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Comment by _yt0l | Hacker News Reader

You're advocating for censoring a source with a better track record than, say, buzzfeed which should by your standard also be censored.

Rather than taking your opinion of Breitbart from the companies who stand to profit from the destruction of their competition, take a look at their front page right now and find just one example of fake news. Feel free to post your findings here.

The argument that "these words are too dangerous to be in the hands of the masses" is the same one used to justify the book burnings in WWII and similar thought policing throughout history.

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A private company is refusing to do business with a particular publishing entity. How is that censorship? How am I advocating we just shut them down? I said I don't see it as frightening that a private advertising company would do such a thing, nor do I find it frightening that other publishing entities would attempt to call out Breitbart on their yellow journalism, and I'm not afraid to condemn Breitbart for their spectacularly immoral publications.

There is also a significantly small number of people that most likely use Buzzfeed as their primary news source, especially in relation to politics. So I'm not sure why you're attempting to draw a comparison there.

What is the logical conclusion of your position if not censorship?

edit: in response to the second part about Buzzfeed, just in this thread there is someone with your stance on this who is advocating for them as a news source. Maybe a coincidence, but I'd say that speaks to it not being a "significantly small" amount.

The logical conclusion is obvious. We as private citizens, companies, and whatever have you, can denounce Breitbart and refuse to patronize them in anyway. We can spread awareness about the practices they use, and the people they employ. I will continue to denounce them until they prove they're willing to amend corrections to their articles, admit their mistakes, hire journalists with some amount of integrity, and cease their love affair with yellow journalism.

To claim I am calling for censorship is really kind of a cheap shot and completely distracting to the actual issues being discussed.

We don't allow businesses to ignore other ethical responsibilities - private companies theoretically aren't allowed to discriminate against or assault people. We shouldn't allow private companies - especially companies that effectively act as common carriers - to shape the messages we're allowed to see.

If your ISP refused to carry, eg, The Guardian because of the fake Duggan headline, would you be pissed off? I would.

Strawman / slippery slope.

This isn't an ISP blocking free speech, discriminating against minorities, nor assaulting anyone. It's an ad network that stopped doing business with a company that violated policies.

They're both common carriers. And I don't think there's a policy that's been violated - if there is please let us know since it's likely to be applied to a lot of sites on both sides of politics.

Genuinely curious: do you know precedent that supports the idea of an ad network considered a common carrier? I've seen people claim the same of websites like Facebook or Twitter, but I haven't seen evidence for this either. I've looked for some, but admittedly not extensively.

Was actually thinking of Twitter and FB rather than ad networks. Sorry, I appreciate original article was discussing ad networks, however same argument (no moral expectation of speech for private businesses) is always used to allow Twitter to inconsistency ban accounts that don't meet SF political mores.

Thanks for clarifying. It's still not clear to me that a website is a common carrier. Do you have a reference I can look at regarding the "no moral expectation…" argument?

Re 'no moral expectation of speech for private businesses', a frequent argument made against free speech is that free speech is only required to be enforced by the government, the first amendment doesn't apply to private companies. This is true, but assumes there is no moral imperative to compel private companies to enforce free speech.

Thanks for expanding. A related concept that I find powerful is that what is legal is not the same as what is moral or ethical.

Better track record?

On what axis? This stuff isn't single-dimensional.

Yeah, Buzzfeed may produce a lot more stuff, and maybe also a lot of fake stuff. However how much of that is harmless fluff versus hate speech and incitement to violence?

Also, frankly, looking at buzzfeed, i question that even on the dimension of truth/lie they fare worse than breitbart, particularly when normalizing against the total post count.

I rarely if ever have seen outright lies and propaganda on Buzzfeed, and I do see those things from Breitbart regularly. And now they also provide serious, top-notch coverage of a lot of serious news. There is no comparison between them and Breitbart.

While the dumb'ed down term making the rounds is "fake news" the really issue is what comes down to faux journalism. Publishing something a "news" that's been fact checked doesn't make it legit if there's a baked in spin/bias that intentional ignores other facts, different POVs, etc. We're getting mostly grade school story telling, and too often that's being passed off as journalism.

In short, the problem isn't fake news. That's easy enough to spot. The problem is the rampant propaganda as embraced by just about ever major mainstream "news" outlet. Most are perceived as legit, but few, at this point, actually deserve that level of respect.

> a source with a better track record than, say, buzzfeed

Says who?

> take a look at their front page

I do see and have seen their headlines often in a news feed I read; I strongly believe they promote racist ideology and are brazen liars.

Needless to say, Bannon might make their front page more amendable at the moment but he can't erase history.

Censoring? What law is being passed here? People are free to choose with whom they do business with, if people decide they don't want to do business with white nationalists, that's their choice, and more power to them.

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