White House launches tool to report censorship on social media | Hacker News Reader

White House launches tool to report censorship on social media

theverge.com

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We are going to have the government deal with shitty Mods?

Back when I was a kid, if the Mods sucked, you'd stop going to that website.

Serious question, why do unhappy customers keep buying what bad companies sell?

I stopped using Facebook and many subreddits. I have this self control.

Is there anyone here that cannot stop visiting bad websites?

>> We are going to have the government deal with shitty Mods?

Breitbart.

>> Back when I was a kid, if the Mods sucked, you'd stop going to that website.

If websites existed when you were a kid, you are not the target market for this tool.

>>Serious question, why do unhappy customers keep buying what bad companies sell?

That's how addiction works.

>>I stopped using Facebook and many subreddits. I have this self control.

Then they have won. Every time a reasonable person disconnects, the ratio of unreasonable people on a platform increases. Unreasonableness, extremism, creates greater engagement, generating more add revenue.

>> Is there anyone here that cannot stop visiting bad websites?

We are all here aren't we?

The platform shouldn't exist as a monopoly for discussion in the first place. If all people, when facing a website that sucked, just stopped using the damn website like GP and me, the platform wouldn't have this much power.

Seriously, what's so hard with not using social media? Aren't there plenty of offline stuff to do and people to talk to in meatspace? Is its prevalence a uniquely American thing?

Are you kidding? Social media companies literally have people on their payroll whose entire job is to increase engagement. They turn the sites into addictive Skinner boxes because the are incentivised to do so.

Of course it's hard to quit. It's designed to be hard to quit.

I would hardly classify Hacker News as a bad website. My inflammatory comments are routinely downvoted as they should be. My good posts tend to be well received. This is quite frankly one of the least terrible places on the internet for discussion with a relatively wide viewpoint for the internet. We've got libertarians, liberals, conservatives and even a few greens and generally we agree to keep it mostly civil because that's why we're all here. There's no crappy memes, no quizzes. We're explicitly here for the comments.

Yes, many people, even (!) in Hacker News.

It's sometimes not about self-restraint, and that's an ongoing discussion here: What do you do when everybody else are on these services?

>>Serious question, why do unhappy customers keep buying what bad companies sell?

Many good convos have happened on this -- Facebook is de facto required for participating in some levels of society. I've heard of people being required to use Facebook to get information as vital as announcements about school for their kids. For those of us with poorly understood chronic illnesses, Facebook is the only place we can find people who share our condition and can trade information with. Many community events are only announced through Facebook events. Essentially, it's infiltrated so many aspects of life that it's become very difficult for many people to fully walk away from.

If Facebook disappeared overnight, my life and that of most of my social circle wouldn't change that much. I think the issue of Facebook penetrating everyone's aspects of life is perhaps unique to your side of the Atlantic. They only have the power people chose to give them. You could opt out any time you like, it's maybe not convenient but it's liberating. See Stallman on freedom etc.

I think part of the problem is that they have the power that OTHER people choose to give them. If my entire social circle uses Facebook then I don't have much of a choice.

Where do I go for a Twitter sized audience if they ban me from their platform? The only real competitor is gab and there's barely anyone using it. The problem right now is these platforms are basically monopolies and are aggressively censoring people on the right side of politics

Why do you need a Twitter sized audience?

People were able to organize and communicate effectively on the web before Twitter, Facebook, etc. Not being on one of the big social media silos isn't de facto censorship, it's just slightly less convenient than being on them.

But it's still entirely possible to build an audience elsewhere.

Nobody is entitled to a Twitter-sized audience. I agree monopolies are bad but the fact that right-wing tolerant platforms are shitshows and niche compared to more mainstream ones is perhaps not the fault of the left. Maybe, just maybe, there aren't that many people holding (and willing to listen to) the kind of opinions commonly posted on gab et al.

Arguing for deplatforming while using a throwaway account to not get deplatformed on your main is somewhat ironic. ;)

Not sure that athrowaway was arguing for deplatforming, though...

I understood that "right-wing tolerant platforms" are different from platforms as deplatforming anything right-wing, as in "not tolerating" it, and that this would be all good, but I might have misunderstood.

Isn't it a bit conceited to think you'll have access to that audience? I don't believe my twitter account is reaching that many people. If the message is strong enough and will get to that many people somehow, might as well start a blog.

> I don't believe my twitter account is reaching that many people.

That's up to your message though. If people share your tweet, it might. If you're banned from the platform, that's not an option, no matter how many people find your opinion valuable, they'll never see it.

The amount of people who see even the most popular tweets is a small subsection of Twitter. If you're banned from the platform, sucks to be you. You shouldn't have violated their TOS. If you didn't understand the TOS then you shouldn't have joined. Pewdiepie is one of the biggest people on Youtube, how many people have heard of him? Outside of that slice of society not many. How many people could tell you off the top of their head who Marshall Mathers is? Noam Chomsky? Outside of tech how many people know who Linus is? The point is there are very, very few people who have their voices heard. Even famous people aren't guaranteed to have their tweets read. If you want a platform where people will listen you have to control your own platform, like Oprah or the pope. You have to have as many people following you as Oprah to have a guaranteed voice.

> You shouldn't have violated their TOS.

Since their TOS are vague, and they enforce it very discriminatory, deplatforming is obviously not about "violating TOS".

> The point is there are very, very few people who have their voices heard.

I agree wholeheartedly. My point isn't that everybody on Twitter automatically reaches everybody else on Twitter. It's that he has the chance. If you tweet something that everybody loves, you can go viral. If you're banned, you can't.

Everybody can run for office, but not everybody can win. If you block people from running in the first place, you better have some damn good reasons, and they better not be "I don't like their political opinions".

Isn't the fact that gab is dominated by fascists and racists evidence that Twitter isn't banning people just for being conservative?

I find it kind of amusing that the same political party that believes internet service providers do not have obligation to neutrality believe internet content providers do.

Edit: spelling mistake fixed

True, that's a weird thing. One side wants ISPs to be neutral, the other wants platforms to be neutral, but neither really want both to be neutral.

>A later question asks the user what year the Declaration of Independence was signed “just to confirm you aren’t a robot.” This is an unorthodox anti-scripting technique, and a generally ineffective one, given the relative simplicity of automatically entering a number.

A twitter user reported that any 4 digit number will be verified.

Well yeah, it's literally a survey and it can be any answer you want. It's not to verify anything other than the guise of "if you don't know when it was signed then you're not an informed american and your opinion doesn't matter"

If you run the Big List of Naughty Strings against it, they almost all pass through.

I'd wager that a Jimmy Drop Tables would also be effective.

If it hasn't been black-hatted already, then someone will grey-hat it before Friday.

Honestly, it seems it was built by people that knew that it was pointless anyways. Just like with the FCC comments scandal, it's not going to be reflective any reality we live in. It's political red-meat for Sean and Donny to make up whatever they want to make up and attack with so many manila folders of blank paper.

In separate discussions verified by Motherboard, that employee said Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/04/25/twitter-cant-ban-ra...

That's what happens when "our country and people first" gets classified as white supremacism.

Phrases like "our country and people first" get classified as white supremacy because they are used as dog whistles by white supremacists.

But that's as silly as classifying the "ok hand" emoji as white supremacist too.

The Streisand Effect when people try to pile on these things as being some kind of secret masonic handshake is insane.

I don't think actual white supremacists could ever come up with propaganda anywhere near as effective.

How would you phrase the sentiment differently? Or is it inherently white supremacist?

What if the country isn't majority white?

The phrase "America First" has some... historical baggage.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dr+suess+america+first+comic&iax=i...

If you're aware of this and comfortable with it, more power to you, but sometimes it seems like not everyone saying it knows about this.

Normally I wouldn't touch this with a ten foot pole, but in this case I genuinely wish to be helpful. Best.

As we all know, algorithmic classification has zero issues [0] and is 100% accurate. Even Twitter's anti-ISIS classification banned a bunch of ISIS watchdog accounts but it was deemed that the collateral damage was worth it. In this case, the possible collateral damage of banning non-racist, non-white supremacists is too damaging to Twitter's reputation among a large portion of their users.

The non-politically charged answer to this is that the algorithm isn't (and likely could never) be perfect and so the statement that it would be politically bad due to collateral damage, exactly as the employee from Twitter said, is accurate. Without all the "nudge nudge, wink wink Racists=Right amiright?" rhetoric provided by the media outlets that reported on it.

Going back to the algorithm, how would one even train it? At one end it would likely be useless and at the other it would be far too inaccurate.

Would it ban for use of the OK hand emoji? How about for saying "it's okay to be white?" Would it judge someone as a white supremacist for pro-white speech or only for anti-POC speech? How about people who tweet about or quote Hitler and how would it know the context? Since "retweets aren't necessarily endorsement" would it ban for retweeting white supremacist speech to draw attention to it/call it out? Would it attempt to do classification and then ban anyone who's mostly followed by or tweets towards/is tweeted at by people classified as white supremacists? Would it ban for racial rhetoric? Being against immigration?

Even assuming it could accurately classify - it quickly becomes a measure of "who's definition are you using" and "how far is far enough and how far is too far?"

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/1/8880363/google-apologizes-...

It's an extremely dangerous conflation of terms to suggest that private speech and private moderation are the same as censorship.

But forcing a "fairness" doctrine onto the tech world is exactly what the current political parties, who feel like reporting for them has had insufficient deference and whatabout-ism, want to do. Uniformly across the center of the political spectrum most of the US government represents.

Speech Rules enacted democratically by small communities are fine. Speech Rules imposed top down by the owners of infrastructure for communication are not great, but at least customers can make choices about them and it's not so unimaginable to find alternatives. Speech Rules enacted top-down by the executive are impossible to argue with and ultimately one of the most dangerous kinds of authoritarianism. The infosec community can tell you they've been fighting a slow, losing battle against going to jail for saying something that is not illegal to say out loud for some time now.

Private moderation is censorship. The definition of censorship is not restricted to government actors.

I regret to inform you the dictionary definition of censorship generally does not include tweets, so a literalist reading invalidates both our positions.

I don't know which dictionary definition you're referring to, since there are many. But most define it in terms of speech or communication, and tweets are most certainly both.

Colloquially, I think most people would agree that e.g. the Hollywood blacklist was an example of political censorship. And yet it was implemented entirely by private parties.

ACLU also refers to this sort of thing as censorship in general, while also drawing the distinction between government and private censorship, e.g.: https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/internet-speech/facebo...

> I don't know which dictionary definition you're referring to, since there are many. But most define it in terms of speech or communication, and tweets are most certainly both.

Most don't, but sure.

> ...

I don't actually disagree with the ACLU's position in theory. However, in practice I know exactly what this is about and I don't see a need to play along with this. This is about the "fairness doctrine" and the desire to enforce it on more agencies to centralized control of internet communication under the government. That is not free speech, and attempts to paint it as such are worthy of ridicule.

I'd rather Facebook's editorial practice be Democratic rather than enforced top down. Then, I'd be fine with any degree of censorship. But since we can't have that in the modern legal framework we both need to content ourselves with consumer purchasing power as a proxy governor on their actions.

I was specifically addressing your claim that "it's an extremely dangerous conflation of terms to suggest that private speech and private moderation are the same as censorship" - the problem here is not the conflation of terms, since the terms are not misused. The problem is that they're trying to come up with a justification for government regulation of speech under the guise of preventing private regulation.

(There's a genuine but separate issue with conflation of private censorship and government censorship, especially in the context of the First Amendment.)

I'd rather Facebook's editorial practices be defined by the market, but this only works when the market is free (as in competitive, not as in laissez-faire), and that's not the case with social networks today. Government's job, though, is to ensure that the markets remain free through anti-trust, not to micromanage monopolies and oligopolies. Indeed, a private monopoly or oligopoly that is allowed to exist, but whose policy is partly dictated by the government in its interest, is the worst of both worlds.

You're editing your post after I reply. Grammatical corrections are one thing, but adding whole paragraphs after I'm sure you've seen my reply? It seems disingenuous.

I have not seen your reply when I edited it. Just had another point to add.

> It's an extremely dangerous conflation of terms to suggest that private speech and private moderation are the same as censorship.

It's extremely dangerous to continue to erode the spirit and meaning of free speech by narrowly defining it as a government only concept. We're collectively losing our ability to tolerate different views and have a level playing field of discussion. We need to get back to "I may not agree with what you say but I'll fight to the death for your right to say it". Both in spirit and in law. Tech companies and political parties have been attacking the spirit of free speech.

> It's extremely dangerous to continue to erode the spirit and meaning of free speech by narrowly defining it as a government only concept.

What spirit is that? No country in the world gives unrestricted speech as a right to citizens. That includes the US, which merely forbids government retaliation.

But what's more, this principle is applied very selectively. Why wasn't it free speech to be an openly gay scoutmaster in 2014? Well, for the same reason that Twitter can ban Nazi speech now: they own the platform and restrict membership as they see fit.

Similarly, you cannot demand the Washington Post print an arbitrary story. Nor can you force a radio station to broadcast your show. They get to make editorial and resourcing decisions for their content.

What's more, social media is not as restricted a space as these prior examples. It is a product. You can to buy it. You can elect to use Mindz and Gab if you want! YouTube is full of extremely bipartisan channels ranging from "Libertarian Socialist Rants" to its dual with "PragerU".

The only one attacking free speech is the folks who want to restrict editorial speech because it gets in the way of their ability to project their message onto people who don't want it. And being able to project yourself onto people actively avoiding you is not and will never be a reasonable definition of free speech.

> What spirit is that?

It’s the spirit of the audience to want all viewpoints available. I explicitly said I’m not talking about the government and I don’t know how your scoutmaster example has anything to do with what we’re talking about.

If you operate a platform, you are not a media company, you’re a utility and you shouldn’t interfere with content. If you’re part of the audience you should demand access to all content so you can make your own decisions. That is the spirit of free speech I’m talking about.

Edit: I explicitly stated I'm talking about the spirit of free speech and not the law. I'm not going to bother replying to comments that don't address that point.

> I explicitly said I’m not talking about the government and I don’t know how your scoutmaster example has anything to do with what we’re talking about.

Really? You really don't?

> If you operate a platform, you are not a media company, you’re a utility and you shouldn’t interfere with content.

This has never been true. It cannot be true in the American legal framework. What's more, that's not what this discussion or the Executive's survey is about. We can look at lawsuits brought by friends of this initiative and public complaints listed to see that their actual complaint is with heckling. Trump wants to suppress sources, Nunes wants to punish the operator of the "Devin Nunes's Cow" account. Heckling is the right of the audience to speak back to the speak and not be lectured to at gunpoint.

If you operate a business, you are not a utility. If Twitter is not a media company, then they are not subject to FCC or government regulation. Furthermore, you are not required to use Twitter, nor do you pay to do so.

The first amendment does not allow you to walk into Walmart with a blazing Tiki Torch yelling "Jews will not replace us".

If the "audience" does not get what they want they are free to move elsewhere and seek it.

Move to gab and speech away. Start a blog, post on Brietbart or the Daily Stormer or Fox News or the Blaze, or the Federalist or r/theDonals. Their comment sections are open, have at it.

No we don't. The meaning of free speech is clearly defined in the United States by the First Amendment. QED.

I explicitly stated I'm talking about the spirit of free speech.

The spirit of free speech is this. You have a right to say whatever the hell you want in public. That doesn't mean I have to let you do it in my home, my business, my private internet website. I am not required to give a platform to speech I disagree with. It also doesn't shield you from responsibility or the inevitable reaction from choosing free speech.

I disagree. The spirit of free speech is that everyone should want to at least have access to all thoughts and speech. You don't have to like them, you don't have to read them but you should have access to them. Otherwise you're letting someone else filter what you can and cannot see.

You can disagree all you want. It doesn't make you less wrong. You literally are limited by the nature of the universe and your physical body so reality is a filter. Time limits how much you can consume should you be able to bypass the physical limitations of your body. Your belief is fundamentally incongruous with the intent of free speech.

If I am forced to host your platform/speech/lewd gestures/etc. you're taking away my rights of free speech to not host your platform. No one is taking away access. What they are doing is kicking the drunk ass jerk out of the bar for harassing other people because they were warned to stop being such a dick and they continued on anyways. They can say whatever they want from someplace them own and no one is preventing access to them. They want a bar full of jerks, they can go right ahead and have no rules of decorum.

You're confusing unlimited speech with free speech. There has never been a right to access to all speech. Private conversations happen all the time and no one has a right to listen to those. So again, just because someone owns a billboard doesn't mean they are required to post your message. The courts have been pretty solid on this and it's why the baker won his case against the couple. You cannot force me to advocate for you if I don't believe in it.

Once again I'll repeat that I'm talking about the spirit of free speech not the law. I'm encouraging everyone to take up the attitude that having information filtered by someone else is inherently bad. Users should be demanding unfiltered access to all of the content on the platform. Just like on Reddit how some subs add a mod log so you can see what they're filtering.

This is the mentality of intellectual inquisitive people and needs to be promoted as it's currently under attack.

Let me try to bridge the gap between you two.

If I'm running a platform, I have the choice to make it a moderated platform or an unmoderated one. If I make it unmoderated, you can have your "free access to everything". [Edit: At the price of it becoming a cesspool that most people don't want to wallow in.] But if I make it moderated, you don't have the right to make me carry anything on it that I don't want to carry. You don't like it? Go run your own platform, and carry what you like.

And between all these different platforms - some unmoderated, and the moderated ones having a bunch of different standards of what they will and will not allow - people get to freely choose which ones they want to spend time on and contribute content to.

All that can work without the government forcing anybody to do anything.

> This is the mentality of intellectual inquisitive people and needs to be promoted as it's currently under attack.

It's weird you say this because it really seems more like the mentality of people who want a state sponsored megaphone to shout, "Debate me you cowards!" into.

This is an opinion about how people should feel about your speech, not an opinion about what rights people should have with regards to speech.

You're welcome to it, but it seems tangential. I certainly am not interested in you telling me how to feel.

By your definition, the spirit of free speech is perfectly fine in a company town where anyone criticizing their employer loses their livelihood.

Um, accept the gop has stated that’s their definition - an employer can require employees to act according to the employers religion.

Also in plenty of small towns that is already the case - people in coal country get ruined if they complain about coal, or the mining companies. Which is considered legal.

But let’s put up a very simple example: if I rent out a billboard on a building I own, should I be required to post advertisements from a political candidate I disagree with? Your interpretation of free speech says yes I should have no choice, likewise if I get a pro-hitler or pro Stalin, pro genocide, or pornography, I have no choice I just display it.

Actually here’s a very American example: during elections people stick the little plastic political boards in their front yard, in doing so they’ve declared that their front yard is a space for political ads - should Someone then be allowed to put opposition ads there as well?

This is your definition of free speech: if you publish any speech, you are required to publish all

Please don't pretend a problem doesn't exist, because you disagree with one of the possible solutions to it (or an extreme caricature of such a solution that you made up on the spot).

I didn't give a definition of free speech (neither its spirit nor the law establishing it). I merely gave an example illustrating how farcical it is to ignore all factors except the government, when evaluating the degree of freedom of speech that people enjoy.

It's precisely because speech is decriminalized that were ignoring it as a matter of law, though.

>The meaning of free speech is clearly defined in the United States by the First Amendment. QED.

No, it isn't.

Here is the text of the First Amendment, verbatim:

    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, 
    or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom 
    of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably 
    to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress 
    of grievances.

Freedom of speech (literally "the freedom of speech") is never defined in the First Amendment, merely referred to in the context of a list of freedoms that Congress is prohibited from abridging, the definitions for which are assumed to already be understood by the reader.

The first amendment specifically applies to the government bodies, and laws passed by them.

It very deliberately excludes private parties - otherwise and random wacko could force the nyt or fox to publish whatever they wanted.

What's worse?

Private companies making decisions about what appears on their privately funded platforms?

Or bureaucrats, ideologues and partisans using government power to influence what appears on private sites?

Considering there's plenty of ideologues and partisans working at those private companies, I think it's pretty bad either way.

All of the above.

I wish it were easy enough to run a web server that everyone just hosted their own content. A Raspberry Pi is already overkill for most pages, and one could easily imagine a content-agnostic (encrypted?) cache service that would handle load spikes.

It's only for social media censorship against USians. The form kicks you out once you tell it you're not a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. https://twitter.com/typeform/status/1128993614250553344

I can’t help but feel the GOP wouldn’t be running into this if they didn’t keep posting attacks on minorities.

If you are saying some set of people don’t deserve the same basic rights as other people, simply because they exist, and are different, it’s hate speech. And if your platform is deliberately based on intolerance then there is not requirement for others to tolerate you. This isn’t a paradox - bigots love trying to say it is, but it’s not.

That's not creepy and McCarthyite at all. No sir.

I suspect that the primary purpose here is not to uncover bias or censorship on social media platforms - it's to get people to identify more strongly as Trump supporters.

This is the classic psychological 'consistency' principle at work. When someone takes the small step of "sharing their story with President Trump" it strengthens their self-image as a Trump supporter. This is then reinforced by receiving frequent emails "from President Trump" thanking them for their support to eliminate censorship. This makes the person more likely to get off the couch and vote for Trump in November 2020.

This shows lighter in my browser, like it's voted down, but it's by far the most insightful comment.

Also, if you're a company and you have a platform like facebook and Twitter, and you're a private company, not the government, you can kick whomever you damned well please off your service, or delete their posts, or edit them to make them look stupid. It's not censorship if you're not the government. If facebook gets all progressive and the conservatives don't like it, let them make their own conservative platform. Too bad techies lean left, going to make that difficult.

Freaking 'merica's biggest political activity is now whining.

FWIW, there is a precedent for treating monopolies differently than other companies. Utility companies, which are natural monopolies, are highly restricted in their ability to refuse service to customers, for instance. Social media companies seem to be natural monopolies.

These companies are providing services for free. Can you force a natural monopoly to provide free services to anyone who demands it?

Based on what we’ve done with hospitals... yes.

Do Hospitals provide their services for free? No.

Are Hospitals and their staff subject to government regulation given the required license to practice medicine? Yes.

I'm not sure your example applies here.

I’m referring to EMTALA, which requires hospitals to provide emergency services to everyone, regardless of ability to pay:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_...

Note that I’m not making a moral point here; I’m only pointing out that we do in fact require a natural monopoly to provide free services on demand.

Individual hospitals are not a monopoly.

>These companies are providing services for free.

No. These companies are not offering a free service. You not paying them directly does not mean it’s free. This is a comment that shouldn’t have to be made here, we all know how they make money and the price you pay to use the service.

The services in question are provided to the end-users for free - they allow you to share your content, your messages and content from others, and to more easily keep in touch with friends and other entities you want to stay informed about. The companies also offer paid services to anyone who wants to place highly targeted messages to very specific audiences.

If a group of people are not a profitable audience to be targeted (or that can't be targeted for legal reasons), or that actively discourages other more financially valuable users from participating, should they be forced to keep providing services for free to those who are considered a toxic presence?

Social media companies aren't natural monopolies. There are no intrinsic high fixed costs, for example. The only significant barrier to entry is lock-in of existing users via their social graph, but that barrier is entirely artificial - Facebook could be a part of a larger federated network, for example, it just chooses not to (but could be forced to).

They are natural monopolies. It’s no accident that each vertical has only a single viable option. Network effects result in Facebook remaining dominant in the “connect to the people in your life” market for the same reason that they result in eBay remaining dominant in the collectibles market.

Wikipedia defines a "natural monopoly" as "a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors."

That's the case for Facebook. The barrier to entry isn't the cost of the machines or software, but the Network Effect: if your friends aren't on the new network there's little reason for you to go there. Once large network is more effective than many small ones. Facebook could give up that natural monopoly, if they chose to, but they won't unless forced.

You're talking common carrier. I am all for designating facebook and twitter and whatever else as a common carrier. But I think if you look into it, those companies have fought hard to not be designated as common carriers. My guess is that common carrier status means that something very much like net neutrality rules would apply, and they wouldn't be able to profit so much from advertising, and they would have service guarantees to meet.

Uh oh, now you're greyed-out.

Better fire up that White House site and send in a report! /s

This is so beautiful.

> Also, if you're a company and you have a platform like facebook and Twitter, and you're a private company, not the government, you can kick whomever you damned well please off your service, or delete their posts, or edit them to make them look stupid.

According to at least some court decisions, this may not be true if you control enough of the public space to be effectively a "public square". This is what people are building their arguments around.

When the Constitution was written, there was a smaller population and towns had a clear center, so you could reach people effectively by standing on a soapbox on Main Street. That simply isn't possible anymore. Now that large corporate entities control both the physical public square (malls) and the virtual environment, there is nowhere left to set up a soapbox. This diminishes the natural right of free speech. There is an argument to be made that any entity large enough to constitute part of the public square should have to allow open access for people to stand on their soapbox.

Not an originalist take by any means, but that's not necessarily a disqualifier unless you're a strict constitutionalist.

I think it's because Twitter has shown they will reverse bans for cases that get too much negative publicity rather than adhere to a consistent policy. This is a logical counterreaction to aggregate and lobby for banned accounts, conservative or otherwise.

Or alternatively, after a sufficient public outcry, will reverse themselves after improperly banning an account when they actually screw up.

It also reinforces the narrative that Trump and his supporters are under constant persecution by the organized conspiracy of leftists and globalists controlling all media and purging and all non-leftist speech from social media en masse.

Nothing gets voters to the polls quite as effectively as a shared identity built around a persecution complex and the threat of an enemy at the gates.

I am totally confident that they will handle reports of censorship by media that supports them completely and totally the same way as reports against media that doesn't.........

I wonder if you can use this to report censorship that the Trump administration is actively doing to scientific reports and scientists themselves who's results disagree with their business and extremist religious agenda?

So Net Neutrality constitutes unwelcome government interference in the internet, but it's okay to force private companies to tolerate extreme right-wing views? This is ridiculous.

It's outrageous. People think this is a good idea?

Not a good look for Typeform.

> A Twitter spokesperson responded to the new tool saying, “We enforce the Twitter Rules impartially for all users, regardless of their background or political affiliation. We are constantly working to improve our systems and will continue to be transparent in our efforts.”

In the discussion with Jack Dorsey on the Joe Rogan podcast, Tim Pool had a good point: some of the rules are intrinsically biased on one side of the political spectrum.

An good example is the rule against misgendering. Twitter forbids referring to a person using a different gender than the one that person choses. E.g., you have to refer to a male-to-female transgender as a "she".

But to conservatives, referring to someone using a gender other than their biological one is the definition of misgendering.

This is a purely ideological take, and Twitter chose the definition of one side over the other. Then they can apply it "impartially to all users", but its the rule itself that is not impartial.

Tim Pool and JRE are obnoxious. Twitter lets people call each other pedos with no evidence all day long and you think that they enforce calling someone a he/she when they go by the opposite gender? Get real.

In that case I guess it's up to Wheaton's law. It is much less distressing to accept designating people with pronouns one believes to be wrong, than to be designated with pronouns that mismatch one's inner identity. Purposefully distressing people is kind of being a dick, and the amount of dickishness should be curbed, so the conclusion naturally arises.

There's an even stronger argument that Twitter's misgendering rule is ideological, I reckon. See, it used to be that all the right-thinking, connected feminist and feminist-adjacent folks thought that referring to people using anything other than their biological gender at birth was not just misgendering, but misogynistic and patriarchal - and even once this shifted somewhat, folks were expected to defend the people who still held those views until around 2016 or so. For instance, when Wordpress banned someone using wordpress.com to outright dox and harass every prominent trans woman out there, there was a successful campaign to unban her and no counter-campaign, because all the left-leaning groups fighting to make Internet sites ideologically correct supported this back then.

Twitter choosing to act against misgendering now isn't simply the result of some abstract belief about respecting people. It's a direct reflection of the changing views of activists in one particular slice of political spectrum.

I'm interested in the dichotomy of comments here between when Trump Admin releases a tool to report censorship and when Elizabeth Warren talks about how we need to break up Big Tech.

Also, it's fascinating how many of the negative reaction comments want to pretend like there are actual alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Amazon Marketplace. If the argument comes down to "it's a private business, do whatever you want"... Well, let's be at least partially honest this is a new problem and these are effective-monopolies.

Why? Censorship is quite a different issue from anti-trust. Censorship in the USA applies to the government, not to individuals (real humans or corporations), basically because the idea is that nobody wants to pay for someone else's sub-moronic "free speach".

Anti-trust, in the USA, is related to harmful effects to consumers. Monopolies can charge monopoly rents, or slow innovations or change in the monopolized market.

Absolutely two different issues.

Also, lots of folks pretended there were actual alternatives to Microsoft in 2000. It's not a new problem.

>Why? Censorship is quite a different issue from anti-trust.

Is it in this case? The censorship here is only effective because of the failures in anti-trust to adapt to the modern internet tech giants. If you are pretending that these companies aren't monopolies in search, video delivery, messaging, and social media... Well, I disagree.

So I get what you're saying, but let's not pretend Microsoft in 2000 was larger than Google or Facebook is now.

The issue is that these companies are clearly pretending to be PLATFORM when it suits them, and PUBLISHER when it suits them.

> So I get what you're saying, but let's not pretend Microsoft in 2000 was larger than Google or Facebook is now.

Larger in terms of what? Cash flow? Probably not. Monopoly power? Microsoft had something like 95% of a market that didn't even have 3 major players. The 4-firm concentration ratio was ridiculous, as was the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index. Microsoft owned so much of the market for PC operating systems that they loaned Apple money to avoid anti-trust issues.

Google is at about 92% of the global share of searches, but Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex exist. DuckDuckGo actually entered the market not too long ago. Google now has nowhere near Microsoft's monopoly power.

I wonder if this is running afoul of campaign finance laws.

The Trump administration has been doing that a lot recently, and while this can easily be misconstrued as a “report to the government” tool, it is not hosted on a .gov site.

Will the executive branch be acting on the information posted here? That also seems legally dubious. [edit: because there are security issues involving using non-government computers for government business. I think Hillary had some problems with that; maybe Trump didn’t hear about it?]

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