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Comment by function_seven | Hacker News Reader

I consider myself a free speech absolutist. Or very nearly so.

But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything.

In earlier times, that meant that no newspaper or printing press was required to print everything sent their way. Today it's the centralized websites that also don't have this obligation.

If FB decides to ban bigots, or YouTube wants to kick anti-vaxxers off their site, so be it. You can host your own video if you'd like, or maintain a personal blog site.* You are not entitled to widespread distribution. Never have been.

* Which leads to a place where I'll agree on obligations: root infrastructure like DNS or network connectivity. Those are the common carriers of our Internet.

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I'm going to respond to this comment because my response is just kind of in general to the whole conversation this spawned.

In what way is facebook more of a public space than hacker news, reddit or any public forum, message board or website where users can sign up and post content?

You couldn't post a bunch of white nationalist comments here or on most other sites without getting banned.

Why would and should facebook be treated differently than other websites? Having a large amount users and money doesn't suddenly make them a public entity. The fact people use their real names and identities doesn't(they're not the only site that does this). Them tracking you across multiple websites and aggregating and selling your data doesn't either.

What is it about facebook that causes people to have this misconception?

If this were ISP's, DNS providers, even hosting providers really shouldn't be able to(as far as i'm concerned, but that's a different discussion and does happen), but facebook doing this is the same as any other website that allows user discussions and user content setting rules.

There's an internet outside of facebook. People making the choice to reside entirely there doesn't automatically make them any different than other websites.

It's the users that choose to give them this power over things by using their service. Though...i know not entirely not entirely...pre installs on phones and things like the free data facebook messaging in the Philipines puts things outside.individual users control sometimes. But that's on poor government regulation and other phone manufacturers.

And...i'm not a big fan of facebook. I find them shady and greatly distrust them. But, part of that is because I understand they're a shady private corporation with zero obligation to the public. Pretending otherwise is unhelpful.

One thing that I've been thinking about, and I'm curious on your thoughts on, is Facebook's "Internet.org" project.

If you're not familiar, Facebook is offering low-cost (or free) internet access in less developed countries to a hand-picked selection of sites [0] and has roughly 100m users. [1]

It's been argued that they're essentially acting as an ISP and are significantly violating the principles of net neutrality. [2]

You say "people [are] making the choice to reside entirely there", but for millions of people around the world, Facebook is the only social media platform available to them at a reasonable cost.

Should operating this platform be enough to treat them differently? I could see arguments both ways.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/25/internet-org-100-million/

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/27/16050446/facebook-net-neu...

I've never heard of that specific program. The only one like that I really knew about was the free data stuff in the Philipines because of a friend of mine there. I know in that specific instance it comes down to basically non-existent regulation over carriers and ISP's and a lack of any real choice.

If Facebook is becoming a defacto ISP in countries it should be subject to the same regulations and really should be required to follow net neutrality rules. Though I don't think those exist in a lot of developing countries(or I guess America also...).

In the end though, it's those country's governments allowing facebook to do this.

These are my realistic thoughts on the matter.

My own personal thoughts...

That shit's downright evil. Government's should absolutely not be allowing facebook to do this. But I feel the same way about ISP's in general owning content providers and favouring their own services.

This practice would be the same as Ford or gm owning a bunch of gas stations and giving preferential prices to drivers of Ford or gm vehicles. I honestly don't understand why it's looked at differently when it comes to internet companies or technology in general.

If a social media company wants to be an ISP or a an ISP wants to be a content provider or host, they really should not be able to give preferential treatment to their own content and companies that do this should be scrutinized heavily for bullshit.

I think it's because Facebook is both more visible and personal than other platforms. Horrible, racist, violent, and outright evil content has existed on the internet since its inception. The difference is that journalists don't browse 4Chan and I imagine when people see content on anonymous forums they're better able to rationalize it because they can come up with a multitude of excuses for the poster. It's a little more surreal to see "real" people openly and publicly calling for the extermination of non-Aryan people.

I think that's why Facebook has been getting more criticism and attention in the media than Reddit or Twitter, despite wielding comparable social influence. On the flipside, I also think that's why people are more outraged about the "censorship" issue. If you ban a Reddit user you're just banning some username. If you ban someone on Facebook, you're banishing a person and stifling their voice.

The slippery slope arguments are sensationalist. Facebook had many motivations for implementing this policy, some of them undoubtedly motivated by money, but ultimately I would argue they implemented it because American and western society pushed them to. To the extent that western society has unequivocally decided that racism is very bad and not good, this policy change will also not push us over the edge into total censorship because that's not what we want (and I think it would be difficult to take the stance that that's the direction we're heading in.)

I would think it has to do with the invisible/nonexistent/impersonal nature of Facebook moderation.

If there’s no face, if the site is designed so you never feel like a guest on someone else’s website, you'll assume you’re in control of the social rules.

> Why would and should facebook be treated differently than other websites? Having a large amount users and money doesn't suddenly make them a public entity.

Because FB is not targeted at specific communities of people like HN, and less so reddit, it's welcome to everyone. Everyone is in fact actively encouraged to join. That's their mission. Private spaces that are open to the public often have first amendment protections:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=139661

The question here isn't whether Facebook/Twitter/etc. have a right to control what is on their platform, they absolutely do. The question is whether there should be safe harbor provisions that protect them from legal repercussions of what they do choose to allow on their sites.

A case can be made to protect someone who allows all comers, who increases the reach of the public to communicate with each other, and who extends the scope of public discourse to be protected from the legal consequences of what their users say. The same case is a lot harder to apply to an institution that curates the content they choose to publish. By way of comparison, telephone carriers, an industry that exerts no editorial control, are largely not legally liable for what customers say over the phone network. Newspaper publishers, who have absolute editorial control, on the other hand are legally responsible for what they publish.

Which of these are Facebook and Twitter? My answer is that the more they limit speech that is not legally criminal then the more liability they should have for what they allow.

The problem is that, for a paper or a TV network, control scales. You can pump your network TV signal out twice as many antennas, and still control every frame of video.

For the telephone network, control does not scale. There is no way for the phone company to censor what happens in one billion daily phone calls. It can't be done (until we get adequate speech recognition, but that's not an answer that I want to see applied in this way).

Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are like the phone company, not like newspapers and TV. Censorship does not scale.

Twitter, being text, could think about trying to automate censorship. The problem is that people do all kinds of typos, circumlocutions, innuendo, and dog whistles to get around such things. Words are really flexible, so it's a hard problem.

Facebook and YouTube are worse. They can try to have automatic assists, but pretty much the only way it can be done is via user reporting. Even that doesn't scale all that well.

I think the interesting case is the presence of a monopolist (and I take no position here as to whether any particular company is a monopoly or not). Other [classically] liberal principles like freedom of contract have been abrogated in such cases, largely out of the realization that competition and choice are what generally make such private exercises of power acceptable.

Like a newspaper deciding what to publish?

There was a time in history where everyone could start a newspaper. Pre civil war in the US, the modern day price of a printing press was $10k and almost everyone in a town would buy papers and take them on a journey across America. That's how information spread back then.

By WWI, the cost in today's dollars for a newspaper grew to several million. People can't live off small papers today. They live off Patreon and YouTube. They depend on distribution platforms in a way we didn't before.

If Amazon bans your books, it's effective censorship for people who only read eBooks. Sure you can distribute the epub/mobi DRM free, but few people are going to bother with that (or know what to do with the file).

I've written about this before:

https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-...

What? The reason starting a newspaper became so expensive is because of a much larger, national distribution model. You're still free to buy a $10k printer and sell newspapers in your hometown. If it doesn't contain hateful, violent rhetoric, you can even advertise it on Facebook!

If Amazon bans your books, you can still buy the book elsewhere, or get it from the author's site. Just because a piece of information isn't in the medium that you prefer to consume doesn't make it "censorship." It's not on Amazon that "few people are going to bother with that" when they ban you for violating their ToS.

Your example of the Daily Stormer is interesting, because it illustrates two ways in which the Internet as it is set up today allows corporate censorship. The first is the one you describe: hosting companies and domain registrars can refuse to do business with you based on content. The second is one you don't mention: ISPs can (and virtually all of them do) prevent you from hosting content on your own servers at your own IP address. This wasn't the case in the early days of the web: most early websites were hosted on personal machines in people's homes or offices, connected to the Internet with their own personal or small business connections.

A truly libertarian Internet would still have the first issue, because of freedom of contract. But it wouldn't have the second, because having an IP address reachable from anywhere on the Internet and hosting any content you chose would be a basic right. (One could argue that having a DNS routable name for your IP address should be part of that right too, but the absolute requirement is the IP address: anyone can reach you with that even if there is no domain name corresponding to it.)

You can make your own website, though.

But Google and Facebok can ban your website and you would not receive any visitors. And you probably would lose old visitors who don't use bookmarks and type your site's name into an address bar.

I must have missed the part where Google and Facebook are obligated to ensure people can find your site via their services...

All of this seems to be something along the lines of "it's inconvenient, so it's bad, and [they] shouldn't be allowed to make it inconvenient on _their_ platform".

By all means Facebook can decide to be a publisher if they wish. That does mean though that they shouldn't be able to hide behind DMCA safeharbor. If they want to prioritize content they need to accept the responsibility that comes along with it.

A popular argument for Net Neutrality posited that allowing non-government monopolies to exercise free-reign over what they've built will result in free speech being infringed. Here is an article and call-to-action from the EFF:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/attack-net-neutrality-...

While I agree that Net Neutrality is necessary, the argument given in this EFF article seems to contradict itself with regard to FB, Twitter, et al. The article notes that social networking sites have been used by people to coordinate in order to get their viewpoints heard. But then it says:

"What does this have to do with net neutrality? Simple: all of these services depend the existence of open communications protocols that let us innovate without having to ask permission from any company or government."

But anyone who uses FB or Twitter does have to "ask permission" from those companies: the companies own the sites, not the users. And the idea that FB, Twitter, et al are based on "open communications protocols" is obviously wrong.

If the argument is that FB, Twitter, et al should have to use open communications protocols, let anyone use them without asking permission, etc., then that is an argument for ending FB, Twitter, et al as private companies and making them public utilities run by the government. I'm not sure that's a good solution. It seems to me that a much better idea would be to encourage competition in free speech platforms on the Internet, so that people do not have to depend on FB, Twitter, et al to coordinate and get their viewpoints heard.

There's a fundamental difference between an ISP and an edge provider. The service provider is like a system of roads whereas the edge providers are destinations.

As long as the roads are free, it should be fairly easy to buy a plot of land and build your own destination. However, if the road company won't allow you access, it stops being feasible.

Now in this analogy, large edge providers are campuses with internal roads that they control and many entrances and exits. They too can become a problem when they grow large enough.

So therefore, I would think keeping the road system neutral insofar as the connections it allows would be the first priority. Making sure edge providers don't subvert the system either by growing too large or by organizing to control the main system of roads would be of similar but lesser importance.

Moreover, if the main roads aren't neutral, there's no reason to make campus roads neutral.

"Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech." - Noam Chomsky

Thank you. Free speech isn't just an amendment for the government, it's a principle for society.

If Facebook were a television station with limited air time for a single track, it would be perfectly valid for them to decide (reasonably) who gets air time. However, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have infinite tracks and time. I don't think the OPs argument is as strong, with that in mind.

Well now you're violating my free speech by telling me I can't decide what content I host on my website.

There is a huge difference between your website in which you post in your name, and Facebook which was created as a platform to allow billions of people to post in their name.

the difference is that youtube/facebook are not publications themselves, but platforms that allow you to publish. So you already aren't deciding what to host, as a user-content driven site, you by default allow anything, then naturally hopefully for moral reasons but necessarily legal ones, you ban illegal content. Beyond that, it still is a privately hosted thing so I'd still agree that your self run user-content based site may ban whatever it likes. However when you reach a general use size, where people rely on your platform for free speech, things certainly feel different. I'm not sure what the right move is, but I don't think its as simple as "my private site is my private site, thats the end of it"

What about the legal risk associated with letting the Frog Brigade post their terrorist cookbook on your platform? Does Zuckerberg have to come to their house and load the bullets into the gun for them so they can make a statement about how angry they are? Because he made an app for people to cheat? I fail to see the connection.

>What about the legal risk associated with letting the Frog Brigade post their terrorist cookbook on your platform?

Like I said, banning illegal content is the first step that anyone ought to take. Generally this is done via moderation staff of the site + user submitted reports. If you're providing a free platform and terrorists start using it as their communication channel, then you're only at legal risk if you do nothing to stop them. However, I'm imagining things like the NZ shooter's 8chan post, where a direct threat is made or a direct implication of violent acts to come. Posting a "terrorist cookbook" actually is a good example, as its sort of right on the line. It seems to be the sort of information that only has negative uses, on the other hand its just information, as opposed to an actual threat. I'm not really sure if such things should be allowed... it could be helpful to terrorists which is bad, but also censoring information is nearly impossible and almost always seems the wrong way to go.

>Does Zuckerberg have to come to their house and load the bullets into the gun for them so they can make a statement about how angry they are? Because he made an app for people to cheat? I fail to see the connection.

As do I...I really don't get what you're trying to say here, can you restate?

>I'm not sure what the right move is, but I don't think its as simple as "my private site is my private site, thats the end of it"

Well get back to me when you've worked out exactly when a private entity shouldn't be able to decide what content they allow. This ambiguity is really too difficult to figure out.

I don't know, or I'd know what the right move is! For this, its sort of a "you know it when you see it" thing, as facebook/youtube/twitter are major platforms used by everyone, and so they feel a lot more like an online town square than a private space. So they are definitely past the line, and ought to have different rules on what content is allowed/disallowed than smaller lower population platforms.

I can agree with you. It's something I've been thinking about lately and I keep coming back to how you'd define this in legal terms. It's tough.

The problem is, if they are forced to allow "any legal content", they'll be overrun with spammers and other no-goods, and the users who just want to keep up with their family will all leave.

Absolutely not! I'd be interested in knowing how you came to the conclusion that was my argument.

Rather, it is important for society to support free speech, not just the government. While society is under no obligation to, it's unhealthy to censor speech.

It's even worse when society self censors free speech, and then pretends to still advocate it.

I was taking the point to an extreme. You're saying a society should support free speech so Facebook should let the white nationalist content stay on their site (by their own good will, not forced by government). Is that not accurate?

Deciding what I allow on my site is an exercise of my free speech. Why is hosting white nationalist free speech more important than my free speech to not host racist content?

If your website's registered userbase is 1/4 of the population of the entire planet, then yes, that's what we're telling you.

It's no longer _your_ free speech.

What's the exact threshold? Just curious so I can make sure to stifle my business growth so as not to give up my free speech to not host racist content.

It's the publisher vs platform debate. If you're curating content based off of promoting your company's vision of acceptable free speech, then you become a publisher and a whole different set of rules apply to you. You're liable for much more in the eyes of the law.

You can't cherry pick the advantages of both and hide under the guise of being an open platform.

I think the terminology we have here for publisher and platform don't exactly fit this scenario. I think it'd be wise to find a new label and set of rules that better fits this type of company.

If you want to take that tactic it's probably just better to reframe the argument.

Most of the problems that come from being a massive social media juggernaut like facebook/twitter/etc come from those services being free.

Being free is what makes them massive monopolies and gives them such broad reach. I think 99% of the problem cases AND the lack of competition in the market could be plugged by breaking the ad-supported/VC-supported model and forcing these companies to charge something to their customers.

That's property infringement, not violating speech.

How does the amount of bandwidth capable for carrying channels relate to whether something should be carried or not in a legal or constitutional sense?

Carrying white supremacist content has a cost to both Comcast and YouTube/Facebook. Nobody expects Comcast to carry the KKK channel and yet they have hundreds of channels and clearly space to carry it. So why aren’t they compelled to do so if Facebook is?

Comcast is few-to-many model, Facebook is many-to-many.

A few content producers create the content that Comcast could potentially carry. Comcast selects what they want to provide to their many customers. Comcast has never marketed themselves as a place where anyone can have their content provided to subscribers. Facebook has, in fact that is the essence of what they do.

To answer your first question, the constitutional response would be "it doesn't". Legally, I'm unaware of any edge cases, except potentially some net neutrality related things. (I'm not very certain about NN.)

My point, however, is that this is neither a legal nor constitutional obligation, but a social and voluntary obligation to a free society.

Agreed. Just wanted to see if there was some precedent I was missing :)

Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter also have as their primary purpose the propagation of information and messages by and among their users. It's not some incidental or secondary feature. It's what they do. And they promote this to the public with almost zero barrier to entry. Yes they are still private entities, but like a hotel that is open to the public, they become constrained in the restrictions they can impose since they have chosen to be in that business.

Free speech isn't just an amendment for the government, it's a principle for society.

Please point out a single society that has upheld absolute Free Speech as a principle for any significant period of time.

The United States has even killed its own citizens when their free speech collided with national security: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/magazine/the-lessons-of-a...

Yelling fire in a crowded theater and calling for the killing of americans are not protected by the first amendment and never have been. They are calls to violence. So no, his free speech didn't collide with national security, his call to violence collided with the full weight of America's call to violence against him.

"Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is a quote from a Supreme Court decision that put American citizens in prison for the crime of protesting against the draft during WW1.

That decision has since been overturned, thankfully. But it would be good if people who keep coming back to this phrase remembered where it came from, and what it was already used to justify.

What is the alternative to a private company making their own decisions on what to allow on their platform? A blanket order to not ban any content whatsoever?

Facebook and YouTube are private corporations and have no obligation to platform any idea. They have the freedom to remove any content on their platforms they like, and your freedom of speech doesn't trump theirs. Of course, you can continue saying whatever it is you like -- you just have to find a platform for it yourself.

Essentially. A person's freedom of speech doesn't imply curtailment of another person's freedom of the press.

There's a difference between supporting someone's right to speech and handing them a microphone and gathering up an audience for them.

There is some room for human judgment and give and take here, at this time there is absolutely no shortage of platforms that allow anyone to broadcast any awful thing they can dream up. Email, web sites, street corners, I believe there can be different standards for different places.

There's no shortage of street corners to protest on. Why are you mad that we pepper spray you when you try to protest in front of the bankers' offices?

Good old Chomsky. I really like his views on this topic. However the question leads down a rabbithole.

Absolute freedom is a contradictory concept. How can you kick an unwanted visitor out of your house because you don't like what he's saying? Aren't you infringing on his rights? Someone needs to draw a line.

So what about a social media oligopoly? How dominant does Google need to be before you have to tell them to allow freedom of speech.

What about network neutrality?

Etc etc...

It's not so easy to answer this question.

It's a centuries old debate initially had out by Hobbes and Rousseau.

Hobbes' famous phrase from Leviathan "bellum omnium contra omnus" (the war of all against all) describes absolute freedom as being problematic indeed. Rosseau provides an answer in The Social Contract to say you can't have a war of all against all, you instead need the state to be responsible for being able to imprison people and collect taxes on them and this alleviates (generally speaking, to a large degree) the problems absolute freedom present.

> How can you kick an unwanted visitor out of your house because you don't like what he's saying?

This is unrelated. If it is your home, you are free to protect it by any means.

He's not talking about absolute freedom in general, though. Only about absolute freedom of speech.

And there's no paradox of tolerance with speech - you can tolerate intolerant speech just fine, so long as you police the actions.

This.

A big problem is oligarchic in nature: if you believe that ISPs should be classified as common carrier utilities that should not be permitted to limit or censor the data you receive within reason, then the oligarchic content hubs should similarly be common carriers of speech.

I don't have a rock solid argument on this, this is just an equivalence I'm asserting.

ISPs are utilities because you only have one option for ISP (running a wire to your house). Content hubs take less than a second to switch, there is no lock in.

The lack of ability to switch providers is what makes it important to have regulations, not just the fact that it is labeled a common carrier.

There is a public lock in. You can switch to another content hub like you can move to a new town for a different ISP. I think that's at the heart of disagreement here: do these content hubs count as public spaces for unregulated communication, or as private spaces, regulated at the will of the owner of the space? For many, due to the population present, other content hubs are not the same thing as facebook/youtube/twitter.

What lock in? There is no friction in typing in a different website's address. Just because other people use Facebook doesn't mean you're locked into that. People watch different TV shows, different movies, read different books, this is no different.

No one is stopping you from making your own forum or website.

The utility of the forum comes from other people. Social graph is absolutely a means of lock-in, and it's long overdue for us to recognize that.

> What lock in? There is no friction in typing in a different website's address.

The fact that all your photos, content and friends are on one platform and not the others, obviously.

That you chose to put there, on someone else’s computer. Other than you and your friends’ and family’s willingness to do work, there is no lock in, and I don’t believe that’s a useful way to define lock in.

So the fact that in the 90s you put your sentences into Microsoft's proprietary .doc format, or that you decided to run your business on Microsoft Windows computers is not lock-in either? What definition of lock-in would you propose that would include the above which is widely regarded as lock-in, but exclude FB as lock-in?

... and yet, child pornography possession and distribution is illegal. Do we think Chomsky would find this unacceptable?

Chomsky’s position is that the burden of proof is on state violence to justify itself, and I think he would agree it’s clearly justified in that case.

However, that’s a very narrowly scoped restriction (and it’s also not clear that such distribution is a type of “speech”). A more appropriate question would be: would Chomsky support free speech for an advocacy group such as NAMBLA, or for creating mangas that depict drawings similar to CP? Those are exactly the type of speech/expression that are clearly vile, yet should still be protected from interference by state violence, from the civil-libertarian perspective.

I suspect that Chomsky would consider child porn - or at least the part of it that is illegal - not speech in this sense.

Speech is the process of communication ideas. Porn is the process of sexually arousing someone remotely. Criminalizing the latter is not criminalizing the former.

You do end up criminalizing numbers though.

There has to be a point where "criminalizing a number" doesn't really work.

A HD-DVD master key is one thing, a huge binary file is another. HD-DVD master key requires specific "numberness" to work, while a binary file can still convey similar information yet be a completely different set of numbers. if I take two pictures in rapid succession of a still life, the two pictures' jpeg data and checksum hashes aren't going to be even close to matching.

That's all fine and good until somebody burns a cross on your lawn. Pretty sure you're not going to be happy with their free speech rights at that point.

Free speech absolutism is naturally at odds with property rights absolutism. The question then becomes under which circumstances should one be given precedence over the other.

>No company or platform owes them anything.

This is discrimination of opinion, strange as that sounds.

There is a reason we don't see signs up like; 'No Blacks', 'No Gays', 'No Jews' in private establishments. Its because its not allowed, we either have a list of protected groups - or a general rule that forbids banning anyone because of their 'group'.

If we don't fairly quickly extend free speech into these platforms, then we will have to eventually legislate a list of protected opinions.

> There is a reason we don't see signs up like; 'No Blacks', 'No Gays', 'No Jews' in private establishments.

Could you imagine the immediate public backlash against this type of behavior by a private establishment? I don't think the law is doing the heavy lifting here.

There's plenty of places where there would be zero public backlash for those types of signs, if they were permitted by law.

May I suggest reviewing the history of the civil rights movement? That sort of discrimination used to be normal in large parts of the US and was overcome through a combination of civil disobedience and legal challenges.

The supreme court heard a court case in 2014 in which a business refused to serve people because they were gay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...

A large number of people are still alive back from when Jim Crow laws were still actively in effect. In 1957 the president had to send the 101st airborne to Arkansas to escort black children to school and seized control of the state's national guard because they were being used to block desegregation of schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine

A non-trivial percentage of Americans would love to have these signs up and are kept from doing so by the law. The women's movement, LGBT rights, and minority rights are actually a fairly new thing, and are still not without controversy in the US.

The cakeshop very much did not "refuse to serve gays", and really there is absolutely no self-consistent way one could agree with FB deciding that certain content is "racist" and banning it while insisting that Masterpiece Cakeshop is in any way obligated to make wedding cakes for someone whose wedding plans they do not agree with.

I'm not speaking about Facebook at all, never mentioned Facebook anywhere in my comment or in this thread, and have not made any statements about the validity of speech restriction in any context so I'm not sure why you're mentioning that. I'm speaking to a general issue brought up by the parent.

As for your comment, the cake shop has a product they are letting people buy (in effect, serving them). They are willing to produce that product for a certain group of people for a certain activity (celebration of a state recognized marriage) based on their identity. They are not willing to produce that product for another group of people for the same activity (celebration of a state recognized marriage) based on that second group's identity. Now you can argue that the shop is within their rights to do that for religious reasons and the Supreme Court would agree with you, but it's still refusing service based on identity and you know it. If you want to split hairs and say they "refused to provide COMPARABLE service because they were gay" as the buyers may have been able to buy other products then so be it.

This is a thread about Facebook, isn't it? And the parent,m or GP by now, very much alludes to it, or platforms in general.

In the bakeshop case though, I do not think it has ever been alleged, that they ever refused to serve anyone cakes just for being gay. I think the whole case hinged on the question whether making a wedding cake is significantly more than just selling a cake off the shelf to anyone who comes in (I am really not sure if, as a matter of principle, private entities in a free society should be compelled to do business with anyone they do not want to, be that marrying gays or cynical coders who go by "Fins" though). So no,I don't think saying that they "refuse to serve gays" is a proper characterization.

Lots of country clubs are still white exclusive. Private christian schools still exclude gay teachers.

Saw a plumber's vehicle driving around recently with a blatant anti-Chinese sticker on it.

> Its because its not allowed, we either have a list of protected groups - or a general rule that forbids banning anyone because of their 'group'.

It's the former. There is no law, at least in the US, that forbids banning people from private property for group membership in general.

It's the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it has its limits just like everything else. Namely employment and "places of public accommodation". If you read the SCOTUS opinion on Masterpiece Cake Shop you will see "public accommodation" mentioned a LOT.

So, I'm certain you will find legally hung signs with racist and discriminatory content in certain places.

> If we don't fairly quickly extend free speech into these platforms

That's outside the scope of the First Amendment. It may not even be possible to pass such a law without infringing on those platforms First Amendment rights... I would expect the SCOTUS to strike any such law down.

Based on the evolution of the web, indeed, it looks like new businesses will be made out of this.

With this banned group, I am concerned about what social scientists call the 'backfire effect', where beliefs turn even stronger and bolder. For instance, this happens with groups of people who hold conspiracy theories; when society rejects them, the conspiracy theorists double-down on their beliefs.

Good luck to them

I think you're right. Every time you censor something you create market pressures for a way to host content that's more difficult to be taken down or traced back to a source.

It's why I think censorship is self defeating, it will eventually lead to a populace being competent enough with certain tools to side step the censor, and you can't walk that back.

The key thing you're missing is recruitment. White supremacists need access to the larger platforms in order to recruit new adherents to their bigoted ideology, which is significantly harder to do if they're forced into "underground" spaces. De-platforming works -- if we make it clear that hateful ideology isn't tolerated in large platforms, then people have to actively seek out such ideologies. If such ideologies are already frowned upon in the public sphere, it makes their recruitment much more difficult.

Totally agree, recruitment will be much more difficult. It's what happens to many conspiracy theorists over time. Their recruitment takes the hit in society.

They existed long before the internet and will exist even if they’re banned from it. When it comes to racism, a lot is spread through family and friends. Get to know certain people long enough and they’ll do the old ‘look both ways and say “they don’t want you to know this, but the truth about (x group of people) is...”’ routine.

Ban what these clowns say on the internet and it might end up giving them more power, since it lends to the “they don’t want you to know” aspect.

All true, but it's a fact that they recruit through the internet and have had a digital organizing strategy since the 1980s. The armored car robberies mentioned herein were used to finance a nationwide chain of bulletin boards known as Aryan Nations Liberty Net.

Recruitment matters because groups that don't recruit successfully eventually lose momentum, are penetrated by spies, or dissolve into infighting over everything from leadership status to money to women. In fact, the biggest mortality risk for RW extremists seems to come from their own peer group, though I don't have stats for this offhand.

Certainly those attitudes and ideologies will continue to exist in the face of deplatforming, but raising the costs of recruitment, retention, and operation seems to be an effective strategy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Order_(white_supremacist_g...

https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/assets/pdf...

The purveyors of such ideologies simply do a wink-wink-nudge-nudge dance.

Look at Germany and its Streitbare Demokratie policies. Then look at how AfD polls.

Right – but then consider what its popularity might be today if AfD-aligned content had been banned by Facebook and other platforms from the start. Parties like the NPD have been around for ages, but unlike the AfD they were kept out of the Overton window and never managed to grow to significant numbers.

And how exactly would you define it to ban it? Germany already has some of the most extensive hate speech / anti-extremism laws in Europe. I mean, it's not just censorship, but e.g. outright bans on parties expressing certain views in their platform, or even just insufficiently democratic internally, and with various specialized institutions that enforce all that proactively. And all that wasn't enough to prevent AfD from operating legally.

Facebook can just ban them by name without any explanation, of course. Are you suggesting that it's a good thing - that, because we seemingly can't write fair laws on this, we should delegate both the laws and their enforcement to private industry, where it can be done without any checks and balances?

I tend to agree.

I think the main argument against that can be made is that the Internet is now so complex that the forbidden speech can easily be silenced entirely, if you start your own blog independent of FB. Especially with DDoS attacks, it can become prohibitively expensive to stop those and the core/root internet infrastructure simply doesn’t stop it. It’s basically a paid add-on and if you want to do it yourself you will need both funding and/or technical expertise.

Either way, I’m still in support of Facebook and others removing this type of speech as I think it’s a net negative to society to amplify it in this day of discovery algorithms.

Seems like we also need to do more to improve the core infrastructure so that you don’t need 5Tbps of bandwidth to keep your blog online.

"But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything."

Thank you - that is very succinctly put and is a reasonable and actionable standard that I hope more people will subscribe to.

That being said, I can't imagine how difficult and frustrating it will be for facebook (and others) to police any kind of definition for "white nationalism" which seems very vague and open to all manner of misinterpretation.

The paradox of tolerance is that we must always be intolerant of the intolerant.

You are always FOR free speech until the speech starts hurting you. ie would you be tolerant of isis posting on FB?

Yes, so long as they aren't breaking the incitement to violence clause.

This alleged "paradox" is just a convenient sledgehammer with which those in power can hit the powerless over the head to keep them quiet.

No, it’s a solution to the problem that if you are tolerant of everything someone will eventually whack you with a sledgehammer. To avoid that you don’t tolerate those who are violently intolerant, which in the US takes the form of the “Imminent lawless action” doctrine.

That, actually, has nothing to do with that BS "paradox" and well predates it. Indeed, you can't do illegal things, and inflicting violence on others is generally illegal. What the "paradox" is used for is to silence those with inconvenient opinions -- if you've followed discussions of the Damore affair, "paradox" has been trotted out as justification for "punching him in the face" multiple times. But on the other hand, to use the simplest example, US is quite tolerant of speech (in the 1st amendment sense) and hasn't turned into communist or other dictatorship. USSR, or China, or Nazi Germany on the other hand did not tolerate any "intolerance" -- that did not turn out too well.

Indeed, you can't do illegal things, and inflicting violence on others is generally illegal.

If someone is consistently threatening violence at some point you need to make the determination about how to deal with that. You can of course do nothing about it but if the person eventually goes ahead and commits violence you now have a bunch of injured or dead people, which seems a worse ill to me than deplatforming.

You think deplatforming is going to stop him from killing people? It might make it more likely - he may convince himself that the deplatforming is part of the great conspiracy against normal people, and he has to strike a blow against it. (On the other hand, it makes it harder for him to convince others to join him.)

Don't deplatform him. Investigate him. Get a warrant and find out who's listening to him. Find out what's going on in their private communications - are they making actual plans, or are they just talking?

Deplatforming is about the laziest and least useful possible response. As Fins said, deal with the violence (including plans to commit it).

Deplatforming and investigation aren't mutually exclusive, not sure why you'd think so.

If someone is threatening to commit violence, there are already perfectly effective legal ways of dealing with it. If anything, if you do deplatform them , noticing that speech becomes significantly harder, while they become more radicalized (and if Zuckerberg did not exist, anti-semites would have had to invent him; but he does exist).

To go back to the original article, though, it is interesting that they are banning white nationalist content. Does it mean that any other nationalist content is just fine. And can I start an Even[0] separatist movement on FB, calling for eradication of the whitey? We'll start with Russians, of course, but after them we're coming for you! /s

If I didn't have better things to do, a conspiracy theory of FB (they did elect Trump, as everybody clearly knows) being in cahoots with Stormfront and specifically calling out whites to stir resentment almost writes itself here.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evens

Are you advocating for Facebook being legally barred from banning any content on their platform that isn't explicitly illegal? That's the only alternative I can think of.

Actually, I am for Facebook having the right to ban anything and anyone from their platform. But that does not mean that doing so would necessarily be a good, or right, or moral thing to do.

You only need to be intolerant of people whacking others with sledgehammers to avoid that issue. There's no problem with tolerating speech in your example. In general, the problem with anybody who is "violently intolerant" is the "violently" part. So when speech is a direct call to commission of a crime, or a conversation in conspiracy to commit a crime, we do not treat it as protected - but it's not because of violence of the speech itself.

The problem is, by being intolerant (even of the intolerant), you're intolerant. So if the "paradox of tolerance" is accurate, then we must not tolerate you.

"But", you say, "they were intolerant first, so they are the ones who should not be tolerated!" From your perspective, sure. Maybe not from theirs, though. That gets you to a cycle of each side being sure that the other is intolerant, and therefore that their own intolerance is justified. Maybe this "paradox of tolerance" isn't the right way forward, even in the face of intolerance by others. You should be better than them, not imitate them.

Worse, if each side can think that the other side started it, well, what if the other side is right? What if you actually are the problem? Using the "paradox of tolerance" as your justification is a handy way to justify your own intolerance, and never have to examine yourself.

Neo-nazis and their ilk tend to be pretty explicit about wanting to kill specific groups of people as part of their ideology, something which your hypothesis seems to overlook.

I think your attitude is still extremely mild. It doesn't matter if we believe ourselves to be neutral, there are groups that consider themselves our opponents, and will work against everything we stand for. And, unless we decide to fight back or at least stop helping them to promote their agenda (which is often incompatible with values widely shared among secular / educated communities), they will prevail in some manner. See also: 2016 U.S. election.

> to promote their agenda > ... > they will prevail in some manner.

As it takes two to tango, so does it take two sides to promote something: one that is doing the promotion and the other that is following the promoter. If the argument is that people are so fickle they will eat up whatever is being directed at them, join the ranks of the promoters, who will thus prevail, then woe upon us. I prefer to think of ourselves as somewhat more capable of resisting insane and malicious messages.

I see what you mean, but it does seem different because FB or YouTube are not publications, but public forums, public communication spaces to publish as a person. Things published on youtube are not on behalf of youtube. Basically FB and Youtube and things like it form space where content fills in.

> Things published on youtube are not on behalf of youtube

Tell that to people using YouTube. YouTube will end up being inextricably tied to whatever content is uploaded using their platform as long as they are the ones who manage its display and recommendations.

I think a better retort would be "tell that to 4chan".

I agree with the spirit of this totally, if I run a coffee shop I sure as heck would kick out white nationalists and would support other coffee shops having that ability.

There’s a weird side to this though that if you want to host a video let’s say YouTube is the place for it. Or if you want to organize a group Facebook is THE place for it. Well what if your group is about shutting down Facebook? Facebook could close it. Heck FB took down Elizabeth Warren’s post critiquing FB.

I think these mega corps need to be broken up so they don’t get so much power in deciding what is and isn’t allowed on the internet. Sure they make good choices like this one but they also make tons of other choices that are only because it benefits them.

I like your comment, I only disagree with the word "spirit". I believe this policy is a slippery slope. No one likes these groups but alienating them, creates a precedent/a policy that legitimizes removal of the one element of our existence that allows for our individuality(spirit). Silence of that which we loathe is failure to embrace our own capacity for loathsome behavior. We all like and dislike different elements in our life. I am a married man; is this not discriminatory to the rest of society. When a corporate entity profits this much off the indoctrination of public, they should be obligated to enforce the tenants of said republic.

“It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.”

― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn,

  In earlier times, that meant that no newspaper
  or printing press was required to print 
  everything sent their way. Today it's the 
  centralized websites that also don't have 
  this obligation.

  ...

  You are not entitled to widespread 
  distribution. Never have been.

This sort of pointing-to-the-past-to-pave-the-future is disturbing to say the least. We don't apply the received wisdom of the past blindly to issues of the present much less the future.

All else being equal, the history of what was allowed to say (and what was not) in newspapers, radio or television is rife with examples of heavy handed editorializing, gate-keeper-ship, outright bias and favor and misguided attempts to selectively allow what truths are judged to be fit to be heard by the masses.

Those were the dark ages for the dissemination of information.

Do we really want to go back to those ages or even a shade resembling what was considered acceptable practices back then?

Heck, most of that stuff happens unimpeded in large parts of the world today, as I write this.

Do we want tell those countries and regions that its okay to sieve and favor what's allowed and what isn't in their public discourse, if a substantial majority of their populace finds it morally repugnant?

Won't those places and people, then apply their own standards of morality in that judgment, which could be diametrically opposite to ours?

Is this the example we want to set for the world to follow?

So what are you advocating? That we force private entities to publish speech, and allow no recourse to enforce social norms through private action, only through government? That seems far more dystopian than the past that you are speaking out against so strongly.

How about we force private entities in a dominant market position in any kind of information-distribution market to be common carriers?

Counterpoint - if every media, platform or provider blocks the content, and the only audience you're allowed to speak freely to, is to yourself - is it still "free speech"?

I'm not saying we're there yet, but we could be at some point.

You literally have the right to go stand on an actual soapbox outside your government offices and yell at people. That's what's constitutionally protected.

No one has to pay attention though.

There's many arguments that can be had either way but the one that always resonate for me is this:

Once you ban speech on any ground that isnt directly putting people in danger, even real nazis for example, they DO NOT disappear. They still recruit. They still operate. You just don't see it.

The people they recruit are suddenly in a bubble where they DO NOT see the opposite view point. Their opinions become unbalanced and they become radicalized. You now have more hard-core nazis.

In this case, I believe FB does this for 3 reasons:

1. many people inside FB believe in censorship and that you can forbid people to speak or think and that it makes the problem disappear. Many people in tech actually believe this.

2. FB sees this as good marketing, and good to retain eyeballs on their platform, specially vs the "we reached out and FB refused to ban nazis, FB is siding with nazis"

3. FB wants to control speech so that they can ask money when you want to be heard. Effectively, this means "media company X pays X so that their message appears more often". The more you control speech on the platform the more you can push for sources of content that will actually pay you money.

Of course, these are just my opinions, and stuff.

> 1. many people inside FB believe in censorship and that you can forbid people to speak or think and that it makes the problem disappear. Many people in tech actually believe this.

That sounds like you're making many assumptions and implications that aren't borne out by evidence. Why do you leap to this conclusion rather than:

"Many people inside FB believe that they don't want the platform they've built and created to be a platform for views they feel abhorrent, and if this means that those views need to feel an alternate home, that's not their problem"?

I am no longer a free speech absolutist. And the reason I am not is the sort of abstract, angels-on-a-pinhead bullshit arguments that fill the responses to the parent post. The more it can be abstracted to "free speech", the less oxygen there is for discussion of the real harm caused by white supremacist thought and white supremacist actions.

I put the safety of society at large first. And if you think that's oppressing you, maybe you should ask yourself why.

Who do you propose gets to decide what speech is dangerous?

That's a disingenuous question. Let me come back with some questions about your question.

Are you proposing that nobody can decide what speech is dangerous?

Are you suggesting there is no such thing as dangerous speech?

Are you suggesting that having someone decide what speech is dangerous is actually worse than the dangerous speech itself?

If you're not suggesting any of these things, then how do you get out of the proposition that someone has decide?

It's not disingenuous - it's the most fundamental question that needs to be answered if you propose speech be controlled.

> how do you get out of the proposition that someone has to decide

I agree ultimately some subset of people would need to decide. My question is who?

You clearly have done answer in mind since you've already conceded the core argument. Who do you think? I'm good with the discourse between the public and Facebook leadership in so far as it targets widespread social norms and ignores the few loudmouths.

I guess I am remembering it wrong but I thought sticks and stones were dangerous but words could never hurt me. (Calls to action dont hurt me either, but I can see how one could categorize them as dangerousness due to the resultant action)

Words inspire action. That's why it matters. To paraphrase the Supreme Court, the problem with shouting fire in a crowded theater isn't the shout, it's the dangerous stampede that follows.

And those who deliberately inspire violent behavior with their speech are very, very careful to make sure it's not an explicit call to action. This is not new. "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" has been around for a long time.

> Are you suggesting there is no such thing as dangerous speech? Are you suggesting that having someone decide what speech is dangerous is actually worse than the dangerous speech itself?

How is that working out in the People's Republic of China? They have a very concrete definition of what dangerous speech and have legions of people to decide whether individual instances are dangerous and to remove them.

Clearly, their system illustrates the hazard of your viewpoint.

Ah, but does it? China is currently going through a period of peace and incredible growth (per capita income has grown about 130x since 1960, in constant dollars). The people are safe, secure, and enjoying opportunities their grandparents couldn't even imagine.

And I suspect that if you polled in China, you'd find a majority agree with the regulations on speech, and sincerely so (not saying yes out of fear). Meanwhile, things are much freer than they were. I'm currently reading a Chinese novel, The Three Body Problem, set partly in the Cultural Revolution, and it pulls no punches about how awful it was.

> And I suspect that if you polled in China, you'd find a majority agree with the regulations on speech

Of course you would, polls like all speech are tightly controlled.

Even here, on an American-centric discussion full of grossly privileged white American men, you'll find most agree on some regulation of speech. It's just a question of degree.

We do, collectively, as a society.

Sometimes we'll get it wrong, and need to correct it. That's fine. We're capable of that.

What's not fine is throwing up our hands at even the concept of performing that judgment, because it's subjective or whatever. That cedes the public square to extremists, which results in a shittier society.

And observational data suggests that American society (and global society) has gotten better, not worse, at this judgment.

When we started this game, we had slaves, who were defined as three fifths of a human being for purposes of political representation of slave owners. Voting was restricted to white land-owning men. It's getting better.

So, popular vote? Let our representatives decide? Something else?

All of the above, and more. Organizations like Facebook can decide to deplatform white nationalists, and we can vote with our clicks or whatever in response to that. You and I can get on message boards and advocate for what we think is just. Over time we all shape our society in our image.

Our representatives. Our judicial system. Our public institutions. Our private businesses.

You're WAY too hung up on this "who decides?" question, ignoring the reality that either someone has to decide, or that no one should decide and society should simply not regulate speech in any way, ever.

Good luck with the latter if you ever have kids.

Ah, but the devil is in the details.

And you're still dodging the fundamental questions I asked you a while back. You're just playing devil's advocate in the details. It's a lame and boring argument.

If we do get there, I hope we can ban the most dangerous speech of all - religion.

We as a society decided homosexual advocacy was dangerous speech just decades ago. We were so enlightened then, right?

'Let's do gay sex' vs 'let's kill people in group X' seems like one of those apples and oranges comparisons people are always talking about.

This comment goes against HN guidelines.

"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Consider this a warning, as we eventually ban accounts of repeat offenders.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

No, we got that one wrong. But, now we're on the path to correcting it. This is good and just and how things should work.

What's wrong and what's right? Who defines it? When? And why?

Because the safety of society at large, especially if we look at the perception of it rather than the real goals, can translate directly into oppression of those who are perceived to be a threat. The whole "build the wall" thing is pitched as being about safety of society, for example. There are people in this country - including prominent elected politicians representing party that dominates state legislatures, and that has broad popular support in most those states - who sincerely believe that BLM and CAIR are terrorist organizations. There's that whole "BDS is anti-Semitism" thing, and some countries already have laws on the books that make it a felony to participate.

Would you say that the political and judicial system of our societies is fair, or is it biased against minorities? If it's biased, why do you expect it to enforce any such "safety of society" laws in a way that is not similarly biased towards the groups that already are the beneficiaries of that society?

You're right. The correct solution is for everyone to stop using the services providing by companies when they begin the downwards censorship slide. Unfortunately most people value using facebook in the >$1000/year range.

Similarly, Fox News isn't required to carry content they don't want to, and their political reach is enormous.

And CNN, MSNBC, Vox, HuffPost, Slate, The Guardian etc. are not required to carry content that doesn't align with their political agenda. I'm not sure I understand your point?

With media outlets there are plenty of alternatives. There are no direct alternatives to Facebook that provide the same services at that scale and reach.

Why do scale and reach matter?

I agree. I've always been in the camp favoring freedom of speech and the marketplace of ideas. My thinking became more nuanced when I read the book Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufekci [0].

Changes in technology alter the playing field for culture—and we've seen this in practice as the Internet and social networking have caused a fundamental shift in what it means to censor information. Censorship used to mean putting the newspaper under state control or blockading the radio station to prevent the message getting out.

Today it's much harder to censor a message by completely suppressing it. But it's also much easier to swamp the signal in noise, by flooding the communication channel with disinformation and distractions [1]. A group doesn't need to be large or powerful to muddle the truth of an issue, especially after accounting for the effects of filter bubbles and confirmation bias.

So to preserve the marketplace of ideas, we need more nuanced approaches in thinking about what communication is permitted. One approach that has been gaining support is in making a distinction between "freedom of speech" and "freedom and reach" [2].

[0] https://www.twitterandteargas.org/

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-tech-turmoil-n...

[2] https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-is-not-the-same-as-f... .

The town library is not required to carry every book. Librarians make curation decisions; that is what we pay them for. It is still a tragedy when small groups of activist Puritanical community members get enough political leverage to remove the books they don’t like. The reason it’s a tragedy is not unrelated to “free speech.”

One might argue that the wide reach of platforms like youtube or FB or twitter makes them almost like root infrastructure.

"If FB decides to ban bigots, or YouTube wants to kick anti-vaxxers off their site, so be it"

Would you take a similar stance if Facebook banned LGBT content or YouTube kicked atheist videos off their site? I am not saying you wouldn't, but both your examples seem to be a bit one sided.

"also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience"

On social media, don't you need to find your own audience?

"... like DNS or network connectivity."

If I recall corrrectly, early in the history of the commercialisation of domain names (1990's), for a time the sole appointed registrar Network Solutions would not accept domain name registrations that contained certain "offensive" words.

> You can host your own video if you'd like, or maintain a personal blog site.

Making that argument would require Facebook to admit there's an internet beyond their walled garden. So far they seem happier to be grilled on national TV in front of congress than make that admission.

> * Which leads to a place where I'll agree on obligations: root infrastructure like DNS or network connectivity. Those are the common carriers of our Internet.

And payment processors, and credit card companies, and mobile carriers, and instant messaging providers.

I’d agree with all of those except instant messaging providers. The others involve massive capital investments to replace them at all; a small IM server can be run on a $5 VPS.

Do you think that a website like the daily stormer should be forced off the web? And should payment processors be required to allow them an account? (for server donations, etc).

> No company or platform owes them anything.

Precisely. I worked on a college newspaper. It was common , had been going on for years and years in face, that a specific hate group would send an order for advertisements, and threaten to sue if we didn't print them. They were usually Holocaust denial ads w/ anti-semitic conspiracy theories. We never printed them, but some schools inevitably did, failing to understand this aspect of free speech. Everyone gets to speak. But if you want a microphone, you have to buy or build it yourself.

Bad example. The college newspaper acts as an editor and has to review what content to publish before it's being published. The college will be held responsible if there's misinformation or something of criminal nature being shared.

FB pretends to be a medium of information for anyone and they don't moderate what is being published before being published. They do however have an obligation for content being distributed after if it's breaking the ToS or the laws. They have to take that down after the fact.

Here the controversy as I see it, is to prevent a group from publishing if it's been labeled as "hate", or "white supremacist" content, where the labeling aspect is very subjective and arbitrary.

Who's to decide the labeling?

> The college will be held responsible if there's misinformation or something of criminal nature being shared.

This is precisely the dynamic that is driving facebook. I don't think the comparison to a newspaper is perfect, but I do think it's apt. In both cases, neither venue is obligated to give anyone their own soapbox to stand on. That was my point.

The problem with FB is they want all the benefits of a platform without any of the drawbacks.

Or rather, it's the public perception of what FB should be and FB is stuck in the middle juggling with politics.

Obviously if you're a shareholder then you want to play it cool with the medias and portray a good image of the company.

I just think it's bad policy.

What if one company builds a loudspeaker that basically drowns out everybody else, just by virtue of scale alone?

I think based on the outcome of this action, it has the potential to do real harm to the internet.

If the current executive branch decides to get tough, they could withhold section 230 exemptions from the private companies.

The net effect would be to destroy the companies platform as no company in their right mind would operate with that potential liability.

>But that runs both ways. Not only do I think that almost all (to borrow a mathematical term) speech should be permitted, but also that the onus is on the speaker to make themselves heard or to find an audience. No company or platform owes them anything...

This!

A thousand times THIS!

People seem to think that free speech absolutists were saying that Facebook should be forced to host extremist content. For my part, I wasn't saying anything of the sort. Facebook has rights too, and as a free speech absolutist, I will jealously defend Facebook's rights as vigorously as I defend the rights of the Nazi/Confederate/whatever you want to call them.

(I think I agree with you on the "almost all" part though, because I do think pedophilia should be stamped out wherever we find it. But that's just MY line in the sand. Others may draw the line somewhere else.)

Facebook and others are not responsible for what their users upload and enjoy the legal protection that comes from it.

If they decide that they are going to be curators of content on their platforms, they are no longer a mere service provider, but a publisher. They might find those protections vanish, which would more or less destroy their platform.

You're misunderstanding (or deliberately misrepresenting) what free-speech absolutists are saying. Nobody is saying that Facebook should be "forced" to host any particular content, any more than anybody is saying that homedepot.com should be forced to host any particular content. What we are saying is that Facebook is no longer a platform for free and open exchange of idea and is engaging in censorship - and it's open season to point out that everything that they _don't_ censor (e.g. calls for violence against politically unprotected groups) is something that they explicitly condone.

==What we are saying is that Facebook is no longer a platform for free and open exchange of idea and is engaging in censorship==

When was this ever not the case? Violent imagery and sexual nudity are already not allowed.

>What we are saying is that Facebook is no longer a platform for free and open exchange of idea...

???

It never was.

I couldn't watch porn movies on Facebook.

Yet you probably can find a public FB page for some porn distributor publishing updates about their new movies and stars.

Point is, even if you find the content questionable, it's still allowed to be shared, as long as it's within the laws obviously.

s/explicitly/implicitly ?

I mean this was the approach they were taking to White supremacist material until now, which was why people were giving them a hard time.

Would you be similarly comfortable with ISPs or cell service providers censoring views they disagree with?

Why do they have the right to use power to suppress viewpoint opponents with 100% flexibility in claiming an individual has wronged a group with no evidence, no clear definition of what the terms are, and no recourse?

It seems like terms like this and hate speech often boil down to “people that are effective at calling out my bullshit”.

It is unethical to with no evidence call republicans or classical liberals Nazis, and then use that as a justification to abuse your power to shut them up. Why not make an argument instead?

On this topic I really recommend Frankfurts [1] terse one hour read arguing that there are three types of statements; attempt at truth, attempt at lies, and attempt to just bullshit people with no regard to relate it to truth. This kind of attempt fall in the third category.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122...

It is quite telling how this is getting downvoted with no argument. Always judge people on their actions, and especially how their actions impose upon others.

Edit: and then this is also downvoted with no argument. A better demonstration of why this facebook policy is a terrible idea could have not happened.

It's not a novel argument, it begs the question from the outset (boil down to “people that are effective at calling out my bullshit”), and ignores objective evidence about the content and aims of the speech in question.

Bullshitting is what many talking heads do on TV, YouTube and tumbler to generate content required for their job. Basically, truth seeking has not done its job on it so the person doesn’t know if it’s true or not.

People are right now most often in a biased content bubble and judging content from what they learn by emotionally mistaking what they learn from possibly bullshit content as objective might lead to injustice.

Most of us agree that people might say bad things and that it would be great if they didn’t, but my claims was that facebooks judgement of the content is unlikely to be objective because:

1) no clear definition of terms like white nationalism and hate speech is a recipe for bias. What liberal or republican haven’t been called a alt-right/Nazi at this point?

2) because of #1 there is a risk that a company that has a clear ideological tilt will most likely end up suppressing viewpoint opponents when the definitions are unclear, because too much is up to subjective judgement and no due process protects against these biases

3) no recourse is bad when things go wrong

In due process it’s the process that reduce bias so that we don’t get the mistakes of mobs of the past (eg people that think they are objective while not having an accurate mental model of what they judge), although it can’t eliminate it.

How do you think facebook has ameliorated these concerns so that they can be objective?

I'm just telling you why your earlier posts got downvoted. I'm not interested in how Facebook has ameliorated these concerns until I see how they do at achieving their stated objective.

It is the stated objective that is highly problematic, because of the lack of truth seeking and humility in how they pursue their objective.

I think another outcome for Facebook is more likely because they seem to be forgetting that they are not the ones creating Facebook, rather they are capitalizing on part of the activity in the relationships amongst their users as long as they can express something relevant to them on Facebook.

They are effectively attempting logical rationing with a lack of emotional meaning to their relationships, and overvaluing what one can learn from subjectivity without truth seeking.

As they said I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

It's quite dangerous to be allowed to be judge, jury and executioner.

FB has become too large and ubiquitous, they shouldn't be all of those.

Exactly, and I am surprised they don't know they should have a better process that is feels fairer to their customers. This seems to be treating customers too logistically, without enough regard to your own potential mistakes and biases.

What about the post office refusing to deliver letters? Or the phone company? How about no heat for nazis from the gas company?

It using the gas company’s platform to heat your racist meeting place allowed?

Facebook is a Privately Owned Public Place more than it is a platform.

Thats fine, but how does the line blur when Facebook takes government money in the form of subsidies and political ads?

I think if they allow public signups then they should not have the ability to censor anybody, except by court order or to comply with the laws of the users region.

Because of course "anything I don't agree with is hitler" is a problem and an inevitability. Its fine if they do not allow public sign ups and all people they are publishing are considered employees or enter into contract with the company but facebook, twitter etc. are different animals and I really don't see how anybody supporting free speech can support facebook inhibiting the speech of certain people.

By doing that you're effectively turning these websites into 4chan. Can you imagine a website like Hacker News if no moderation was possible, nobody could get banned and nothing could be removed without a court order? You'd just have every thread spammed by bots.

That's the problem with unmoderated online discourse, cheap inflammatory posts are easy to make and draw a lot of attention while in-depth analysis takes time to write and to read. Why bother coming up with a clever retort if you can just spam "no u" and "fuck off" until those people are driven away?

In my experience no moderation doesn't result in more varied opinions, instead it turns into an echo chamber where the bullies take over. Again, look at 4chan or some of the most popular, less moderated subreddits. It's pretty crap.

The ideal state of affairs is when you can have multiple platforms, moderated in different ways as they compete for customers in a free (i.e. competitive) market, where such moderation, or lack thereof, is a part of their pitch to new customers.

But we let companies monopolize whole segments of the market. And then every such segment becomes a vast echo chamber of whatever the prevailing public opinion at the moment is.

I don't understand your position. The 1A is fulfilled—in word and spirit—to your satisfaction so long as government puts up no barriers to speech, even if private, quasi-monopolistic firms filter speech to their own ends?

I think you do understand it, yeah. The only caveat to that is the private control of what I believe to be public infrastructure. The wires that connect all of us.

What makes the wire public infrastructure and facebook not? What would facebook have to do to become public infrastructure, or comcast have to do to become not?

One is contracted by the US government to provide public infrastructure (and AFAIK still hasn't fulfilled their end of the agreement), and the other is an entity that operated and grew organically to provide a service that the government didn't ask for.

Is google fiber (which, afaik, was not contracted by the government) private infrastructure in your model then?

(Both yes and no are certainly valid answers, I'm just curious about how you view this)

I don't know what Google's contracts and agreements are with local municipality, so the short version of my answer is that I don't know how i'd classify Google Fiber myself.

For a more general point of view, i'd take into account a lot of factors such as:

- who "owns" the service, both from an "on paper" POV and who builds and maintains it

- what does the contracts between the entity and the government say

- did the government pay for a service to be built by the entity, vs the entity asked for permission to build the service, vs the entity built the service using non-government-permission-required resources

- what was the spirit of the relationship between the entity and the government

- who will be using the service

- is the service a government-allowed monopoly

- etc.

Facebook does pass some of those tests (eg. the "public at large" is the target userbase for it), but fail a lot of the other tests at least in how they operate in the United States. Comcast's general laying out of wire + offering services over that wire passes a lot more of those tests and puts the service into public infrastructure in most folks' eyes.

edit: formatting

Comcast can't do anything to no longer be public infrastructure. Rather, municipalities would have to rework their regulations to allow anyone that follows a defined process to install the same infrastructure that Comcast has.

Likewise, Facebook would become public infrastructure when the government puts regulations in place that make it impossible or prohibitive to start a new social media site.

That's an interesting perspective!

How do patents interact with it? If facebook got a patent on some new VR technology that allowed face to face interaction at a distance, and didn't license it out, would that turn the relevant portion of facebook into public infrastructure? What if they licensed it out but only to other people who also won't serve people saying <x>?

Clearly not a definitive answer but some elements to think about:

Facebook's business consists in promoting some of the content their users put online (the content that makes them win money) so they cannot claim to be a neutral carrier.

Comcast cannot be asked to filter content since what they carry is encapsulated at least and encrypted most of the time.

You could compare it to the street vs a private hall - everyone has the right to walk on the street, but not to automatic admittance to private venues.

Now the problem is that social networks in many respect fill the old function of the 'town square' which was a common area accessible to everyone. That commons area has effectively been divided up in the name of capitalism, in parallel to the Enclosure Acts which destroyed the British commons, so now we have a large number of (private) platforms instead.

There are of course protocols don't suffer from this problem of private capital and monopolistic control, but (like land for the commons) protocols without infrastructure can't compete effectively against platforms' huge network effects. The practical upshot of this is that extremist groups will usually just head for other less discriminating platforms, eg there's a lot of white supremacists on Vkontakte (though I'm not sure how this will pan out if Russia rearranges its internet connectivity with the rest of the world).

"Free Speech" != 1A

Exactly. Freedom of speech isn't just freedom from government censorship. Other entities can infringe on it.

And when you're in my house around my children you absolutely do not have it.

Right. Freedom of speech logically cannot be unlimited for everyone at all times. That's why government protections of freedom of speech tend to be limited in scope.

His position was that government should not stifle speech, but that a private company should not be forced to re-print it. There's a big difference between prohibition/regulation and coercion of speech.

I am in agreement with you on this point. FB isn't obligated to give anyone a publishing platform.

People with hateful, racist rhetoric are can certainly attempt to fully self host their shit content on their own servers. Essentially all they need to do is figure how how to run their own authoritative DNS servers, and their own http daemons. Various publishing CMS that work on a common LAMP stack server are GPL/BSD licensed and require no external connections to any platform services.

Hopefully, ethical ISPs will refuse to host their VMs or dedicated servers, so they'll have a bit of a harder task to find a publishing platform. But if you spend 30 seconds googling "russia VPS" you can find VM services which don't even disconnect customers for hosting virus/worm/trojan/botnet command and control sites, so the racists can go there.

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