With Apple, Facebook and Spotify doing this (and lots of reporting about it) I'd say ... cue the Streisand effect.
Sometimes it's better to just not do anything, but I guess that doesn't get you PR points.
Sometimes it's better to just not do anything, but I guess that doesn't get you PR points.
Adding barriers to passive consumption, by vulnerable (misinformed) people, is probably also a good thing. It's not being censored/outlawed, just made slightly less convenient to access. Fake news are a threat to democracy.
What sorts of demands would be listened to or have any chance of being effective if not having the weight of force of law behind it?
It is an awful misconceptions that the only way to effectively get other people to act differently is with law. It is lazy and leads to unnecessary use of force. Most things that are bad are not illegal (e.g., lying to your friends, being mean, abandoning your parents, cheating on your spouse) and yet occur at much lower rates than they would without the many extra-legal mechanisms that keep them in check.
In practice that's not what happens.
So yeah, I'm not shedding a tear over IW (though they probably have a point, on one occasion or another. Other media address these points so it's not dependant on them)
However, I think we should make the tradeoff explicit here. Just saying "Apple shouldn't do this because it's censorship, and censorship is bad" is a rather naive attitude. I would argue two things:
1. This isn't censorship, it's a refusal to broadcast. It's one thing to say "You can't say that", and another to say "I'm not going to allow you to use our platform to say that." The government is not allowed to prevent speech, but that doesn't mean that private companies are required to enable it.
2. It's not "fake" news. It's fake. It's literally made up stories, about child sex rings in pizza parlors and slave colonies on Mars.
So you might say, what's the harm in making up stuff? Well, people are shooting up restaurants and making on-air death threats to journalists and generally gravitating towards authoritarian viewpoints sponsored by organizations such as infowars. And guess what tool authoritarians love to employ? CENSORSHIP. Failing to hold these jokers accountable for their words and instigation actually and inevitably leads us farther down the path towards actual censorship than refusing to give them a platform. I would rather companies take a stand against this stuff than just allow them to exploit our misguided notions of democratic rule to undermine actual democratic rule.
It is, just like we need to teach kids not to drink poison. But we also don't use "we need to teach kids not to drink poison" as an excuse to leave easily drinkable poison in reach.
At some point, we'll have educated people better on how to do their own critical thinking. But we're not there yet, and acting as if we were isn't a strategy for success.
It doesn't just show up in your podcast feed.
This is about providing a platform to someone who willfully spreads lies.
There has been research into the effects of Reddit clamping down on hate speech a few years ago. Guess what: not giving assholes a platform actually works. It's still a cesspool but less so than it used to be.
I'm also suspicious -- what stops the aforementioned individuals from finding another website/forum? I seem to remember hearing that after Reddit closed down several of the more unsavory/flat-out-awful subreddits, a large contingent of those users moved to another site (can't remember which though).
FWIW, I support clamping down on hate speech, but only if it's accompanied by some form of education (otherwise, you're just hiding the problem).
Constricting hate speech has a notable impact on the dignity and well-being of those impacted[1].
[1] EG: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13504630.2015.11...
I am not sure any populist politician has quite realized this power. Trump has to an extent but he has no backing from anyone in media, education, or most government employees. Now that Trump has broken so many tacit rules, I fear a charismatic leftist populist would be able to nationalize these private struggle sessions and vastly amplify his or her power.
The mob has not been a force in politics for a long time. I fear a resurgence.
You realize which country has some of the more effective and stringent hate speech laws in the world? If you do, did you stop to ask yourself why?
But I also fully support the property rights of Twitter, Facebook, etc to exercise control over the content of their platforms.
You wouldn't permit someone setting up camp on your front lawn, passing out, say, NAMBLA literature would you? It's unlikely you'd say "Sir, I do not like that that you are on my lawn evangelizing man-boy love, but it's your god-given right to do so!" -- you'd probably (rightly say) "Get get the F--- off my lawn!"
Your property, your rules.
There is a correlation between the support of freedom of speech and gender / race, unsurprisingly.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1559-1816....
In other words, these platforms are powerful enough to silence people. Today, it's people you agree with silencing. Tomorrow, it may be people you disagree with silencing. It's not a good thing that massively powerful private companies are deciding what speech should be allowed and what should not. The law doesn't require it, but as users, we should demand that these major platforms are open to everyone, not just the ones that the majority currently approves of.
Their platform, their rules, within the confines of the law.
Those aren't orthogonal. They seem to both be true in this case (what "it is about" is subjective).
[0] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-market-share-of-podcast-ap...
The Streisand effect applies when the attempt is to hide or censor information for no reason other than hiding information.
This is obviously not true. Apple has had a ridiculous "no politics" policy on the App Store for years, censoring the anti-war left.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/538kan/apple-just...
I’m leery of people who cite one scientific data point alone. It smells like an appeal to authority. And you’re throwing up a strawman with your rhetoric about blocking a communist podcast.
Alex Jones himself has said in court it’s an act and he’s just an entertainer. Sometimes the act gets old and shows get canceled. Is that censorship?
In this case the show isn’t even canceled. Just removed from one of dozens of podcast directories. It’s still findable at the source. Your complaint is really about the creation of a slight inconvenience. There’s no real censorship here.
Not saying they will, because they haven't indicated that yet, but they are working with the extremist SPLC to craft a policy around 'hate' content and 'hateful' content (the latter to presumably include content that isn't hate content but could be misconstrued as hate content, perhaps?).
https://newsroom.spotify.com/2018-05-10/spotify-announces-ne...
No.
Right leaning source: http://dailycaller.com/2018/04/19/splc-maajid-nawaz-muslim-e...
Left leaning source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/opinion/southern-poverty-...
http://www.metalsucks.net/2017/09/14/infant-annihilator-bann...
That was the moment when I cancelled my spotify account.
Oh and to be sure, they don't need to "working with the extremist SPLC" to do that. This ban has more to do with some sort of pseudo moral outrage, wich the right is quite capable of on their own.