messages... the regulatory fallout of this political decision is going to be fascinating to watch.
I'm also curious on another aspect, as I don't believe "right to free speech" is meant in any way to imply a lack of liability for damages caused by that speech.
If I convince millions of people that Example companies widgets kills kittens, when I have no reason to believe that to be the case, I would be held liable for the damage to the brand.
But the pseudo-anonymous nature of the internet and most platforms, and even trying to avoid problems like the Streisand effect allow damaging speech to avoid consequence.
I'm not advocating for any approach to fix the problem, this is just a curiosity of mine as of late.
> I'm also curious on another aspect, as I don't believe "right to free speech" is meant in any way to imply a lack of liability for damages caused by that speech.
It depends what you meant. The law doesn't give carte blanche to say whatever you want, however you want, either. Your example above is what libel and slander laws are about. People make (probably millions) of false claims about companies daily and none of them rise to the level of a credible accusation largely because they're done anonymously. Someone who could actually "convince millions of people" probably has at least SOMETHING damning, and if they don't, the backpressure from everyone else is going to be pretty intense. That's actually _normal_. Desirable.
_Some_ speech _does_ require freedom from damage because otherwise the direct effect is the chilling effect. Political speech is specifically one type of such speech. The internet really has forced us to look carefully at what kinds of speech warrant that protection and which don't and we clearly haven't figured it out yet.
But certainly giving that power to private companies - and removing it from the hands of the people, the government, the law, the courts, and posterity -- is _definitively not_ the right way to do it.
Yea sorry if I was unclear, I was referring to slander and libel civil actions, and using an intentionally contrived example that probably didn't fall into the grey area as I intended.
I think the really difficult part about all of it is, the areas that don't require protections, aren't because the speech isn't damaging, it's that an uneven application of the rules can lead to worse problems. Or issues where it's impossible to find objective neutral parties (a jury) to decide on issues central to politics.
It's sad that mainstream media outlets even get away with slander in politics. Everything is twisted either to fit their views or just to make outlandish headlines to get clicks.
I believe the vast majority of the content you see on Twitter and pretty much everything you see on Facebook is from people you follow (ads excluded). Twitter/FB though use an algorithmic feed mechanism to reorder the posts which makes sense. I think they should be transparent about how they generate the feed, but I don't think you can hold them accountable for the content of a post someone made just because it got reordered to the top by an algorithm.
The block is only needed because of the amplification. If tweets and posts showed up chronologically vs from ML-driven engines to identifying the most grabbing content, we wouldn't be systemically hyper-charging emotionally hooking misinformation.
You don't need to unplug the bullhorn if there is no bullhorn.
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all used to use chronological feeds instead of ones sorted by personalized algorithms. They switched to the latter because they found they could make the platforms more addictive and increase screen time and therefore ad revenue. Doing so also involved them making the algorithms purposefully seek out inflammatory content in many cases to show to users because that keeps the user on the platform longer.
Nobody's systematically hyper charging emotionally hooking anything. This is or rather, without the artificial suppression, would be completely 100% organically viral.
It shouldn't be up to absolutely obviously partisan corporations to decide which October surprise info dump is misinformation deserving of censorship, and which is the aok rough and tumble of presidential electioneering.
Finally, on the facts, the Steele dossier was far more obviously fraudulent than pictures of hunter smoking a crack pipe in the bathtub...
But it's okay, because they own the platform. the people on twitter complaining about it are free to start their own twitter-like platform. It's a great country that allows this.
If they want to take that stance, they should also be held liable for anything posted to "their" platform, from porn to slander, fake news, and any personal insults.
They are trying to claim control only when it suits them and not when there may be liability. Can't have it both ways.
Don't compare the whole world to private property. When someone comes along and complains "Hey you censored my post" their response amounts to "We control over what is acceptable on our site". At that point haven't they just taken responsibility for all the content on their site? I suppose they could claim they're going to censor certain things on certain high profile accounts as a policy for [reasons]. Maybe?
There are multiple levels. While I like the idea of separating seeing only what my followers post and seeing other posts, it gets really blurry when the people I follow are clicking the "like" and "retweet" buttons. I would guestimate around 30% or more of my twitter feed are posts people I follow have liked or retweeted rather than posted on their own.
And the network can make that happen on its own, without an algorithm reordering content - if someone I follow is retweeting something that someone they follow retweeted.
Liable in what sense? Who would have standing to sue? The New York Post hasn't suffered any damages. (US courts don't consider loss of potential revenue from hypothetical newspaper sales or web traffic to be damages.)
If you choose to follow disinformation posted by a hostile nation state, is that a right to free speech or free amplification? What if those voices argue harmful or destructive effects on you and your society?
I guess the line is so blurred because often these aren't "people" but often institutions, governments and those intending to shape public opinion, even bots in some cases.
You're talking about it like Twitter is censoring someone specifically but it's so much more complicated and nuanced than that.
It's exactly what they were saying at the invention of the printing press. Amplification becoming too cheap. Maybe being on the side of censorship is always being on the wrong side of history no matter the issue. Can you remember one time in history where we now like "thanks god they censor these thoughts!"?
How exactly is press free amplification? How do I get my random opinion broadcasted to a newspaper audience? I would probably have to write an opinion column and send it to the journal, then they would read it, and decide whether or not they want to publish it.
If it's the NYT for example, you can be sure that no matter how well written your piece is, they will never publish something that pushes the theory that COVID-19 is a plot by Bill Gates to put chips into everyone.
But you can probably find a sketchy, low-audience journal that would.
Well it's the same thing, a well known community was banned from Reddit to prevent them from using Reddit's amplification mechanism (/r/all etc), but they now have their own clone of it, with a smaller audience, that you are free to consult.
"Free amplicfication" isn't about absolute lack of cost, it's about cost relative to older mechanisms. The printing press allowed information to spread much faster and more cheaply than having a monk write it by hand. It also allowed ideas that were not monk-approved to appear in print. When it first came out people were pretty upset about the incorrect ideas that propogated as a result.
Eventually people with power figured out how to mostly control the printing press and so created the heavily gate-kept institutions you describe. The transitions our society is facing now echo these past struggles.
There are similarities with those past struggles, but the differences are significant.
We cannot simply hand-wave some of them away as "the struggles every new medium faces."
Printed materials were still pretty gate-kept. Sure, anybody could spend a modest sum and get a bunch of roughly-printed pamphlets printed up. You could walk around London and hand them out. People did, and I suppose some of these ideas got traction. And some of those ideas were even good.
That was still a lot of money and effort, and it was still a lot of work to establish some kind of credibility so that your ideas might actually gain acceptance. Otherwise you were just a crazy person handing out pamphlets along with all of the other crazy people.
Today, you can post insane and dangerous COVID-19 falsehoods to half of the freaking world via YouTube or Facebook and your message is indistinguishable from ideas presented by people who actually know what they're talking about.
The gatekeeping America used to have was... not great. Network television's self-censorship was often stodgy, at best. But you didn't have absolute fucking lunatics screaming about chemtrails and Bill Gate's 5G microchip mind-control scheme racking up literally millions of followers. That is a PROBLEM.
If you say to me that the ideal solution is to simply have a more educated populace, I wouldn't disagree. However, that doesn't solve things now. We need long-term solutions (education) as well as short-term ones (so we don't have the loonies electing other loonies who actually get to steer the most powerful militaries on the planet)
"But you didn't have absolute fucking lunatics screaming about chemtrails and Bill Gate's 5G microchip mind-control scheme racking up literally millions of followers. That is a PROBLEM."
This article is about blocking a story by the NY Post. It may be true or may be false, but it already passed the traditional gatekeepers.
This article is about blocking a story by the NY Post.
It may be true or may be false, but it already passed
the traditional gatekeepers.
It passed a gatekeeper, and was refuted by others. And if you're describing the NY Post as a "traditional gatekeeper", you're not familiar with the NY Post.
In the distant past of 2007, the National Enquirer broke a sex scandal involving democratic politician John Edwards which often is thought to have played a major role in the 2008 dem primaries.
Should factually accurate information that matters to people be rejected or hidden because of style? Who gets to decide the correct style? Would you apply the same standards to alternately aligned publications of questionable style, like WaPo/HuffPo?
The National Enquirer is listed at the edge between "Propaganda / Contains Misleading Info" (2nd lowest category) and "Contains Inaccurate / Fabricated Info" (lowest category).
The argument that Twitter or FB need to restrict/block content is based on the idea that Twitter/FB built readership for "lunatics" in the first place.
Bu that argument doesn't apply here for two reasons:
1. The NY Post has existed in some form for 200 years, and has built its own reader base.
The NY Post is old (founded by Alexander Hamilton!) but in recent decades has truly evolved into a gleefully trashy and conservatively opinionated newspaper, having been run by Rupert Murdoch for some time.
I completely fail to see how their rights are somehow being impinged here. They have their own mini-media empire and are part of a larger media empire.
How... exactly are they being stifled and why is Twitter obligated to amplify their voice?
I would certainly agree that this does fall afoul of Section 230, which I think was a great foundation but could use some serious rethinking.
That's the crux of it. There is surprise that Twitter even has a "bar". People used to think of Twitter in one way, and now Twitter's actions have encouraged people to think of Twitter in a different way.
So twitter is not an impartial conduit - instead it is editorial and opinionated, and should face legal accountability for it's views as such, in the same way as newspapers?
> The New York Post’s front-page article about Hunter Biden on Wednesday was written mostly by a staff reporter who refused to put his name on it, two Post employees said.
> Bruce Golding, a reporter at the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid since 2007, did not allow his byline to be used because he had concerns over the article’s credibility, the two Post employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.
...
> Many Post staff members questioned whether the paper had done enough to verify the authenticity of the hard drive’s contents, said five people with knowledge of the tabloid’s inner workings. Staff members also had concerns about the reliability of its sources and its timing, the people said.
> Today, you can [print] insane and dangerous ... falsehoods and your message is indistinguishable from ideas presented by people who actually know what they're talking about.
I bet the response of the Catholic clergy to the printing press was probably pretty similar to this statement. And the ideas of the reformation were certainly far more dangerous than any chemtrail conspiracy.
Chemtrail conspiracy theories are... pretty insignficant. If your goal is to eradicate all conspiratorial wrongthink of this magnitude or greater, you are going to run into ~a lot~ of problems. Epstein memes are very popular.
One, nobody is taking away your right to say or think things. This is about Twitter's obligation (or lack thereof) to broadcast your thoughts to others.
They are not burning you at the stake like a vengeful Catholic church during the Inquisition or outlawing your thoughts like "wrongthink" in 1984.
Two, the printing press analogy is highly flawed. Twitter is like the owner of one specific printing press, not some entity that controls all printing presses. If you owned a printing press, would you want to be obligated to print things you find factually and harmful?
I assume you'd certainly want the freedom to turn down printing jobs. Or do only certain freedoms matter?
> If you say to me that the ideal solution is to simply have a more educated populace, I wouldn't disagree. However, that doesn't solve things now.
Even in the long term, how are you going to produce this more educated populace? Or rather, who are you going to entrust with the task? The same educational establishment that produced the current populace?
But even if you can produce your more educated populace, you still have the problem that the Russian trolls aren't going to stand still. They're going to be better, too, by then.
Or rather, who are you going to entrust with the task?
The same educational establishment that produced the
current populace?T
Ideally, education teaches critical thinking, not a specific indoctrination.
Education, obviously, often falls short of this ideal and you don't necessarily need formal education to be a critical thinker.
I do think that's pretty achievable. When I went through school in the 80s and 90s we weren't exactly devoid of this sort of thing.
Absurd ideas like chemtrails and flat-eartherism don't last very long in the face of the slightest hint of critical thinking.
But even if you can produce your more educated populace,
you still have the problem that the Russian trolls aren't
going to stand still. They're going to be better, too, by
then.
I certainly don't disagree, but doing a better job of critical thinking certainly seems like a reasonable first step no matter what else we do.
How much funding is adequate? I'm so sick of hearing that throwing more money at X is our only solution. Per capita education spending has gone up significantly in the past 30 years.
Enough to pay teachers an enviable wage, so that the job is desirable and competitive, even in poor neighborhoods (not just the schools with good test scores). Funding education reduces crime, homelessness, poverty... it's not a magic bullet and you don't just get there by throwing money at the problem, but with good policy and adequate funding, education is just about the biggest payoff investments that we can make as a society.
Personally I actually get value from HN, there's plenty that is informative and useful here and I consider HN a discussion forum. Social media is more what I would term fb where the main point is about the social connections, instead of the discussion and learning the discussion implies, in my opinion.
As for concrete proposals .. it's a massive topic, and full of interdependent systems and feedback loops and it might be hubris if anyone says 'heres a single concrete proposal to address it all'.. but here's some thoughts more on identifying issues to address in the context of schools, and aligning the results of schooling to learning.
A natural process of learning, especially for children, is to copy an image/role model/idol and learn through imagining themselves as that role model.
What are the social aspirations, or role models, that children usually idolise in our current schools and society? Film stars, sports stars, super models, instagram 'influences' which are usually just models ..
Common themes amongst these: glamourous lives, big money, social capital.
Another common theme is accomplishment in those fields does not have a linear relationship to hard work, to learning, and to the cultivation of knowledge.
Instead it's about coolness, social gaming, and largely about genetic lottery of beauty or sporting ability - yes some hard work but that's not going to get you far without these other pre-requisites.
It's also about luck, so rewards are not linearly related to effort, thus the payoff for effort is very uncertain.
Actually accomplishment in those fields is mostly a winner takes all market environment, so most people can never find success, and the majority of people who realise that they can't ever succeed to their aspirations give up putting in effort, it's a cause of apathy.
So the mainstream kids who idolise mainstream 'stars' aren't incentivised to learn and apply themselves mentally, they are incentivised to try to be cool, play social games, preen themselves for physical beauty, and hope to heck they are lucky .. and the vast majority has to face the unhappy reality they will never be stars.
That's a problem. What if their role models were Einstein who had a talent for imagining and discovering interesting things about the world, even as he worked a mundane job as a clerk (in the patent office). What if social capital for the mainstream classes was accrued to people who worked hard and made sensible decisions and created useful things, instead of to playing social gaming and trying to look beautiful/rich/make other people jealous and 'influence'.
So I don't have a concrete proposal, or the 'answers', but (I think) at least this is asking some of the right questions!
Very flawed comparison. The government lying to you is one thing. The government has literal life and death control over you and others. There is only one government and we can't easily choose another.
These things are not true about Twitter. You can go post on your own Mastodon instance or the Daily Stormer or the Fox News comment section if Twitter is too restrictive for your liking.
Also, do you recognize the irony/insanity of complaining about this on Hacker News, a strongly-moderated platform? HN's centralized moderation is far more stringent.
I believe the consequences of professional, expert misinformation -- half a million civilian casualties -- pales in comparison to the amateur hour on Twitter. I'm referring to New York Times reporting in the lead up to the Iraq war, which was later found to be purposeful fraud, and played a huge role in juicing the public for war.
You don't need to look very far to find other examples.
The "press" has historically not been neutral; political sheets/tabloids heavily aligned with specific parties or individuals were very common in American history until the 20th century. There was little, if any, notion of "journalistic integrity" - they were simply a way to get out what specific persons wanted heard.
It's not a great comparison because both entities are regulated completely different based on what they allow on their platform/paper with exceptions to certain things. That's where people are getting confused. If you curate the news, you can be held liable for things published, if you don't you are allowed a pass (with some exceptions.) By stepping in actively censor a news story that has yet to be disputed, social media platforms have opened themselves up to being held liable for -all- posts.
> They removed links to a story that violated their published policies.
I am not sure that it matters 'why they censored'.
Put it another way, I do not think it matters if they applied their own ToS rules correctly, incorrectly, selectively or whatever.
I am not sure that their terms of service, allow them to claim protection under 47.230 [1]
I am sure that the position that the fed government investigators will take.
If Twitter folks (or their crowd-sourced moderators, or committees) gray-out/remove/comment on/hide/edit content that Twitter claims 'is not theirs' -- then it is hard to imaging they are compliant with the 'non-publisher' protections of section 47.230.
Imagine if one is a for-profit business, claiming tax code for a non-profit organization.
Their Terms Of Service mentions: 'Making the world better and being charitable. We do not do business with bad clients'.
Does that make that business less criminally liable for claiming taxes of a non-profit?
I don't agree with the comparison either, but, in the 16th century just about everyone could make a broad side and disseminate whatever they wanted.
Literally, wars were started because of this. Similar to today's information age propaganda wars and disinformation, physical media was used in a similar way. There are some valid comparisons here.
It's not an entirely inappropriate comparison. The similarities are obvious, and they are extremely relevant.
However, relative to the days of broadsides, the barrier to entry for dissemination of ideas has decreased by orders of magnitude and the potential reach of such ideas has increased by orders of magnitude.
It's like comparing slingshots and nuclear weapons. Yes, they're both things that let you hurt people from a distance.
Huh that's a cool comparison. I guess society will have a rough patch when a new, more accessible medium of communication is mass released to the public.
For clarity, the printing press was for books. Newspapers did not come along until much later.
Interestingly, the Catholic church was very concerned about the ability to mass produce literature and wanted to have control over what could be published. They didn't want just anyone to be able to publish a book. Imagine giving people a platform to speak out against the Church!
I don't think it's comparable. If social network is the new newspaper, everyone is free to create your own newspaper. That's why I'll always defend net neutrality. But forcing a private institution to adopt a specific editorial stance, THAT'S anti-freedom. In general, we should work to promote alternative platforms, not to force the existing ones to promote what we believe is right.
> If social network is the new newspaper, everyone is free to create your own newspaper.
The main difference is that people buy a newspaper for the information it publishes while people join a social network because their friends are there. A social network starting to editorialize content is therefore a problem since there is really no alternative ways to keep in touch with friends as effectively, meaning these social networks gets to force their opinions on people.
I agree, but I am also a fierce critic of what Facebook and Twitter are doing. By doing this they are actually driving many people to even -more- extreme platforms. I am generally not opposed to them banning antivaxxing, and things that are an active threat to safety...but banning the NY Post story was way too far, and Twitter has even doubled down on it by banning the follow up stories. The thing is that their business models rely on them not being held liable for what is posted, yet by curating things which aren't abhorrent or in the interest of public safety they have opened up a massive can of worms of potentially removing their limited liability from user generated content.
> But forcing a private institution to adopt a specific editorial stance, THAT'S anti-freedom
Who is forcing a private organization to adopt any stance? "Leaving alone" is not the same as "actively promoting." Twitter leaving alone a story does not mean Twitter is promoting that story, that is exactly what section 230 is about.
> not to force the existing ones to promote what we believe is right.
I guess they don't need to pay taxes either, or take a stand against violence, or racism, or....? They still exist within the society in which they function and that means both social and legal rules bind them, same as you or me. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, their status as a corporation doesn't somehow entitle them to a more special or louder voice than any one else's.
Is it the wrong side of history? Early printing is unambiguously connected with violence just as much as it is connected with intellectual freedom. Blood Libel and the associated murders of innocent jews could not have spread in the same manner without broadsheets.
"It is really complicated" is the conclusion that early modern historians of information come to.
> Can you remember one time in history where we now like "thanks god they censor these thoughts!"?
Well, the honest answer to the "can you remember" question is going to be misleading. By the nature of the thing we're talking about, the historical things like that are things that people aren't going to remember.
If you believe in "to the victor go the spoils" on the information front, then successful censorship (and more generally propaganda) is always on the right side of history.
I think a better argument is that being on the side of forcing people to do things is being on the wrong side of history no matter the issue. People should be free to decide, of their own volition, that they want to choose to not amplify something. That's different from being compelled to not amplify it, which is generally bad.
But I can think of a number of examples of censorship that history has not judged poorly:
- Libel and slander. If I say "I used to work with 'hartator and they brought in KKK flags every morning and broke the build every evening, you don't want to hire them," it's generally considered reasonable for you to get the government to force me to stop and also force other people not to repeat what I said.
- Planning crimes. If I say "Hey, let's get together tomorrow evening and murder some strangers for fun," and we start talking about how to do it, it's generally considered reasonable for the government to consider that a crime.
- Trademark infringement and other fair competition laws. If I say "These headphones are recommended by Apple" and they're not, or I say "These apples are organic" and they're not, or I say "This is an all-beef sausage" and it contains pork, it's generally considered reasonable for the government to say that I can't keep saying that if I want to keep selling the things I'm saying them about.
- Employment agreements. If I say "Hey, new employer, here's a list of my old employer's customers and here's some of their source code," it's generally considered reasonable for the old employer to object.
(There are a number of cases of compelled action that are currently not considered unreasonable - prison labor, military drafts, etc. - but I think those stand a much higher chance of being on the wrong side of history, in the long term, than any of the above.)
> Can you remember one time in history where we now like "thanks god they censor these thoughts!"?
Absolutely, of course. Hate speech and Holocaust denial are censored in Europe generally, and a majority of people in those countries today do say support these bans (i.e. they say "thank god"). Because they saw the kind of hateful thinking that led to WWII, and how shockingly easy it is for people to be convinced of revisionist history, and don't want that to be repeated.
Similarly, libel laws function effectively as censorship, but are widely supported. I think most of us are happy that newspapers can't maliciously print lies about common citizens.
(Edit: love that I'm being downvoted for this -- apparently people don't like these objective facts?)
The printing press was also used to fuel deranged, antisemetic hysteria in the form of Martin Luther’s widely-disseminated book, On the Jews and their Lies. So, I guess some things really never do change:
You’re mischaracterizing how free speech was viewed in the recent past. “Free speech” (as a cultural value, I’m not talking about the first amendment) was about the marketplace of ideas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketplace_of_ideas. It meant a free market in ideas, where the dominant ideas arise from competition. What you call “amplification” is just something that makes the marketplace more efficient—it allows ideas to disseminate faster so people can decide which are the good ones and the bad ones. The curation you mention is the antithesis of a free market of ideas.
You're defining "dominant ideas" as the ones that make people the angriest and get the most clicks! That's not the same as quality. That's entirely how those amplification algorithms exist!
Actually, I don't think the "free speech" argument as deployed in defence the unmoderated promotion of fascism actually has a coherent concept of quality: the entire point of the argument is there will never be a time when an idea can legitimately be locked out of "the market", because there simply isn't any fair way to judge ideas.
Whenever the market idea is mentioned, it's always to invoked the principles of unregulated exchange, and not to remind readers of things like legislation about quality control for products to enter the market. And it is always argued that this market should have a constant and unceasing exchange (and more to the point that their particular idea should be given more space), so this isn't a market that works toward a consensus but rather a site that needs to be maintained in constant conflict.
Yep, countries with a greater average IQ have much less people believing dumb theories (e.g about bill gates and covid-19), countries like Japan and South Korea. All countries that reduced funds for public education years ago in a short-sighted attempt to save money are seeing it's dire consequences, and now amplified thanks to the internet.
Teachers still complain they have to pay for school supplies from their pockets [0] [1], and if the money is not going to them I wouldn't really call it educational funding
Ask anyone what they think "educational funding" is and they pretty much will all mention teacher's wages among other things. The single most important thing to get good education is good educators, and to get good educators you need good wages, but I'm pretty sure you already knew that so you are just nitpicking about the exact definition of those words.
That's what they make after 15 years experience, the actual average for all teachers is much lower[0] (it is $38.761), one cause is that about 30% of teachers leave the profession less than 5 years later[1]; for example the average pay for a teacher in NY is 45K, one of the most expensive places to live in the US. According to the OECD itself teachers on the US have one of the longest working hours[3] in the world, this unpaid overtime means money lost due being unable to have a second job or due incurring in costs directly related to lack of time (e.g. eating out thanks to having no time to prepare lunch); the cause of this overtime seems to be lack of prep time in the instructional day as teachers are expected to be actively teaching for most of the day, and are provided woefully few hours for planning, correcting, and collaboration [4]
I don't think I agree that they are mischaracterizing how free speech understood, and I don't think that distinction you are drawing identifies a new idea incompatible with what they are saying. Free speech encompasses a lot of things depending on what you want to emphasize, including a notion in a healthy democracy the best ideas survive critical scrutiny.
As other have mentioned, I think however plausible that conception of speech was then, it's utterly ignorant of the problems we're facing today, where ideas spread for reasons that have nothing to do with merit. If anything, I would think you would want to agree with the person you are replying to that the spread of ideas is not due to good ones rising to the top in a marketplace that is selecting for quality.
> As other have mentioned, I think however plausible that conception of speech was then, it's utterly ignorant of the problems we're facing today
I think it is the exact opposite. Maybe I have read too many dystopian novels like fahrenheit 451, or 1984, or read too much about Chinese govt's control of its population, but I feel that modern technology has allowed too much censorship power in hands of not just the govt, but a few corporations. And it is extremely important that we do not compromise on free speech now.
We're dealing with the net result of a few different forces. Social media has enabled a massive avalanche of misinformation, and of this massive avalanche of misinformation, some subset of that new avalanche gets removed.
The net effect is that there much more misinformation than there has ever been before. Despite the best efforts of twitter, facebook & youtube they appear to have been virtually powerless to halt the spread.
The problem of social media CEOs having too much power is real, and has wrought real damage: Zuckerberg's naive ideas on speech have lead to far too much harm, and now that he's recovering from his free speech trutherism and implementing reforms it's too little, too late.
Lastly I would say that if you are looking at this state of affairs and seeing 1984 or fahrenheit 451, you're seeing things wrong. There are fair examples of that, e.g. Hong Kong, mainland China. But the western internet doesn't fit that at all.
Two keys to an actual functional market place, as you allude to, involves both good faith engagement (you aren't going to convince somebody deliberately out to cause harm to stop with a well reasoned argument) and critical evaluation (something that is practically non existent on most of the internet)
I understand the theoretical argument, but empirically do you think the quality of ideas that people believe has increased from (say) 2000 to 2020?
It seems like there's a lot more going on than just faster dissemination, and the way information travels these days might have introduced new asymmetries and inefficiencies.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
with silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
America has never been about quality. Quality is a result of vigorous and excessive competition.
It is sort of funny to say, "America has never been about quality," while referencing a poem about immigrants who moved here for a better quality of life. I think you've missed something rather obvious.
I think the quality of ideas has improved. We focus on disinformation, but social media gets used for a lot of other things. Reading a dry article on police brutality (which let’s face it, people just skipped over in the past) is a lot less impactful than seeing something shared by a friend.
I think we’re overestimating the effect of social media. A certain group of highly educated urban liberals is shocked by Trump. (And I don’t say this pejoratively. My college educated friends were literally despondent after he was elected.) And they’re looking for an explanation. And it so happened that social media became a major force around the same time. But I think that’s mostly, though not completely, a coincidence.
Social media didn’t create Trump. Right wing populism is happening all over the world, in Europe, India, etc. Its a reaction to liberalism and globalism that’s been brewing for decades. And social media didn’t create Trump’s audience. My mom, a 70-year old Bangladeshi woman who has voted straight ticket Democrat since she was naturalized, thinks Trump is too unpolished, but loves his “energy” and “vigor.” She thinks he would be a “great President” if he could “implement his ideas.” My mom doesn’t have a Twitter account. (I think she’d love Boris Johnson, i.e. Trump with a bit more polish and competent.)
She didn’t get this from Breitbart. She watches CNN in a loop all day.
Social media isn’t not a factor, but I think folks overestimate how much of a factor.
> > A certain group of highly educated urban liberals is shocked by Trump.
> 3 million more people voted for Hillary than Trump.
As I said, I’m not using this as a pejorative. I’m not just talking about folks who voted for Hillary, but ones who were despondent when Trump won. I worked late on election night and got home to an election watching party with DC yuppies and when I walked in the door I thought someone had died. These are the folks who were so stunned the started looking around for an explanation. And social media just happened to be rising at the same time.
Not all Hillary voters reacted that way. My mom and dad voted for Hillary. But they weren’t shocked by the existence of Trump. They didn’t see it as an indictment of the system. They didn’t go on the whole Russia collusion ride like all of my friends. (Not coincidentally, they supported Biden from the start. Meanwhile, I was shocked when Warren and Harris did so poorly, when it came to voting, because that’s who all my grad-school educated urban friends supported.)
I don't understand how anybody cannot be shocked by Trump. He's unlike any previous president, he has aggressively pursued his radical agenda, has broken every norm that has gotten in his way, communicates in purposefully shocking ways. I could go on and on. His supporters are also shocked though in a good way. He's the most polarizing president of our lifetimes by far. Anybody who thinks he is normal is just not paying attention.
I’m talking about the period immediately after the election, before trying to dismiss Comey, etc.
And don’t get me wrong, he’s not fit for office, but the idea that there is anything “radical” about his agenda, before or after the election, is pure gaslighting.
He actually ran on a moderate Republican platform. He committed to protecting Social Security and Medicare off the bat. (Remember Bush and Gore fighting over the “lock box?” Even fricking Sweden has partislly privatized their social security.) Even though it was right after Obergefell he said pretty much nothing about same-sex marriage. He criticized Clinton for her past criminal justice stances. Bluster aside, even his immigration platform wasn’t nuts. Liberal darling Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand became prime minister by campaigning on cutting legal immigration by half. Trump didn’t even do that. He focused on stopping illegal immigration, which 60% of Americans worry about: https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro....
His agenda also hasn’t been “radical.” What has he done? He has banned refugees and immigrants from certain countries—all ones you would expect given the political status, such as North Korea and Yemen. The only one on the current list that looks odd is Nigeria, but Trump instituted that ban at the same as the EU imposed Visa restrictions on Nigeria (February 2020): https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/eu-plans-to-impose-vis...
He repealed a bunch of unpopular environmental regulations Obama pushed through in the last couple of years of his final term. This was after his 2012 campaign, where Obama criticized Romney for standing in front of a coal plant and saying “this kills.” https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/oct/16/barack-oba...
> Governor, when you were governor of Massachusetts, you stood in front of a coal plant and pointed at it and said, ‘This plant kills,’ and took great pride in shutting it down. And now suddenly you're a big champion of coal," Obama said.
> You wouldn’t always know it ,but it went up every year I was president,” he said to applause. “That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas that was me, people.”
So yeah, Obama waited until the last couple of years of his term to push through some unpopular environments rules such as changes to that would require farmers to get federal permits to drain ponds in their land, and things like that. And Trump repealed them just as easily. That’s what happens between administrations.
Then you had the First Step Act, which was a progressive step.
He appointed three justices who were prominent in conservative legal circles long before Trump came in the scene.
So what exactly about his agenda was “radical?” Even if he had succeeded in things like repealing the ACA, that would have taken us back to 2008? (And Trump genuinely didn’t want the total repeal option without any replacement. He was the one who crafted the repeal and replace idea, while previously republicans had just wanted to repeal.)
Here's a list of radical actions, even if you think these were good ideas I don't see how you can argue they're not radical in the sense that it's outside anything previous presidents have tried to do
- increased military spending to Iraq war levels during peace time
- trillion dollar deficits during boom times
- fired dozens of cabinet members and other top officials whenever they didn't display dictator levels of obsequience to him
- got impeached for using US diplomacy for personal political gains
- tried to kick millions off of SNAP
- had DOJ help states kick people off voter roles
- reduced confidence in the election process
- changed DOJ's long standing definition of civil rights to instead protect religious people and white and asian discrimination
- pulled out of major international agreements with little notice including the Paris Agreement and the Iran deal
- attacked european allieas and weakened NATO
- cut legal immigration in a bunch of ways including cut refugee by 80% and cut H1B. And implemented draconian inhumane policies on illegal immigrants.
- appointed hundreds of extremely ideological judges
(hopefully d ang doesn't slap us down for discussing politics)
> - fired dozens of cabinet members and other top officials whenever they didn't display dictator levels of obsequience to him
> - got impeached for using US diplomacy for personal political gains
Bad, but not radical.
> - tried to kick millions off of SNAP
Clinton did way more welfare reform than Trump.
> - had DOJ help states kick people off voter roles
Cleaning up voter rolls is required by federal law.
> - reduced confidence in the election process
Bad, but not radical.
> - changed DOJ's long standing definition of civil rights to instead protect religious people and white and asian discrimination
Not radical. In Evanston, Illinois, Asian kids are now being held back from returning to in-class instruction: https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-school-be-antiracist-a-new-.... We can debate the merits of this, but it's not radical to suggest that discrimination against asians is a violation of civil rights laws.
> - pulled out of major international agreements with little notice including the Paris Agreement and the Iran deal
Presidents change course on foreign policy all the time. Trump's foreign policy has been relatively successful.
> - attacked european allieas and weakened NATO
Are you talking about a concrete policy?
> - cut legal immigration in a bunch of ways including cut refugee by 80% and cut H1B.
Not radical. European countries have done the same thing recently, after realizing their 2015 actions on refugees were ill-advised. Calling a cut to H1B "radical" is hard to credit. Is every small shift to the right from a Republican President "radical?"
> And implemented draconian inhumane policies on illegal immigrants.
Very bad, maybe radical.
> - appointed hundreds of extremely ideological judges
No, just normal conservative judges. The "extremely ideological judges" are ones that think you can look at a 230-year old document and find new things in it that nobody realized were there before. We have normalized that gaslighting, but taking a view that the words on the page mean what they say isn't "radical."
To be fair, the Trump team targeted the electoral college win. If they had targeted the popular vote, i.e. campaigning in states that they wouldn't win outright, but could garner votes, they most likely would have won the popular vote. Meaning they could have won that game if they had tried.
Correct. The popular vote is meaningless for the same reason who is leading after 500 meters in a 10k is meaningless. Nobody is trying to win the popular vote. Most of the voting eligible population doesn’t vote, and we don’t necessarily know which way things would break if folks campaigned for those votes.
If you are in favor of the popular vote movement, how do you reconcile that for residents of sparsely populated states like Wyoming? Why would such residents bother to vote at all under the popular vote? (I would not)
A packed stadium rally in Pennsylvania would have about the same number of attendees as a packed stadium rally in Wyoming or Rhode Island. You couldn't just rely on predictable "safe states" won by voters going straight-party on ballots. As it is, there's barely any reason for a Democratic presidential nominee to show up in reliability red states, let alone offer them anything in a platform.
Switching to a popular vote could lessen the current extremism.
I'm not surprised at how your mom reacts to Trump. I'm surprised so many young people believe that covid is no big deal. I agree with you that the quality of our ideas has improved, but I also disagree in that the spread of our bad ideas has also improved. Concepts that were held by a fringe of society in the past, like the idea that the Earth is flat have grown their own communities who have interests in keeping those ideas alive. Ideas, bad and good, have gotten a lot stickier.
With stickier ideas, the marketplace becomes worse, because nothing ever gets pruned out of it. Too much energy is spent on limiting the growth of bad ideas than can be spent on refining the better ideas.
> I'm surprised so many young people believe that covid is no big deal.
Have you ever entertained the idea that perhaps you're wrong and they're right? I mean it's at least possible that you've been lead to the wrong conclusion by systemic errors that have yet to be identified, and perhaps wont be for many years into the future.
> I think the quality of ideas has improved. We focus on disinformation, but social media gets used for a lot of other things.
I'm not sure what anything else in your post has to do with the quality of ideas being better. You claim that right wing populism is a reaction to liberalism and globalism, and that ideas are getting better. This leads me to connect the dots and think that your claim is that right wing populism is a good idea.
We know now, in hindsight, that the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression led directly to the circumstances that led to the rise of Hitler. And indeed, Hitler was not alone. Fascist dictators rose throughout this time period. Was the discourse worse then? Was it better then?
This feels disingenuous. "Ideas are getting better." "Fascism is a natural reaction." Please, if you are trying to make a political point, say it. Don't tiptoe around it.
I gave an example of the "good things" I was talking about:
> Reading a dry article on police brutality (which let’s face it, people just skipped over in the past) is a lot less impactful than seeing something shared by a friend.
Attitudes towards for example LGBT people and on racial issues are have advanced significantly since 2000, and I think social media has a lot to do with that. (One of the major issues cited by people for why they switched their opinion on same-sex marriage was knowing people in committed same-sex relationships. Social media makes those things more visible.)
As to right-wing populism: it is not fascism, any more than left-wing populism is Jacobinism or anarchy. I don't think it's a "good thing" necessarily, but predictable and possibly necessary. I think Boris Johnson, for example, is absolutely what the U.K. needed, before it got swallowed up by the EU.
> I gave an example of the "good things" I was talking about:
>> Reading a dry article on police brutality (which let’s face it, people just skipped over in the past) is a lot less impactful than seeing something shared by a friend.
> Attitudes towards for example LGBT people and on racial issues are have advanced significantly since 2000, and I think social media has a lot to do with that. (One of the major issues cited by people for why they switched their opinion on same-sex marriage was knowing people in committed same-sex relationships. Social media makes those things more visible.)
Fair enough. I disagree. I think social media has also helped radicalize folks, though I feel that nothing has really changed (not a positive change either). The press was, after all, hopelessly partisan and sensational for most of the West's history. We just had a brief respite. But fair enough and thanks for clarifying.
> As to right-wing populism: it is not fascism, any more than left-wing populism is Jacobinism or anarchy.
What's the difference really? I'm not talking about the boogeyman "literally fascist" thing. Fascist regimes themselves frequently started out as right wing populist representative regimes. Hitler is a fantastic example of that transformation ad absurdum, but there are several other simpler ones, like Franco. And these fascist regimes often started out quite popular.
And likewise with left populism. Stalin and Napoleon are left populism ad absurdum, but we have several more "mundane" examples, such as Tito or Hoxa. I think extremism is bad because of its tendency to flout the rule of law. I see that happening around the world all over again.
> What you call “amplification” is just something that makes the marketplace more efficient
Most efficient in generating engagement for selling banners, not in lifting up the most correct or useful ideas. Was it is, it's pure marketplace manipulation.
Yeah but the issue isn't good ideas and bad ideas and a marketplace where they can be disseminated. We're talking about facts and truth vs. misinformation and actual lies. And in that context, Mark Twain's saying comes to mind: a lie can travel halfway around the world before truth can finish putting on its shoes. This is infinitely more true today since the lies in question are manufactured to be as inflammatory and scandalous as possible, so as to keep their consumers engaged, and they can be spread to entire audiences with the click of a button.
> What you call “amplification” is just something that makes the marketplace more efficient—it allows ideas to disseminate faster so people can decide which are the good ones and the bad ones.
Can you cite empirical research showing that the process works the way you believe it does?
That's not how it works in reality, in reality a lot of gullible people who before internet would have spend their whole lives without hearing the "flat earth theory" now have access to internet and are quickly influenced by a lot of stupid theories because they are pretty bad at distinguishing bad ones from good ones; although just to be clear that is more a failure of the education system than anything else (e.g Japan has near 0 flat-earthers unlike America)
> are quickly influenced by a lot of stupid theories because they are pretty bad at distinguishing bad ones from good ones;
Actually this is an interesting problem to think about; what, then, did these people believe before they could get access to crazier ideas?
I think you'll find the answer was still, "what they were told to believe". The answer hasn't changed from then to now, we're simply far more aware of being upset at the answer. In a way the problem that was always there has been revealed and some people don't like the loss of control over these people's opinions.
Me personally I'm an advocate of "let go, stop controlling, see how things turn out" and then fix the real problems that appear, rather than creating worse problems by squeezing the play doh too tightly. It has the upside of being morally defensible rather than having the air of "I destroyed your life for your own good."
Exactly. People seems to forget that the social landscape of people using Internet in 90/2000s was totally different. As far as I remember, internet was then populated by idealist early adopters, gamers / tech savvy hobbyists. Part of this pool translated to conservative boomers and now Internet is considered as a serious thing.
> People were also stopped from sending the article in a private direct message
In this instance, the solution has already reached beyond the realm of "don't allow certain things to be amplified". You literally cannot share this information even in a private 1-on-1 chat.
> we go back to uncurated things
Yeah. The more I reflect on things the more I think social networks are just a thing that shouldn't exist. Although, of course, here we are on hacker news talking about it. So IDK. Maybe you just can't unring that bell and we're just screwed.
> Who gets to choose who gets pick the things amplified or not?
I get that you're asking this question rhetorically, but the "obvious" answer is the correct one: the people that own and operate the amplification system as their business model get to pick. Why should it be otherwise?
If the powerful choose what is and is not amplified, they will try to avoid amplifying things which hurt their causes, and to amplify things which support them.
I don't want to be a pawn of the wealthy, or of governments, or powerful people in general. I don't trust my own government to do what's in my best interests, let alone foreign governments. I certainly don't trust the wealthy, either. That's why I think it should be otherwise.
> I don't want to be a pawn of the wealthy, or of governments, or powerful people in general.
Then don't. It's your choice to get all your news from facebook or twitter. You're here on HN, so I believe you already understand that the contents of facebook and twitter shouldn't determine the contents of your thoughts.
I don't want countless people to be pawns of the wealthy. I don't think very many people themselves want to be pawns of the wealthy.
Yet very many of these people will continue to use Facebook and Twitter for news, rather than changing to an alternative. So your solution to the problem fails.
> I don't want countless people to be pawns of the wealthy. I don't think very many people themselves want to be pawns of the wealthy.
It's not up to you. People can visit whatever websites they want, your subjective judgements about the nature of the content on the website isn't relevant. If they have a problem with the website they are free to visit another one.
> Very many people will continue to use Facebook and Twitter for news.
That's their choice. Very many people will continue to use pornhub and there is nothing the church can do about it... yet.
For me, it's simple. Facebook is doing bad things. I don't like bad things. I think we should stop Facebook from doing bad things.
Is up to me to stop it? No. Of course not. Obviously not. In fact, even if I had the power to single-handedly, unilaterally, stop Facebook from doing these things, I wouldn't. Because I don't believe that might makes right (that's my wider point, after all).
What I want is a popular, democratic movement to regulate the websites that people use, in the way that the informed population think they should be regulated.
Allowing countless to be made pawns of in the name of liberty seems foolish.
> I don't want to be a pawn of the wealthy, or of governments, or powerful people in general.
yeah - this is the same sentiment out founding fathers had (in US obv.)
> I don't trust my own government to do what's in my best interests...
That's why we vote. The system created relieves us of worrying about being manipulated by powerful people, by letting the people run the government.
The truth is, your opinion only counts as much as your vote. That's how it should be. Your fringe opinions shouldn't count more than the rest of the people's opinions. So go vote. And let that be that.
The dirty secret is that no-one picks that. There's no-one turning the knobs to adjust your news feeds, just like there's no-one managing your Gmail inbox who you can turn to for help. It's all machines. Algorithms automatically amplify what's most engaging, and flame wars are more engaging than calm discussions.
Not the algorithms OP is referring to. Those are black-box learning models which discover what to recommend based on - in the case of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter - what generates the most advertising revenue.
The "particular values, agendas and biases" you're referring to are just advertising revenue, not some political bias installed by the developer. If you WANT to believe there are such developers working at those companies, I can't stop you. But the evidence isn't really there. Make some friends who work at those companies and see what you can find out from the people who actually develop the tools you're accusing of having such political bias in.
Now, if we are talking about political bias in these platforms' policies, you might have something.
Calling it an amplifying algorithm is an insult to the term - literally a sort by most recent or appending to the bottom of a text file primitives posting would favor flame wars as "engagement". The rhetoric of sinister algorithims has been passed around a lot by propaganda "documentaryists" but really with even a bit of knowledge knows trying to cast a correlation algorithim as a singularity in a box master manipulator is absurd. What is next? Putting the wind on trial for billions of sexual assault charges because of all of the skirts it blew up without their consent?
The fact that machines are helping these people accomplish their goals does not mean that people don’t have goals and that they shouldn’t be liable for the consequences of accomplishing their goals.
People dont really understand how dangerous of a situation were in right now. When big tech platforms can amplify or decrease thoughts, sources, and even political candidates voices, they literally decide politics. Democracy is being challenged. We need to decide if we want kings or democratically elected representatives to be in charge of the country.
The only thing that has changed is that the power that used to be in the hand of the press and those with access and control of the press is now in other hands and in some ways more transparent.
A lot of the people yelling about the power of social media giants now are yelling because they represent the old status quo, not because they want democratisation of thought.
People choose which press to go to based on what they thought of the information provided there. People choose social networks based on which people are on them. Social networks controlling what you see is therefore much more dangerous than newspapers controlling what you see, since if you don't like what you see in a newspaper you can just switch but if you don't like twitter removing your posts most of your reasons to stay are still there.
> People dont really understand how dangerous of a situation were in right now. When big tech platforms can amplify or decrease thoughts,
Every form of media has that power, social media is not at all special in this respect. A post getting banned from twitter makes no difference to someone that gets their news from Fox News and talk radio. It's up to the people to manage their own thoughts, same as it ever was.
> If it isn't illegal or incitement of violence, it doesn't need to be removed.
But it can be removed, because its one of many millions of privately owned websites on the internet... This is the great thing about the internet, anyone can create a website and run it however they want and users are free to visit whichever sites they like the most. This is a win-win for everyone except for those who want to control what site owners do with their own websites.
"Can be" and therefore "must be because I say so" are two entirely different things.
It's still an option to just leave it alone. What is this obsession our culture recently has that says "Just because I CAN do something, I MUST do something"?
It's an option to leave it alone, but it's the site owner's prerogative. If you don't like the site owner's moderation practices that's fine, but there's no reason that your opinion should override the owner's intentions with respect to how the site is run and the type of content on the site.
We are not talking about next video suggestion here. We are talking about censoring direct messages or feeds people deliberately follow. Tech companies inserting their political bias in direct communications. Not amplification.
You're still free to send a text, write a letter, call. Twitter and facebook aren't public utilities.
I saw an interesting comparison the other day. If this was a message board from the early 2000s, and the moderator was deleting posts, you move on, not throw a giant fit about free speech using some one else server.
Twitter and facebook have become an internet "public square", kept in monopolistic power by network effects and compulsion mechanisms stronger than casinos.
Insofar as they're monopolies, they should be managed by the people as if they were a public space.
This would be similar to the central area of a mall or when companies provided housing to workers to prevent unionization efforts. Both places were upheld as places where the First Amendment must be upheld, despite private ownership.
Because it's not about being able to say what they want on a particular platform, it's about saying what they want where everyone else will hear it.
A lot of people look at this issue and see two groups fighting over it. There are (at least) three groups though: for, against, and undecided. This is really a fight about how to convince the undecided, so solutions like "go make your own platform" aren't desirable; undecideds aren't going to know about the new platform, and won't automatically appear en masse on it, so it actually makes reaching them more difficult.
This is a crucial point. We are not talking about someone coming to my house and blaring Tweets with a bullhorn.
If I follow @NYPost then I want to hear what they tweet. Twitter may have every right to censure them, but it’s the wrong thing to do, and people are rightly incensed about it.
If I want to retweet a @NYPost article to my followers that is my business. And my followers can gladly listen or unfollow.
Twitter’s faux rationale about “hacked materials” sticks coming just days after NYTime’s story on Trump tax returns.
If these monopolistic social networks want to interfere in public & private messages on their platform to the benefit of particular political candidates they shouldn’t be doing it with the benefit of Section 230 immunity and/or should be scrutinized for making campaign contributions in-kind, like how National Inquirer got hit with charges for their buy&bury on Trump’s affair.
If you want to hear what the NY Post has to say, you can sign up to their email newsletter [1]. You can forward those emails to those who care what you like.
In regards to section 230, the whole point of it was to allow platforms to selectively restrict content from third parties. Before 230 some courts had ruled that if they restricted content from any third party, then they shared in liability for any third party content they did not restrict. So if I deleted spam for boner pills from my chess BBS, but did not delete someone’s accusation that a particular chess book was plagiarized I might be sued by the book author for libel. To ensure I would not be liable for that kind of thing, I would have to let the boner pill spam stay, along with anything else that was not illegal.
Twitter has made themselves clear on this. They're going to censor content they don't like, even in direct communications.
Use another platform if you don't like it. If you can't do that because all of the content producers and your friends have decided that twitter's level of censorship is ok, then you're just out of step with the rest of society.
It's like complaining that Coca Cola is an evil company and you hate them. If everyone else but you still likes Coke then your view on their practices, however valid it may be, won't be relevant
It’s totally fine by me if they want to take on the legal liability of being a publisher.
I think it goes against the stated purpose and core mission of their platform. So perhaps they are lying to their users, and even to themselves.
> The mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers. Our business and revenue will always follow that mission in ways that improve – and do not detract from – a free and global conversation.
It also may be an illegal campaign contribution in some cases.
wouldn't this leave you in a worse situation? say twitter becomes a publisher (whatever that means) and gets sued out of business. then you still won't be able to follow @NYPost or retweet content to followers.
I'm curious, how do you think twitter becoming a publisher would help you to accomplish your stated goals?
Twitter can't afford to become a publisher, so if the law didn't let them do what they do now without being a publisher it would force them to stop. Currently they get to eat and keep the cookie.
Twitter and Facebook are in a no-win situation. Remove this content and they are punished by the right removing section 230 protections. Allow it and the left calls them destructive monopolies and breaks them apart. It seems they have chosen to halt the spread of murky 'October surprise' claims on their platforms rather than repeat the course of October 2016. I can't blame them (and agree with their decision).
> Remove this content and they are punished by the right removing section 230 protections. Allow it and the left calls them destructive monopolies and breaks them apart.
This seems to suggest a larger solution -- that these platforms do actually have within their power to implement.
Stop helping those two bickering ninnies by taking sides, and instead use the huge bullhorn society has handed them by screaming, "Shut up the both of you, stop bickering and maybe help the people you were elected to help!"
Who is right and about what are always less important than simply helping people. There is SO MUCH that is being left undone because we endlessly want to debate single issues for literally DECADES while people die in the streets.
Leadership was abandoned long ago and these gigantic bully pulpits could right the ship and instead they are being used as game pieces by their partisan owners. It's... sad to watch.
Perhaps, instead of outlawing new technology and modes of communication, we should produce more speech to teach people how it works so they don't get sucked in by an algorithm and believe everything they read.
Those editorial boards you speak of get things wrong constantly. Limiting who can respond to them in front of an (at least) equally large audience is dangerous and a disservice to all, especially minorities.
Limiting who can publish and the size of their audience is categorically a violation of free speech. There is no daylight there.
Wouldn't the obvious choice be to let everyone have the same access to free amplification? No one is being forced to listen, and I'd rather have the ability to ignore what I don't want to see/hear instead of a bunch of 20 somethings Engineers deciding for me.
I can't think of a way that you can provide equal amplification to everyone. Physically there is only so much space "above the fold" on a website or on the first page of search results. Something has to be put front and center, thus receiving more amplification than other things.
How would you determine what can fit on your mobile screen? What sorting algorithm would you choose?
If you sort based off of what the most recent submissions, you might not ever see things that interest you and you might leave the platform.
If you sort based off of most recent or the most comments, then the most controversial posts would be amplified above more moderate and well thought out posts.
You can think of any type of sorting algorithm you want, you can even provide options/combinations. However it is impossible to give all content the same access to free amplification.
"I can't think of a way that you can provide equal amplification to everyone."
Yes we can. You could make a transparent algorithm in which eg. 15 out of 15 posts in my FB feed are from my friends in chronological order, at most two per friend. Likes etc. are just graphics and a reply from a friend bumps the post.
And something similar for Twitter.
It is not rocked science if you don't want to make the site so bad you possibly can to make visitors stay longer and see more ads when they wade through the irrelevant crap to see the post they want to see.
This is de facto no recommendations and no amplification. Which I agree with; IMO even algorithmic recommendation is an implicit endorsement of "we want you to see this content you didn't specifically ask to see", at which point that's an editorial decision that people should be held liable for.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you have only 15 posts that can be viewed at a time, doesn't that mean those 15 posts are getting amplified over the others? Maybe not since all posts theoretically would be temporarily visible in those 15 posts at some point?
Won't posts that encourage quick responses (clickbait, memes, controversial posts, etc) be bumped up much more frequently, thus making sure they are amplified more than other postings (while burying other posts)? Sure this might not be much of a problem on a site where you only are following a small number of people, but I find it hard to imagine it could translate to a larger site that inherently isn't just you following a few friends (i.e. Reddit).
Ye well one friend could spam alot and almost always show up in his two slots in the feed. But aslong as you have a finit number of annoying friends you could deal with that by maybe muting them from the feed or just live with it. It might be a problem since many Facebook users have 100s of "friends", but I see that as an user error. You could have a "favorite" bar with friends you easily could click on and see what they have posted. Ie. actively looking instead of a feed if the feed gets too spammy by 100s of friends.
Having absolutely equal and fair exposure would need some kind of normalized random selection of posts since last login but that would probably just get messy and confusing.
"Won't posts that encourage quick responses (clickbait, memes, controversial posts, etc) be bumped up much more frequently, thus making sure they are amplified more than other postings (while burying other posts)?"
Ye but atleast its deterministic, your friends find it interesting enough to talk about and the conversation can continue till it is done instead of disapearing in the feed. There could be a big cross to click to mute it.
I have no hope of having an algorithm decide what I want to see. That is my main point.
I like the way Twitter is now, if you configure your settings correctly. You see all the top-level Tweets made by the users you follow. In chronological order. And nothing else. Of course, this includes retweets. If you don't want to see retweets from one of the users you follow, you can specifically disable retweets from that user.
Whenever I see a comment like this, I have to point out that they are already deciding what you want to see and hear. On most of the platforms in question you're being suggested content by a bunch of algorithms that you can't inspect, understand, or control. And while it's not censorship, drowning signal in a flood of noise is not that different.
Suppressing in direct messages is pretty different.
A lot of people I know use twitter DMs as a primary communication method for people in their own families, even inside the same household. Twitter filtering communication between family members in your home is ... well ... a perfect excuse for me to strongly encourage them to stop using twitter.
I think "amplification" is simplifying the effect that these social networks have.
Not only do the social networks allow you to amplify your opinion, they also nudge users further and further into bubbles where voices amplify even more.
Before social networks, if you got a pro-environment newspaper, the bias of that paper still had a bound on it. But imagine if the paper was constantly changing based on what you read. Were you interested in the article yesterday? Here is an even more biased article. Read it again? Try this article even more biased. Soon, the original paper would be so moderate that it would almost appear anti-environment.
The number of conspiracy theories floating around right now is alarming. And I blame a lot of it on the algorithms that these social networks are using to promote content people seem interested in. You get into rabbit holes and eventually land up reading extremist/fringe theories.
Key to this is that the objective isn't interest, it's "engagement", addictive behaviour and advertising consumption. It may be content that you hate, or-- better-- content that depresses you: Sapped of initiative you just keep scrolling and clicking, and some studies have show that depressed people are easier to influence and more vulnerable to advertising.
It's impossible because amplification is a zero-sum game. There's a limited amount of attention per human being. Thus everyone vying for attention is competing in this game, and any criteria for choose one amplified voice over the other necessarily results in bias.
It is a completely unavoidable artifact of our attention span and mortality, with no possible workaround. Hence why curation and bias becomes the value propositions.
That’s a good point. In many ways it is a free market for attention span. Except that people can now pick not from a short list of established editors, but from a massive list of interesting people to follow.
I think people should be the judge for who they trust and/or want to listen to.
I don’t see the “but now we can’t control what they see” objection kindly.
Our problems are simply symptoms of a business model that’s out of control.
If I had to choose between advertising and free speech, I’d be happy to utterly abolish advertising. Even though that means completely tearing down the current media industry.
Obviously there’s middle ground to be found, but censorship is just treating the symptoms and in the dumbest possible way.
When radio came the first few decades were great, but soon more and more people started to broadcast and corrupting music started to harm society. People demanded that government and only government could artfully decide whom aught to be allowed to speak to the masses and censors cracked down on unlicensed radio. Several decades later however and the enthusiasm for radio censoring lost it appeal.
When television came we also had a few early decades where everything were great. There existed one or two stations, and that was it. Then suddenly a flood of people and companies started to use this new technology and harmful video nasty with violent and nude content started to hit society and people cried out once again for government to start censoring and determining whom aught to be allowed to speak to the masses. Several decades again and the enthusiasm for TV and movie censoring lost it charm.
Then Internet came and everything was fine the first few decades with only a few major websites like yahoo and myspace. Then 4chan and 8chan was created and quickly people want censoring again, but this time its not the government who should determine who aught to be allowed to speak to the masses but rather a handful of companies in charge of social networks and cloud services. This is where we are now. In a few decades, I predict the enthusiasm for Internet censorship will drop a bit as it done for all previous technologies that enables unregulated amplification of speech.
I would second this and take it a step further and point out that the right to free speech is not the right to freely say whatever you want. This is particularly sticky when it comes to misinformation.
Currently we have systems which make misinformation more dangerous (primarily via amplification) and a bunch of people conflating free speech with the freedom to say whatever you want. I think what we still need to explore is whether or not there is a responsibility on individuals to be factually accurate when engaged in amplified speech. What does that even mean? Do you simply need to believe what you are saying at the time? Or is the standard higher? Is this responsibility shifted if you provide a citation (where the responsibility of the cited source shoulders some of the responsibility for your derivative thoughts)?
It's a particularly thorny issue. One that isn't necessarily new, but is particularly acute in contemporary times. I am against censorship, but I also recognize certain trends which seem to be deepening divides and strengthening conspiracy theories in our society.
> My preference would be that no one is, and we go back to uncurated things and to an internet where you have to look for the things you want to read/watch, versus getting content pushed onto you.
What a well written response, my friend. Hats off. Perhaps EdgeRank truly was a pandora's box we should have left well enough alone. Who knew how much havoc a simple matrix determinant could cause?
> While I believe free speech is a good thing, I believe free amplification is terrible.
This thought is the exact reason the first amendment separately mentions freedom of "speech" (hard to accomplish much with it) and "the press" (much more effective).
>> and we go back to uncurated things and to an internet where you have to look for the things you want to read/watch, versus getting content pushed onto you.
But people are lazy. Why write a post when you "share" some crap that came through your feed with one click.
We will get to self hosted distributed social media when it becomes easier than Facebook or Twitter.
- Attention is a zero-sum game. In the past, we'd get more of our news from local papers, radio stations or lunch break gossip, resulting in a natural diversity of viewpoints. Nowadays, it's all the same social media outlets and handful of national newspapers (whose staff generally spend all day and form their opinions on Twitter, which thus winds up being upstream anyway) for everyone. Compared to what we had before, one side winds up getting free amplification anyway.
- I don't think free speech as a positive right for the speaker is necessarily the correct framing; at least, it neglects half of the issue at hand. I consider it at least equally important that "free speech" protects my right as an information consumer to get exposed to as many viewpoints as possible on a matter. Right now, my sense is that national newspapers all echo the Twitterati consensus, Facebook has developed in such a way that social and increasingly technological pressure would not allow even those people on my friend list who I suspect had interesting and generally well-thought-out non-mainstream opinions to share them with me, and the rest is all conspiracy websites that are unusable as a source because they've largely been cut off from the means of establishing credibility and separating wheat from chaff via social proof.
If I were a US voter (I'm not), I'd want to know whether Biden was involved in corrupt dealings. As it stands, it seems that if there were a compelling case that he was (and, well, I don't know if there is one!), the media and its allies would be working overtime to prevent me from learning about it.
That's not even remotely the same thing. When you post on an AOL message board, the only people that see it are people who are in AOL, use the Message Boards, and actively choose to read the thread and post with your message.
When I log in to Twitter right now I get a message that Ariana Grande has a new album. I don't follow her, I don't care about her, but Twitter decided I needed to see that.
I have notifications disabled but I can only imagine what it pushes out.
On top of that pushing of unsolicited information, the social networks purposely push controversial topics to gain your attention. After a while those controversial and outlandish posts are legitimized and normalized.
The difference in scale is so astronomically large that using 'amplification' for both of these cases is misleading at best.
How many AOL users were there, total, in the 90s? Now, how many Twitter users are there, today? It's not even a fair fight.
That's only one metric, another would be trust, and clout, and others. The president tweeting is different from a random AOL user posting to a message board. Totally different beasts.
Huh? Assuming only talking about USA, AOL had more than 30 million subscribers. And that's not counting their family members/guests. Twitter claims to have 40 million active US members, a claim I doubt heavily. They aren't far off.
Not all AOL subscribers participated in these boards/posting though.
In addition, you have social media boosting other social medias, Facebook, Reddit, this place, each with their own individual brand of shenanigans. You didn't have that way back when (mostly because the alternatives were just as sparse)
30 million subscribers who read the message boards? And they all took each post as seriously as they do a tweet today? I doubt it. You're also cherry picking from my comment and ignoring the parts about how amplification is different today than then, outside of the numbers scale.
Also, I'm not comparing to just the USA twitter users either! It's a global platform. That matters. Retweets are not region-locked!
Not just message boards, live chat! Thousands and thousands of chat rooms, and everyone on IM, and everyone FWDing inappropriate emails around. I'm not sure how old you are or if you had AOL, but it was by far the most social internet experience I'd ever had!
Global users, of course, Twitter trumps it in count, no doubt. I only assumed US users because the post was about US politics.
If you have free speech but no-one is allowed to hear it. Is it still free speech?
How is this any different to “you are free to speak but you’ll be murdered after you do”. You’re still free to “speak”, you’ll just die after. Freedom of speech right?
The challenge with this framing is that you're equating social media to newspapers which provide editorialization. IIRC, one of the core distinctions that allow many tech companies to avoid liability for consumer generated content is not having an editorial role. If they embrace being media companies and editors I believe different regulations will apply to tech companies than currently do.
Isn't that why they are cracking down now? As social media platforms were increasingly used to spread outright lies, propaganda, and radicalization, the public started to demand social media apply editorial functions- and here we are today.
"The public", it was a small group of elites. And of course big tech aren't against getting more power so they "comply", they were just waiting for the chance to do it without significant backlash.
Stepping outside the US, there is evidence that misinformation spread of Facebook (including WhatsApp) was directly responsible for the Rohingya genocide and forced migration [1]. At what point do these platforms have an obligation to not allow themselves be used for such campaigns?
Okay so maybe we need to start regulating AI, or machine-curated content, or recommendation systems, but not stamping out one of the cornerstones of western intellectual culture. Free speech is certainly more important than YouTube’s engagement metrics.
I’m not disagreeing with that, and I’m also aware that as a private company, whatever they do with their website isn’t an infringement upon first amendment rights. I’m just bristling at the parent comment who seemed to be saying that in our new AI-driven world, free speech is no longer an intrinsically valuable thing.
>I’m not disagreeing with that, and I’m also aware that as a private company, whatever they do with their website isn’t an infringement upon first amendment rights. I’m just bristling at the parent comment who seemed to be saying that in our new AI-driven world, free speech is no longer an intrinsically valuable thing.
Those are all good points.
I didn't understand GP to be claiming that ML algorithms trump free speech, which may explain why we're actually in violent agreement WRT YouTube's recommendation algorithms.
I'd note that I avoid the big social media sites like the plague, and not even primarily for the toxic atmosphere. Rather, I find the business model to be inherently cynical, exploitative and destructive of communities (cf. sites like nextdoor.com).
As long as the incentives (maximization of advertising dollars) favor pushing for ever higher engagement, the cycle that creates increasingly fine-tuned filter bubbles and "targeted" advertising, we're going to see less focus on free expression from large corporations, because their primary goal is to maximize profit.
I believe that this model will eventually collapse and be replaced (with something better or worse, I don't know) with a different one. My concern is in the damage that this will do to our discourse and societal cohesion in the meantime.
Which points to larger problems with our economic model. Maximizing short-term profit is fetishized as all-important, regardless of potential downsides[0]. That focus legitimizes predatory behavior based on the (incorrect) idea that captialism is necessarily a zero-sum game.
This distorts the economy and the culture, pitting us against each other in surprising (and very destructive) ways.
I am most certainly not advocating that we abandon capitalism, as its had a largely positive effect on health, wealth, technological advancement and a host of other areas.
Rather, I believe we need to change the incentives around markets to encourage a broader, fairer capitalism that creates increased prosperity for everyone, rather than those already at the top.
[0] From a long-term perspective, focusing primarily on short-term extraction of value from the economy is self-defeating. Primarily because our economy's success is based on consumer spending (~70% of the US' GDP is consumer spending). Through wage suppression, rent-seeking and (a good thing) automation, we're reducing the ability of larger and larger segments of the population to contribute to that 2/3+ of the economy. If unchecked, we'll eventually get to the point where wealth and income are so concentrated that we won't be able to sustain that model and everyone will lose.
Because there are only so many pairs of jeans, lava lamps, snow globes, raisins, cars, houses or pizza pies that any one individual or household can use.
This argues for a much broader distribution of economic resources (wages, access to capital, safety nets, infrastructure, etc., etc., etc.) than we have now. This could provide enormous benefits to those who have the least and, in the long-term, those who have the most.
Beyond that, it can create a stronger, more resilient economy for everyone.
> While I believe free speech is a good thing, I believe free amplification is terrible.
This is so abusable. Even the best of intentions won't stop it from being abused horribly. I value twitter much less. The same thing is happening there that happened to the declining legacy media.
This amplification isn't magic. You can't build an audience on YouTube (or anywhere) unless people actually care about what you have to say. And doing that is hard work.
Speech is considered violence by some people. It has been this way since the late 80's but it was confined to certain subcultures that weren't taken too seriously. But they have taken over certain institutions, like the university (and increasingly big-tech), and own that platform and teach this as esteemed fact rather than an opinion.
And it's dangerous because when you equate speech with violence then how far are we from responding with a so called violent act with actual violence?
One thing they've gotten right is that discourses (how we talk about things) does in fact have a lot of power. So controlling discourses means you consolidate power. When you control how we talk about things then you can control what we talk about. When you control that, then you control how people think about things and you've now successfully won the culture and therefore seized actual, real power. Like being able to use a small minority of corporate activists to pressure a company into viewing certain content as violent or "problematic" and other content as orthodox and therefore appropriate to "platform".
This is how the church worked in the West for years, how it still does in certain places (Saudi Arabia) - by using dogma to determine what is right and wrong. To become the sole arbiter on what is knowledge and what is blasphemy and therefore the authority to discipline and punish.
> But they have taken over certain institutions, like the university (and increasingly big-tech)
And the media, which is increasingly opposed to free speech.
Today we're seeing journalists talk about how other journalists should be banned from the public square by powerful corporations. They seemingly aren't bright enough to pause and wonder if this will ever be used against them. And this is being done under the banner of progressivism.
> And this is being done under the banner of progressivism
I think it's a very confusing time. A lot of people want to be "good people". They don't understand how the definitions of words have changed and what they're really signing up for. "Anti-racisim" sounds great - what reasonable, moral person wants to be racist? But you begin to read the text and you start to see it isn't what you think it is. That it isn't anything like what we've been working towards in terms of civil rights and equality.
I don't think "Progressivism" is the right word. There's not a good name for this philosophy yet other than derogative terms like "woke". Social Justice maybe but I find it unjust. I've seen "therapeutic totalitarianism" as one candidate.
Its authoritarianism. One thing that frustrates me so much as an independent, is the refusal of even very intelligent people to acknowledge the y-axis of the political spectrum. People accuse the left of going right while the right goes far right, but that's not it! They are both going "up"!
There's still a lot of actual racist violence by the police in this country. And there's a situation where municipal governments essentially have no power to actually stop out of control cops.
But there are lots of people who want to do something but aren't going to dive full tilt into actually challenging the serious problematics of a violent police force. So there's a huge market for "do something small" which involves challenging fairly petty expressions of racism.
Basically, on "the left" and "the right" you have experts taking people's real grievances and turning them into "feel good" symbology. The idiocy of the social signaling is annoying but the way the actual grievances go unaddressed is a considerably worse problem.
Bari Weiss wrote in Tablet yesterday (before this current hullaballoo had begun) about this[1]. I think "successor ideology" is an apt if awkward stand-in term, because it focuses on the project as an attempt to ideologically present "the next stage" or replacement for liberalism:
No one has yet decided on the name for the force that has come to unseat liberalism. Some say it’s “Social Justice.” The author Rod Dreher has called it “therapeutic totalitarianism.” The writer Wesley Yang refers to it as “the successor ideology” — as in, the successor to liberalism.
At some point, it will have a formal name, one that properly describes its mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality. Until then, it is up to each of us to see it plainly. We need to look past the hashtags and slogans and the jargon to assess it honestly — and then to explain it to others.
The new creed’s premise goes something like this: We are in a war in which the forces of justice and progress are arrayed against the forces of backwardness and oppression. And in a war, the normal rules of the game — due process; political compromise; the presumption of innocence; free speech; even reason itself — must be suspended. Indeed, those rules themselves were corrupt to begin with — designed, as they were, by dead white males in order to uphold their own power.
There isn't anything remotely "leftist" about this sort of thing. It's done in service of some left-ish movements. Or, rather, I'd argue that "progressive" and "left" have been (mis)appropriated.
>Today we're seeing journalists talk about how other journalists should be banned from the public square by powerful corporations. They seemingly aren't bright enough to pause and wonder if this will ever be used against them.
One of the issues is calling media personalities who read from teleprompters, "journalists". Call them actors, call them media spokespeople, but they aren't engaging in anything that can be construed as, "journalism". Further, it isn't in the interest of corporate media outlets to hire people who are smart. They want people who sound articulate, look good on camera and repeat the talking points that they are told to repeat. What we see on cable outlets these days shouldn't be considered, "news" so much as infotainment. By now, most people, regardless of their political affiliation (if any) understand that society has largely gone off the rails, and in their desperation they are left with an appeal to authority to make things better and restore a patina of "normality". It is dangerously seductive to suggest to people who are desperate to end the chaos that if we just silenced the "bad" people things would be okay (leaving unsaid who determines who is bad and what we are allowed to think and say).
It's really kind of mind boggling really. Does the Times not think they will ever fall afoul of the goodthink, and this weapon will never be used against them?
Some people consider a lot of speech violence but nearly everyone considers a small amount of speech violence or some equivalent. Telling someone to grab a electrified wire is violence by nearly everyone's standard. A mafioso directing a hit man to kill is nearly everyone's standard. The famous "shouting fire in a crowded theater" is mostly violence etc.
So you can't say the situation is "free speech or not". The situation is always where the boundary is. Of course, the question of where quickly spreading slander on the eve of an elections is on the spectrum of protected speech is a complicated question. But it's a bit different than the question of whether a given dogma can be challenged.
Right when there is a clear and imminent danger has been the judicial limit on speech. I think nearly everyone finds this reasonable.
To my point though there is the idea that “silence is violence” which implies if you don’t actively work towards a certain groups objective then you are in fact committing violence.
Does this mean that when their social revolution is complete I will hang from the gallows pole because my named social media accounts do not account for me actively promoting their cause? After all my silence on the matter was a hostile act. Maybe I’ll just get a struggle session and be re-educated. Lifelong ban from participating in society but alive at least. If I’m lucky.
> Right when there is a clear and imminent danger has been the judicial limit on speech.
Are you thinking of “clear and present danger”? That used to be the test in the United States, but since the 1960s it is “imminent lawless action.”
> I think nearly everyone finds this reasonable.
I don’t know about that. From what I can tell, the US legal system is extremely accepting of speech that incites violence relative to many other democratic governments. I think the current test is unreasonably lenient and likely allows a lot of speech that directly advocates and incites violence.
To my point though there is the idea that “silence is violence” which implies if you don’t actively work towards a certain groups objective then you are in fact committing violence.
Yeah, certain kind of leftists are prone to over-the-top rhetoric. What does it mean? Not a lot given these aren't organized group, not even ineffective organized group but just individuals seeking attention for themselves.
"Does this mean that when their social revolution is complete I will hang from the gallows pole because my named social media accounts do not account for me actively promoting their cause?" Yes, it does mean that. They're saying so explicitly.
And I think it’s important to highlight as you have. People will say “well they don’t really _mean_ that”, etc. but they should be taken at their word. They do.
>And I think it’s important to highlight as you have. People will say “well they don’t really _mean_ that”, etc. but they should be taken at their word. They do.
And who is "they"? Specifically. Not some amorphous "group" like "progressives" or "the left" or "SJWs".
I'm not being snarky here. It seems to me that one of the most damaging trends we're seeing is equating a hundred million (and more) people with the loudest, most obnoxious and nasty .01%.
Painting folks with such a broad brush is a recipe for division, conflict and mayhem.
Assuming that someone with a Trump bumper sticker is a dyed-in-the-wool racist and white supremacist fascist is stupid in the extreme. And so is assuming that someone with a Biden bumper sticker is a totalitarian monster bent on total mind control.
People are individuals and should be assessed and measured as such.
It's intellectually lazy to just stick anyone who doesn't share your beliefs about Trump or Biden or abortion or gun rights or any of a hundred other contentious issues into a big box called "enemies."
And when you do so, you play right into the hands of the tiny group of folks who want to profit (politically, economically or both) from dividing us.
You have the choice not to do so. It's up to you and me and everyone else to step up and judge people on their individual actions, not some invented "in" or "out" group.
The infamous "shouting fire in a crowded theater" was mentioned by Holmes in U.S. v. Schenck which had nothing to do with fires or theaters. The case involved whether Schenck could be convicted under the Espionage Act for the crime of writing and distributing a pamphlet that expressed his opposition to the draft. That is the dangerous idea that sent a person to prison.
>...In 1969, the Supreme Court's decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio effectively overturned Schenck and any authority the case still carried. There, the Court held that inflammatory speech--and even speech advocating violence by members of the Ku Klux Klan--is protected under the First Amendment, unless the speech "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action"
Even Holmes seemed to quickly realize that the Schenck decision was odious since in the same term, he also wrote:
>...In what would become his second most famous phrase, Holmes wrote in Abrams that the marketplace of ideas offered the best solution for tamping down offensive speech: "The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out."
Telling someone to grab an electric fence is not violence by anyone’s standard. Nor is shouting fire. As a society, we have never considered those utterances to be violent crime.
You are incorrect here. "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is one litmus test for speech not protected by the 1st Amendment. And telling someone to grab a wire that you know is electrified and they don't is pretty violent.
How many times do we have to go over the fact that the fire issue is actually proves the point. It was a bad ruling used to silence Yiddish WW1 protestors that referenced that hypothetical in the first place! So tired of seeing this regurgitated so much.
There is absolutely speech that is violence, and it is typically not protected by free speech. Harassment, yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, calling for literal violence against others, these are allowed to be regulated (in the US) and understood broadly to be dangerous.
Then you're going against a hundred years of legal thought on free speech there. There's a reason certain speech is not protected, and it's been hashed out. if you have a better legal argument than "it's just not," I'm interested, but it needs to address why previous thinking is incorrect. Edit: a [quick link][1] to all the types of speech in the US that is regulated and why.
Searched for 'violence' and derivative forms in that wiki link:
> limitations on free speech balance rights to free speech and other rights, such as rights for ... protection from imminent or potential violence against particular persons.
The speech is not violent. However, we can say that speech that promotes such might not be allowed under "free speech."
Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is not violent though it can cause people to panic and cause harm.
What does this have to do with what I said? Why do you think I said anything about what is protected? We are arguing about the definition of the word violence.
Why is violence your line? What makes violence unacceptable but verbal harassment, abuses, bad faith arguments are deemed acceptable. Honest question that I'm still not settled on. What I still believe is that society should be the one managing this boundary area, and the state should stick to it's defined rules on free speech.
People should be able to boycot people, free enterprises should he able to manage their media channels, the state should not.
Who said violence is my line? Who said anything about what is and isn’t acceptable? Where are you getting this from? We are arguing over what the word violence means. I didn’t make any other claims.
That line is from a 1919 court case about whether you could oppose the draft.
>calling for literal violence against others
This is permitted under Brandenburg v. Ohio. Calls to illegal action are only prohibited if they are (1) intended to cause illegal action, (2) reasonably likely to produce such action and (3) imminent.
> Speech is considered violence by some people. It has been this way since the late 80's but it was confined to certain subcultures that weren't taken too seriously. But they have taken over certain institutions, like the university (and increasingly big-tech), and own that platform and teach this as esteemed fact rather than an opinion.
The radical left as some name them. But more specifically the activist culture motivated by “critical theory” to dismantle scientific-liberalism and enlightenment principals/philosophy.
Just to clarify you believe the radical left have infiltrated the upper echelons of capitalist society and academic institutions and have an anti free-speech agenda and have a goal of dismantling enlightenment principals?
Can you also explain what you mean by scientific liberalism?
“A liberal society stands on the proposition that we should all take seriously the idea that we might be wrong. This means we must place no one, including ourselves, beyond the reach of criticism; it means that we must allow people to err, even where the error offends and upsets, as it often will.”
- Johnathon Rausch
1) no one owns the blessings of what is knowledge by virtue of any sort of implied authority.
2) all accepted knowledge is open to revision upon new evidence or proof
This is a good read that articulates this more than I can.
I think some people have an inherent need to gain influence. To have power over others, tell them what to do. Due to monopolization and centralization, there are fewer and fewer spots to do it in a constructive way (found your own company?).
Except if you claim that you're offended, you're suddenly given the right to control what others say. If you claim that you are fighting racism/sexism/etc, you're shielded from 90% of critique. So this "safe haven" has attracted all kinds of opportunists that just enjoy attacking others to feel better about themselves.
Look at your typical BLM protestors. It's not Black doctors protesting against being treated differently from White doctors. It's unhappy people from both races that have found an uncriticizable cause to justify their own disappointment in life.
It's 100% inline with free speech to let a given website decide what they want to publish. Even if it is a very popular website.
If they make bad decisions, then people can go to competitors; it's as easy as typing in a different URL. That's how the Internet--and open societies in general--are supposed to work.
What it looks like to me--someone who has been on the Internet since before the turn of the century--is that a more recent generation of people grew up with these very popular websites as part of their lives, and they came to believe that these very popular websites are somehow inherent to the Internet and to society in general.
They're not. The Internet is more available to entrepreneurs, startups, and new ideas today than it was when Twitter and Facebook were started. They're not too big to fail.
Where does one go when Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube seem to take these steps in tandem? The joke of "go make your own social network" has been tried with places like Parler and Gab, but they get banned from app stores, ironically blocked from technically, but not ideologically, decentralized services like Mastodon, or even dropped from web hosts. The open Internet is dead.
> Where does one go when Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube seem to take these steps in tandem?
I know folks like to get all conspiratorial over social networks "acting in tandem", but it really shouldn't be all that surprising.
Individuals have vastly different tolerances for all sorts of things, but if you lump them into groups of tens of thousands, the average tolerance for things will be quite similar.
When the latest alt-right provocateur hits the threshold of bad PR for Facebook, he's likely right at the threshold for the other major social networks. No need for a shadowy cabal.
The question is who defines that threshold. In this case, its a few people at a few tech companies, and I don’t feel like it’s controversial to say that they all internally inherit the progressive/leftist/whatever Bay Area culture they’re largely based in.
You can still publish! AWS and cloudflare will happily take your money if you're not a neonazi. If you are a neonazi, A) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTs_Q4hEqmA B) you can find some mom-and-pop co-lo that will take your money. AFAIK, 8chan is still serving page views.
>cloudflare will happily take your money if you're not a neonazi
Cloudflare isn't as ideologically pure as you might think. To this date, they have only refused service to Daily Stormer and 8chan for political reasons. Real neonazi sites like stormfront dot org (unlike 8chan that had many apolitical communities like for games or anime) continue to enjoy their protection because it hasn't negatively affected their stock (the news on DS and 8ch broke before the IPO, but their launch might have been a failure due to bad press).
Sure, but that's like "if the utility companies are cutting of your water and electricity, just make your own! nobody is stopping you from hooking an exercise bike to a dynamo and buy bottled water at the store". Technically true, practically not really a thing.
You can say just about anything you want, but that doesn't mean other folks are required to listen to you or expend their resources to amplify your speech.
And that's a good thing. Because if you can force others to publish/host/amplify your speech, others can force you to do the same with theirs.
Sorry I just fail to understand the conservatives' values here. They will go to the supreme court to fight for their right not to sell cupcakes to gay people but then turn around and demand to control what twitter does with their servers.
This is false. Nobody has fought for a right not to sell cupcakes to gay people.
In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the owner declined to perform a creative service, that being decorating a cake for a gay wedding.
You might think that is also wrong, and that’s fine, but it’s a very important distinction. Legally compelling someone to perform a service that violates their religious beliefs is tricky to balance against non-discrimination. You have to consider the precedent that doing so would set. The supreme court recognized this in a 7-2 decision, so it’s clearly not a trivial or ridiculous objection. It only is to you because you don’t share the religious belief. But we must balance everyone’s rights, and that isn’t always easy.
The baker refused to make a custom made cake for the wedding and offered them an off the shelf cake instead. That is very different from a big corporation refusing to serve you off the shelf services that requires no manual actions at all on their part.
Some of twitter's users see them as complicit in spreading disinformation. So it does cost them something of value to do nothing. It costs them their reputation with some segment of users. Twitter is making a judgement call. They think pissing off some conservatives by banning this link will net them more good will from other users.
On the morals of it; I think that if twitter thinks that banning all conservatives will make them more revenue they can and should be allowed to do it. My value statement would hold equally if you :s/conservatives/liberals/g.
Conservative lawmakers have become very found of the Obama quote, "Elections have consequences." Well, the culture war has consequences too. And conservatives have completely gotten their asses kicked in the culture war in the last 30 years. Due to anachronisms in our means of determining representation this has not translated into a loss of legislative power. But if they want to hold sway outside of Washington they will have to make an effort to win back the hearts and minds of the public and more importantly the American consumer.
They will go to the supreme court to fight for [a sole proprietor's] right not to sell cupcakes to gay people but then turn around and demand to control what [giant corporation] does with their servers.
So if @Jack solely owned twitter it would be ok? I don't see how being on the NYSE makes the morals any different. If anything having a board of directors and shareholders makes TWTR more democratic not less.
What does limited liability have to do with a corporation being owned by one person? I assume this poster is questioning the "giant corporation" part. Maybe you meant to say "any corporation"?
I also mistakenly thought the cake baker was a sole proprietor. They are incorporated. I should have done a simple search before posting my original comment.
That said, I now mostly agree with the comment I was originally replying to.
> What does limited liability have to do with a corporation being owned by one person?
Correct, nothing. To clarify:
My position is that an entity enjoying limited liability (which in the US includes an LLC or corporation owned by a single person) has exchanged "rights" for indemnity and therefore can be compelled to - for example - bake a cake or not censor content hosted on their servers, but that a sole proprietor can do whatever they want re: refusing service or moderating content.
I think the whole idea about not selling cupcakes to gay people is stupid (but I understand the theory, it's like asking an ideological vegan to provide the side dishes to a BBQ), but it's not the same issue.
In monopoly situations (or duopoly, if you wish), there are generally different rules that apply, because you can't just go somewhere else to do business: there is nothing else. Hence utility companies can't simply go "I don't like your nose, no water for you".
I guess I just don't see twitter as a monopoly. I lived a long time before they existed and I hope/suspect I will live a long time after they are a major player in the news cycle. (Lets just say I'm not long twitter.)
I think creating new platforms has actually gotten easier since twitter's inception. Back in the day it was almost magical to have a website that performed at scale. Now you just hand a credit card to your favored cloud provider.
In your metaphor I see the internet as the utility not the platform provider. If akamai or level 3 decide that they wouldn't carry your traffic, then you might have a case that you're being censored.
If Apple can keep Epic out of the app store then @Jack can ban whomever he damn well feels like.
The audience is the monopoly. The entire media and political class are addicted to Twitter, and they haven't even heard of Mastodon or ActivityPub or whatever.
Sounds like twitter is doing a good job of keeping it's user base happy :) and I would argue that not spreading disinformation is part of keeping them happy.
Other companies/platforms are free to advertise or offer services to entice users to switch. As conservatives like to remind us money is speech. You are not entitled to someone else's attention but you can try to buy it.
Maybe there's a higher principle here than partisan warfare?
If they were banning Russiagate conspiracies, while letting conservative stuff run rampant, would you be giving me the pitch about how private property is more important than free expression?
Maybe there's a higher principle here than partisan warfare?
You're going to call me a neoliberal shill ;) but I'd say my higher principle is the market. There is a reason why Nestle, Version, and Disney spend loads of money on twitter and not on gab. Nestle doesn't want chocolate chip ads next to holocaust denial. So yes if twitter decided that pissing off their liberal users grossed more revenue I'm fine with it.
Don't impute principles to the market. Those companies wouldn't touch gay rights with a 10 foot pole until one day all of a sudden they're beating their way to the front of the line at the pride parade. They'll follow what's popular, and if that's liquidating jews, they'll do it (some of them did!).
In this particular case, where there's a common carrier for information, we figured out the market failures and how to handle them long ago, the answer is neutrality to the message. There are some people in the thread making the case that it's different now, and maybe it is, maybe we need a different approach, but "just trust the market" is the dumbest idea ever.
The market is paper-clip-optimizing gray goo. Harness it, but don't anthropomorphize it and certainly don't "trust" it.
As far as comment wars go this a been very civil. Thanks! :) This will be my last reply in this thread but I wanted to try to make the case against conservative populism one more time.
Don't impute principles to the market.
I'm not saying the market has principles. People can be moral or immoral. As you have noted, the market is amoral. I was saying that the debate over who can say what and where they can say it can be solved by the market. Twitter owns their severs and can decide what they want to do with them. You don't have the right to compel them to allow you to use their severs. You are free to build (or rent) your own servers and scream into the void. No one is obligate to listen to you but you are free to provide them something of value in return for their attention.
Those companies wouldn't touch gay rights with a 10 foot pole until one day all of a sudden they're beating their way to the front of the line at the pride parade.
This is very true and it should be of great concern to conservatives. In the previous generations, conservatives had a lock on the culture war but since the 90s they have completely ceded the field to progressives and liberals.
Republicans have only won the popular vote for president once since 1990. Trump isn't even attempting to win the popular vote this year. The median income in 2018 was 10k higher in blue states than red states. And you wonder why advertisers (and thus twitter) value blue tribe users more?
Conservatives can't gerrymander the market. They are going to need to find a way to compete for relevance with the majority of the public not just their base.
They'll follow what's popular, and if that's liquidating jews, they'll do it (some of them did!).
This is a straw-man. No one is in favor of letting billionaires commit extrajudicial killings. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is higher in my principle stack than the rights of market forces.
In conclusion, I will say there is a way out of this morass for conservatives. They have to kick the neo-nazis, the proud boys, and qanon out of the party. They have to accept science and that the scientific method is the best way to determine objective reality. If they continue to call anything that falls outside of their accepted narratives "fake news", they will continue to lose the culture war. And thus, be more and more sidelined from the national discourse. Due the undemocratic elements of our constitution they conservatives may retain political power, but in the end, the consent of the governed is more important.
Ah, I had it right the first time, you're stuck in partisan war rather than a property rights absolutist.
Don't trade principles for that, it's not worth it, the news cycle will be different tomorrow anyways. Certainly don't trust the corporations over individuals or the press for a one news-cycle 'win'. What kind of liberal values are those? "George W Bush liberals"?
Those projects failed because the general public agrees with FB/TW/YT’s actions so far. When they bad QAnon, the only people annoyed enough to leave are QAnon adherents, so you get a new social network full of trash. As a result, nobody else follows them.
People don't visit FB/TW/YT for their editorial control. People tolerate FB/TW/YT's actions because it is easier, they don't necessarily agree with them.
Scale makes a difference. These social networks are no longer just a small private website serving a local community but a critical communications medium.
When they can influence billions and shape elections, it's time to seriously review their power. This is how we treat ISPs and phone providers today, and social networks of a certain size should be considered in the same class.
Undersea cables, phone lines, and the radio spectrum are critical communications media. Private web sites with selective publication criteria by way of their content moderation policies are not.
Until you are delisted from google, banned by youtube, blocked by facebook and twitter and now your online potential was reduced in 90%. Imagine being blocked from every walmart,costco, 7-eleven and being told that it is freedom because you still have the choice to go elsewhere
> Imagine being blocked from every walmart,costco, 7-eleven and being told that it is freedom because you still have the choice to go elsewhere
I'm imagining someone who messes up badly enough to get banned from all those places and still somehow blames the stores rather than their own actions.
> I'm imagining someone who messes up badly enough to get banned from all those places and still somehow blames the stores rather than their own actions.
That’s exactly what antisemites say of Jewish expulsions.
Should private companies have any regulation at all? Should oil companies avoid pollution? Should ISPs ensure quality of service? Should medical companies ensure safety? Why is it that trillion-dollar companies that are larger and more powerful than anything else before should not be regulated when it comes to something as crucial as our freedom to communicate?
I find it ironic that another major HN story today is another instance of Google wiping out someone's account without any recourse, erasing their online presence and decades of data. Is that the new normal? Megacorporations ruling our lives without reason or appeal?
The world has changed. Social media is no longer just a website. It's communication fabric with network effects larger than entire nations that surrounds our lives. We either deal with it accordingly or risk losing much more.
I fundamentally disagree with your premise that these incumbent commercial social media services are a communications fabric. These companies are in no way common carrier, critical communications media.
The underlying physical infrastructure, sure, the underlying standards like the TCP/IP stack, DNS, Ethernet, etc, well those are too, but these are categorically not quite same as what you are arguing should also be included in that group.
But why? You offer no explanation other than saying you disagree. What exactly is the difference?
More people communicate over social media than phone lines today. Why is the former not equivalent to the later? Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey said that he believes social media is a human right - do you disagree with him?
You keep talking about social media in general but the question is whether Twitter and Facebook specifically--just those two companies--are critical infrastructure.
Obviously Twitter is not because it has been down for about an hour now and life is going on just fine.
I'm not sure that "critical infrastructure" as regards to communications mediums and legislation should be understood in the terms of absolute necessity, rather by terms of popularity and wide usage. That wide usage brings with it a lot of power on the part of the platform owners and a certain immunity to being boycotted or replaced.
The critical question is if they ought to be allowed to wield that power unchecked, up to and including when that reach has progressed far enough to have real impacts on our political system, and so impacts on people's lives.
Remember, we're talking about what we'd like the law to be, not what the law is. These definitions are up for debate and redefinition.
Of course they ought to be allowed to affect the political system. The whole point of the First Amendment is to ensure that private citizens can act to change the government—the fundamental concept behind the design of the U.S. federal government.
News organizations have wielded this power for at least a century. Their decisions on what stories to publish obviously have political implications, and in some cases their editorial boards even explicitly endorse one candidate.
Facebook and Twitter are private entities, just like The NY Times or Fox News.
Section 230 applies equally to any interactive computer service, whether it is operated by Twitter, Facebook, NY Times, Fox, Ycombinator, or even you or me.
The First Amendment applies to everyone in the U.S.
Yes, and since social networks are only third-party content, they should not be interfering with it otherwise they are exercising editorial control and are now first-party content.
I said communications medium, not infrastructure. Life goes on fine when the internet is down or your phone is disabled, but they're still considered important and necessary.
Facebook and Twitter are just 2 of the biggest with many others like TikTok, Whatsapp, WeChat. It's the size and scope that should be used as a measure of when they cross over into public utility vs private project.
It is about political power, Facebook and Twitter shouldn't have the power to significantly alter elections by selectively choosing what information people see.
Facebook and Twitter make money through the sale of advertisements and the sale of data for market research purposes. If their power needs to be moderated, people can do like the old television days and boycott their advertisers:
The "old television days" are long over. Considering the size of these companies and their advertisers, there is no way that boycotting or other protest would make any impact.
Basically everyone advertises there. So boycotting their advertisers is like boycotting earning money because your disagree with the government and want to hurt their tax revenue.
> Should private companies have any regulation at all?
I can actually get behind no regulation for private companies, twitter can censor who they like as I can drive my favorite tank registered as my company vehicle and don't bother with taxes anymore.
When they can influence billions and shape elections, it's time to seriously review their power.
Yeah, but it seems like FB and Twitter have been reviewing their power over the last four years.
They looked at the power of trolling-network, botnets etc to the influence elections. They basically triggered a circuit-breaker when a heavy hit-piece hit their networks.
Which is to say "the power of social networks" isn't just the power of the owners of the networks but also the power of groups embedded in the networks. Should these providers be fair brockers for all kind of manipulated viral content as well as for individual positions? Should they use their position of the ultimate kill switch to be the ultimate authority? I don't know but I don't think you put the most recent events as Facebook versus Organic Content - it's more Facebook versus Rupert Murdoch.
They have no accountability or oversight. Their reviews are completely up to them and they have nothing to prove to anyone about efficacy beyond increasing advertising revenue as much as possible for investors.
> .... and they came to believe that these very popular websites are somehow inherent to the Internet and to society in general. They're not.
Amen. And my feeling is that we would be better off without them. This is why i'm in favor of slow computing, slower network speeds, and slower lifestyles. (I should state that this is not sarcasm)
Modern 4k monitors are awesome. Need a fast computer to drive them.
My phone shoots 20 megapixels photos. I only post them on social media once in a year or so, but have cloud backups and I need bandwidth for that. I watch movies sometimes, Blu-ray ain’t available at local physical retail, again need internet bandwidth and local storage.
If you're an entrepreneur today and you start an internet company without paying Google or Facebook money for advertising you're probably not going to succeed. The only question is how much marketing "tax" these companies will extract from you. If you have direct competitors, you'll at least have to pay Google to keep their name off of the first search results for your company.
> It's 100% inline with free speech to let a given website decide what they want to publish.
Imagine I make a website where I censor everything except pro Trump memes. Is that a bastion of free speech, compared to a website where I allow, y'know, actual free speech and discourse?
I can't stand when people try to conflate the first amendment with freedom of speech. Nobody is (seriously) arguing that websites shouldn't have the legal freedom under our government to limit speech to whatever they desire. What we're arguing is that these platforms ought to value free speech as a principle and act impartially. Of course they have, and should have, the freedom to censor whatever they want for whatever reasons they want. But they should have the integrity not to.
Facebook and Twitter have never been impartial principled venues for free speech. They have blocked content from the very beginning, mostly relating to sex and violence. Facebook even banned photos of mothers breastfeeding their children.
And they make editorial decisions constantly about what content each person sees. The fact that these decisions are scaled by computer algorithms does not mean they are not happening.
This idea that they are neutral and free communications channels is a marketing message that they invented and pushed, because they thought it would help them succeed in business. We don’t have to believe them.
They’re just private companies, two among millions. If they make unpopular decisions about how to operate, they will fail. They should be allowed to do that.
Conversely, if they make popular decisions that you disagree with, it doesn’t mean the whole concept of free speech is damaged. Again: just two companies.
>What we're arguing is that these platforms ought to value free speech as a principle and act impartially. [...] But they should have the integrity not to.
But you're ignoring the fact that the corporations' value system consists of maximizing profit.
Anything that isn't pushing in that direction is both a distraction and a hindrance to the stated goals of the corporation -- making money.
Valuing free speech or having integrity are laudable ideals. I do my best to prioritize both. Sometimes I fail. But I do the best I can.
But my (or your) goals as an individual aren't relevant in this context.
Changing the incentives for these corporations to do whatever it takes to maximize profit would be a good thing.
That will entail the willingness of a majority of us to vote with our feet/wallet, likely aided with smart regulation.
But until we change those incentives/priorities, the status quo is what we'll get.
When guns were flint locks, the amount of damage one person could do was pretty limited. When machine guns became generally available (and i'm aware $200 is not "generally available" in 1920). That changed. These weapons were introduced to "force multiply" an individual.
Before the internet, the amount of damange a single guy with free speech could do was pretty limited. But with the internet, we're all force-multiplied. This message is probably going to be read by hundreds of people. Maybe thousands. In meat space, i'd have to be standing in a large concert hall for that kind of audince.
I still believe in free-speech, and frankly I also believe regular individuals should be able to buy machine guns. But I don't blame people for having some hesitation about that. Crazy people exist... and force-multiplying those individuals can cause a lot of harm to society. I'm very pro-speech, but I respect that we might need to have a conversation about it.
Never owned gun, and never thought of owning one, until this year, precisely when politicians told us, on TV, that calling 911 is a privilege, and when politicians condoned publicly looting and robbery and violence and abolishing police. I never felt so much need to own many guns and train for tactical shooting to defend my family when needed.
If you genuinely believed the police are there to protect you, and not to ensure the status quo is enforced and continues, you are naive, or you are not part of a marginalized group. That is not meant to be an overly hateful statement.
Police (and other law-enforcement) are an exercise of the power of government. The former exists to ensure the latter can continue to exist.
Therefore, police (and law-enforcement) exist to enact laws to preserve the status quo and whatever accepted social mores happen to be in vogue at the time via statute. Protecting you and your loved ones only occurs when your needs align with the desires of the state.
If you happen to be part of a marginalized group, often, power structures dictate that the desires of the state run contrary to your needs, or, more often, the desires of the state are literally enacted to make your life more difficult.
For example - Where I live, we have a saying, "No cops, no problems." This is because a) police take 45+ minutes to respond because we're very rural, b) police generally only respond by taking notes and harassing anyone they find on the scene, regardless of their role, and c) police, once they respond, are well known to run warrants on anyone around just to be able to say they've arrested someone that day (the second part of that is my conjecture, but I also can't come up with a reason they would run warrants on an innocent bystander, regardless of said bystander's past).
My need of having my car not be stolen apparently does not align with the government's need to ensure my father is prosecuted for low-level drug offenses from many years ago. (to use the next word too much, I think) Therefore, police do not have my interests at heart. Please apply this lesson to any other marginalized group to see where the problems with police come from, and why I called you naive.
Since the beginning of time, civil societies have had police and a justice system. I know it's in the old testament.
Society needs an authority to turn to to resolve disputes or injustice and to maintain order, the alternative is chaos.
That authority may not be perfect, it may have certain biases that need to be worked on, but without it, disputes will be won by the superior marksman.
I guess, then, at the heart of the 'defund the police' movement is an attempt to move toward working on those biases.
That is what is lost in much of the conversation - we need to fix certain things in the policing of the US - because people immediately turn to 'what will we do if there are no police'.
I guess, how do we turn the conversation from 'defund the police' to 'fix this shit' without losing people along the way?
> Most Americans have a positive experience with police and with police protecting them. This is true in minority communities too.
I'm not a minority and I grew up solidly upper middle-class. But even as a child, I knew that it was really dangerous to piss off the police.
Because the police were generally considered to just be the biggest and best armed gang. Because they acted that way.
Things have gotten much better in the ensuing 35-40 years here, but there are still serious, structural problems with police impunity -- especially if you're a minority[0][1]
NYPD (in decades past) is an bit of an outlier... but even then, there's a gulf between "have a good experience with" and "don't piss off".
Modern polling is what I based by contention on, and I don't think citing the most notorious counter-example (and reaching back before reforms to solve exactly the problem you allege) is much of a response.
Minority communities routinely poll in favour of INCREASED presence in their communities nowadays.
>NYPD (in decades past) is an bit of an outlier... but even then, there's a gulf between "have a good experience with" and "don't piss off".
I'm pretty much with George Carlin (at least I'm pretty sure it was him) WRT the police:
"It's not that I don't like the police, I just feel better when they're not around."
Really? I find that very difficult to believe based on the sum of my interactions with police. Maybe they're lying, but most of the people I've spoken to have nothing but negative things to say about the way they've been treated by police.
This is like the review site problem... people don't tend to walk around giving random anecdotes about good experiences with routine or common services.
But the polling is what I based my comment on. Even in minority communities, increased police presence polls significantly higher than decreased presence - and that's before proposing any reforms.
I mean I specifically ask them if they have ever had an interaction they would characterize as positive and most say "no." admittedly I've only talked to 15-20 people about this so my sample could be skewed.
Yeah, I'm well aware of Warren v. District of Columbia. That said, in reality most police do respond to 911s, they do help communities, and they do fight crimes. Oh, the police in our town do catch mail thieves. In another word, they do protect us by upholding the law.
It's total absolute bullshit to say all police don't care about protecting you. You might have had poor experiences, but generalizing from that is a mistake.
You’re ascribing a lot of emotion to a pretty disinterested argument. The purpose of police is to enforce laws, not protect people. This isn’t a hateful statement, it’s a fact that has been affirmed in court. If there is a shooter at your local high school, police are entirely within their rights to cordon off the area but not go in and intervene (this is precisely what happened in Florida). That’s not to say that those same police officers were indifferent to the lives and plights of those students, but their goal is to enforce laws, not save all lives by any means necessary. Trying to generalize your experience of police into their policy is a mistake.
How does cordoning off the area and not going in reflect enforcing the law to the best of their ability? Mainly in contrast to cordoning off the area, and then sending at least someone in.
Because it is to the best of their ability. Sending someone in sounds good, unless of course you’re that someone, and then you get to worry about either dying or killing someone innocent. Police have no duty or responsibility to risk their lives in order to save someone else, just like an emt, firefighter, lifeguard, etc.
Police care about protecting you just as long as your interests align with the interests of the state, is what I said.
For most people, these two things align.
Most. Not all. That is my point. I live in a community that the police absolutely have no interest in protecting. We are a problem to be dealt with, not a community to protect.
Not everyone has that experience, I understand that. But police are, by virtue of who pulls the purse strings, an extension of the power of government.
I never said all police don't care about protecting you. I said they absolutely care about protecting you, as long as your wants align with the needs of the state.
I don't think it's a necessary condition that your interests are aligned with the state for the police to protect you, unless you're applying a very flexible interpretation as to what the interests of the state are, in which case the point becomes pretty weak.
Good thing that poster was talking about police as an institution and power structure and not making your strawman argument about about what is in the heart of each and every cop
Good thing that literally their first sentence says police aren't there to protect you, which I literally cited in my post, and not some strawman argument about what is in the heart of each and every cop.
> If you genuinely believed the police are there to protect you, and not to ensure the status quo is enforced and continues, you are naive, or you are not part of a marginalized group.
“ If you genuinely believed the police are there to protect you, and not to ensure the status quo is enforced and continues, you are naive, or you are not part of a marginalized group. That is not meant to be an overly hateful statement.
Police (and other law-enforcement) are an exercise of the power of government. The former exists to ensure the latter can continue to exist.”
Do you know this is just regurgitated political theory from Karl Marx and wasn’t considered even remotely true for thousands of years?
Is it true now? Probably not, but you seem convinced it’s true...
Don't be confused. Regardless of political leaning, the police are not your friends. If the US were to degrade to a dictatorship it would be the police rounding up the "undesirables".
No, I'm not confused. Police has been of great help in my community. They are kind. They take crimes seriously. They are friendly to kids in school. I shouldn't need to mention this as it goes without saying, but whatever: they are kind and friendly to kids of all colors in my community.
And dictatorship in what way? You mean that the president repeatedly asked mayors and governors to ask for national guard, as required by law, but couldn't do anything because they said no? You mean the president has no power over state or city jurisdiction so he could only yell on Twitter for opening the cities -- pathetic in a way. You mean the president has no authority to ban critical race theory so all he could do is to ban them in federal agencies, again under his full authority? You mean the president has no power over media so all he could do is to call them fake news? Or you mean that the first thing that Hitler did to gain power is to disband the police, just like many of our justice fighters have been demanding?
Are you somehow forgetting the bizarre, unmarked "police" presence Trump sent into Portland? Are DHS and Border Patrol agents with no identifying information or accountability reassuring to you?
Curious about why people downvote this. Really just curious about specifics, as I fully understand that people have different opinions on gun ownership. I used to be really against gun ownership too.
Is it because
1. I didn't state facts? I double checked videos
2. I took what politicians' words out of context? Again, I double checked the context.
3. I should not use a gun whatsoever? But then how do I protect myself, assuming escaping is not an option (of course I'll try to run first).
4. This is advocating violence? Then what's a better alternative?
It's because this is a discussion about free speech, not gun ownership. Gun ownership was just being used as an analogy in the comment you were replying to. They'll also downvote this comment, because it asks why people voted a certain way, which is against HN guidelines.
Well, because the below is an incendiary and mostly false statement. Additionally, just because the police in your community are perfect doesn't mean real problems don't exist elsewhere.
"when politicians condoned publicly looting and robbery and violence and abolishing police"
Seattle council member on looting of stores: "Colleagues, I hope we’re all saying we understand why that destruction happened and we understand why people are upset", and "I don't want to hear is for our constituents to be told to be civil, not to be reactionary, to be told looting doesn't solve anything."
And didn't Don Lemon, the warrior of our justice warriors publicly called democrats to stop rioting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp7oPgIwpZ8? To be fair, being silent does not mean supporting rioting. I guess that the Portland government letting "protesters" destruct federal court building for 5 months is not condoning either. But hey, it is the righteous people who told us "silence is violence, not me.
> because the police in your community are perfect doesn't mean real problems don't exist elsewhere.
Of course not. But following the same logic, we should "abolish" or "dismantle" police for a few bad apples?
I appreciate this discussion and your viewpoint, but I frankly fail to see your point.
What is being said is that the police shouldn't be the instance to handle incidents where what is really needed is counseling, or social working. We're talking about shifting funds to those and let police do what they have been trained for.
On that, as an aside... I will say that as black-belt in Aikido, I remain flabbergasted that police officers are not taught simple techniques to subdue or disable people/threats without resorting to deadly force.
To your original post I will also say that owning a gun does not make you and your family impervious to crime! You cannot protect your family with a gun, it doesn't give your family a bullet proof shield. On the contrary you will likely escalate a situation.
> What is being said is that the police shouldn't be the instance to handle incidents where what is really needed is counseling, or social working. We're talking about shifting funds to those and let police do what they have been trained for.
I wish that's the discussion, but I failed to see that's what actually happened. I'm aware that many people argue that "defund police" means allocating fund for better use, but it sounds revisionism. The word "defund" means stop funding, simple and clear. BLM/ANTIFA's demand is clear too: abolish police. The word "abolish" does not mean restructuring, nor does it mean improving. The Minneapolis council woman was specifically asked for her view about "dismantling police", and I don't see how the word "dismantling" can be interpreted as routing fund to a better org.
So, no, the left populists did ask for reallocating funds to "handle incidents where what is really needed is counseling". They were asking for dismantling police. People may take "defund" as "reallocate fund", but that's interpretation that is not supported by facts.
What side? I was simply stating the demand by the BLM protesters in Washington DC and in NYC, as well as the demand by the leadership of BLM movement. There are multiple videos, pictures, and NYT/WaPo OpEd that showed such demand.
You know that the aphorism is "a few bad apples spoils the bunch", right? The underlying metaphor is that you have to get rid of the entire group because the infection has spread to all of them even if it's not immediately visible from the outside.
Because you're spouting off about abolishing the police when a tiny fraction of people actually want to do that, much less elected officials. That any number of elected officials CONDONE rioting. It frustrates me to no end that people will hear one boogeyman then start talking about the end of civilization.
> It frustrates me to no end that people will hear one boogeyman then start talking about the end of civilization.
It also frustrates me to no end that people will see one police brutality case, which was later challenged with tons of video evidence, then start talking about all cops are bad, there is this and that evil systemically, and then start rioting and looting with all righteousness.
I use to hate police when I was younger. I think the advent of the body camera has been a game changer. I've also seen police do incredible heroically things they did not need to do. I wrote this a few weeks ago:
We've seen hundreds of instances of police brutality, many of them after George Floyd was murdered. After Breonna Taylor was negligently killed by incompetent cops, judges and prosecutors. The state is killing people. That should be worth protesting.
> abolishing the police when a tiny fraction of people actually want to do that
A number of jurisdictions adopted steep police budget cuts in recent months (including e.g. Seattle and Portland - home to multi-month violent riots), and Minneapolis literally dismantled their police department. So I challenge this assertion.
I also don't get how cutting LE budgets is supposed to improve policing.
You haven't listened very much, then. There has been a lot of discussion on how social services, mental health services, and demilitarization of police tools and tactics would benefit cities.
In a near-zero-sum municipal budget, funding increased homelessness assistance, increased staffing for mental health response, increased investment in lower income/higher crime areas would necessitate funds being reduced elsewhere; many suggest reducing police funding in places where those new services would step up.
If cops stop responding to certain kinds of emergency calls, is it not reasonable the funding for that capacity get shifted to the group that does respond? If cops were fighting fires and then a fire department was created, wouldn't you shift some of the firefighting budget to the new crew?
"The Police Department reductions passed Monday represent only about $3 million in 2020 savings; the department was allocated $409 million this year — more than the city spends annual on parks and social services."
Your comment is disingenuous. This is only for 2020, this is how much they could cut _retroactively_. City council demanded 50% cut for 2021, and overrode the mayor's veto to allow this to proceed: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-c...
Quote: "Though the council’s bills were expected to immediately slice only about $3 million from the Police Department’s $400-plus million annual budget — nowhere close to the 50% that seven council members in July vowed to extract — the council members described the trims as a crucial “down payment” on more sweeping changes to come."
Dig a little deeper next time. Don't fall for fake news.
My prediction is that Seattle and Portland will be Detroit within 4 years. The city will be empty, most business will flee. I left Seattle years ago because I was sick of the bullshit that's going on there. I lived on what became the border of CHAZ. I even made a video about it:
I'm in contact with people in Seattle frequently. I'm still really shocked at how bad things have gotten. I knew police officers and defense attorneys there too. This defunding thing is not going to end well.
Pretty much my expectation as well. I'm looking for properties in Texas or Florida right now, before real estate market craters in WA, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.
Seems like an overreaction. No one has actually abolished any police force in the U.S., AFAIK. The Minneapolis city council made some noise about it, but most of them regret it and nothing has come of it.
Any guns you own are statistically more likely to kill/injure your family than protect them.
I appreciate the optimism. Usually I'd be optimistic too. I'm pessimistic in this case because I sense a culture shift. Few media, few intellectuals, and few politicians initially condemned the rioting or looting or violence. They did so only months later. Instead, CNN reporter could stand in front of a burning building, telling millions of people that it was a "mostly peaceful" protest. And where are the politicians when the business owners in Kenosha saw their life's work burnt away by mobs?
What does that have to do with protecting your family? No one in Minneapolis or Kenosha died as a direct result of looting/civil unrest, and no one invaded any personal dwellings. In both cities, the only deaths were protesters killed by non-protesters.
And from personal experience - I live in Minneapolis, and at no point during the unrest did I fear for my personal safety or my property. Well, except when the police with machine guns rolled through my city yelling and shooting "less-lethal" ammunition at anyone who dared peek out their front door.
>I'm pessimistic in this case because I sense a culture shift. Few media, few intellectuals, and few politicians initially condemned the rioting or looting or violence.
I appreciate your point of view and anyone who didn't condemn violence should be roundly criticized.
However, my experience here in NYC was much different.
Not only did pretty much everyone decry the violence (a significant portion of which -- and there's plenty of video evidence too -- was instigated by police), but time and again over the two or three days that there was looting, the protestors took it upon themselves to stop the looters, because no one wanted that -- except the looters.
What's more, much (not all) of the violent actions against police property were perpetrated by folks from out of town.
I can't speak to Portland or Seattle or Kenosha, but here in NYC, even some of the police[0][1] stood (and knelt) with the protestors to condemn police violence and urged the protestors (to cheers, I might add) to kick the looters and other violent folks out.
There's nuance there and it's sad (especially in the context of discussing social media) that those nuances are lost in social media bubbles where the loudest and most extreme are given undue exposure, if not primacy in the discussion.
> Allowing Free speech still is the hill I'd like to die on
At this rate it will be the hill that the civilization dies on. The whole "absolute free speech is a sacrosanct human rights for everyone" is an ideal that simply would not scale with the 21st century civilization. Most users around here grew up firmly believing that value, and it is further reinforced by American/Western exceptionalism, so I can see how this comment will be very negatively received.
But we can all agree that freedom isn't free, at one point in the future the cost would be so high that the whole civilization would be facing a "give me freedom or give me death" moment. I can't predict whether that moment will come in the form of an anti-science misinformation campaign during a pandemic that is far more serious than even Covid or a mentally deranged, conspiracy theory supporting leader who has full control of the nuclear arsenal, but that moment will come one day.
The second law of thermal dynamics applies to more than just physical systems, entropy also plays similar role in a complex society that is getting ever more complex. Before our species can attain the ability to modularize our own society through interplanetary colonization to ensure survival, we have to face the very uncomfortable truth that we have to put in more rules and checks into our existing society to ensure the entropy doesn't snowball out of control too fast. That means we have to put everything on the table and re-exam all of our values, because there is no value to speak of in a dead world.
The unfortunate thing is it's very difficult to have this conversation, even with very intelligent people, without everyone getting emotional. After all a lot of these beliefs and values are something we hold very dear, and maybe that is the ultimate tragedy of our world.
And yet,here you are, freely spouting non-sense, misinterpreting the second law of "thermal dynamics" and arguing for a very strict and highly-self-convenient notion of freedom of speech.
I still wish you can express your views all over the internet without the risk of being cancelled.
>I still wish you can express your views all over the internet without the risk of being cancelled.
I don't, especially if me spreading nonsense directly causes harm to a large number of people and the society. I do not believe my unlimited free speech rights is of higher priority the health and wellbeing of the overall society.
The whole "individual rights always triumphs over the interest of the society" is exactly the type of American exceptionalism I mentioned. It's a very strange notion in many cultures (and no doubt you'd say those cultures are inferior) and it's more or less another symptom of a culture that worships narcissistic behavior.
You are just one guy in the Internet, relax, dont give yourself too much importance. While people fight to stop the "tin-foil brigade" to have their loony youtube channels, they enshrine Hollywood actors, Silicon Valley neo-barons and politicians, whose opinions are ACTUALLY dangerous and influential, and yet none of them will be cancelled.isnt it curious?
The whole point of my comment is I am not important, and neither are you, so both of us should shut up if our speech materially hurt the society.
> Silicon Valley neo-barons and politicians, whose opinions are ACTUALLY dangerous and influential, and yet none of them will be cancelled.isnt it curious?
I see you failed on reading comprehension. They should be cancelled if they are proven to be dangerous to the society, such as anti-mask movement or anti-vaccine movement. I don't know why you are trying to trivialize "tin-foil brigade" when it literally killed many people this year.
> I am not important, and neither are you, so both of us should shut up if our speech materially hurt the society.
That's an oxymoron, if we are irrelevant we then dont have the power nor the audience to affect society in a grand scale.
> I see you failed on reading comprehension.
Nice try.
> They should be cancelled if they are proven to be dangerous to the society, such as anti-mask movement or anti-vaccine movement
And yet they are free as a bird. From Jim Carrey to Boris Johnson, from Jack Dorsey to Elon Musk, from Mark Zuckerberg to Alysa Milano, they have spouted absolutely nonsense and they are as influential as ever.They should not be banned btw, but ridiculed.Alex Jones deserves the same treatment and not being hypocritically swept under the rug.
> I don't know why you are trying to trivialize "tin-foil brigade" when it literally killed many people this year.
This a global pandemic, a big portion of the deaths was sadly unavoidable no matter your location in the map or your political persuasion, it is juicy ammunition for political gains though. The other big part in the deaths comes from the clusterfuck of mismanagement of the crisis. The people responsible for that WILL NOT be cancelled. The influence of the loonies in their youtube channels represents at worst a minuscule fraction of the deaths.
Do you agree that there are objective facts that should be accepted by the society for the well being of the society? Such as Earth is not flat, vaccine does not cause autism, and wearing a mask is helpful at preventing Covid spread?
If you do not believe such object facts exist, then we do not live in the same reality, if you do, then there must be some mechanism that raises certain statements into the status of "facts", and that's the same kind of mechanism we should apply.
Please explain what you think I’m strawmanning. If you demand that certain topics be banned from discussion, you must explain, as a matter of implementation, who gets to decide what is banned.
> Do you agree that there are objective facts that should be accepted by the society
What, concretely, do you mean by "should be accepted by the society"? To use an extreme but historically common example, does it mean that people should be executed for having different beliefs? You need to be more specific.
> If you do not believe such object facts exist
I do believe the Earth is round. I do believe it’s a fact. I don’t believe people should be banned (or worse) because they think otherwise.
In fact, flat Earth theories are interesting, because they challenge my assumptions and ultimately clarify my understanding of the subject.
This is why freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas is so important: It is the only mechanism by which we can correct our own epistemology and keep it in check, both at the individual and at the societal level!
> there must be some mechanism that raises certain statements into the status of "facts"
Sure. What does this have to do with censorship, though? The topic of discussion was policy, i.e. what is to be imposed on other people.
Wow you are not even discussing in good faith anymore.
Where did I say discussion of certain topics should be banned? Where did I say people should be killed for believing different things? It’s literally strawman after strawman from you.
> you must explain, as a matter of implementation, who gets to decide what is banned.
No I don’t. I pointed out a problem, but I am not suggesting solutions, and I sure as hell don’t owe you an implementation.
> The whole "absolute free speech is a sacrosanct human rights for everyone" is an ideal that simply would not scale with the 21st century civilization.
> But we can all agree that freedom isn't free, at one point in the future the cost would be so high that the whole civilization would be facing a "give me freedom or give me death" moment.
Feel free to clarify what you meant, which is precisely what I was asking about.
> Where did I say people should be killed for believing different things?
I explicitly said that was an example, not something you specifically said.
If Jim Jones had an amplification like Twitter, maybe it would be 909,000 people that drank the kool-aid and killed themselves rather than the 909 people that did.
Some ideas don't deserve to be amplified, and there is no guarantee that anyone and everyone gets to have their ideas amplified by everyone else. I see far too much right-wing kool-aid being guzzled today, and it seems like about 40% of America would rather die by suicide than live in a world where compromise happens with liberals, and for no good reason except misinformation, disinformation, and subterfuge.
So you'd really rather watch the world burn than accept that Twitter has no obligation to amplify anyone's lies?
> If Jim Jones had an amplification like Twitter, maybe it would be 909,000 people that drank the kool-aid and killed themselves rather than the 909 people that did.
The mere fact you say that it shows you have 0 idea how a sect like that works and how it preys and works on people.
> I see far too much right-wing kool-aid being guzzled today
You are correct but it is highly suggestive you only mention right wing lunacies, sure, climate change denial, anti-vaccine movement and oil industry cheerleading are particularly popular in the right win and they will be very damaging to society. But how about left wing lunacy, no reason for concern? From opposition to nuclear energy to GMOs, blank slatism and denial of any significant difference due to sex or ethnicity, forced quotas across all areas of society, cancel culture, a strong government promoted censorship. I am going to be honest I am pretty left wing, for real, not the american variety, and with the exception of global warming and vaccines(this is not so clear cut politically) I find myself more often than not in the other side of the road from them,
I don't follow your argument. Free Speech doesn't mean that anyone has an obligation to listen.
You can solve being saturated by noise on the listening side much better than on the sending side... much better because the listeners needs are diverse, because listeners must be robust against adversarial inputs (or otherwise the first madman with a random number generator floods you out), because the listeners time/sanity is what is at stake so that's where the incentives are, and so on.
The fight against entropy should be all of our missions but it can be accomplished without forcefully silencing people.
"Free Speech doesn't mean that anyone has an obligation to listen"
Quite.
And those who have no obligation to listen include Facebook and Twitter. They are absolutely under no obligation to deliver any message you wish to send.
You won't get much disagreement from me on that basis though I wish that was the reasoning they gave-- rather than the transparently false statements about leaked documents.
I'm also dubious about applying that to private messages: Twitter isn't a party to those messages, interception of the content is an unlawful wiretap. Without unlawfully monitoring the content of the users private community it's not clear to me how they could be suppressing the content.
They are free to do whatever they want with any message on their platform, private or public. If they were regulated as a common carrier, this would not be the case.
I believe that Twitter and Facebook have no desire to be regulated as common carriers.
There is no way this is an unlawful wiretap, as they own and operate the wires.
This is absolutely not true under federal law (18 U.S. Code § 2511.) (also apparently CA PC 631).
It doesn't matter who owns the facilities. Except for certain narrow exceptions (warrants, government officers, jails, incidental operations necessary for maintenance) any unauthorized third party interception of a private communication is unlawful. Common carrier status is relevant for liability but is irrelevant for § 2511.
I think you are confusing a Twitter DM with a private communication. Note that Twitter is not intercepting your DMs, they are the ones transmitting and storing them.
And I’m free to criticize their censorship, and the way they lie about it.
If the only reply left is “Well, they can legally do it!” (assuming their lies about said censorship aren’t legally problematic), that’s very telling. It completely ignores the question of morality, especially when the platforms in question have so much control over society.
Lots of things are legal. That doesn’t make them right. In some cases, they’re very wrong.
As far as entropy goes, if we actually have a "supreme leader" then it would actually drastically lower entropy. It would be a shitty society to live in unless we are talking about a benevolent AI or something, but entropy would indeed be low.
Btw my original comment wasn't about the danger of free speech, it's about the danger of absolutely unchecked free speech from all aspects of society.
It should be the hill that civilization dies on, because without free speech there is no civilization. Without free speech corruption will grow and societies will decay because there is nothing to stop the rot before it spreads.
You could even make the argument that China and Russia are actively feeding into things like this in order to make people anti-free speech/thought and cause internal strife/erosion because our eroding institutions (including free speech) gives them a leg up globally to set their own agendas in motion.
The very fact that is successful just further reinforces my point doesn't it? If we see different countries as competing organisms, obviously in the 21st century China would have a leg over us precisely because of things like their government would shut down any anti-mask speech or movement at the first sight.
Imagine a terrorist cell just unleashed a biological weapon that's far more deadly than Covid. Which country do you think will fare better in this scenario, China or the U.S.? Would Americans still be arguing about the superiority of democracy and free speech if a majority of the people died?
No I don't believe there are no trade offs, I believe a free society is a vastly superior system despite its drawbacks. I'm sure if the United States government did a strict lockdown and welded the doors shut of COVID patients and left them to die, we'd have a much lower case count.
> I'm sure if the United States government did a strict lockdown and welded the doors shut of COVID patients and left them to die
No country did that, why are you making things up? China stopped people from leaving their houses but at the same time provide supplies and delivered food through organized effort for weeks. That was well documented by even foreigners living there.
Hell, let's not use China's example, what about countries like Singapore, South Korea, New Zealand, etc all managed to be both democracies and selectively enforce rules at the same time?
>Hell, let's not use China's example, what about countries like Singapore, South Korea, New Zealand, etc all managed to be both democracies and selectively enforce rules at the same time?
Not sure what your point is here. If you're saying information is a virus to society and we need reasonable restrictions on it to save it...I don't agree and there isn't much if any recorded history to support that assertion. Information and expression doesn't kill, it's not a virus. It's not even a comparison.
>I don't agree and there isn't much if any recorded history to support that assertion. Information and expression doesn't kill
What the hell? Are you serious? Yes, anti-semitism never killed anyone, anti-vaccine misinformation never hurt anyone, and calling Covid a hoax didn't cause any unnecessary death either /s.
>it's not a virus
It's not, because it spreads far, far faster than even the most dangerous virus.
Yes you are correct, it is the damn commies. That's why people like Snowden and Assange received all sort of protection by the western democracies for their roles in unveiling bad stuff done by powerful people. Could you imagine Snowden in Russia or Assange in a left latin country? Yucks.
That's a great deflection, but it's not in the same sphere as the fear of the newly found fears of election interference that is driving people to become anti-free speech. That is directly coming from Russia and China.
Snowden and Assange are quite different, though I am also not opposed to whistle blowers, if it isn't reckless and endanger lives (such as giving up troop positions, etc.)
> it's not in the same sphere as the fear of the newly found fears of election interference that is driving people to become anti-free speech.
I grew up in a latin-american country, US interference in elections was a given, not a suspiction, a fact, million of dollars poured by the NED and the CIA, which proportionally meant a huge fraction of the electoral budget in the country and yet people still went to vote. Now I need to feel worried about the end of the civilization as we know it because the russians bought 500k or so of facebook ads and have bot farms? Go to reddit, specifically to r/politics and you will see there the blue wave doing the same, but there is not outcry. Hillary lost, because she was a lousy candidate and because of the EC system, luckily for Vladimir he also got what the wanted, but not because of the genius of his intelligence services.
I don't deny any of that, and I don't think Hillary lost because of Russia. I don't even think that was their goal at all. The entire goal is to establish distrust in American institutions among the populace, which includes the 1A. That was my entire point.
I understand your point , but surely you would agree that A) Any Russian disruption is dwarfed by the inside dynamics in the country. B) Many people in power use the Russian-scare to promote a narrative that may help them to maintain or obtain power. This is nothing new. McCarthy did the same.
As long as there is people and society there will be a civilization one way or the other.
You may not like that civilization, but saying a specie cannot survive unless we adhere to democracy and free speech is the product of your upbringing but not the product of objective reality.
Misinformation and hate speech are clearly important issues. But loosing free speech would be a colossal mistake. I used to live in a country with no free speech, trust me the USA in its current state is hundred million times better and more just.
Free speech is just super fundamental. So, in my opinion, nothing restricting free speech is acceptable - the downsides of that are just too enormous. We need to learn to live in a society where information is easily available and free speech has absolute protection. And yes, this involves learning to be able to detect misinformation, manipulation, etc. without outright banning it.
Voltaire put it well: ""I disagree with what you have to say, sir, but I will defend, to the death, your right to say it."
There are then questions of monopolies and utilities.
Cloud providers won't allow you to host certain content and if you buy your own server your internet provided can and will restrict the kind of content you can host.
Also there are de-facto monopolies on communications and social networks.
> Cloud providers won't allow you to host certain content and if you buy your own server your internet provided can and will restrict the kind of content you can host.
yeah because in practice free speech isn't black and white like these internet discussions like to pretend it is. Is not being allowed to host child porn a violation of my free speech?
there's nuance when defining free speech. Similar to the paradox of tolerance, you need to draw the line somewhere otherwise you'll be drowned out and taken over by speech that doesn't happen in good faith.
Every country has limits to freedom of speech. In the US you can't lie to a Federal Officer, you can't distribute or possess images of child abuse and you cannot advocate for a direct an imminent threat of an individual.
Those are all pretty reasonable. You CAN have a fictional representation of child abuse (writing/drawing) which is illegal in the UK, Australia and pretty much any other country except Japan.
Speech is tricky. Every country has limitations. China has freedom of speech in their constitution, so a law by itself is not enough to ensure you actually have that freedom.
Right free speech isn't straight forward.I think that is lost on alot of these commenters.
But there's two layers here, does free speech apply to social media. No it doesn't, it's not the government. What would be free speech violation is if you criticized the government then had the government tell the social media company to remove something.
Then there's the hypothetical, if social media companies had to listen free speech. Is spreading manipulative false information protected free speech? That seems abusive to me, close to slander.That's not protected speech.
Slander isn't criminal, it's a civil issue. And social media companies don't have to worry about that _because_ of section 203 protections.
Under US law, yes, social media companies can do what they want in this particular case. But should they? They are massive and they control narratives. The fact that we have real freedom of speech proves this because we have other channels to discuss and bring attention to this issue.
There is another angle: Because of FB/Twitters massive size and control over their audiences, is allowing some stories and blocking others election interference? It most certainly is.
they might only control the narrative on twitter. only around 10% of americans would be a monthly active user on twitter. the world is not twitter, or social media. It might feel like that. Plently of people are still getting their news from other places. the article is still on nypost.
> is allowing some stories and blocking others election interference?
Lets say CNN decides to not publish this story, is that election interference? Now their viewers won't know about it.
You could also say its election interference to run an unfounded story in the first place
> "Is not being allowed to host child porn a violation of my free speech?"
- No, in that specific case it would clearly violate the rights of individuals depicted in the content you are hosting and therefore must be taken down.
your argument is also similar to saying: "don't like your water company? - Drill your own water well!",
"Don't like your power company? - Install your own power sources", etc.
In many places utility companies have a monopoly. Twitter doesn't have a monopoly on the Internet, there are a billion other places you can post content.
In the physical world, the analog here is "you are standing on a box in front of the courthouse, shouting today's particular theory on some regressive tax, and nobody is listening (but nobody is pulling you down and shoving a sock in your mouth either)"
The online equivalent of the image I have painted above is, "You go on Twitter and you post something, and nobody is interested and it just gets ignored."
Twitter removing it is the same as someone pulling you off the box and shoving a sock in your mouth.
Until that actual public square exists online, Twitter, while they may have the legal right to silence you, have an ethical responsibility not to - because THEY chose to provide the platform that they knew everyone would use.
If they want ideological filtering they should make it part of the signup requirements.
Your analogy is entirely wrong. The equivalent to standing on a box on the street is hosting content on your own server, which anyone can still do. The equivalent of someone pulling you off your box is someone coming to your server rack and yanking the cables out, which Twitter is not doing.
>Until that actual public square exists online, Twitter, while they may have the legal right to silence you, have an ethical responsibility not to - because THEY chose to provide the platform that they knew everyone would use.
You are under the misapprehension that Twitter (or Facebook or Google, or any corporation for that matter) has any ethics at all. They exist to make profit. And anything that doesn't align with that is unimportant to them.
I'd also point out that on Twitter or Facebook, you aren't the customer, you're the product. And they keep you in your little section of the feedlot (filter bubble) to keep you pacified and feeling good, as they profit off your PII and eyeballs.
Counter point, I live in a country with no constitutional free speech and a government with a censorship office, and this country is free and open and a wonderful place to live. So you're going to have to find a better causation theory.
I actually don't care who said it, I like that quote because of its meaning and not due to the authority (or lack of thereof) of whom could have been its author.
I was born in the early 90s, and likely grew up on the same internet you did in the late 90s/2000s. In that time, I remember fondly, of participating and even moderating many, many, phpBB, vBulletin and Invision forums, and this idea that, in the past, you could post anything you wanted and people would just "put up with it" has never been true to me at least. Even 4chan never had the "free from consequences" free speech that seems to be worshipped.
Yeah. There was a significantly higher ratio of moderators to users back then and the way I remember it is that toxic people were banned and no one batted an eye.
Now it seems like half the internet is comprised of toxic people.
The “communities” are also huge and generic rather than smaller and topical. Back in the 90s/2000s moderators were usually enthusiasts with domain knowledge and insisting people stay on topic was a pretty solid moderation tool since the moderators’ on topic opinions usually had more value than some random troll.
Even pre-internet, one's social groups would cast them out if they were to say something everyone else in the group thought was wrong or didn't want to hear..
I grew up in the early 2000s. I find it difficult to understand as well, but I think what happened is that emotional human contact was overrun by corporate/nation-state bots. Bots cannot be convinced that their positions are wrong; they exist solely to spread discontent and fear. This is far different than the early Internet where you could safely assume everyone you were talking to is a real person. They may be a dangerous person, but a person nonetheless. You could equally assume that their day job does not consist of demoralizing or confusing people, and their positions on the issues were a result of genuine thought and strategy rather than a built in set of beliefs meant to serve some mystery person or group's end game.
Basically, free speech only works if we have reason to believe the people holding onto the "bad" ideas in the idea marketplace listen. It stops being a solution when there are no consequences to being wrong, when your reputation doesn't matter, and when you can be as immoral or insidious as you want without a care in the world. This is the result of automation invading human spaces.
Does this mean you agree in principle with George Bush's 'free speech zones' aka "you can say what you like, but you have to do it over there where nobody will hear you"?
For every real bot there are probably 10 people accused of being bots because the accuser can't cope with people who disagree with them. In this respect 'bot' has become the new 'troll.'
The word 'bot' is overloaded unfortunately. It means today, both a robot as before, and also, a person who is unwilling or unable to have a normal conversation. Real people are 'bots' too today, when they don't actually talk to other people but only parrot the same points repeatedly. They may as well be robots as far as we can tell from their text online.
> 10 people accused of being bots because the accuser can't cope with people who disagree with them.
If those 10 people aren't really talking, though, then I would consider them bots too. If they are stating one point, over and over, and refusing to listen to others or change their minds about anything, then...they're bots.
You can't talk on Twitter. Any thread loses its order and it branches randomly. Different users sees different threads. It is made to encourage monologues. I guess it is why it is popular among politicians, celebs and journalist.
Maybe those ten accused people have the problem, or maybe their accusor has the problem. It's just as likely that somebody throwing around insults like 'bot' is the person with the problem. If I call somebody a jackass, maybe it's because they're a jackass or maybe it's because I am the jackass.
It is not just "some people are stupid", that is too small scale thinking. We are constantly assaulted by algorithms trained to manipulate people, trained off of millions of A/B tests and microinteractions, constantly being tweaked using real psychological research and real manipulation techniques. There are real weaknesses in the human mind, and we have to constantly be on guard to avoid them being exploited. For most people it is simply too much effort to go through life and read every comment as if it is trying to trick you. They just want entertainment, and that's totally fair.
Antivaxxers, people who deny the efficacy of mask wearing and social distancing in preventing the spread of airborne diseases, climate change deniers, people who think emacs is better than vim. There's a lot of cases where the evidence is plentiful and unrestricted speech is at odds with keeping the world going.
I was born in 1974. Netscape's browser (what became Mozilla) was released my junior year of college. It was a cute alternative to gopher and ftp.
Then, newspapers were published once or twice a day. Magazines weekly or monthly. Publishers worked as editors, fact-checkers, and curators (with their various agendas, of course).
The original miracle of internet free speech was the promise that anyone could become a publisher - no more gate keeping by major media companies - no more financial barrier to entry to buy presses, paper, delivery trucks.
Then various platforms emerged to centralize online publishing -- Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LiveJournal, Yelp, ... and thousands more. They took the profit model of traditional publishers (paid advertising), exploited the structural advantages of digital publishing, and gave up the overhead and responsibility of curating and creating content.
Now we are trying to figure out how to manage real time publishing platforms that can't (or won't?) validate identity, won't take responsibility for fact-checking, are open to targeted manipulation by adversaries, and are capable of distributing damaging lies and propaganda with little oversight or financial consequences.
Speech is still "freer" now than when I was a teenager. The reach of an individual voice is massive in today's world compared to the 1980's. When I was young, my community was the people who lived within biking distance. Now it includes all of reddit, twitch, hackernews...
Can we sustain these advances while managing the mob-mentality inherent in human nature? Can we protect our forums from adversarial misuse? Are open platforms that shrug off responsibility for content while collecting advertising profits compatible with democracy?
> Now we are trying to figure out how to manage real time publishing platforms that can't (or won't?) validate identity, won't take responsibility for fact-checking, are open to targeted manipulation by adversaries, and are capable of distributing damaging lies and propaganda with little oversight or financial consequences.
The identity validation part is worth repeating. I'm not a fan of real names, but I'd consider opting in to an identity that follows me between platforms so I could build a reputation.
I'd also like to see more transparency from social media platforms. I'd love to be able to get metrics on a post. X% of likes came from these countries. X% of retweets came from known VPN IPs. X% of shares came from IPs in known botnets.
I'd also LOVE to filter out people that participate over a certain volume. If someone is spending 8h+ per day on Twitter, I want them hidden because IMO they have nothing to add if all of their experience is from social media and not the real world.
Most of the tech companies have decided that China will soon dominate the world. They appear to be getting ready for China's attitude towards free speech to be imposed on the rest of the world.
You know that's not the first time that idea has occurred to me either and I have this worrying nagging in the back of my head that that is literally exactly the long game they're playing.
Its is not censorship. No censorship has taken place. The article still exists on the NY Post web site and their newspaper. Their audience is still sizable.
Their article included personal information and was consistent with policies that have been in place for almost a year.
Twitter is not a public utility in the way that phone services are. They were (rightly) criticized along with others for letting mis-information run amok in the last election and beyond. They have (slowly) taken steps to listen to these concerns and this is what happens.
I full support Twitter in this. This is not censorship, this is limitation of deliberate mis-information and personal information.
How is failing to send private messages which contains ideas you disagree with not censorship? You've limited the definition to "taking down the originate reference" but that's too limited.
Because they weren't private messages. Private messages are between two parties. Instead, these were messages on a platform which is owned by Twitter between two users where these users have agreed to restrictions. You can read about those restrictions here:
But that standard has never been used before and was manually engaged here.
Trump's taxes were repeatedly shared and there are photos of the content (not to mention the content itself, which is far more private than an email address).
This standard has never been applied like this, and you can still link to the Web Archive version without limitation - same content.
It's also not "limitation of deliberate misinformation" - that has never once been used on deliberate misinformation like the Steele dossier.
The selective application of their terms is precisely the problem. It renders their policies essentially meaningless when certain groups are given preferential treatment.
The thing is, I would have thought by now that these companies would have learned from the past. The more you try to censor information on the internet, the more attention you draw to it.
My editorialization aside, Twitters stated reason is that the images contained in the articles include personal and private information (email addresses and phone numbers) which violate our rules.
That (to me) is valid in itself. I do wonder, had they redacted things properly then this would all be a non-issue.
To your example; my understanding is that Trump's taxes did not in the same way (by this I mean things like Trump org address etc isn't a private address). I have not dug deep into those articles to say that with 100% certainty.
That may be true but that was a reason they used later, as an excuse.
Hence they don't ban the Web Archive mirror (which has a static URL), and they don't ban any of the previous leaks about Trump taxes, health records, etc.
Not to mention Wikileaks - by definition that is a trove of email addresses and completely uncensored
private information that you can tweet with impunity right now.
That's kind of comparing apples to oranges. One is a public figure, the other not. And is tax info comparable to email addresses? I'm not saying whether or not it's fair, only that it's very different kinds of personal information being compared here. Equivalency is hard to establish.
Being a public figure doesn't mean your rights don't exist.
I actually abhor that the photos of Hunter were shared, but he's a public figure too. As this (and other recent reporting) has shown, he was using his father's name and implied access thereto for personal profit.
Note that there is no evidence Hunter ever actually got Joe to do anything for him. What is a matter of record is that Hunter was IMPLYING he could do so, which is scummy but probably not illegal. Johnson-Grassley investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe and I want to stress I'm not alleging otherwise.
What could go wrong from empowering biased corporations with the ability to control a national narrative of what constitutes misinformation and hyperbole? I'm noticing a wide spread lack of the ability to weigh the pros and cons of policy in order to arrive at a rational decision based on due consideration of legitimate data analysis. I guess we should've been concerned when today's young adults couldn't discern real from fake news sources. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK284782/
Makes me wonder how well equipped the next generation of underprivileged and minority children will be, among whom illiteracy will be a serious issue because they and their parents were never able to catch-up socially after being thrown to the wolves of self preservation and unchecked puritanical shaming. Sure a website like hacker news is well-moderated and I am appreciative, but it's a matter of scale. A for-profit corporation granted with the ability to control the political narrative of an entire country is neither, "moderated content", nor, "news". If time has anything to tell it works fine, until the narrative is wrong.
"Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me" Was the phrase I grew up on. Seems like the opposite today where we allow looting and riots but saying the wrong thing gets you in trouble.
So HN can't remove posts either because that violates free speech? I grew up on the internet too and forum bans were always a thing. You haven't convinced me this is different.
I've been here over 10 years and I don't really recall seeing anything other than blatant spam or crap removed in that time. Maybe I've just not seen it happen. But, the way things seem to have worked here (very well I might add) is that when enough of the community disagrees, things get downvoted to death and if you don't have "Show dead" enabled, you don't see them. Your choice. I've had show dead enabled as long as I can remember because I like to see everything posted.
Sometimes I agree with things a lot of people here clearly disagree with and I'm fine with that. I can decide to either argue my/their case or move on and accept we have different views. Maybe sometimes seeing things heavily downvoted here changes my mind on subject as well and question if my views are right or not.
We can't all agree about everything all the time. Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm wrong. We all are, nobody is ever 100% right, 100% of the time. I sure as hell don't want somebody else controlling everything I see and read because they think it might give me the "wrong" ideas. I'm an adult and I should be allowed to make my own mind up and most importantly question things, as should everybody else, regardless of education level or where they "fit" into society.
When I think about all of the forums and comment sections I regularly interact with, the ones with the most open, democratic, free speech, with little to no direct moderation seem to be the most engaging, tolerant and frankly, nicer places. I've given up on engaging with anything that's heavily moderated or frankly, blatantly biased - Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and I feel a lot happier.
‘I would rather have questions that cannot be answered, than answers that cannot be questioned’ - Richard Feynman.
> I've been here over 10 years and I don't really recall seeing anything other than blatant spam or crap removed in that time.
Well, besides the usual "who decides what's 'blatant spam or crap'?" response to the "it's only bad stuff that gets censored", I'd suggest you haven't really been paying attention, then. Take a look at dang's comment history[1] and you'll see a lot of warnings before ban but also plenty of bans and references to previous bans, usually for substantive, not spam, reasons.
As others have already mentioned, HN is in fact actively moderated. It's by far the most curated public discussion forum I frequent. The civil tone that prevails here is in many ways a result of the community guidelines being strictly enforced, and backed up with a banhammer.
If you were to take the above at face value, would this change your perception about the value of moderation in online communities?
HN is a LOT more heavily moderated than Facebook, Twitter, and most subreddits. You must really not have been paying attention if you haven't noticed after 10 years.
Controversial content (lately that means political) regularly gets flagged and removed. As a recent example the NYT Trump Taxes article went through cycles of being posted, rapidly upvoted, then flagged to algorithmic removal, over and over again. To point where meta-discussion came online (and was flagged) [1]
Personally I think downvoting is the appropriate response to say "this is not interesting or relevant to HN", but many have realized flagging provides outsized influence.
Give me a break, the president should have his twitter account permabanned for all his ToS violations, and he should use official channels like a .gov web site to address the nation, where he can be held more accountable when spreading blatant falsehoods and certainly won't be censored.
This whole sham of using Twitter is a freedom of private speech trick he uses to facilitate ambiguously mixing occasionally factual official statements with trash "protected" speech.
If anyone holds his feet to the fire for tweets, he can simply claim he was acting as a private citizen stating an opinion - obviously the president of the united states wouldn't use twitter for official business!
I look forward to seeing how history treats this embarrassingly incompetent era of american politics.
> he should use official channels like a .gov web site to address the nation, where he can be held more accountable when spreading blatant falsehoods and certainly won't be censored.
I'm calling/writing my congress-critter today to ask that they look into doing exactly this
I think verified government accounts based on a person's role in the government would make more sense. It gets rid of the ambiguity you're talking about. If Trump was forced to tweet from @potus, the verified account for the POTUS, that makes it clear he's communicating as the POTUS, not a private citizen.
Personal accounts should be subject to the same rules as everyone else. Give official government accounts special treatment; can't be banned, no censorship, etc..
I don't think that addresses the problems sufficiently.
Official government statements should come through more secure channels than a privately owned and operated web site that arguably resembles a 21st century tabloid where people's accounts are regularly hacked or otherwise taken over, and both censorship and access are arbitrary and unregulated.
Just today we have an example of a C-SPAN political editor admitting to having lied about their Twitter account being hacked to abdicate responsibility for comments they made on the platform [0].
Such claims would not only be unbelievable coming from secure government owned and operated channels, but would be damming to the administration should they honestly occur, incentivizing running such services properly without such vulnerabilities and with an immutable audit trail.
Furthermore, if a .gov provided forums for open public discussion in response to official statements, they would actually be protected under the 1st amendment. Unlike on private platforms like Twitter, where arbitrary censorship and blocking of discussion/access is perfectly legal.
All of this junk occurring on private websites like Twitter/FB is completely misguided and a tremendous disservice to the American public.
> Official government statements should come through more secure channels than a privately owned and operated web site
This can be done today. An application communicating via an open and federated social protocol can be stood up on government infrastructure/DNS namespace. These systems already exist and work.
I would be 100% onboard with a complete ban on social media use for government officials conducting government business. Add in a Wikipedia style diff history for official government policies / positions and it sounds even better IMO.
> immutable audit trail
This would be amazing because knowing that something is un-delete-able might cause some politicians to take a pause and think about what they're saying. Some. Lol.
But if the president did make major announcements on HN, he would not be subject to moderation on here? If the president has unilaterally imposed these restrictions on what Twitter can do by virtue of using it, he should make it official and make Twitter a public service. Otherwise, I don't understand how this is different than the president showing up at your house yelling at you with a megaphone and refusing to leave because your property has now "taken on a different role".
I have to agree with this. How is this really any different than blocking spam links or links to undesirable websites in direct messages? How does it differ from moderators on a website removing users from a group for valid or for trivial reasons? Does a company like Twitter have any obligation to allow anything it doesn't want on its platform?
This situation is very much a double-bind. In this case, someone gets to make noise about the "truth they won't let you see" and claim bias.
The problem is the scale and centralization of power with social media.
Global conglomerates serving billions where moderation is controlled by a few individuals with absolute control and no accountability. This is a major issue as these networks are quickly becoming a critical medium of communication and expression in this century.
But what if some of those small communities engage in no-no think? How can we allow those with no-no think to co-exist with our world? Shouldn't they be stamped out of existence for the good of everyone else who doesn't have no-no think?
Sadly the above is a very common belief structure now. It's a product of utopian thinking where if just this one more enemy can be destroyed, peace will fall upon the Earth and all will be well. It seems to be that these utopian dreamers always end in the elimination of those who don't share their dream vision of the world.
I would much rather go back to a series of small private communities with known members, much like how the physical world still has neighborhoods and groups of friends.
It still has plenty of idea sharing but enough social friction to support proper filtering and decorum.
It's censorship that benefits their power structure or preferred power structure. It's easy to demand freedoms when others have them and you are fighting to gain them. Once that freedom or power has been achieved, some simply turn out to have not been concerned about gaining it for everyone but just for themselves and their group. Talk of fairness wasn't genuine, it was a means to a end for them to gain what they wanted with no concern for everyone else.
The real folly in all of this is the assumption that these tools will always be in their hands and will never end up turned against them. History shows that this is almost always a poor assumption and that the reversal of power often happens both sooner and faster than ever imagined.
The fundamentals of free speech are just easier to uphold when the forum (Internet) is much smaller and the participants (hacker culture, chat rooms) are more uniform. Both the size of the forum and the diversity of the participants has changed - that's what happened.
Put another way: humans evolved living in fairly small groups that were often related to each other. Their brains are optimized to operate in that environment. Put those brains into an environment where the number of other humans is orders of magnitude larger and most of those other humans are not physically present and not related to you and...that brain doesn't work well.
Over simplified version: free speech advocates of the bygone era started hearing too much that they disagreed with.
The reality is that people were always saying what is being said today, but there were many more checks that reduced how far and how quickly the message would spread. You may have had right and left leaning media outlets, but they were typically closer to centrist views. This is more due to them having to maintain their reputation by checking facts than censorship, so the main thing that differed was their spin on a story. That pretty much left word of mouth and fringe publications. Fringe publications are just that, they had limited distribution. Word of mouth was pretty much restricted to social circles. Anything too far from reality (or people's perceptions) quickly died off.
Online business models changed that. Fringe publications are no longer fringe, at least not in the historic sense. Word of mouth is no longer word of mouth, since people have access to publishing platforms. Reputation is no longer a restraint, so fact checking is irrelevant. Rather than settling on more centrist views, we tend to focus upon the extremes. A lot of disagreeable stuff is being said at those extremes, which is why (I suspect) that a lot of the old-time free speech advocates have reevaluated their positions.
(And all of that is before considering how some people are actively manipulating what we are exposed to.)
If you're having trouble with it, then perhaps try and remember how the Internet has changed over time. What started as a network of scientists and enthusiasts has become a network of corporations and governments (increasingly driven by party-focused politicking). That's not even mentioning the emergency of social networks and the prevalence of foreign and domestic misinformation/manipulation therein.
If the Internet hadn't changed so radically, their viewpoints might have also remained similarly stale.
What twitter does has nothing to do with the NY Posts' free speech. Just as NYP is free to say whatever they want, Twitter is free to silence it on their platform. Freedom of speech and the first amendment is to restrain the federal government from prohibiting speech. That is the hill to die on, as it protects twitter's right to do what it wants to do with its platform.
An orthogonal issue is social platform monopoly or oligopoly, and that we need more options and better competition.
Do you think it should be illegal for HN to moderate posts and ban users (without accepting legal liability for all user generated comments)? If HN can moderate comments, why not Twitter? If you think it's unethical for HN to operate the way it currently does, why are you still here? Maybe you should stick to your principles and delete your account.
This isn't an all-or-nothing type of deal. A company does not have to take responsibility for copyright infringement in order to have the right to moderate their own platform. I do not see what Twitter does as censorship and don't believe users should have the expectation that whatever they post will be amplified.
It’s weird how happy people are to give up freedom, isn’t it?
American Democracy is absolutely, 100% under attack on the internet today. We should be doubling down on the freedoms that make America the amazing place it is, rather than sowing the seeds of tyranny.
>But the new generation of people, even here on HN and the internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship that I don't believe I'm in a proper reality/timeline anymore.
It turns out being able to lie at scale is a more credible and more immediate threat to society than nuanced restrictions on the flow of information.
If you play any Town of Salem style game, you know that being able to call out and dissuade low effort, poor quality information is a way to improve pro-social discourse. Are there issues with selecting what counts as anti social information? Yes. Which is why restrictions are typically exceedingly narrow.
However the ambit of what restrictions are justifiable runs along a spectrum; even amongst western democracies, there is a dramatic difference in what is acceptable and what is not. Germany, for instance, has exceedingly strong restrictions on pro-nazi speech. The US, by contrast, places a far higher immediate value on freedom of speech, to the point that it struck down campaign finance laws as being of lesser importance.
Times change and people are noticing that the result of the pendulum being so far swung in one direction on this issue has caused tremendously deleterious effects.
>> It turns out being able to lie at scale is a more credible and more immediate threat to society than nuanced restrictions on the flow of information.
I too started the Internet in the 90s and I was post 20 then.
I also have seen "weaponized trolling" in the last ten years that seems to make the world a good deal worse. The way climate change denial has gotten legs from combination of the average person's poor thinking and the particular dynamics of electronic communication. I see bots on my FB feed activating now, pushing propaganda that makes me chuckle but certainly push some morons to actions.
Putting aside the point that Twitter/FB own the medium. Someone is going to manage any given medium. Is "throttling" censorship? Because the NY Post story never was made unavailable, it was just throttled, it just slowed down, slowed down enough that the rebuttal was made available at the same rate as the original story.
There are junctures where "free speech" can't really be a criteria - Oliver Wendel Holmes' "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is the epitome of such examples (and these can be misused, in fact Holmes' made his example to misuse it, justifying repression against those who oppose WWI). Is spread viral false news on the eve of an election in the "fire" or the "freedom" category? Honestly, throttling seems like a good compromise if we're looking for the simple free availability of information. But when information is the coordination, activation and/or manipulation of people at scale, talking about freedom stops meaning a lot.
Suppose there's a fire, and a hurricane, and an epidemic and an economic crisis and different things shouted will save some people and trample other people. What category is "shouting" "you don't need a mask, come shop before I go bankrupt"? Etc.
A private company stopping people spewing misinformation to huge numbers of people using their private platform isn't "censorship".
The problem with "some people only use facebook for news and so this means they are effectively censored" is "some people only use facebook for news". Fix that, don't try to force services to broadcast obvious harmful nonsense to people.
The idea of truly unfiltered free speech on a global scale is impossible, because you have to be heard and we can't let everyone broadcast to everyone: there is too much noise. Free speech does not—and has never meant—the right to every platform.
I was born in the late 70s and also was there and ready for the heady birth of the web—as a teen and then a college student, it was great. I subscribe to the free speech, anti-censorship ethos.
But this ain’t censorship; free speech is alive and well for anyone willing to find the right platform. This is a platform provider [belatedly] denying access to lies (they aren’t opinions) that have been weaponized to exploit those platforms’ recommendation algorithms for the liars’ own gain. It is more like how the internet started to develop defenses against spam in the late 90s, with spamsum, SpamAssassin, etc.
I am probably your same age and I have a totally different position. This does not mean I am wrong and you are right, it just only mean your opinion is just an individual take, not a generation voice.
Yes, there are many platforms, but what is happening now is the 90s equivalent to be banned from MSN messenger, MICQ, IRC and Usenet at the same time, sure you could go to an obscure geocities page to express yourself there but it is not the same. Thankfully that did not happen then.
In this specific case is not about lies, it is just unsavory emails and pics, highly unethical but not very different from what all the rags do all the time, it's very disingenous to think Twitter acted on good faith and not because it was politically convenient for its CEO. If the leaks would have been about Trump people would be crying bloody murder about the censorship.
> I grew up during the late 90s (born in late 80s) learning about the internet and its philosophies.
And with this specific case, I'm with you on your hill.
But more broadly we're usually not talking about the web from the late 90s. We're talking about a handful of modern social networks most of which use of anti-democratic dark patterns. And algorithms that are known to push a given percentage of users down a rabbithole, who can then be weaponized for who knows what purpose by who knows which nasty actors.
In essence, we're talking about factories which-- if there were a market for it-- could produce a version of the internet from the 90s with the slight difference that a sizable proportion of your 90s internet acquaintances happen to spout racist rhetoric and becoming walking, talking bioweapons this time around.
I know that's not the topic here. But that is a much bigger problem IMO and the answer of "more speech" is at most helplessly incomplete wrt it.
E.g., there was story on the intercept sourcing leaked FBI documents that showed the FBI's awareness and concerns about white supremacist infiltration of local law enforcement[1]. This was to the point that the FBI was cautious about sharing access to its surveillance tools for fear that they could be used by some local LE to target and harass minorities. (Not sure if that's in the same article or a different Intercept article.)
Racist rabbitholes can draw on a pre-existing audience of racists, which make them more widespread and effective, and that attracts more ad dollars.
Two-- emphasis on "rabid." There are racist groups where the membership is people from various ethnic backgrounds spouting the stereotypical white-supremacist rhetoric. The draw is apparently aggression and violence.
If someone on the left wants to "counter" that, the video content is going to need to be equally irrational and aggressive to sufficiently capture the audience's attention. Again, you've got a smaller audience here. But the smaller audience you gain is going to be equally irrational to the far right group.
So you've got a system that optimizes for irrational, rabbit-hole ideologies (hell, it could be bigfoot or flat earth for all they care), that tends to filter out more reasoned, thoughtful content. Hell, I can't even listen to a movement of a Brahms symphony without commercials interrupting a section. Even television isn't that fucking allergic to reasoned reflection.
Talking about free speech inside such an unhealthy, anti-democratic system is about as coherent as adopting one of that system's rabid, rabbit-hole ideologies.
1) Old school free speech advocate, changed positions since
2) Had to figure this out practically, so not just theory crafting.
Context: Part of a mod team for a forum, and we were torn between ideals of free speech and what was actually happening on the forum.
Important note, moderation may be the main service the internet/SM platforms sell - curation, removal of trolls, the cleaning and keeping viable an environment for exchange of ideas. Earlier ideas from 2000, web 2.0 etc assumed this would happen naturally. "The better ideas bubble to the top". The market place of ideas.
This metaphor doesn't work when someone is selling goods that destroy the market. If you have a vegetable market, and someone starts selling crack cocaine, then there really isn't something an egg plant vendor can do about getting people to buy the healthier vegetable/argument.
And thats what is happening. On our forum, people were introducing material that short circuits logic. Any long intelligent answer was displaced by an emotional outburst, or cat videos, or jokes, flame wars - on serious topics.
This makes the exchange of ideas moot, and replaces it with the exchange of emotions.
The market place of ideas does not work at the internet scale, even for web forums, unless someone is moderating.
---------------
Additional random thoughts:
First, things are much worse than you feel, because the act of speaking is almost entirely the act of being online. Censorship means you don't get to be heard (although you can speak), so it is, in internet terms, pretty serious.
1) This worked when the network didnt have centralized forces (as value collects in a network, activity increases, and the network will create some version of filters who become gatekeepers.)
Thank you, I’m great full for the input. Yes. Moderation is needed for free speech to work. Without it, the effective exchange of ideas breaks down because the communication medium happily amplifies noise.
Viral and malformed ideas will beat facts every time. Counter speech fails.
We're in a power transition where the Left is now in control of major societal levers: Academia, Hollywood, sports entertainment, the mainstream news media, large government bureaucracies, and big tech.
Once the loudest champions of free speech because they were trying to break down the old power structures, the Left is now consolidating its power and sees no need to allow upstarts to criticize the new order.
To call this "the left" is ridiculous. What you're talking about is the "multicultural mainstream", the neoliberal center.
Essentially, it's the ideology of those major corporation that want to ban all sexist and racist discourse because this sort of thing makes it harder for teams of people scattered about the world to work together. It's an ideology that's still OK with tremendous wealth disparities but which want those disparities to not be reinforced chauvinistically.
My POV is from American politics where the left is in lockstep with the censorship going on at Google, Facebook, and Twitter. This very story is about how Joe Biden is being protected by those tech giants. Those tech giants also are the ones protecting leftist movements like Antifa and the Democratic Socialists of America.
Maybe there's a part of the left outside of the USA that still stands up for free speech? Not here in the USA. That game is over. Except for a few voices in the wilderness like Brett Weinstein and Sam Harris, the left is comprised of those whose interests and actions now align with the tech giants.
Is it “free speech” to deliberately create a misleading story/propaganda for your advantage, then spend money on fake accounts to astroturf your propaganda and give it fake credibility on third party corporate services? — That sounds beyond the intent of “free speech” to me.
BTW, I use to run “blue ribbon campaign” banners on my 90s era webpages. So I understand where you’re coming from.
It falls within free speech, because otherwise the institution which determines whether the speech is what you describe becomes too powerful.
The correct way to deal with this is probably twofold: to have a variety of organizations which determine what is untrue, and to somehow figure how to make them seem credible.
Those organizations should probably operate independently of the companies actually implementing their blocking algorithms, and obviously of each other.
Then we need a diverse enough set of communications channels that each can make independent determinations how they filter communications on their platform, referencing the analysis of various organizations in the first paragraph.
This would maybe make for more controlled environments while not having universal censorship of controversial ideas.
I fully agree with you regarding free speech. Where we probably differ is that I also uphold the rights of private companies, however large, to set their own standards of what can be posted to their platform. Now, if we want to have the debate about whether the platforms are too large, have too much power to shape the conversations we have, etc, we can have that debate. But it isn't censorship for a private company to remove information it believes violates it's standards (whether because it's false, misleading, or for other reasons).
If anything, the first amendment explicitly protects a private organization's right to curate their own platforms the way they see fit.
Twitter could declare support of Donald Trump a bannable offense today, and those people can promptly sign up for a site like Parler.
And Parler has even more censorship. Adult work is completely legal in the US, and pornography is a form of constitutionally protected free speech, yet Parler strictly prohibits it on "Decency" grounds.
I see no problem with social netoworks drawing a line in the sand. The big ones can draw a line at violence, hatred, and fascism. The little ones can draw the same line and stand shamefully on the other side.
First, I'm not for or against any specific actions in saying this, but...
I'd say that if your views on what censorship is haven't changed as the actual social medium of thought has (over 20 years), then you're perhaps being dogmatic about censorship. Ideas around censorship came about when the social medium that mobilized thought were MUCH more viscous.
Like imagine a physical surface on some liquid medium, in which its initial properties were such that a small force rippled to such a degree due to viscosity. You'd generally know the forces other points would feel when event Y happened so much distance away. But if suddenly the liquid developed very different properties, and now waves travelled differently through it, you must respond by adapting (or at least CONSIDER adapting). Whatever science or activity or measurement was happening on that surface before, that would need to be adapted or changed or even discarded. One's views on how to navigate the environment must change to respond to such an important change in the mediating layer.
Sorry if that's a bit of mixed metaphor, but I truly feel it's more than light analogy. Anyhow, be well!
You say on HN which has highly moderated comment threads.
So suppressing free speech is only ok if it’s done by unpaid volunteers (never mind that free speech as such never existed, since you still had all sorts of restrictions include libel, defamation, fire in a theater, etc kind of restrictions).
If I discovered that HN moderators were banning links to specific major news articles they didn't like, I'd find that extremely concerning. As far as I know, the HN moderators restrict only comments which are needlessly inflammatory and posts which don't have to do with the technology industry, and I'd be fine with it if Twitter or Facebook adopted similarly general policies. (I'd be a huge fan of forming some version or corner of Twitter without politics at all, frankly.)
I was born in 89, I don't remember things being this way. It feels artificial and forced, like some foreign state is having their way with public influence in our country and by extension the world. Sickening. Free speech should be free, and I'm surprised people in the tech industry feel opposite.
I wonder, do they really feel this way? Or do they pretend, to go with the flow and not be labeled a racist?
The problem is not free speech, people should focus on the monetary aspects which is the root cause of this. Social media and ad revenue are the driving forces. Free speech would still be not an issue weren't it for those conflicting interests of the social media companies.
If you believe in free speech then you must believe that Twitter has the free speech right to choose what they want to host on their privately owned servers, the same way a homeowner has the free speech right to choose what lawn signs they want to display on their yard, and a newspaper has the free speech right to decide what editorials they want to publish.
If you think free speech gives you the right to force your speech onto other people then you don't understand the concept of free speech.
You reminisce fondly of the old internet, but the old school forums were all heavily and completely arbitrarily moderated according to the whims and egos of the mods. Unrestricted free speech was never a thing there.
A large portion of liberals convince themselves that woke capitalist censorship isn't really censorship and that it's fighting "the good fight" so long as it's hurting their enemies.
A large portion of conservatives convince themselves that the media has a left bias and therefore it's reasonable to ingest even trashier garbage uncritically. Very similar position - so long as their media is confirming their biases / hurting their enemies, they're cool with it, even if it's based on fiction.
We're in desperate need of a nationwide media criticism education and the free time for average people to actually engage in it. We should all be aware of various journalists, publications' biases, the think tanks they cite as "neutral" (often Koch-backed, e.g.), etc. The problem with garbage "news" in social media is that it convinces people of nonsense.
That's not really a problem of media outlets so much as a public that has no real response to it. Little familiarity with media criticism and no way to effectively push back outside of something like Twitter. Everyone tries to work within their extremely limited frameworks, many of which are systematically hampered by the forces that fund and profit from these camps.
The first steps to getting the boot off of our necks are (1) vastly improved public education with practical political courses that include media criticism, critically responding to statistical claims and graphs, and questionable forms of argument, and (2) a strong enough economic floor so that the average person can justify spending the time to actually pay attention to this stuff. If you're worried about your next paycheck and avoiding the stress of bills and incoming financial woes, you'd rather watch some TV than spend several hours learning about why Bari Weiss kind of sucks.
Up until a few months ago I agreed. I have since been convinced that the power of Twitter/FB etc in connecting people who have never been connected is something we need to think carefully about...
1. Creating a level playing field by setting clear standards of what is allowed vs what is now allowed for all social media. Gov bodies are the ones to do this as companies have proven they can't self police themselves.
2. Break up big tech - too much power in their hand that they are absuing. This would be painful though for the stakeholders and won't happen easily as there are lot of vested interests.
During the 90s information traveled slower and those with large audiences took the time to research reports before sharing it with the world. And if it turns out that they were wrong, the correct information can be spread across those few platforms to everyone.
Now, misinformation can be created way faster than it can be discredited and there are a massive number of surfaces where the misinformation can live without being corrected.
What’s stranger to me is that people who spent their whole lives distrustful of the US intelligence apparatus suddenly found the CIA and FBI above reproach in 2016.
The entire Russian hacking the elections in 2016 narrative should be a black pill to every technical person in 2020. Did you ever even find out what that “back channel from Trump Towers to Alfa Bank” ever was?
2010s aside, in the context of this article and discussion, there has been no infringement on freedom of speech.
When you engage discourse within an institution, you are subject to an informal, sometimes formal social contract. If you entered a christian church in 1789 making certain statements, you would be removed (censored) from the church at the minimum. That still holds true today. Only today, this private institution is no small church with a handful of people, but billions. Still, under our current framework it is a private institution with a social contract that its users have agreed to, formally, or informally. There has been no violation of free speech because it is not a public institution. If you feel there's a moral violation, you can either choose not to participate as is your right, or you can petition, as is your right, to have the state get involved with how this private institution conducts itself.
What internet were you a part of? We banned trolls, nazis, and conspiracy theorists all the time on early Internet forums and irc channels. It’s only in recent years that this behavior has been tolerated on large platforms. The fact is that newer platforms just serve to promote bad behavior rather than expose it.
A lot of us spent a fair bit of time on hardcore free speech platforms and "saw what that got us" with cesspools like the various internet chans. A society that doesn't police itself is anarchy, and that really isn't helpful for any civil discussion or learning. While there should be no rules in private between friends etc, public forums need restrictions in order to have some level of functionality without descending into flamewars.
The hill I'd really worry about with free speech is when punk hacker types turn on encryption, the current ultimate guard ensuring free speech.
Edit note: I'm not pro the twitter blocking of the article, especially not in DMs as some have noted is occurring. I'm just slightly disillusioned to unlimited speech on the internet superhighway thanks to trolls, flamebaiters, frauds, and more.
HN hasn't change. It's always been this way since it first started. Even in the 90s, "censorship" like what we see today happened. The actions haven't changed. The scope is what is different. Instead of affected a few hundred people, it's now affecting hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions.
> internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship
I don't see that having changed. Obviously I don't know the specific people you are thinking of, but judging by your comment here and the timeline you are mentioning, I don't see much as change beyond scope.
Honestly, if people think people are becoming pro-censorship, I think it's more a case of ignoring everything that was happening before.
A little older than you, but same basic experience.
I also don't understand how the tide turned so swiftly against freedom of speech, and in favor of authorities deciding what people should be allowed to hear or read. But it did turn, and I don't see the trend reversing.
While I don't like the prospect of an increasingly censored society, it will be interesting to watch the struggle between the big platform censors and those who want to say banned things. I expect this will only escalate over time.
Anyway, just wanted to say you're not alone. Watching some of your cherished values be discarded by society is something you have to accept as you get old, I'm afraid.
> I also don't understand how the tide turned so swiftly against freedom of speech, and in favor of authorities deciding what people should be allowed to hear or read.
Freedom of speech meant freedom from /government/ control of speech. It has never meant freedom from the any impact. This article (facebook et al blocking/removing/deplatforming) is functionally no different than a newspaper choosing what to publish in their editorials page, a property owner having a bulletin board whose postings they control, or a shopping mall not allowing someone to stand up on a soap box and proselytize.
Freedom of speech has always meant the idea that different points of view should be aired, not suppressed, and that people should decide for themselves what is right or what is correct, rather than authorities deciding for them.
A society where "wrong" points of view are thoroughly suppressed by giant social media companies or angry mobs (or angry mobs on social media) might not violate the literal text of the First Amendment, but it lacks the spirit of free speech that inspired the First Amendment in the first place.
What I find most disappointing is not that Facebook is censoring QAnon (or whatever), but that the popular sentiment is they should be. That's a big change from the culture I grew up in, and not for the better.
In my local newspapers growing up, the "letters to the editor" section was always populated by the local nutjobs writing inflammatory screeds. Hypothetically, the letters had stirred a lot of discussion, and my local paper decided to print them in bold type on the front page. Then the letter-writer got so popular, he was elected mayor of the town. But then the newspaper noticed it was having some negative impact on local politics, and the garbage collection for the print shop was suffering, so they decided to entirely stop publishing the nutjob. The writer cried out that it was a violation of their freedom of speech.
But none of it has anything to do with freedom of speech because they don't . I'd 100% support the newspapers' decision to stop publishing them (while also criticizing them, since it was their choices that created the issue in the first place). I'd also applaud anyone who felt strongly enough to cancel their newspaper subscription, or even start their own local competing paper!
They work under that exemption, but by having an algorithm that preferentially shows certain material to each user, they are exercising editorial control. Worse, the editorial control is a black box from the outside.
The question is: Does the news media (which includes Facebook, Twitter, and other social media) have a duty to objective reality? In the old days major news organizations had a public obligation to stick to the truth as much as possible. They had fact checkers, independent editorial boards, and other firewalls against false information.
Without such protections people end up believing convenient lies at a much greater rate, which is destructive to society. We've tried the big experiment with unfettered flow of information and it resulted in people being less informed and more radicalized. Clearly it doesn't work, at least not at scale.
We always used to disagree on topics, and argued passionately over these. But we (mostly) agreed on facts and what is true and what is not - and then argued conclusions or actions.
What is different these days is that we simply deny the facts, provide "alternate facts", or simply lie about facts. As a result we no longer agree on a basic basis of truth, truth has become a belief or a choice.
That is toxic, since it is used to simply avoid meaningful discussion. It is a fundamental change in how we conduct our discourse. And so new measures are needed.
Rather than censoring speech, I'd prefer fact checking, which may or may not amount to the same.
I think this is just an extension of the Eternal September. The population of the Internet is wildly different from those that you're thinking of: not only is a majority of the world now online, a vanishing minority of the countries many of us are primarily exposed to are not.
There are plenty of reasons that this new population may establish different norms than the old one: Some say it's because they're privileged, and don't understand the harm that Enlightenment liberalism does to the marginalized. Some say it's because they were free-thinkers and iconoclasts, and indeed, you'd expect any heavily-selected subpopulation to be less conformist than "all people". Others have claimed it's simply intelligence: back when the Internet was all educated nerds, support for free speech was higher because of the well-known correlation between intelligence and free speech absolutism[1].
In addition to the Eternal September effect, I think the broader retrenchment of liberalism we see across the world is very relevant. The cause/effect relationship between the Internet and this cultural retrenchment is unclear but IMO, almost certainly bidirectional. My model of liberalism has always been that its support in large populations is a fragile state, and that it's only supported by the masses when they've cargo-culted it from their civic religion. The minute this effect fades, most people don't have the moral reasoning ability to actually hold a principle, and can't be convinced that protection of an enemy under a principle is a protection of that principle, not of the enemy. They also don't appear to have the capacity to understand that the world turns, and the person on top is guaranteed to be someone they dislike, at one point or another. The only skew that rolling back Enlightenment protections is likely to have over time is against the _marginalized_.
[1] Note that this isn't a stand-in for "free speech is good", since the proponents of the privilege argument would claim that measures of intelligence are themselves just measuring privilege.
putting on my asshole hat maybe it's because the internet in the 90s was mostly above average intelligence techies who statistically had a better chance of doing thorough research. But now everyone's on the internet and those same techies are trying to come up with ways to prevent false information disseminating among the uneducated or at minimum unwilling-to-do-research masses
Free speech moved from everyone having a voice on _their_ servers to people being entitled to say what they want on _your_ servers. There have been moderators ever since people gathered on someone’s server to discuss things.
Moderators still exist even though we are not just on IRC anymore.
Your idea of free speech doesn’t exist in communal internet spaces as abundantly as you might believe. Perhaps it never did.
But were you ever a member of a forum that didn’t moderate? Even bbs’s had moderation (although slightly less necessary).
The internet I remember had “host your own website” type freedom, not “you can say whatever yo want anywhere you want” freedom. But then, people back then didn’t equate using some company’s platform with publishing. No, publishing meant setting up your own thing.
But the new generation of people, even here on HN and the internet
hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship
I was born in the 1970s and I can tell you why I flipped.
The (hopelessly naive) ideal many of us had was that, by breaking down communication barriers, we'd create an egalitarian "marketplace of ideas" and the best ideas would win. And by "best" ideas we generally meant principles of equality, science, and so forth.
Regardless of what you feel needs to be done... I'm sure you can agree that hasn't been achieved. Probably more like the opposite.
The problem is that by amplifying all voices, we've simply created another "might makes right" situation. Unfettered online discourse is dominated by those who yell the loudest. This includes a large number of woefully misinformed people, and genuinely malicious actors such as (for example) the hordes of paid internet trolls funded by America's rivals in order to sow discord and disinformation during our 2016 elections.
In effect, we've replaced the staid and conservative corporate self-censorship of decades past with something that is quite frequently worse.
I mean, free speech sure sounds good, but in reality it means that your racist uncle ranting about chemtrails on Facebook gets to be heard right alongside people who actually know what the fuck they're talking about.
I unapologetically do not know what the solution is.
There is no solution to this problem that doesn't involve unaccountable third parties setting the ground rules for what is okay to say. I'd take a thousand racist uncles writing about chemtrails before taking a single official censor. The abuse factor for the latter is simply too high to ever permit.
Freedom of speech, as a concept, includes by extension the freedom to be wrong.
I do not think that law is adequate to cover the current state of affairs.
Personally, I'd allow curation/gatekeeping by platforms like Twitter as long as (1) it's transparent (2) there are viable alternatives, including totally unmoderated places where people can post all the coronavirus hoaxes and exhortations to "join the race war" they desire.
It's also worth noting that you are posting this on Hacker News, platform that is far more stringently curated/moderated than Twitter. Why are you here if moderation is so objectionable to you?
You are here presumably because you like the job they do. If that changes you can go someplace else. There are countless alternatives to both HN and Twitter and you can even start your own. Either from scratch, or just spin up a Wordpress site or a Mastodon instance or whatever.
The problem is this isn't a Freedom of Speech issue except from Twitter's point of view. They can delete whatever they like on their platform. People are free to leave the platform if they don't like that policy. Everyone gets what they want (as reasonably as possibly!) in the end.
Your 90ies must have been very different from mine. IRC operators, forum moderators and what not happily banned people back then. It’s not like you could even take your bullshit to your own channels or sub forums if it was bad enough, because you’d get network banned.
Things have changed though. In the 90ies you would have been laughed off the internet if you seriously suggested the earth was flat. Conspiracy theories back then weren’t making people shoot up pizza places or plan to kidnap governors. Today we’re seriously seeing diseases we defeated come back and kill thousands of people because of anti-vaccine Facebook groups.
So yeah, people around you have likely changed, because free speech doesn’t work when it has no consequences. And I’m not talking about putting people in prison, I’m talking about laughing them back to their caves so their infectious collective stupid doesn’t ruin democracy. If it’s not already too late.
I used to be right with you on that free speech hill, but like so many other people I just got sick of all the anti-vaxxers, Holocaust deniers and whatever scumbags who cause harm, abusing it. And it’s not like they don’t have freedom of speech just because they get banned from popular platforms. Just like the 90ies, they are free to set up their own.
I would rather see you work on removing US libel and slander laws, and petitioning Germany to make it legal to make nazi salutes again, which are more direct free speech issues, instead of private platforms doing what they want with their private platforms.
The information in question was obtained very clearly illigally, where linking and consuming the source information is illigal. Twitter has a legal obligation to not allow people on their platform to use their service to do this.
You are still surrounded by people with the same ideologies, it's just harder to hear us because of the noise. The people who are pro-censorship and regulation have never been a friend to the internet or its philosophies.
There is no difference between "censorship" on Twitter/Facebook and "censorship" on HackerNews. Each site has a set of rules that must be followed. Don't like it? Then start your own website.
internet and social medias pretty much emphasized problems that were already existent, and made them much harder to ignore. For example, I truly believe gay marriage wouldn't have been a thing worldwide without social medias. I think Americans need to have a talk about what they want to define as protected free speech, and what consist speech that endanger others or doesn't move the world in a better place (perhaps this needs a definition of what "a better place" is as well).
I am the same age as you and agree with you, but don't plan on dying on any hill: the high ground is a strategically superior position so we should win.
I think a big part of the backlash is because of 4chan culture going mainstream. 4chan's idea of finding weaknesses in society and attacking them "for the lulz" has been adopted by right wing youth culture. The culture war has lost all morals. I've asked friends that knowingly disseminate false information why they do it and they see themselves as part of an all out political war where anything goes. I don't see how democracy can function in such an environment where nobody knows what is real or fake.
People are purposely spreading misinformation on these platforms and dumb people are eating it up. It is causing an intelligence crisis in the country because anyone can register a $20 domain, throw a WordPress blog on it, post some fake partisan smut and have it go viral.
You have freedom of speech. You don't have freedom to build a cult out of gullible people. Back in the 1990s when we were kids the only people on the internet were people smart enough to be there. Misinformation didn't have the reach it does now because the surfing public was mostly techie people with above average intelligence.
The bar has been dropped and now everyone is on the internet. There's "proof" of every concept on the internet. And no central repository for truth that everyone trusts.
There's a difference between being pro-speech and being anti-weaponization-of-falsehoods.
And then there's the issue of Facebook spending billions of dollars on code and infrastructure. How would you like it if you developed a social network, discovered that terrorists were using it as part of their deception campaign, and then have the government FORCE you to participate in the terrorist plot that you, your shareholders, and your engineers don't agree with? How is that fair to Facebook, who invested their resources into developing the entire platform? Maybe before the GOP wants to use disinformation campaigns they should have thought about developing their own distribution network beforehand? I mean you can't seriously be mad at Facebook for being good at capitalism, can you?
people are strong believers that if they are in the side of "good" they can voice their opinions freely as long as they don't hurt "others opinions" note that this others opinions will change every day/months/political agenda make sense just like when Amy said "sexual preference" and the dictionary deemed it as offensive the day after. we are living in an idiocracy of the good equal to the one of the Z movie demolition man.
Also from the moment you not in this axis of the good anymore you'll be deemed nazi, fake news, banned by social media. it is crazy to see that all the newspaper took the russian collusion seriously at first (and even do it know while many investigations couldnt find it) but their first reaction to a biden article is to ban it.
We are living in a democracy of the good where the good is defined by a minority of overly violent only entitled personalities
I think the fundamental issue with what you're saying here is that it assumes that privately owned social networks are places where free speech matters.
These are curated spaces, and they are not run democratically, they are run capitalistically. Twitter isn't even in the business of providing a forum for speech. They're in the business of serving ads.
Your free speech cannot be infringed by a corporation, as the corporation does't gatekeep anything but access to their platform that they own. Your right to speech exists separate from their platform or their permission to use it.
And if you believe in the free market, you can't complain that the largest social networks gravitate towards political ideologies that are most friendly to their profits. You also have no obligation to participate in those networks if they don't offer you a space that you enjoy participating in.
Just because the social networks that cater to you are smaller doesn't mean your rights are being infringed upon. It just means your ideas are less successful in a free and open marketplace of ideas.
It becomes an issue when people do try to start their own networks, those networks get smeared and service providers (credit cards, hosting, dns) start cutting them off.
Is it ‘pro censorship’ or pro ‘companies should have the freedom to run their company the way they want’?
I don’t understand how the government enforces private companies to (re)publish content in a way that doesn’t infringe on the companies first amendment right.
You can (and I personally do!) say that Twitter should have the freedom to make censorious decisions while still encouraging them not to do it. It's like saying "everyone should eat healthy meals" - that doesn't mean the government should force them to!
So if someone takes the extra step and says they endorse Twitter's actions here, I think it's fair to call that pro censorship.
I was born in late 70's in Czechoslovakia so I remember the communist regime with its propaganda. I'm all for free speech but when I see propaganda I want to smash it with a steel tube which probably makes me pro-censorship.
I still want to believe in the ideals of Internet as I've encountered it back in 1994 but that would require ideal people and we're not ideal. So some rules are needed.
Its not a black and white world. Its a shades-of-gray world. Hill to die on is a figure of speech. The problem is, some people have taken its metaphorical strength to very odd places: Pizzagate, is turning it into a hill to kill from.
I love free speech. I hate the outcome. I wanted a more literate connected world to empower truth, and did not realise the compelling power of falsity. It spreads faster.
Oregon Trail Generation checking in. IRC, even the rowdy networks, had no free speech thanks to the 'tyranny' of channel operators. #politics on EFNet was (is?) notoriously right wing for instance. Message boards had no free speech thanks to their moderators. I don't see how this is any different?
One of my best friends from high school (in the 90s), highly conservative back then, asked me two years back, about how he was rethinking "this whole free speech thing"
I've lived in 3 countries. I've visited over 15. I had problems with America's foreign war involvement, and the corruption that bled from the Bush years into the Obama years. But I still came back, because despite all our issues, the Freedom to Speak is the bedrock of America and it is the only thing that can truly fight the type of corruption we are seeing today. I wrote this a few weeks ago:
i was with you back in the 90s, but ive observed the open communication of the internet not going at all well. forums that don’t censor always turn into cesspools. HN censors, yet you are here.
What happened during the early 2010s is that colleges and universities started implementing Stasi methods like anonymous reporting on professors and making professors write humiliating self-criticisms.
All this to appease a fragile and spoiled generation.
The effects now show on the Internet, where "open" source projects implement similar oppressive tactics in the name of attracting new "contributors" (who rarely do anything useful).
Unfortunately, the boomers, who first raked in all the money and leadership positions in SV companies, support this cultural revolution in a last attempt to preserve their power.
engaging in fraud is not speech. If I told you that I owned a hedge fund and would make you 10x returns, that's speech. If I take your money with the promise of 10x returns and enroll you in a scheme, that's an action.
Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequence.
If I sell you a bar of lead painted gold, and tell you that it's solid gold, I can still be held responsible for fraud. My words would constitute a crime.
Now, if I told you explicitly that it was lead, but you decided to pay the gold price of your own free will, then I would be okay.
It would literally be the words I used to that constituted the crime. Lying isn't free speech in plenty on contexts. Go file a false police report and find out what happens.
It's still free speech. It just comes with consequences. The OP doesn't dispute that. Why is it that folks are so eager to run to this as if it were an argument, as if it somehow invalidates that speech is a freedom?
Misinformation is such an Orwellian term, considering most "facts" and "fact checking" are subjective unless it's hard numbers, but even using numbers and stats isn't enough anymore because even they must be interpreted within the context of contradictory concepts like a persons lived experience.
Politicians need to control the narrative. If everybody is on Facebook, Twitter, that's where politicians will go. Wait until everybody starts coming to HackerNews lol.
