Comment by notveryrational | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notveryrational | Hacker News Reader

notveryrational

Having been censored multiple times by tech firms, I fall squarely into one camp.

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 love the unspoken sentiment behind your experience.

"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's literally censorship I tell you!

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.

And everyone seems to be fine with the censorship, until it is their own worldview that is censored.

"First the came for the ..."

Moderation != censorship. When facebook can send you to jail for your speech, then we can talk about censorship. I don't want to live in a world where I can't ban bad actors from my own servers (thus violating my freedom of speech).

When a moderator removes one of your comments because they disagree with the content, that is censorship. When a moderator removes your comment because it breaks a well defined rule, then that is moderating.

Trying to moderate "hate speech", which is highly subjective, is a losing proposition.

When well-defined rules include "content that the government wants to suppress because it criticized them" the rules provide censorship via moderation.

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.

Censorship is not defined as illegal speech. Some forms of censorship are perfectly ok, like when you remove objectionable content from your own platform. If the government were to require you to remove that same content, it would still be censorship, but in a much worse form.

No, that's the point. Censorship is a specific thing, and to muddy the waters by claiming moderation is censorship means that during times of actual governmental overreach it will be that much harder to recruit people to your cause.

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.

No person is claiming that "moderation is censorship".

Merely, this specific act of moderation was an implementation of censorship.

Moderation and censorship are two different things that are not mutually exclusive.

Something can be both moderation and censorship at the same time.

You are presenting a false dichotomy.

This conversation on HN can essentially be boiled down to "law versus ethics".

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.

Were the Snowden documents really legally grey? The Guardian had no problem publishing them.

The Guardian was also forced to destroy copies of the files it owned by the UK government.

Because the UK government has a censorship program that prevented journalists from reporting on source material relevant to the interests of their citizens.

An example of Snowden documents being legally grey, and even the example of the guardian being under pressure because of it.

American documents were leaked to journalists and that was a legally gray problem in the UK? Don't be silly.

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.

American documents containing information about things the UK government considered state secrets. If there wasn't a legal risk, why would the Guardian have complied? That's kind of unrelated to the question if you consider that legal threat justified or not, it's clearly there.

> If there wasn't a legal risk, why would the Guardian have complied?

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.

If you have to ask, they are

Anything marked secret/top secret doesn't technically stop being confidential just because they've been leaked. IIRC the guardian didn't actually publish many if any of the documents; just their own summaries and reporting.

At least for me, the freedoms enshrined in the bill of rights and other amendments are valuable not just as restrictions on government power, but as restrictions on power. The more asymmetric the relationship between two parties, the more sensitive we become to exercises of power by the stronger party over the weaker one.

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.

The restrictions put on governmental power are proportional to the power we give the government. Your employer can't imprison you, collect taxes from you, send you off to war; pretending "social media add tech company" is in any way comparable doesn't add much to the conversation. You first have to give google the right to send you to jail, before you can demand due process from them (that's a dystopia I think no one wants, not even the tech CEOs).

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.

Power doesn't have to be absolute in order to be asymmetric. In turn, the restrictions imposed on an employer or service provider should be proportional to their dominance.

You can want the Bill of Rights to be "restrictions on power", but as a positive description of reality and of law, they are not that. In fact: the Constitution had to be amended to make those rights binding on State governments, and it's not perfectly legally clear that all of those rights have been so incorporated.

The idea that they bind on Facebook is... aspirational.

> is ... aspirational.

I'm going to steal that phrase.

Its not a matter of what their legal status is. Its a matter of what drives our sense of whether some behavior is right or wrong.

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.

I understand the point you're making, but the Bill of Rights is an odd document to use as your moral lodestar. It was designed for a particular purpose: to structure and constrain a new government. It isn't a manual on how people should conduct themselves, nor did its authors intend it as one. It leaves out things that manual would certainly include, and includes things it wouldn't.

Freedom of speech is a much larger broader concept than the First Amendment.

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.

Freedom of speech is a principle. Some people seem to forget that.

This has actually already been determined. For instance, businesses are required to serve all colors regardless of sexual orientation, color, religion, etc.

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.

While it’s well within Facebook’s rights to censor content that appears on their platform, it’s also within OP’s rights to call out their attempts to whitewash and sanitize their little part of the Internet.

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.

The HN readership has its own fascistic tendencies, including a large portion of its membership that defends censorship, surveillance and propaganda.

Increasingly, that's representative of the US population writ large.

In no way was there an attempt to transfer risk.

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?

There is a difference between hate speech, racism, bigotry, incitement to violence and political speech.

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.

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