White House drafting order on tech industry 'censorship' | Hacker News Reader

White House drafting order on tech industry 'censorship'

politico.com

35 pointsga-vu13 comments

This doesn't sound good. The government choosing what's on my feed is way worse than Silicon Valley companies doing that. I've switched companies over not liking my feeds but it's much harder to do that with governments.

Edit: it's not that I don't think they should have any control but this is explicitly that they don't like how they are being treated politically (instead of threats of violence, or other more established reasons that censor things).

It was inevitable when they started censoring the red team. I for one am glad that they are researching how to do it, social media is the new public square, and no entity should be able to control it.

The article itself says that Republicans are skeptic about the government deciding when it is politically fair, so it will probably end up being a more elegant solution, like removing CDA 230.

I really don't believe it's Twitter's fault that a small subset of users are unable to follow the rules of their service. People get reported for breaking the rules and if they do it often enough they get banned. They can't relax their enforcement because one group of people breaks the rules more often.

The problem is not that users aren't following the rules. The problem is that enforcement is, shall we say, very selective. To give but one example, Mitch McConell's account just got banned for posting a video of a protest outside his house.

The Mitch McConnell campaign account got frozen after it was reported for posting a video that contained threats (towards the candidate), which is against the Twitter TOS.

I don't agree with this action, but it's consistent with their TOS. I don't believe I've seen other campaigns that have posted videos of people threatening the candidate so I can't make a judgement call about enforcement consistency.

I don't know if you're intentionally trying to mislead by not mentioning _which_ candidate, or if you've been misled yourself by fake news, but the violent threats in the video were agains McConnell himself, from a crowd gathered outside his house, and not by McConnell himself against anybody else.

I said towards the candidate while only mentioning one candidate. That's not obfuscating in any way.

Wouldn't removing CDA force tech companies into more censorship, not less? Where is the elegance with that approach?

Here's the EFF on the importance of CDA 230 for people not familiar with it: https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230

Edit: also no entity does control social media. There are a decent amount of different sites (Reddit, 4chan, twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Hackernews, Discord, and a bunch of smaller ones) I think a lot of the issue is that the goalposts for what we consider okay as a society have moved in the last decade or so. For example people care a lot more about hate towards LGBT people, and conservatives are way more likely to run afoul of that. As a interesting side note there have been social media sites started to try to get away from the "censorship" but they have yet to actually catch on.

Good. People ought to have a say in the rules that govern their lives. Tech companies shouldn't get to make those rules unilaterally.

The problem is that a group has decided that hate speech is a critical part of the conservative platform. It isn’t, and there are plenty of conservatives who aren’t hate mongering bigots. But we have an administration that seems hell bent on censoring anything critical of them and claiming that any limits a platform may put up to block racism, violence, or general bigotry as being “censoring conservatives”.

I see no way that this would pass any kind of constitutional review - the fact that this is coming from the same political group that religiously opposed any legislation to limit the ability to sell automatic weapons to people who go on murderous rampages is all the more depressing

Why don’t they start with Hacker News, where you’re permanently silenced if you express a non-left political opinion.

Let’s start by banning hateful people like Donald Trump from Twitter. Let them find and fund their own platforms for that willful ignorance. They know it’s hard to survive alone — look at 8chan — so maybe they are willing to play by the rules if we enforce them.

Censorship is occuring and it is very dangerous. Just as bad or worse is the fact that there are such widely divergent worldviews and polarized camps. It's like people are living in parallel universes.

What's even worse is that both of those universes are highly biased and distorted.

Society may need to come to terms with the idea that reality is a social construct rather than a rational one.

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