Are Facebook and YouTube quasi-governmental actors?
economist.com
economist.com
All of your social media accounts get deleted so you move to your own website. Until the hosting company decides they don't want to do business with you so you start hosting it yourself. Until the domain registrar you used decides they don't like you so now you have to give people an IP address to reach your site. Until your ISP terminates your contract because they don't like people hosting websites on their network.
So many services controlled by private companies that can choose to not do business with someone.
"Nazi" is closely associated to the Holocaust, but you don't have to have killed someone to be a Nazi.
From Wikipedia:
Nazism is a form of fascism and showed that ideology's disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system, but also incorporated fervent antisemitism, scientific racism, and eugenics into its creed.
From that definition, Daily Stormer certainly was home to Nazi's, perhaps more appropriately "Neo-Nazi"
> Since being a Nazi is not a legally protected category they’re free to not help Nazis.
What currently is legal is obviously irrelevant when the question is what should be legal.
> and it doesn’t involve a legally protected class.
All your saying is that the CEOs' censorship is legal because it's legal.
Societies have used shunning as a way to regulate themselves for thousands of years. There's no reason why we can't do the same thing on the Internet.
The only problem is that the power to shun is being concentrated into too few hands. A group that blames the Jews for literally everything[1] should be shunned, but it shouldn't just be up to one guy to decide that.
The Daily Stormer deserves everything they got. The fact that they've bounced from provider to provider means that the free market is operating correctly; they're being shunned. But as CDN's buy each other out, that gets to be less of a solution.
[1]: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4325810/Writers.p... [subhead Morals and Dogma]
Also, according to Wikipedia over a few days the site had its domain registration revoked by several providers, its Youtube channel, Discord, and Twitter accounts were banned, its links were censored on Facebook, and it was DDOSed by Anonymous.[1] If you look at the Wikipedia link it's actually nuts how much effort was put into silencing the site.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer#Site_hosting...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer#Site_hosting...
And where do you suppose ISPs get internet from?
Not looking to good for the rest of us, though.
Most of the users that Twitter and Facebook deletes are actually people (or spambots, but even Gab blocks those) who ought to be deleted, so any service that's primarily filled with expats from them gets filled with slightly-oblique calls to violence and general quackery.
So when a poor user who isn't a skinhead gets banned because someone who happens to have the admin bit has a personal beef with them, they're supposed to switch to Gab? That's not an okay alternative.
That discrimination is not based on intrinsic qualities, though. You can't discriminate on skin color, sexual orientation, etc. because society-at-large has decided those are qualities that you're born with.
But it's perfectly within everyone's right to discriminate against assholes, if that's what they judge you to be.
You can try to change their minds, but there is no right or law that forces them to listen.
Furthermore, a person can't change their genetics. But they can change their attitude, personality, etc. so those are not intrinsic qualities.
No, you can't because society has decided you can't. Being something you are born with may or may not be part of the reason some in society support that designation, but its mostly beside the point. Religious or politocal affiliation is not widely viewed an immutable condition of birth and one is protected in the US and the other in at least some US jurisdictions.
Yes. Freedom of speech and freedom of association exist.
That's a feature, not a bug.
Sure, perhaps people have forgotten about a particular march especially if they do not consider it relevant to their lives, or a wider movement but at the time people heard about what was going on.
(In contrast, consider the infamous Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, which was smaller.)
Surely freedom of speech is different to freedom from consequence.
If I want I can legally (in the US) go about spreading hateful lies, but I better be prepared for the consequences of my actions. I can say what I want, but it doesn’t mean what I say is acceptable or that others have to like it.
If platform owners decide they don’t want me using their systems to promote my particular brand of racist demagoguery, well, fair enough.
There must be some sort of social responsibility. The Internet gives anyone with a bit of determination the reach and influence previously only available to large organisations, but with great power etc...
Yes it’s legal to say anything, but surely for those who do say things, especially to a large (and largely uncritical) audience there is an obligation to do so responsibly. By poisoning our shared information well with their vicious lies, Mr Jones and his ilk are being highly irresponsible and should be held to account.
Would you like this thesis as much as it was framed in the other direction? Assume that all platform owners are just fine with that 'particular brand of racist demagoguery' but really can not stand the utterings of the last Nobel peace prize winner (just to give an example) and decide to kick him to the curb. Would that be 'fair enough' or would it cause an outcry? Other than a shift in political bias there is no difference so it should be the former but I expect it to cause the latter.
Those platform owners would come with the same ratification: 'There must be some sort of social responsibility. The Internet gives anyone with a bit of determination the reach and influence previously only available to large organisations'.
BTW Facebook and Google have both received large amounts of government tax rebates etc. for their datacenters, so there is some government involvement. e.g. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/google-microsoft-facebo...
In the US legal context, what determines the permissibility of discrimination is the grounds on which one discriminates.[1]
0: https://reason.com/volokh/2018/06/17/more-on-masterpiece-cak...
Solution: No idea, but it's interesting to see this play out around media orgs instead of like, actual users who might have an opinion. Alex Jones is a strong face for InfoWars, but the whole thing is a media company.
We have to stop conflating the importance to speak without threat of imprisonment with a right to publish anything anywhere.
Yes Alex Jones is horrible. Problem is, if crazy people don't have freedom of speech, you don't have it either.
However, it's also arguable that the men who wrote the Bill of Rights had not even a shred of a clue about the power of social media on the Internet. News spread slowly then, and there was time for considered debate.
I mean, they were concerned about restraining democratic will to protect against populist extremism. For example, US senators were initially elected by state legislatures. And the Electoral College wasn't just an accounting system.
But damn, I don't have an answer. One could argue that Alex Jones is basically yelling "fire", and so has no expectation of free speech. But what about the antiwar.com people? What's so horrible about advocating the rights of Palestinians, or opposing sanctions against Iran?
Of all the things you could argue, I think this is explicitly not one of them. All the crazy and ridiculous things Alex says are in no way comporable to a direct call to violence or endangering Public safety with knowingly false statements.
In other words, Facebook is silencing free speech in a way that is definitely not covered if they must comply with the bill of rights.
OK, hypothetically, if he were part of a Russian operation to destabilize the United States, would the US government be justified in prosecuting him? I mean, consider Mariia Butina , who "face[s] charges related to interference in the presidential election."[0]
0) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/16/us/politics/trump-russia-...
Sedition is a different charge than censored speech.
> I meant "fire" in a political sense.
When you are talking about free speech, there is no other sense other than the literal in-a-movie-theater sense.
Is it just a PR issue?
The fact that government power, has in the West, declined extensively since the 1970’s, means the power went elsewhere. The corporate / finance sector, with rock bottom interest rates provided from capital across the globe have received most of it.
Of course this did all provide some benefits via the many innovations we’ve seen. But there are also many, probably more, downsides that we are seeing now.
You can just get yourself a generator, right.
And of course, Apple is under no obligation to sell you a MacBook. After all, being a hateful person is not a protected class.
I think it's about time we build a "bad people" list, which companies can consult before providing service. And if any company doesn't respect it, we can social media mob them into compliance.
Unless we want to start considering platforms like Facebook public spaces subject to all generalised government regulations for those spaces.
We can find common ground, but I wish it were possible without restricting what people can say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin%27s_execution_list_of_J...
See recent supreme court rulings.
I had an ex who would go 6-9 months without paying her utility bill, simply because there was nothing the power company could do about it. She was abusing the system, but the rules are setup that way so that people who really can't afford to pay their bill don't freeze to death in the winter.
Look, power companies can cut power. Sure there are rules, but the point still stands that they can do it. But it's not even relevant because getting your power cut can affect your ability to remain alive.
Not posting on Facebook is not going to kill anyone.
If Silicon Valley keeps looking like it is coordinating its censorship, then I would expect those laws to be extended to ISPs & social networks.
In Germany it isn't an explicit right, but some judges ruled that your existential minimum to live includes heat and power.
> Stealing small amounts of food to stave off hunger is not a crime, Italy's highest court of appeal has ruled.
Who gets to decide on who goes on that list? This is a very dangerous predicament that could shut out legitimate voices and dissenters. The list itself would likely be against first amendment rights.
I know being barred from the networks that most people use will be an inconvenience for you, but it's for the good of society that people like yourself aren't able to easily disseminate these sorts of ideas.
In fact, I know a guy with power and influence that can expedite your blacklisting, so I think I'll mention your name to him.
Please do not resist, comrade. If you behave we may remove you from the list after a suitable number of years.
That is, until they find themselves on said list.
Any thoughts on the MacBook vs a MacBook with automated engraving offered by the company?
Where do cake decorators fit into this? Is the situation different if the decorating process is automated?
But no, I doubt it would matter.
A company can refuse to put your initials as "KKK" on the product they sell you, regardless of the method by which they do it.
But isn't the problem with the social media actors in the first place...
A few hundred or thousand people angrily tweet about something -- who cares, right? Wrong. Cable media cares. They pick up a few of the most inflamitory examples from Twitter (it's easier to find quotes on Twitter than it is to go outside and report) and they present these tweets as if they represent a mainstream movement involving millions.
And these angry (but tiny) mobs are having an enormous impact on private companies and public policy. The tail is wagging the dog.
That's quite literally a small army (for reference, it appears the number of active duty US marines is around 200k).
Without commenting on the causes this (or any other) army of followers believes in, it's staggering to imagine what kind of impact monetary incentives, dispersed, for example, by way of an autonomous smart contract that is funded by anonymous donors via 'x' cryptocurrency that relies on some simple proof of action for payout, could have on the frequency and magnitude of actions such groups carry out.
We really are at the beginning of a new chapter in the history of humanity.
A second big difference is facebook decides to de-platform groups on facebook for what they do on facebook, they aren't banning people on a shared bad people list. That would be a kind of cartel/collusion which breaches other restraints on a company's behaviour.
> In a blog post on Twitch’s community board, the company said that if a streamer uses other mediums to send targeted harassment or hate toward another streamer, it will consider those actions a violation of Twitch’s policies — even though the activity didn’t happen directly on the platform.
https://www.polygon.com/2018/2/8/16988424/twitch-rules-haras...
Yet, Apple imperiously employs a EULA to prevent me from using iTunes to make nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons
Don't think this is satire that can't happen.
Shall we get started? First: anyone that seriously advocates we the people build a list of dissenters among our own citizenry. Second: anyone that wants to gut core provisions of the Bill of Rights and US Constitution.
That's about it. We don't really need to go any further. So, ready to sign yourself up for that list? I think it is such a fantastic idea that you really can't allow this opportunity to go to waste, and well, you know, you'll go down in history! That's even better than 15 minutes of fame on TV!
Betteridge's Law wins again
There is always a two-way relationship between the regulated and the regulator. Therefore, all regulated companies are, in a sense, merged with government. The greater the regulatory regime, the more deeply society becomes impressed with the features of fascism.
Do the stakeholders of the banking, pharmaceutical, media, and war cartels, forged in government agencies (whose charters they themselves drafted) and nurtured through regulation, hold sway over Alphabet and Facebook? It's a simple enough question to research and answer.
Free speech is exactly and specifically the right to control what expression you and your property are deployed to support. Private censorship isn't merely consistent with it, it is the core of it.
>you and your property are deployed to support
In particular: "you and your property" is a much more general concept here then it might normally be. If I lend out my printing press to people then I should be able to say what they print with it. If I sell printing presses at a fair market rate, ie I am satisfied with my side of the transaction, then I shouldn't turn around and impose terms on the use of that press. These two things are qualitatively different, even though they both involve limiting the use of printing presses that were at one point mine.
It is. So what?
> there isn't a place for that kind of conduct on platforms with any kind of standards.
Flag it as "obscene, flagrant garbage" and hide it. Allow the user to decide. If they want to switch their account to "allow all", that's their choice.
Google does this with search. They can easily do this on YouTube.
They choose not to, which is unfortunate.
The tradition of American law certainly flies a different way than the approach you suggest. I sincerely respect your position, but feel that wisdom and tradition have found value in taking a more nuanced approach.
was broken by this incident: "The Pizzagate incident, like Jade Helm before it, illustrates Jones’s ability to influence his followers to take action in the real world, no matter how far-fetched or unrealistic his claims might be. The Pizzagate “story” emerged in the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign, and thanks in part to active promotion by Michael G. Flynn, the son of former National Security Advisor Michael T. Flynn (who also appeared to endorse the story on social media), was still going strong a full month after Election Day, when Edgar Welch appeared at Comet Ping Pong with an assault rifle, ready to “rescue” the children he was convinced were being held in the basement. Welch fired several shots and spent close to an hour inside the restaurant before apparently determining that there were not, in fact, any signs of any criminal activity anywhere in the building. He surrendered to police, and later pleaded guilty to assault and weapons charges. Welch was sentenced in June 2017 to four years in prison."
Source: https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounders/alex-jones-five-...
It is rather audacious to me that you seem to assert that speech in social platforms that are owned and operated in the US with US citizens talking to each other is somehow separate from the rule of law of the US government. The internet was essentially created by the US government. The notion that internet companies somehow supersede individual governments is- dangerous.
The decision of social platforms to enforce their policies in this matter is in part in response to the will of their stakeholders, but also to insulate themselves from anything remotely close to being a party to defamation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law
> It doesn’t apply here. <- doesn't hold up for me.
One could argue that ironically, in exercising editorial discretion on content, social platforms demonstrate their ability to censure content, and thus open themselves up to liability for all of the content they chose not to take editorial action against.
If you've gotten this far in this thread, please spend some time with Alex Jones' greatest hits and give me your honest opinion of its merit.
Snarky disclaimer: I give money to the ACLU, I believe in free speech deeply, and though every fiber in my being is opposed to their cause I will fight for the right for Westboro Baptist Church to be able to assemble peacefully in public space. But even Alex Jones' site acknowledges the need for limits: https://www.snopes.com/news/2018/08/07/censorship-platforms-...
With regard to the Pizzagate incident, using the same set of arguments, I can claim that fringe leftist publications resulted in the Congressional baseball shooting where people were actually hurt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Congressional_baseball_sh...
So are you arguing that all those groups he participated in should be banned? That's what it sounds like.
Are you willing to ban Bernie for incitement?
> It is rather audacious to me that you seem to assert that speech in social platforms that are owned and operated in the US with US citizens talking to each other is somehow separate from the rule of law of the US government. The internet was essentially created by the US government. The notion that internet companies somehow supersede individual governments is- dangerous.
It is not the job of private companies to enforce the law. That's the government's job. And there's a reason for that. You do not get to be judge, jury, and executioner because you have some superiority complex.
If the government took action, we can have a substantive discussion over the merits of the case ... but it's irrelevant, because they didn't.
> The decision of social platforms to enforce their policies in this matter is in part in response to the will of their stakeholders, but also to insulate themselves from anything remotely close to being a party to defamation.
It doesn't matter what reason they had for doing it. They may not even have had a reason. It is their right to do it ... but just because you can, doesn't mean you should. That was my point. It's a poor decision.
> If you've gotten this far in this thread, please spend some time with Alex Jones' greatest hits and give me your honest opinion of its merit.
What merit does the WWE ( https://www.wwe.com/ ) have?
He's the equivalent in the talk show space. It's entertainment.
Do some people take it seriously? I'm sure they do. Some people take the WWE seriously too and think that it's real. So what?
Even if the content has no merit whatsoever, so what? Again, we're not talking about the government censoring him. That's when merit would come into play. It's a private party.
They can absolutely do it. And they shouldn't, because censorship is bad. Really, really bad.
And let's not pretend like their censorship is targeted at only undesirables. Well, I suppose it is, but it depends on who is pointing the finger. These same shitty companies censor perfectly legitimate content in China, because $$$. Not cool.
All these private companies that banned him, they all categorize content. They can easily have a nutjob category and if I want to watch that, it's my business. I don't need the social engineering, thanks.
Also, social engineering usually backfires. I hear Alex Jones has a really popular app and website now due to all the publicity?
The interim solution is to demonetize any non-original content, political content, news and opinion based content and disable personalized political or social advertising on all platforms.
Because at the moment the large social media companies are profiting from incentivizing extremism and division and are basically poisoning the well.
As a society, we did not have qualms before the internet about publishers declining to amplify the views of people like Alex Jones. Even in the absence of YouTube's support, he arguably has far more of a voice now than he did in the pre-internet days, before he could host his own website. He has that on top of all the traditional means of communication he always had, which includes passing out flyers and yelling in the street.
It is the responsibility of information disseminators to curate their content. Nobody is going to jail over these editorial choices, so the notion that this is a constitutional issue is pure hysteria. YouTube and Facebook are finally stepping up to the responsibility they have long owed us from the beginning.
If they are publishers then they should be held responsible for the content they publish.
Just like a newspaper would be.
I think we are waking up to that, and this is a sign that we are beginning to move in that direction.
For example if a reporter at the NYT slanders me then I can hold the NYT responsible.
Facebook wants to say "oh no no no we are just a platform - you have to find and sue the poster" while at the same time heavily curating content.
Any large private platform or network should be subject to the First Amendment, because most of them don't operate primarily in a free market. Instead they are monopolies that enjoy network effects and as a consequence are easily strong-armed by governments.
If Facebook's stock keeps declining and it ends up a shadow of its current self then it can be released from this obligation.
If I run the most popular website for people who like chili do I now have to allow posts related to all types of soups? Can my really popular chili site remove posts about your dog you keep making?
Silicon Valley social media companies are effectively public forums on private land.