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Comment by danschumann | Hacker News Reader

If you ban a conspiracy theorist, doesn't that give him credibility among conspiracy theorists? Suddenly he's right. Suddenly there is a conspiracy between facebook, youtube, etc, to ban him. Suddenly he's a prophet rather than a satirical nut. What he said would happen came true.

There seems to be a dumbing down of America, where we expect corporations to be the ones to decide things are right or wrong, rather than letting individuals make up their own minds and spot satire or bad will or exaggeration on their own. Anyone watching Alex Jones could laugh at some of his more ridiculous claims. Just because some people believed every word he said..

How is anyone better off now that he's banned? People who didn't watch him still don't watch him. People who did watch him still watch him ( maybe moreso because they downloaded his app ), and people who were on the fence maybe think he was right.

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The concern isn’t that his “followers” would find him more credible. Those followers will follow him to the ends of the earth, regardless if he was banned. Conspiracy theorists never needed to be right - so operating on a model that giving him hard ammo for his theories is worthless. Alex Jones can’t be wrong in the eyes of his followers, so that he can’t be proven right either.

What his removal on these platforms does is limit his reach. He’s completely allowed to, in the confines of the law, to say whatever he wants. That doesn’t also mean he is owed a loudspeaker to blast his asinine message to the entire world. This is about limiting the reach of a deranged individual. If you don’t believe this works - look at what happened to Milo after he was banned from Twitter. The near weekly Milo articles simply dropped off the face of the earth. And it’s likely Alex Jones’ limited reach will prevent from amassing new followers who choose to harass the parents of the “false flag” sandy hook shooting. That, to me, is more than reason enough to ban him.

There’s a huge line between the confusing, but relatively safe flat earth conspiracy theorists and the the one that actively riling up people to harass parents grieving over children.

You are correct that banning them from platforms limits their exposure, but why do you think it's desirable?

Why defacto monopolies should decide who is allowed to exercise speech and who must be silenced?

Do you feel this practice will never be turned against you? Do you disagree with the idea that if crazy people don't have freedom of speech, then nobody has freedom of speech?

And I know the common argument that sure, they can just start their own Twitter or move to another platform.

It's similar to how Republicans close all but one abortion clinic in a state and claim that whatever, you're still allowed to have abortions, but only in this one remote clinic and only on certain conditions.

>but why do you think it's desirable?

For the same reason I'm not allowed to post porn on hacker news. Why aren't we talking about how Y Combinator infringes on my freedom of speech by deleting my posts on Big Wet Asses 7?

>Why defacto monopolies should decide who is allowed to exercise speech and who must be silenced?

You should brush up on your definition of monopoly. What is the monopoly that is deciding who is silenced, and what market do they have a monopoly over?

>Do you feel this practice will never be turned against you? Do you disagree with the idea that if crazy people don't have freedom of speech, then nobody has freedom of speech?

This is a very tired and poor argument. If you have "crazy" ideas, like for example, if you believe the earth is flat, you are fully welcome on Twitter/Facebook. What Alex Jones and his ilk are accused of is harassment and inciting violence. The day I start using Twitter to incite violence is the day this "power" will turn against me. Until then, I have nothing to worry about.

>There’s a huge line between the confusing, but relatively safe flat earth conspiracy theorists and the the one that actively riling up people to harass parents grieving over children.

How about anti-vaxxers...are they somewhere in the middle?

I think weakening herd immunity and resurrecting deadly diseases in areas where they were previously erradicated puts them in the 'harmful conspiracy' category.

People got real joy out of seeing Alex Jones banned from public platforms. It saddened me. I think Alex Jones is foolish entertainment and nearly never agree with his message. But it hurts me to see someones free speech curbed. We can all say: Ah, these are commercial companies, so free speech doesn't matter. But these commercial companies aggressively took on as many users as they could and concentrated them (often behind walled gardens). For all intents and purposes, Facebook and Youtube are public spaces. Good luck with your social network if you are banned from Facebook. Good luck with your amateur news channel if you are banned from Youtube.

These people get banned for what their followers do. But there is no consistency, and political preference. When someone posts the phone number of an employer (after he is deemed racist by a one-sided video), and over 200 people call and the guy loses his job... Twitter does not act. When a verified journalist publicly shames, with photo, a teen alt-right protestor (in an effort to scare people into staying home next time)... Twitter does not act. When the president of the USA threatens nuclear war or reposts incorrect far-right propaganda... Twitter does not act. When people proudly in their bio state that they will punch anyone they perceive as a violent nazi, and post videos and incitements to promote punching more... Twitter does not act.

First they came for Alex Jones, but I wasn't a conspiracy theorist, so I did not care.

Twitter is now a platform where a single tweet can deny you entry to the US. Where sending a 10-year-old .gif to someone with epilepsy can land you in jail with a felony. Where terrorist attack announcements are broadcasted live for all to see. Where people dig up 5-year-old tweets and take them out of context, and send them to your employer. Where preference is given to a select few verified people and their voices amplified (who cares what a spoiled out-of-touch movie/music star thinks of politics?). It may be too late to salvage.

Here is for a conspiracy conspiracy: The connection between fueling conspiracy theories and foreign intelligence agencies is interesting. See for instance the "active measures" [1] tactic.

I don't know all the details yet, but Facebook and Youtube should have connections with US intelligence. If Alex Jones, like WikiLeaks, was used by foreign agencies to promote conspiracy theories harmful to US political and democratic coherence (9/11, birther movement, division over gun rights, pizzagate), these companies should be aware of that, which turns their decision into a different light (but of course, they can not come clean about this yet).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures

The article is not about Twitter banning Alex Jones, it's about Twitter shutting down an API.

The main theme of the article is Twitter shutting down an API, but the article opens and closes with Twitter not banning Alex Jones. This point clearly seems important to the author and is worthy of discussion.

(I would have prefered if the author wouldn't have mentioned Alex Jones, it only distracts from the main message. But here we are)

Agreed! She smuggled that in like we'd all agree. Twitter's so problematic with its contrarian defense of free speech and technical problems, right gang?

>How is anyone better off now that he's banned? People who didn't watch him still don't watch him. People who did watch him still watch him ( maybe moreso because they downloaded his app ), and people who were on the fence maybe think he was right.

Existing on a platform has two undesirable effects that are relevant here: 1) It legitimises them, to a degree, by putting them in the same place as honest and factual sources; and 2) It provides zero-friction paths to more followers. If one path to getting inside somebody's head requires being retweeted by somebody they already follow, and the other requires them to visit and re-visit an external domain, one of those is _much_ more likely to catch people.

> People who didn't watch him still don't watch him

I'm not sure. I think this might be the type of advertising that money can't buy. It puts him and his enterprise, even if temporarily, in front of a wide range of people who would otherwise never waste a single cycle on his content.

Blanket banning platform users based on hate speech, is still the loss of freedom of speech. The question is where do you draw the line? There is an good conversation about this on the JRE podcast with Jimmy Dore. https://youtu.be/k3YcGRCGEuY

It literally is not, by the actual legal definition of freedom of speech. I think a lot of people have this oversimplified idea that "Freedom of speech" means "Anyone should be able to say anything, and they should face no consequences for it", but this simply has never been the case, and the people trying to redefine freedom of speech are being extremely duplicitous by pretending that they're not twisting the definition.

There is a distinction though between the broad concept of "freedom of speech" and the legal government protection and US specific first amendment. I think there is an equal amount of disingenuousness coming from the side that tries to say that freedom of speech only exists within the context of a government backed right-to-free-speech, rather than as a broader concept itself.

> the people trying to redefine freedom of speech are being extremely duplicitous by pretending that they're not twisting the definition

What about the people trying to redefine freedom of speech from a concept to a legal definition?

It is a legal definition. It the US it goes:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech"

"Free speech" in the US is a specific legal limitation on congress. It doesn't mean that individuals or companies have some obligation to provide others with the means of spreading their ideas.

You're confusing two things: the legal protections afforded by the First Amendment (in the US) and the concept of free speech. They are not the same.

I wouldn't say Twitter would be violating the Constitution by banning Alex Jones. I would say I'd like to live in a world where private corporations didn't censor digital mass communication.

>I would say I'd like to live in a world where private corporations didn't censor digital mass communication.

Why on earth would you want that? We already have a tonne of mechanisms by which anybody can say anything they like, within the confines of the law, and ignoring that arguably infowars breaks that, why does _everything_ need to be like that?

If you go to, say, a forum about cooking, and start talking about cars, then ten years ago getting your posts deleted for being off topic was simply considered good moderation. Now it's a political statement that causes controversy! Sets of rules and codes of conduct have been a mainstay of almost every serious digital community since day one. Everything from 4chan to mailing lists to twitter to niche forums to basically anything else has _always_ "censored" content which is against the rules.

A world where nobody gets to set any rules is a world in which good communities cannot grow. We've seen this over and over again, with every mature community having enforced rules, and every attempt to create "rules free" or "uncensorable" communities ending up collapsing in on themselves.

I think we need to frame this discussion in the reality of the situation: This "censorship" is nothing different to what has always been done, and the people who are now claiming that it is wrong are the ones pushing for a massive change in how we operate. Reasons and justifications for this must be provided.

I disagree with your assumption that a lack of censorship means total anarchy. Consider that Twitter has cultivated an environment conducive to politics and journalism. It's not that Alex Jones is off-topic it's that he's saying disagreeable things.

> We already have a tonne of mechanisms by which anybody can say anything they like, within the confines of the law, and ignoring that arguably infowars breaks that, why does _everything_ need to be like that?

Because digital communication is important, and I think it should follow the same mechanisms as analog communication.

>It's not that Alex Jones is off-topic it's that he's saying disagreeable things.

I think this is the central disagreement. He _is_ breaking the rules of twitter, by any interpretation, but even were he not, I don't think you can just wipe away concerns with that the things he's saying are "disagreeable".

We're having a lot of problems currently around the fact that we have people who have gotten very good at propagandising and communicating in malicious, duplicitous ways. Alex Jones and friends aren't coming to the table in good faith, and asking to be treated as if they are is one of the tools they're using to twist polite discourse for their own profit.

While it's incredibly important that anybody who has something to say in good faith be allowed to say it, we still need to be able to protect ourselves against people like Alex Jones, who is simply trying to extract profit from a gullible audience.

The line is established:

The (US) government has legal limitations on what it can do that results limiting of free expression.

Corporations do not.

Twitter, FB, and any other platform run by a private company is not obligated to provide a platform for anyone, nor is it obligate to suppress anyone whose actions do not break laws covering private individuals.

FWIW I terminated my Twitter account yesterday. The platform provided no value to me, and I did not care to provide value to them.

People who pretend corporations and other private entities are incapable of abridging freedom of speech or censoring others are doing far more harm to the definition.

No one is saying anything about not suffering consequences for speech. Even though that argument is a holy bucket as well. Prison is a consequence of many things so saying "freedom of speech doesn't mean you shouldn't suffer the consequences of it" technically allows for imprisonment based on speech.

Freedom of speech is the freedom to say whatever you want.

However, everyone also has the freedom of association. And on my personal property, my rights trump yours. I am free to curtail your speech, to censor you, to deplatform you. And my line can be whatever I want it to be.

And in doing so, I could say I'm for freedom of speech up to a certain point. I'm not going to let certain views persist where I can control it.

But those people are free to say what they want in areas they control or in areas where no one has control. And the government in the US has taken the stance that it will not make any law abridging the right of people to say whatever. So if you want to go to the public park and say whatever, that is your right. No one has to listen.

See: Milo Yiannopoulos. Arguably he became a lot less prominent after he got banned. It is easy to be exposed to tweets and ideas by someone you don’t follow, yet not necessarily the rebuttals of those ideas.

Milo became less prominent after he got banned, but not necessarily /because/ he got banned. His loss of prominence followed an impressive string of self destruction, of which his banning from twitter was only one part.

> ...people who were on the fence maybe think he was right.

It's clear that Twitter et al. are more interested in users who don't currently know who Alex Jones is; they clearly believe that the number of people who haven't been exposed to Jones is much larger than the number of people who have been exposed but are "on the fence".

IMO Twitter et al. are probably correct at least on this point. Jones isn't exactly an "on the fence" kind of guy.

Supposing we are purely concerned with the efficacy of these bans, as opposed to their moral/ethical/social implications, the question is: does banning Jones substantially reduce the number of people who see his content?

I don't have an answer to that question, but IMO it's the right question to be asking (again, from a purely "supposing your goal is to shut down Jones, is this action effective?" viewpoint).

> There seems to be a dumbing down of America, where we expect corporations to be the ones to decide things are right or wrong

I see exactly the opposite. There seems to be a heightened awareness and importance of social/political issues, where we demand corporations implement our own notions of what is right and wrong.

My hope is that the ultimate effect is that corporations effectively remind us that their property is private property and that this reminder renews interest in preserving the commons and enabling individual ownership.

Jones' content has been reported by countless users. Platforms finally gave in. Remaining neutral was impossible anyway. The culture war is in full throttle.

It's a silly war, as you already pointed at the laughs, and how the two camps are already seem to have been set in stone.

But politics was always about tipping the balance, disrupting the status quo. There's a new generation, there are always people that just got online. (Look at the murders in India. Proper witchhunts complete with the mob pleasing climax via human sacrifice or execution at the end. All because of some fuckwads started a rumor. Fake news at its best.)

Are we better off? Fuck knows, but the curators of these platforms had enough of Jones, and I can understand them removing his content.

> If you ban a conspiracy theorist, doesn't that give him credibility among conspiracy theorists?

Not just among conspiracy theorists. You've heard of the Streisand effect? Alex Jones's banning corresponded with the infowars app release. It quickly shot to the #1 "trending" app on Google Play.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/technology/infowars-app-t...

Did you really have to derail this discussion with this side-topic too, instead of participating in one of the numerous other ones in the last few days?

Read the first sentence in the article. It brings it up.

That doesn't mean it's not a side-topic that's been copiously discusses elsewhere, and not the main topic of the submission. Less than half of the comments here are about the core topic that's new-ish to HN, since you and another user successfully derailed it.

In Myanmar, hate speech on Facebook just contributed to an actual genocide. So unfortunately that's something that we have to reckon with when considering these kinds of questions.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-...

Less people will discover him. His site will seem sketchier to people wh haven't drunk the Kool-Aid.

I expect corporations to police their platforms. I don't expect NBC to air a documentary on why the Holocaust is fake, and I don't expect YouTube to host one either.

The truth doesn't necessarily rise to the top. Quite the opposite. As Terry Pratchett said, "A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on." We can't just put the boring old truth on the same level as an exciting lie and expect everyone to figure out which is which. The current rise in conspiracy theories demonstrates that.

Companies have no obligation to allow hate speech and incitements to violence on their platform. And because of how media bubbles work, it's very easy for people to get in a part of the internet where all they see is Alex Jones-type content, and constant exposure to that can change a person without them realizing it. I've seen it happen with people I know, who started out fairly reasonable and have since descended into raving lunacy over the course of several years.

We expect corporations to help fix this problem because they're in part the cause of it by creating systems which recommend content people want to see and in the process trap those people in a bubble of content that reinforces those positions.

I'll take it a step further: Companies have no obligation to allow speech on their platform. Full stop.

If I run a Transformers forum and I've decided that FIRRIB* will be the only opinion allowed, then that is the only opinion allowed. You come in here with that FIBRIR nonsense and I'm well within my rights to deplatform you on my forum.

* A semi-humorous debate in Transformers fan circles. FIRRIB stands for "Frenzy Is Red, Rumble Is Blue". Frenzy and Rumble are two tape cassettes that transform into robots. Their toys use the same molds, the only differences being in their colors. Due to the overall similarity of the two, the names get swapped in various incarnations. They toys have Frenzy as blue, while it's the red one in the cartoon.

>Companies have no obligation to allow speech on their platform. Full stop.

Despite my whole belief in freedom of speech being an extremely important value I'm going to play half devil's advocate here.

I agree that no site owner should be obligated to provide speech for its users. I don't have any methods of commenting on my personal website. Am I restricting freedom of speech? No, there was never a method of speech (especially a nonrestrictred one) and I never made any promises that there would be.

This is where my problem comes in. Social media sites claim that they're for everyone and that everyone should be able to have their say. Well... Until it brings them bad press then everything goes out the window.

There's decent arguments against calls to violence, but often if they don't cause negative press attention or otherwise seem against the site's political Norm chances are it will go unchecked.

But the moment it's anything doesn't fit the political narrative or causes bad press, social media operators will bend over to restrict speech.

If there actually is an illegal/credible call to violence or otherwise illegal content the authorities should be involved otherwise the prominence of very few main methods of communication being able to censor legal content at will is concerning.

There's always going to be unsavory characters in the world, and social media sites have methods to let users block them without banning people outright.

TL;DR The main issue I have is social media platforms advertise themselves as being neutral actors where everyone has a voice as long as they're not breaking the law, but act completely opposite of how they advertise themselves often due to pressure and political bias.

I mean, you effectively run an authoritarian site where you and only you get an opinion.

And that's fine. It is your platform.

I had a similar discussion with someone else. We see censorship in general as something wrong. So only bad actors do it. Good people, like you and me, don't do bad things. So we don't censor. So whatever we do can't be censoring, because only bad people censor.

What if censorship isn't always bad? For instance, you censor all opinions not your own on your site. You have established it as the one stop shop for iotku's opinion on things iotku wishes to opine on. Since I do not have iotku's opinions, I can't really elaborate on them. I can't explain why iotku thought x or y. So my voice is pointless in that realm.

Although the question of how much of a responsibility these sites have to hold to the purest ideals of freedom of speech isn't a bad one. I personally believe that they can make that determination themselves and it is not my place to insist on a certain standard.

> Companies have no obligation to allow hate speech and incitements to violence on their platform.

And if Twitter decided to ban a prominent gay group because of hate speech toward Muslims? Would you support their right to do so then?

What I support has nothing to do with it, they can do what they want. I already don't use Twitter, I don't care one way or another.

> If you ban a conspiracy theorist, doesn't that give him credibility among conspiracy theorists?

If someone believed this before without evidence, then supplying them with evidence either way does nothing to change that situation. Except...

> How is anyone better off now that he's banned? People who didn't watch him still don't watch him. People who did watch him still watch him ( maybe moreso because they downloaded his app ), and people who were on the fence maybe think he was right.

You forgot the future generations of people who now won't be exposed to his messages just because a random Facebook friend is a convert. I am thankful for that.

As quixotical as it sounds, we must be intolerant of intolerance. Exclusion is the only goal of the intolerant, and by allowing them to speak we are encouraging the very behavior that we are trying to prevent.

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