Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

I would definitely not want the government to be able to control what ideas/speech is allowed on these platforms and what isn't. Nor do I want a single entity (as Facebook/Twitter exist today) to have that control. What we need is more effective anti-trust legislation and enforcement, so that a number of platforms can coexist and compete even though there is a strong network effect to having a single platform.

I would also support laws requiring that these social media platforms a) protect consumers' data b) don't censor beyond what the law requires minimally. But it might be easier to go the competition route.

View on HN

> I would definitely not want the government to be able to control what ideas/speech is allowed on these platforms and what isn't. Nor do I want a single entity (as Facebook/Twitter exist today) to have that control.

I have come to the admittedly sad conclusion that you can't reside in the middle here. I mean, you can idealistically, but slope will slide to one side or the other in practice. At least at this time I think you can ask for government interference or not. I would like to think that you could trust each side to know its boundaries, as we see in other regulated industries, but time has shown either side cannot. Which side would you want to give an inch to, because a mile will be taken (or according to some doomsayers it already has)?

The US government has censored the broadcast media(tv, radio) since their formation. So we do have some fairly solid evidence that the US government has not wildly abused that power.

I'm not sure this has to be an all or nothing thing. We have some reasonable protections built into the Constitution and case law that back that up.

I understand your hesitation about having the government involved as there are plenty of examples of government influence on the media around the world. I share the same fears.

With that said, do we really have any real world proof that the US government in recent years has over stepped its boundaries in regards to media restrictions?

We don't all publish TV content. We can see from retransmission fees for over-the-air content to the decimation of business models like Aereo what happens when content is governed. I see the Aereo business model as very similar to what's happening w/ article 13 in the EU right now.

But in general I don't think you can compare broadcast mediums to bidirectional ones (e.g. words on the telephone or text on the internet).

That's not really driven by the government so much as the media companies.

Big media companies have weaponized the government to serve their interests, it makes sense that social media companies will do the same.

They’ll write the rules together, make the barriers to entry even higher, and pat each other on the back.

Then it’s on to the next moral panic, this one’s been fixed!

Strongly disagree. The spectrum of transmission is regulated and parcelled out by the government, and it could be used differently. Indeed it is, with whitespace wifi devices. The battle over how many empty adjacent channels should be required for these devices is real, and ongoing. Take away the regulation and TV broadcasters lose. People who have televisions but no working knowledge of computers lose (if spending less time on the TV is a lose). People broadcasting to each other bi-directionally, over longer distances and through thicker obstacles than the current wifi bands allow, win hugely. The media companies are intertwined with the government, sure, but this is fundamentally a government problem.

The US government does have a history of cenorship - the banning of Henry Miller's novels and Wilhelm Reich's writing are the most prominent cases.

The US government hasn't censor broadcast media much given that most broadcast media owned by large corporations with ties to the state themselves.

And there's no reason that government wading into regulating Facebook could do anything remotely sane. A lot of Facebook's scandals have nothing to do with censorship and everything to do with filtering bias. When state agency is going to be qualified to regulate that?

But the internet is international - no local censorship is localized.

You won't want a random foreign government censor your speech.

The US does it all the time.

Why is okay when the US authorities shut down a site because of some bullshit DMCA violation that the rest of the world shouldn't be subject to?

> but time has shown either side cannot.

I wouldn't be so pessimistic. Off the top of my head, a number of industries are regulated / heavily regulated and thrive: media; air travel; automotive; transportation of dangerous goods; medicine / dental / veterinary; legal practice.

Industries want to be regulated. Regulation favors the big players and keeps out any newcomers.

The internet is now at the maturity level where it's ready to be locked down so Facebook, Google and maybe 1-2 other players can be cemented as the dominant players for decades to come through regulations ostensible there to stop them from becoming too powerful.

It's called "Regulatory Capture", and it's one of the most important concepts to understand to grasp how the modern world works.

Whoever was subject to EPA regulations clearly didn't want to be regulated, because the agency has been gutted during this administration.

Regulation is not as black and white as you are painting. Plenty of regulations do good things, because people can't be trusted to act with a social conscience when profit is their motive.

> Regulation is not as black and white as you are painting. Plenty of regulations do good things, because people can't be trusted to act with a social conscience when profit is their motive.

Indeed. I think the argument ventured is that it is burdensome to the point that only the big established players can bear

> Plenty of regulations do good things, because people can't be trusted to act with a social conscience when profit is their motive.

This is one of those sentences that sound logical, until you start thinking about it.

The fact that people sometimes do bad things in no way proves that regulations do good things. If anything, it's an indication that regulations might also be bad, since they are made by people.

Often the same people who are being regulated, believe it or not...

The alternative is no regulation, which I can't see ending up as anything other than a chaotic profit and power-seeking free-for all that does no favours for the average citizen that isn't part of the capitalist class.

Who do you think has the most influence on the regulations?

The powerful or the powerless?

This is such nonsense.

Some regulation can form regulatory capture, but other regulation can enforce an open, accessible marketplace.

Let's see how Facebook likes antitrust regulation.

I mentioned that other industries are successfully regulated (and many are unsuccessful, preventing inclusion by outsiders). I find the internet however so open a medium, regulating that data is like regulating what you can write, say on the phone, etc. We accept that there are downsides to openness on those fronts because we have chosen that tradeoff. I think the error is comparing it to something like air travel instead of comparing it to what you can write in a book. The more we use these analogies the more we strain to choose ones we like, and I personally liken internet data to writing something down due to ease and the sheer amount of people that can do it. Sure there are differences in reach, which is why it's incomparable.

I think regulating the internet, as you put it, is a different case than regulating these companies.

Facebook etc are more akin to broadcasters in terms of sharing ideas than they are akin to a telecom company offering communications infrastructure.

It’s not difficult to create a website to share the same ideas. In fact, it’s already done.

Openness is already there. Otherwise I agree.

I have come to the admittedly sad conclusion that you can't reside in the middle here. I mean, you can idealistically, but slope will slide to one side or the other in practice.

I don't see evidence that there is no middle ground here. Facebook and Google filter a lot of content. But that is filtering and not absolute control and there are significant other sources for those who want them.

State regulation would, however, produce a situation where everything remotely like a filter would be exposed to whatever regulation was implemented and that would in fact be a tremendous advantage for these same large players.

That filtering is not absolute control, but it is enough to control an election, consider these stats:

http://www.journalism.org/2018/09/10/news-use-across-social-...

Especially with 'AI-based filtering', which blurs the lines on what is filtered and why, these companies have both significant discretion and plausible deniability when it comes to censoring content.

Promoting the adoption of more than one platform might be done by forcing auditable federation of personal data -- with explicit user control and consent.

It won't help once you realize the people don't care and you can't make them care. It's not ignorance that's the problem either, it's intentional apathy. Until you can show a regular person how they are literally (i.e. not in some made-up tech way) harmed, they aren't going to concern themselves with it and rightfully so. If you make up harms or posit unproven or inapplicable-to-most harms, you will actually hurt your case by crying wolf instead of help it.

Maybe. Consider something though -

In South Africa Twitter is huge. In Germany, Facebook is. Instagram is big in the UK. Now take the possibly not unusual scenario in which a South African lives in London and has family in Germany.

Granpappy in Berlin would search for his grandson in London from Facebook but finds him on Instagram. He'd add the grandson as a friend and see the grandson's Instagram photos in his Facebook feed.

The South African guy in London searches Instagram for his nephew in South Africa, and finds him on Twitter. And sees that Twitter account's posts in Instagram.

If someone on Facebook finds me on Instagram, Instagram could notify me that Mr. X is searching for a profile that matches mine, and ask if I want to allow access to my stuff. If I decline he can't. Federation, with user control and consent.

I think it could work. And even if it was useful to a tiny monitory at least there's real choice. Inclusive of all.

It definitely could work, but who will make it work? I would really like to see my wife's facebook posts without having a facebook account (or just looking at her iPad which is what I currently do...) and she may be interested in my posts elsewhere.

I can see how it should be easy to send content from foo#twitter.com to bar#facebook.com as individual messages, format issues not withstanding, if foo and bar have agreed to correspond. But which end would manage the existence of that relationship and push/pull the data?

Maybe it needs third-party brokers to do it?

Interestingly I can see some parallels here with the current status of banking in the UK. After centuries of operation as "closed systems" there are now rules to force banks to provide APIs so that new entrants can offer inter-operation services. Maybe in a hundred years social-media companies will be forced to do the same? ;-)

In the context of the post's case for regulation - if that were indeed to happen then federation might be an approach.

Kodablah's point is not that it couldn't work technically, only that there's no public pressure to force them to implement it.

Also, such federation, if not open to third parties (easy to justify with spam, malicious parties, etc) can actually strengthen the current big platforms against competition.

My suggestion is in the context of regulation. Of course there's no incentive for social networks to do this of their own accord.

There actually is, probably to avoid the regulation in the first place: https://datatransferproject.dev/

That's a very interesting idea. And maybe this comes back to the notion of "lock-in" more broadly. That is, not just in the consumer-facing arena but also for enterprise software. Isn't lock-in ultimately working against a competitive market dynamic?

>What we need is more effective anti-trust legislation and enforcement, so that a number of platforms can coexist and compete even though there is a strong network effect to having a single platform.

There are a lot of platforms out there today. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit and Whatsapp are all huge. Plus there are smaller players like Tumblr, Viber, Telegram and plenty of regional players. The only anti-trust error was allowing Facebook to buy Instagram and Whatsapp. But that was a result of poorly enforcing existing laws not a regulatory gap.

One major issue is discriminatory access.

They shouldn't be able to pick and choose who gets access to what APIs and under what terms.

Everyone gets the same terms or no one does.

>anti-trust legislation and enforcement, so that a number of platforms can coexist and compete even though there is a strong network effect to having a single platform.

So, I get what you are saying.. but what kind of monopoly tactics are twitter/facebook actually doing? In my view it's virtually nothing.

Let's ignore facebook since it wasn't exactly first to market with myspace before it (although it was first to market in "this has your real name attached"), and talk about twitter.

Twitter had a fairly unique idea, you can post public messages that are very limited in scope. They were first to market on that- and that's why everyone uses it. What is stopping twitter clones from popping up? Absolutely nothing. Many people who read HN could easily make a suitable twitter clone. But would anyone use it? Pretty much no. Why? Because people like to centralize their technology as much as they can to make it actually useful.

What a pain in the ass it would be if you had 4 different twitter equivalents that you were trying to use.. or try to remember "oh friend A is on twitter1, Friend B is on twitter3" etc.

Now, yeah people still do this do a degree of course.. some friends might be on facebook, others twitter. So of course this segregation still exists but it's generally for products which are different in scope.

Anyway- my point is it's people and the marketplace have decided "1 facebook is OK" "1 twitter is OK". Arbitrarily trying to break them up is not what people even want. Paranoid people might think that's what people want because all they can see is the possibility of censorship and security stuff, but 95% of people just want to use something that works and they can connect with people without everything being a pain in the ass.

> So, I get what you are saying.. but what kind of monopoly tactics are twitter/facebook actually doing? In my view it's virtually nothing.

You are correct - monopolies are defined to control the supply of something to manipulate prices and hurt consumers.

The problem with these platforms is not that they are anti-consumer, the problem is that they are anti-competitive because they control the entire audience that a product can be sold to. This results in the commoditization of suppliers (eg news, books, etc.) and reduces competition in the distribution space of the economy that targets consumers.

It's a different way to think about it because it's a new concept in our modern world, but the mental model that I've seen is that there are three stages of creating something and selling it to a consumer:

1. Supplier / Manufacturer 2. Distributor 3. Consumer

In the old days, monopolies controlled supply and distribution, which resulted in consumers being hurt. Now, "aggregators" control distribution and the consumer, which leads to suppliers to drive down their costs or not even participate in the consumer space.

I HIGHLY recommend reading about aggregation theory on Stratechery to get a deeper understanding of this as Ben Thompson does a great job in explaining why the FANG companies do what they do: https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/

> What a pain in the ass it would be if you had 4 different twitter equivalents that you were trying to use.. or try to remember "oh friend A is on twitter1, Friend B is on twitter3" etc.

It can be solved with interoperability. If it is not a problem for mobile networks - phone calls and text messages, why would it be problem for social networks?

Both facebook and twitter (and pretty much everyone in the market of social apps) build their monopolistic walls out of the network effect - we have the users people are interested in so nobody wants to use your service.

Mandating open communication between these services would help to break this monopoly and possibly just naturally evolve into the idealistic goal diaspora was aiming for, small networks of social groups that have news feeds floating between them and the ability to pick and chose from locally hosted and separately hosted feeds.

> What is stopping twitter clones from popping up?

Networks effects.

More precisely, The fact that you can't read and reply to someone's tweets on a clone, due to Twitter's terms and conditions, and copyright law (enforced by states).

Network effects are powerful, but Twitter especially has a weakness:

1. Popularity follows an extreme power law, so the number of people that would need to move is smaller than you'd intuitively think

2. Fads change relatively quickly, so it's not even necessarily about getting people to move, but about getting the next generation to invest somewhere else

3. The big players are extremely metrics driven, so if people feel like the tide is shifting, the transition from trickle to deluge could be shockingly fast

It's not all theoretical - Instagram created an entirely new network effect very quickly, and only FB's ability+willingness to gobble it up kept it from being another major player. But the next thing will come soon enough (less than 10 years for sure, probably less than 5), and then the dynamics of the space depend on the whims of a South American butterfly (or SF Biz Dev)

> Instagram created an entirely new network effect very quickly

That's a very good counterexample.

I'm increasingly of the position that without regulating these platforms, we don't ensure that they stay open and free, we ensure that they are controlled by foreign governments the occasional well-backed PR firm.

As for your end statement I'd say it's the other way around. They are commonly controlled by your well backed PR firm and occasionally controlled by governments.

The problem is that FB and Twitter has become a regulating entity in themselves - often with a political slant.

I would add Google to that list, but they are generally quieter about their actions.

I think in order to have any effective antitrust action, interoperability needs to be mandated, with data being easily exportable/visible to other companies.

that's far easier said than done. Simple example a basic chat who's only info is userId+message. Then service A decides they want userId+message+timeSent and service B decides to they want userId+message+userStatus(happy/sad/busy/away)

and on and on. Basically forcing interoperability means a huge slowdown on innovation as you can't add anything without a committee and years of negociation

It’s really not that hard. I ran a site for many years that interfaced with hundreds of different sites.

It could be as simple as not actively thwarting crawlers. Or in your example, they provide everything they have as an API and it’s up to the competitors to adapt to whatever features they provide. In which case, other companies can focus on the lowest common denominator and making that interoperable.

It’s not perfect or seamless, but the baseline isn’t that hard, and that’s good enough for most people.

And it’s funny you bring up messaging, for many years it was interoperable across many services via XMPP and it worked pretty well, until everyone decided it was in their competitive best interest to silo it. We really haven’t gained much in terms of innovation in that space since then, in many ways it’s much worse.

Heh, because Facebook has been so highly innovative lately.

Just exempt 'small' services from the rule. Maybe this will kick some of the get big at all cost behavior that's permeated tech companies recently in the teeth.

Find I find interesting is that there is little talk about actual attempts to provide solutions for this situation: Thee feediverse with mastodon, etc. or matrix.org.

To bring it down to a populist formula: Why not make a law that requires the interoperability/federation of social networks? We have laws that set requirements for restaurants... why not for social networks?

> What we need is more effective anti-trust legislation and enforcement, so that a number of platforms can coexist and compete even though there is a strong network effect to having a single platform.

One way to achieve that would be to require that platforms for user-generated content make that content available on open protocols, such as ActivityPub and RSS.

> I would also support laws requiring that these social media platforms [...] don't censor beyond what the law requires minimally

Then they wouldn't be allowed to ban spam, which would be a regressive step.

How will this solve any problems ?

There’s several assumptions here (for example: more platforms will mean better ‘X’), but how would that link with the actual issues being faced by society vis-a-vis social media?

How does anti-trust legislation work for these kind of sites? If Facebook was split up then what would stop a single identical entity from popping up in some other country that fills the niche for the entire world? I've seen it mentioned in various places on this site but I can't understand how it would work in practice.

>Nor do I want a single entity (as Facebook/Twitter exist today) to have that control.

If you're operating a business you fundamentally need that control.

The platform you're talking about it the internet. It already exists. You can use it to say whatever you want within law. If you use someone else's servers to do so they can boot you, just like I can kick someone out of my house.

What's needed is not antitrust laws, but interoperability laws (or, construe them as antitrust laws).

If there's interoperability between networks, then no one network can become dominant via momentum only, and has to actually provide value to users, and prevents lock-in.

what's the point of the internet if, due to network effects, everyone is using the facebook app?

Which network effects are locking you in to using Facebook and not self-publishing, or using Twitter, reddit, hackernews, Medium, Tumblr, or any other website?

Nobody is going to do the rounds to manually check their friends’ mediums, tumblrs, hacker news, reddit posts, for every friend.

>I would definitely not want the government to be able to control what ideas/speech is allowed on these platforms and what isn't.

I definitely want the US, with their strong ideas of free speech, to be the ones controlling those platforms. Because, as they are now, they are severely restricted.

The thing about strong free speech laws is that it protects facebook and twitter's right to censor. Telling users of their platform to shut up is part of their free speech rights.

Free speech does not mean a guaranteed platform for your ideas, unless you are the owner of the platform.

You have a poor understanding of free speech. If you use someone else's service/platform, you have zero right to free speech (certain speech is protected, but it's very limited).

The freedom of speech is specifically protection from government censorship. E.G., If you're publishing a newspaper the government can't come by and tell you what to say in it. The newspaper can publish (or not publish) anything they want.

Replace “newspaper” with “Facebook” or “Twitter” in your post and where do you end up? I think GP might have a better understanding of 1st Amendment than you give them credit for.

No. Facebook the company can publish or not publish whatever they want. They can censor you all they want. It has nothing to do with free speech as outlined in the constitution (which again, protects individual people from government censorship).

Somehow I must have typed my thoughts unclearly in my response above, because I agree 100% with everything you say immediately above (19171197). Facebook can censor whatever they want (IMO, private decisions on what to publish are inherently themselves a form of speech) and therefore the government is barred from censoring Facebook's publishing rights on First Amendment grounds.

If you take my suggestion (in 19168078), you end up with: "The freedom of speech is specifically protection from government censorship. E.G., If you're publishing <a site called Facebook> the government can't come by and tell you what to say in it. <Facebook> can publish (or not publish) anything they want." (For clarity, I agree with this 100%.)

The original post to which you replied (with expressed disagreement) said "The thing about strong free speech laws is that it protects facebook and twitter's right to censor." I also agree with that post 100%. It's your interleaved post's (19167743) first sentence in response to that ("You have a poor understanding of free speech.") that I disagreed with, given that that poster appears to hold the same point of view that you do immediately above.

I guess? it's a weird stretch. There's nothing specifically protecting what a business decides to censor other than the fact that the government can't engage in censorship.

But Facebook and Twitter are the ones publishing, not you as the user.

I agree 100%. That's why I suggested that then-GP (now GGGP https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19167303 ) was right/relevant.

Would you also be okay with your cell service provider censoring your calls and texts? After all, it's their platform you're communicating on.

>Free speech does not mean a guaranteed platform for your ideas, unless you are the owner of the platform.

Extorting the platform owner with implications that if they don't do as the government wishes they may compel them isn't exactly "freely given" consent.

The government has the ability to regulate many things, but threatening prior restraint of speech is a pretty bold claim, and perhaps content providers should call that bluff.

I think the government could modify safe harbor laws. Require sites above a certain size to minimize censorship to retain their safe harbor status. Eg allow everything that isn't illegal, is on topic, isn't advertisement, isn't spam and probably some other categories I didn't think of.

One of the big reasons these big companies censor things is because they're afraid of public backlash for being associated with certain types of content. If the government doesn't allow them to censor that content then the public wouldn't take it up with the platform.

>I think the government could modify safe harbor laws. Require sites above a certain size to minimize censorship to retain their safe harbor status. Eg allow everything that isn't illegal, is on topic, isn't advertisement, isn't spam and probably some other categories I didn't think of.

I think maybe it would be good to draw from the physical world. I'm not a lawyer but IIRC some states (eg California) let you leaflet on private property like malls if they're open to the public... I wish I could recall details but applying a similar logic online could be interesting.

But any modifications of safe harbor would worry me greatly.

Where did you come up with the idea that free speech laws give them the right to censor. It doesn't. Ownership and private property rights give them the right to censor.

Ownership and private property makes them liable for what happens on that private property, yet they are somehow exepmted from that liability. So all perks and none of the responsibilities.

That's a funny view. If someone comes to your bar and pushes another person's into a stool and kills them are you liable?

The government will absolutely entertain a lawsuit on those grounds, yes.

Whether liability and damages are assigned would depend on the details, but the principle is quite clear here.

The government often entertains strange pursuits in the name of justice. In the United States, a man was choked to death for selling loose cigarettes. That the state did it in the pursuit of the social contract doesn't make it right; and one should consider carefully the principles under which the state should pursue justice, with a careful eye towards how the state is liable to twist those principles to hurt the least politically empowered.

if your bar is running every tactic possible to keep you there and drinking and ignoring the consequences of it then yes i think they would have to answer for that.

That's a dangerous call to make. An Orlando nightclub once ran every tactic to keep its patrons there, and they fell victim to a predator. If the nightclub weren't working so hard to keep its patrons there, fewer people would have been victimized Are they liable? Why or why not?

They might be liable for not adequately protecting the patrons, for example. My uninformed personal opinion is that they are not liable in this case since they did have a security guard, but that guard is also being sued (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/06/0...).

Otherwise yes, it is quite possible to be liable for whatever happens on your private property. If drug deals are taking place between third parties in your house won’t you be liable? If you allowed those parties there you most definitely will be.

You're still punting the ethical question to a question of law. If someone is on your property and a car off the street swerves into your property and kills them surely you wouldn't be liable... or let's say a meteor hits your guest. Surely there is a limit to where liability kicks in. Where should that limit be and why

If your business is in letting the cars swerve onto your driveway then you will be liable. Don’t compare normal and regular human behavior on a platform to a meteor hitting the guests.

Unless you're Norwegian PM posting Pulitzer-winning photos.

A more robust id solution which is applicable to entities with revenue over X would be a constitutional way to solve the issues discussed in the article

The governments most successful crackdowns regulate the intermediaries

So in graph theory, you look at the node you want to control and then take the complement and restrict the nodes in the complement, while prohibiting the target node from interaction with non-restricted nodes

there is no sanction on non-restricted nodes and no sanction on the behavior of the target node, with voluntary compliance entered into by the restricted nodes

Examples of this approach: Accredited investor regulation (non-accredited citizens not prohibited from investing, businesses risk consequences)

Online gambling prohibition (citizens and online casinos not prohibited, voluntarily licensed financial institutions are prohibited from processing transactions)

I have greater issue with Google Search[1] than I do FB and TWTTR, they should provide a politically unbiased index of the surface web, but unlike DDG, Bing or others, they curate theirs to further their world view outside that required by law.

Twitter and FBs issue is reliance and optimizing for engagement which leads to clicking and surfacing the most outrageous stuff at the expense of the ordinary.

Google search doesn’t have “an gagement problem”. They have black hat SEO problem, which is different, but they go beyond that and tweak some search results for political reasons. Not talking about terrorism or supremacy groups at all, but somewhat controversial social issues, (reproductive) sometimes tame issues (searching for candidates)[1]. The EU has fined them for “re-ranking” SERs and SSE effects.

>These data showed that Google’s search results favored Hillary Clinton (whom I supported) in all 10 positions on the first page of search results — enough, perhaps, to have shifted two or three million votes in her direction over time.<

Given that, 2-3MM vote swing (vs, what the outside estimate was under 50k votes for Russian bot sway), I’d say Google is the real problem in affecting democratic elections.

[1]https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/09/13/google-big...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com