Gatekeepers or Censors? How Tech Manages Online Speech
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
During the Snowden Disclosures, I took to Facebook with the documents getting published and started to do my own summaries.
Facebook implemented a policy in which it would not let any post that contained a link to a Snowden Document. In some cases they would let the content get posted, but I confirmed with a friend's account that it was not visible when scrolling my feed from another account. Posts about other content were all visible and otherwise had no problems.
I complained and Facebook got back to me with a customer relations paragraph about keeping their platform free of unwanted or questionable content.
Not long after I discovered through media, and then some friends from Turkey, that what I experienced was identical to state sponsored censorship that Facebook extends to the Turkish government.
This lasted for close to the entire duration of public attention on the global and domestic surveillance scandal.
(Other links and content in other scenarios, for example May Day protest organization, was similarly blocked by Facebook - at least in Seattle for the organizers that I was in contact with).
"I took to facebook to post links to grey legal documents rather than hosting them myself because I wanted facebook to be liable; Im shocked when they told me they didn't appreciate the transfer of risk. It's literally censorship I tell you!"
Freedom of speech is not, and hopefully never will be,"freedom to post on other people's servers unmoderated".
It literally is. Most people would say that is justifiable given that Facebook owns the platform, but that dosen't change the fact that they're censoring what users say.
"First the came for the ..."
Trying to moderate "hate speech", which is highly subjective, is a losing proposition.
In this case, Facebook - presuming what they did was "follow the rules" - is following censorship rules.
So perhaps the thread should be about the US government forcing companies to censor free speech for them.
It's fairly easy to get people onboard with the idea of moderation, once you insist that that's censorship you now have a population that's "ok with censorship" which is exactly what the fascists trying to make the equality want.
Merely, this specific act of moderation was an implementation of censorship.
Moderation and censorship are two different things that are not mutually exclusive.
You are presenting a false dichotomy.
Those supporting censorship make basic references to it being okay because it is legal.
Those opposed to censorship make basic references to it being wrong because it is unethical.
Clearly, there is a tension between what is legal and what is ethical.
Imagine if some Saudi documents were leaked to journalists and the American government walked into the Times and forced them to destroy the documents at gunpoint.
This was clear and simple government censorship.
Not particularly unusual or remarkable for the UK.
They were at gunpoint.
If there was merely a legal risk, it would have been sorted out by the courts and with lawyers. Example: Pentagon Papers, NYT.
This was a no-disagreement, forced compliance situation. It's not like they debated with the armed guards and they came to mutual philosophical position.
And note that The Guardian _did_ disagree. They had no other option.
So the entire argument "They complied (when forced at gunpoint and under threat) -> therefore it must have been a legally gray thing for them to report on global surveillance documents" begs the question. And to that point, the argument would be thrown out of any courtroom on those grounds.
When strongarm governments exercise their authoritarian muscles, we don't need to apologize and make excuses for it.
I think that we do have a reasonable expectation that our employers and service providers won't interfere with our religious lives, that all employees and customers have equal rights and responsibilities, are entitled to due process during disputes, we have the right to not self-incriminate, to face our accusers, to defend ourselves against attack, to associate with whoever we please, and so on.
When a dominant platform for communication starts to exercise its own authority over what can be communicated on their platform, I think its only natural that we consider it to be an unethical abuse of power. Property rights are not absolute. As one party becomes more and more dominant, I think it is appropriate that we recognize the asymmetry in the relationship and restrict that party's ability to exert power over others.
If you don't like the policies for Google, Facebook, others, make your own. Maybe like minded individuals will follow (most likely they won't). Once you no longer have this right then we can talk about censorship.
The idea that they bind on Facebook is... aspirational.
I'm going to steal that phrase.
The Bill of Rights and later amendments enshrines the ideal that power should have limitations. Just because this ideal was first applied to government doesn't mean that we must stop there.
Consider for a second if some political position was banned by all privately owned mediums in the US. Say for example it was reported on the violence is Bangladesh. Every internet provider would stop transferring data if it detected any mention of it, every server hosting data in any format would immediately remove any mention of it, Microsoft, Google, and Apple pushed updates to their OS's that would terminate what you were doing if they detected it.
Would freedom of speech (not the First Amendment) have been attacked in such a far-fetched scenario? Yes, despite it only being private companies doing things they have the right to do. As such, we can conclude that in such a scenario, freedom of speech includes requiring private entities to support a message they wish to not support. Now, would that not also apply in a less far-fetched scenario? I see no reason it would not.
It's a regressive part of this epoch of human history that the opposite is true of free speech: companies are required by law to surveil and censor.
It seems HN readership likes to stand up and defend these companies when they get rid of stuff we don’t like, like Nazis and Alex Jones rants. But if we woke up tomorrow and FB or YouTube started deleting content about progressive causes, we’d lose our minds and start sharpening the pitchforks. The double standard is evident. Either these guys should have editorial control of what they publish or not.
Increasingly, that's representative of the US population writ large.
Facebook was a community platform where I could reach out to the people I knew and loved - my friends and family. That's the only reason I made Facebook posts.
Regarding moderation - do you agree that something can be both moderation and censorship at the same time?
To make this more clear, consider Facebook's relationship with the Turkish government. Facebook will moderate the content in Turkey to what is allowed speech in that country, including moderation to remove criticism of the government.
Is that moderation or censorship? Or is it both?
Clamping down on political speech and whistleblowing is the definition of censorship. If Facebook as a private party was not hosting any political content then it would be valid, but hosting other political content - for instance politicians and activists calling for ending Chinese censorship - while suppressing Snowden's leaks is a brazen act of political censorship and hypocrisy.
If this was a thread about China's dominant social media platform silencing whistleblowers there would be hundred percent agreement its wrong. It is untenable and duplicitous to demonize others for censorship while defending or hand waving this kind of 'moderation'. This makes a mockery of free speech and reduces it to jingoism.
Many of the big social networks lack compartmentalization. On the other hand twitter demonstrates that it's not necessary, just helpful.
Unforuntately, minority voices are stifled in almost every single subreddit. Sure you can say people are free to make their own subreddits for those voices, but for example a community like /r/canada has a very valuable virtual real estate in its name. Most new canadian redditors will at one point check out /r/canada because it's canada's subreddit. Unfortunately moderators largely stifle conservative perspectives, forcing them out to subreddits like /r/metacanada.
/r/canada is like <company>.com: anything else looks second-rate. /r/canada2? /r/bettercanada? /r/altcanada? /r/the_canada? /r/mapleleaf?
I think reddit should've gone with `/r/:username/:subreddit` to remind everyone that every subreddit is just some random person's forum, not some canonical message board on that topic. It also makes it much easier to migrate to another subreddit because you aren't stuck picking some second-rate subreddit name like /r/bitcoin -> /r/btc.
/r/spez/politics, for example, reminds you that it's the politics of whoever spez is (reddit co-founder) and his mod team.
(It also could mean that a person deleting their account, or being banned, takes down the subreddit; it means transferring ownership becomes complicated.)
We have seen issues where cities have had terrible moderation and that people have complained about it/split off. (r/seattle and r/seattlewa sticks out, as does r/chicago, r/realchicago, r/chicagonothinggoes, r/chicagoanythinggoes)
/r/spez;always_good/politics, for example, could specify the politics feed minus anything spez or always_good marked as spam or off topic (rather than using whichever mods you've set for your account).
Do you have a concrete suggestion for giving the moderators less power, while still ensuring that subreddits don't get overrun with trolls?
Keep in mind that physical in-world minorities can amplify their voices vastly online. Sometimes this is something we want (by allowing, e.g., African-Americans to point out systemic injustice) and sometimes it's not (Fascist goons shitposting racist propaganda and driving people off twitter.)
Well, we can't have our cake and eat it too.
So it's less about giving more power to minorities (which are still just groups) and more about giving power to individuals to manage their own content. I'm actually shocked more social network don't give their users even more control over their content curation.
I hear where you're coming from, but I subscribe to a small amount of subreddits, and moderate one - and I am absolutely not willing to clean up after every troll, shill and bot that posts to all of them.
As a specific example, I moderate a local meetup subreddit. We have fairly specific rules about what is and isn't allowed, and our subreddit is better for it - because people aren't allowed to just link to random events in the city, we require that they be events that they are actively interested in attending. (The rationale is twofold - one, people won't just spam links to their events, and two, attendees will find at least one person they can connect to instead of attending alone, which can be somewhat daunting.)
If we, as moderators didn't do this, we'd have to rely on every user to "clean up" our subreddit for us. Those that didn't care to would find our subreddit useless, since it would be filled with links to garbage Facebook events, meetup.com sales pitches, and ads for competing subreddits and apps. Those that did, well, they'd have to do the work that we do.
Why should we ask that of people? It's like opening up a dance club, but telling everyone that it's BYOB, and BYOmusic, and BYOchair if you get tired, and also you gotta bring a broom if you want the dance floor to not be full of garbage. At that point, what's our value-add?
You bring the premise?
But I agree that in your case, moderation is usefull and important.
But I'd suggest that's again because of reddit's dynamics.
Consider a different social network that is instead focused on enabling users to group with other users they deem productive (automatically, simply through interactions, or manually they can give a score from 0-100 for each person [otherwise this score is auto-generated based on signs that indicate a productive relationship). So in this social network, each person's content is effectively cooperatively curated by people they deem productive members of the network.
I believe under a social network system like this, that moderators would not be necessary. Yes the social network, as a whole, will get spammed, trolled and diluted with many many posts. But there's other systems for helping navigate this. Ultimately though, I believe the concept of productive networks supersedes the need for most moderating functions. Will there still be a need to prevent stuff like death threats or etc. etc.? Yes absolutely, but I believe that decision is ultimately an admin-level decision, not a moderator-level decision.
I also think that system would work well as long as you're interested in the people in the system, and not in topics in the system.
2. Are we sure that the downvotes were organic? Are we sure it wasn't an algorithmic attempt to fight vote brigading?
If there is one thing I wish I could beat into people's heads with a stick about online discourse, is that any place free of moderation is not going to be a free speech haven, but a cesspit where the people with the most free time will dominate and drive out others.
It's incredibly cheap and easy to shit up a conversation, but quite costly to have an engaging dialogue. By having no moderation, you're actively choosing to reward shitposters, and punish quality contributors.
And, no, adding an up/downvote mechanism does not solve this problem.
It depends. One forum where I spend some of my time has very hands-off moderation and it does have a) some quality conversations b) diversity of opinions. Of course it descends regularly in low-quality drivel, insults and/or shitposting, especially on controversial subjects, but it works.
Edit: But I can't say that it works everywehre, just that it can work.
It's the case on that forum and the off-topic discussions (religion & politics) are accesible only to accounts older than 1 year, so it helps to limit shitposting in those discussions. Accountability for your opinions in that case just mean getting mocked by other people (I said free speech, not nice speech).
I just wanted to show an counter-example disagreeing with your (apparently) absolute position.
Yup! That's one of the good ways of holding people accountable.
Of course the limited reach of the spoken word and inertia of the speaker put limits on how much shitposting you can do in meatspace, but sometimes it's still preferable to have as little moderation as possible and instead enable each user to filter outer the noise on their own.
Going back in time, what about newspapers and letters to the editor? Those had a clear range of what was allowed and acceptable.
Is there really anything stopping us from using these rules except for being afraid to not post bullshit everywhere unsanctioned any longer?
Proponents will argue you can own your own site, so long as the hosting is okay with what you say, you can run your own hardware, so long as the co-location center is okay with what you say, you can run the server from your home so long as your ISP is okay with what you say, and it will be delivered, so long as the various individual ISP of you readers also find what you say okay.
The end result is the American population of free-er and free-er from the government (which won't, almost, anymore do something against an individual for being the wrong X,Y, or Z. Why should they expend the effort? All they have to do is enforce Right To Work laws, and private enterprise will do it for them.) (The US Post Office may no longer seize copies of Fanny Hill, but I will wager it couldn't be posted on Facebook.)
Edit: Down-voted for trying to make a prediction without even passing judgement on the topic. Funny how that works.
I was simply pointing out that this phenomena is not new or limited to the internet. It is inherently human. It also is neither completely negative or positive. It just is.
Does it? Because it's currently ok to say that "white people suck" and various other overtly racist statements that would have been interpreted as such by society as little as 10 years ago.
Secondly, it is not currently ok to say that "white people suck". The huge uproar over that is evidence of such. However, society has decided that saying "white people suck" is inherently different than saying "[any historically repressed minority] sucks". Society has also decided that context of those statements matters. Saying that offhandedly on Twitter as a joke is different than saying it in a campaign speech.
I think that debate is far from settled.
No, it bends towards wherever it ended up going. Which by some remarkable coincidence, will be whatever most people currently approve of. Equating that with "justice" is a tactic to bash people who don't like whatever change is being discussed, without having to actually explain why that change is good.