Comment by bisby | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bisby | Hacker News Reader

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It's amazing how people act like they have the "right" to post some content anywhere.

Youtube, facebook, reddit, hacker news are all private organizations. They are not legally obligated to host your content (in some cases, like copyright infringement, they are legally obligated to NOT host your content).

The only thing that keeps these sites from arbitrarily censoring their users is money. If facebook deleted every article that zuckerberg disagreed with, people would eventually stop using facebook (there might be some speculation about how their "top stories" algorithm "filters" stuff out).

Less users means less ad revenue. But on the flip side, if samsung accounts for a noticeable chunk of ad revenue and that becomes at risk, less ad revenue means less ad revenue too. If blindly DMCA'ing videos yields a loss of 2% of users, but keeping the video up yields a loss of 5% of ad revenue (from samsung's share), then I imagine they will always prefer to side with samsung.

This isn't illegal, this is just one of the truths about capitalism. If a company exists to make money, it will side with money. if a company exists to provide a quality service, it will side with quality service. Quality service often doesn't have the marketing team though.

>It's amazing how people act like they have the "right" to post some content anywhere.

It's amazing how, every time a private organization is criticized for how it handles speech on its platform, some tedious rando jumps out of the woodwork to smugly lecture everyone about how private organizations don't have legal obligations to host anything.

Yes. We know. We know, we know, we know, we all know. The First Amendment does not apply. We are not saying that Google is legally required to do anything. We are saying that Google's behavior is not in the spirit of free speech and chills discourse. That's it. Can we take it as read that everyone's up to speed on this and move on without the pointless derail, please?

It's amazing how widespread the idea that that, because it's legal for private organisations to take down whatever content they like, no-one should criticise them for it has become. However could this belief that benefits those with immense influence over the public discourse have become so common?

Your tone suggests some sort of nefarious plot, but in the US that idea is widely consistent with fairly prevalent preferences for strong private property rights and a distrust of regulation that predates mass media.

A business owner is seen as more like the average person than is a regulator or other academic "public discourse"-spouting person.

Today they're telling Youtube what to do, tomorrow they're telling your company what to do...

See also positions on NIMBYism vs "it's my land, why can't I build whatever I want?", Uber and AirBNB vs existing regulations, and many others.

I don't think there's any kind of actual conspiracy going on; it's just that this argument is a convenient political soldier. If these companies were censoring the other side politically, it's the other political side that would be deploying it.

On on the side of, society extends corporations a lot of rights and protection. Stand to reason that demands that they serve the public interest aren't unreasonable. Especially in this case where the claim is corporations are abusing a right; copyright and trademark protection.

Which in this case, just to keep things concrete, would be in the service of compelling people to host objectionable speech against their will.

"objectionable speech" is a pretty melodramatic way of saying "parody videos of a consumer product", on par with "taxation is violence and theft"

They object to the speech and decline to host it. Juggle the words however you like to make it more emotionally palatable to you. My goal is to speak precisely.

If your goal is to be precise, you should double check the definition of objectionable. It means that the common man would deem it offensive, not that a particular party would object to it for a reason like saving face.

You want your common carrier protection or not?

Going even further, another way to interpret the 1st Amendment is that it is the federal governments responsibility to protect those freedoms, and that it would be well within the power of Congress to enact laws prohibiting the censoring of free speech, even on so called private platforms. This sort of thing has been done in the past, for example by prohibiting discrimination based on race even in private establishments.

Actually, I don't think this is a valid interpretation of the First Amendment, which is written specifically to circumscribe the powers given to Congress, beginning "Congress shall make no law..."

In other words, this is a right to be protected, not just passively allowed.

Perhaps people at HN know. But I'd argue internet users in general don't. Just look at the outcry that happens when reddit censors stuff.

Outcry is one of the mechanisms that dissuades censorship on privately-owned mediums. Let's have more outcry please.

You are totally right, we should disown whoever posseses the digital main-street. Its outrageous the public, the people of the constitution have to be beggars in some private backyard.

Huh? I absolutely have a right to come out and publicly say that YouTube or Facebook is practicing censorship of ideas for political or financial gain on their platforms, and express the fact that this is a bad thing for users. Expressing such an opinion is not tantamount to stating I have any "rights" under their platforms or being entitled; you are connecting those dots in your head without basis just to be snide.

You have the right to say it, but where are you going to say it where it will actually be heard?

All the big platforms are private and could hypothetically block your message without offering you any recourse.

Many of the safe-harbor laws protect a service only so long as the service is neutral. If they can make a good-faith argument that their mechanisms are used only to neutrally remove content based on good-faith assertions of copyright infringement, OK. If anyone can make a case that it's used as an editorial tool based on the opinions or ideas expressed in the removed content, well, that's the ballgame. YouTube suddenly has a negative value because losing its safe-harbor status will allow it to be pummeled into bankruptcy by lawsuits.

So maybe before you come rushing in to post your "ha-HA! Literally no one in history has ever considered that this is a corporation, or pointed this out, or had exactly this discussion, I must smugly educate them on that fact" lecture next time, you should do your homework first?

Its amazing how people act like money and short-term metrics are all that the matters, and the the only purpose of money is to accaccumulate it as an end in itself, and that the public shouldn't communicate to applysocila pressure and consequences to bad actors.

OP was just saying that is how most corporations act.

That doesn't make their behavior automatically good or beyond criticism.

Their entire business model of distributing arbitrary uploads is a grant from the government, one which was very controversial until the overton window passed.

edit: We can certainly decide that it's in the public interest to place limits on the editorial control over sites that rely on safe harbor, just as phone companies aren't allowed to censor particular conversations. Things get to be rights because we collectively decide that they are.

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edit: Deleted, because it is completely wrong.

[Your libertarianism ignores the law. In order to qualify for safe harbor under DMCA, their ability to exercise arbitrary editorial control is limited. If they want to choose what they host, they are choosing to be legally responsible for what they host.]

That's not actually libertarianism; it's crypto-fascism. There is no distinction between a totalitarian government and a perfectly "libertarian" company which owns all land and property, so true libertarians must be concerned with how power is actually distributed.

Tech giants have scale and effects on par with government, especially as these "independent" companies tend to make decisions in lock step. Thus libertarians should be primarily concerned with the rights of the distributed actors within these ecosystems.

This is why the Distributed Web is so important. We need to be sharing all our videos/content in a P2P manner so it can't get censored.

Nothing stopping anyone from distributing their videos via torrents (some musicians do this).

That makes content discovery very difficult.

Why?

A centralized directory that hosts no content will be DMCAed or sued just as easily as one that does, so they will have to implement the same kind of result censorship. And decentralized directories are very vulnerable to spam.

Funny how people tend to view things like malls and social media as public places. It's a mass illusion we all place on what is inevitably a biased corporate product fully intended to make money.

It would be interesting to see what a municipal social media platform would look like.

There was a pretty famous course case in Canada on this point, on whether a mall could be useful as a public space.

Court decided no, but a dissent lamented that there were no public spaces in many instances.

I just searched, and the US Supreme Court has gone back and forth on this issue.

http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/do-you-have-free-speech-...

that being said, I think there is probably legal precedent in holding Youtube accountable to the public interest given its breadth and depth. Looking at the typical 1st amendment litmus test re: falsely yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater - even if that theater is private, what is yelled inside becomes public interest if it affects the public welfare.

It's a popular myth that yelling "fire" in a theater is unlawful.

For speech to be unlawful it must incite violence:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time...

http://civil-liberties.yoexpert.com/civil-liberties-general/...

Being trampled to death is fairly violent. I wonder how non-intential violence would be viewed by a court.

Even the incitement or "fighting words" doctrine is limited to specific face to face threats: https://popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-cens...

Have you ever read the marketing material from those companies? Because they do talk about their mission to host your content.

Capitalism is great, but if it gets out of hand, government intervention is needed. Two good examples are the breakup of Ma Bell and US v. Microsoft (2001). For a present day problem, look no further than ISPs.

Ma Bell and ISPs are odd examples, because their monopoly or quasi-monopoly positions are possible because of government involvement.

> Ma Bell and ISPs are odd examples, because their monopoly or quasi-monopoly positions are possible because of government involvement.

False: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

Doesn't enforcement of copyright fall under government intervention?

There is regulation. It's called the DMCA and it actually forces Google to take down any video that Samsung claims to be theirs.

And in this case, it's a false claim. Thus: it's an abuse of the DMCA.

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