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Comment by romaaeterna | Hacker News Reader

Unaccountable censorship of expression by our main communication providers is incompatible with Democracy. Communication is often a natural monopoly, and you can't just "start a competitor" to Twitter and have the market fix the problem (see gab.ai).

If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), us normal human beings need the right to appeal, public auditing, bright line rules, and due process rights.

It's not wrong for Twitter to have rules to protect the weak from the strong, and individuals from the mob, but it needs to be accountable and above board about all of it or it will make the problem far worse.

EDIT:

Just to provide an example, here are a few ways this notification could have been so much better.

1) List the specific rules violated. Link to the public process for rule review and adoption.

2) Link to ids and contact information for any human beings who made the decision.

3) Link to code and data sets for any algorithm behind the decision.

4) Provide and link to an appeal procedure instead of just a compliance procedure.

Imagine how much better that openness would be for Twitter's users. (While somewhat onerous for Twitter the company.)

View on HN

If we look at some differences between Twitter (or insert your favorite social media platform here) and email:

* Email providers have zero responsibility for filtering information

* Email users form their own networks dynamically through actual relationships rather than some artificial structure of "followers"/"friends"

* Email users never get banned from sending email (although maybe in some cases an individual service may ban extreme abusers)

* Email's operation is totally independent of irrational mobs/corporate interests/whatever

In short, I think the core problem with this situation is in your first line: social media has become a "main communication provider" and it's fundamentally unfit for purpose. Email and other protocol-based communication independent of platforms (IRC is another good example) is still the best solution for a primary communication provider.

The answer is much simpler than you are making this appear.

Sending an email is a private communication. Sending a tweet is a public communication.

Your email provider is not a publishing platform any more than the paper store or the USPS is a publishing platform.

Twitter is a publisher, although as an Internet publisher disseminating user generated content, they are protected by law from the typical liability that publishers sometimes face for the communications that they publish.

To say twitter is not for fit for its purpose is bizarre. Twitter is one of the most powerful publishing tools ever created.

Email, ActivityPub, and Wordpress are decentralized publishing communication standards. Email one-to-many distribution / spam being the thing youre ignoring. Facebook and Twitter are proprietary, centralized, and closed systems.

Shifting the conversation from publishing to the audience, completely glosses over the actual minutia at hand.

Literally no one is censoring email, or even discussing the possibility of censoring emails, unless you’re into totalitarian regimes.

OP meant to say publishing platforms not communication provider because of course there is absolutely no natural monopoly for email providers, but clearly natural monopolies for social networks.

Spam is a nuisance. It’s simply not how someone reaches 100 million followers.

Platforms can be decentralized. Look at WordPress. You can host it anywhere.

ActivityPub let's you build federated interconnected social networks, an interoperable solution like email.

I believe that's an artificial distinction. Companies like Mailchimp have already started implementing protections like mandatory opt-out mechanisms to protect themselves from liability. If networks of mailing lists around political rather than business interests were more common, I'd expect no less this kind of self-policing.

The OP hits at a fundamental problem. I'm not sure there's a clear path forward.

I think the more relevant distinction here is that email is federated. Once Mailchimp has sent out the emails, there's not much it can do, and it would be pretty unreasonable to force Mailchimp to review filter all their emails.

Twitter, on the other hand, is publishing these messages on their site. It's very easy for them to simply stop publishing those messages. Because Twitter is in charge of Twitter, it also has to be concerned about it's brand. The more public nature of Twitter also help this along, of course.

If something like this was to happen in the ActivityPub or XMPP space, the way of handling it would probably be something in closer to email than twitter.

Do you think Federation will be a distinction the public and politicians will make when the next manifesto is posted on Mastadon instead of 8chan?

It’s common for technologists to assume the underlying technology / implementation is relevant, when in fact it’s really just the user facing functionality that counts.

You have a good point. I suspect if the manifesto was private on mastodon it would be pretty similar to email, but if it was a public post, like public twitter posts, the effect would be the same.

Mandatory opt-out is part of the CAN SPAM act, and has nothing to do with liability for the content of the messages.

A publishing tool that can mimic private communication tools. Not for well thought out letters but for words spoken in a conversation. Which makes it so powerful. Which makes it so problematic.

From your last paragraph the term you are looking for is "common carrier".

Email goes over common carrier networks between private hosts and so is pretty close to a common carrier network. Twitter isn't and doesn't. Maybe there should be a way for web services to provide a similar service with similar protections.

In the US, at least, this isn't true. ISPs aren't considered common carriers--you can thank Ajit Pai for that.

If it were true, it would be true for both Twitter and email. Messages from both systems hop between neutral providers in the exact same manner.

Let's avoid the contorted legal definition here, and instead use the real-world definition where "common carrier network" means using an established protocol for routing and delivery, in which many separate entities work together to establish network reach.

In that case, it's true for both Twitter and email. The exact same network is used.

Twitter has denied that it is a publisher in court. It is a Common Carrier in effect, and has benefited - to the detriment of its competitors - from common carrier protections.

Any time Twitter has been called to account for what it publishes, it claims it's not a publisher. Give them what they want.

They are a platform distributing UGC protected by the CDA.

Any discussion of “common carrier” is entirely orthogonal, and basically nonsensical in the context of something like Twitter.

“Common carrier” generally arises as a trade-off for a government granted monopolies based on limited access right-of-ways. This was true for railways, and true for telephone wires. Why would this apply to a random service like Twitter?

Email as a standard is a neutral vector for mass communication but email in it's real-world form as a service provided by large 3rd-parties is not. Email service providers have monopolized the market for personal emails for two reasons, the first being the difficulty of setting up and maintaining a personal email server, and second being the enormously difficult challenge of filtering "spam". Google's Gmail service has a near monopoly over the personal email market and their highly effective spam filters played a huge role in the early success of that platform (large amounts of free storage was the primary reason but their spam filters were also the best at the time). Yes, that's plausible but the context in which it occured does raise questions. On a more anecdotal note, I have noticed that particular emails (membership renewal reminders, specific call-to-action campaign emails, etc) coming from 2nd Amendment groups wind up in my spam folder whereas other, less activity inducing emails from the same groups pass through without issue.

The manner in which emails are classified as spam is something that will always be highly subjective, leaving room for malevolent manipulation to occur. I'm fact, there may be precedent for this dating back to the 2016 election. There was a brief period where all Trump campaign emails were being flagged as spam by Gmail's filter algorithms. Google had plausible deniability in stating that it was a glitch caused by their algorithm's ability to globally flag senders whose emails are overwhelmingly deleted before being opened by users.

I'm going to play a little bit of devil's advocate here, because I think your comment has the beginning of a good conversation.

>* Email providers have zero responsibility for filtering information

Not necessarily true. Spam filtering is an expected feature nowadays, I would say, bit you're right that e-mail providers aren't required to do that sort of thing. Still, known spam IPs are regularly blacklisted from major e-mail providers.

>* Email users form their own networks dynamically through actual relationships rather than some artificial structure of "followers"/"friends"

Mailing lists and newsletters are more like a social network than typical e-mail. But the fundamental difference isn't how users form their networks, it's how the networks are structured: on Twitter, I take a message and broadcast it to everyone and Twitter puts ads around it, and other people see it even if they don't "know" me. The equivalency is e-mail:Twitter DMs :: massive mailing list:Twitter.

>* Email users never get banned from sending email (although maybe in some cases an individual service may ban extreme abusers)

You can get booted from a mailing list, and other users can block you, but more or less it's true that Microsoft won't ban me from Exchange servers. And that's kind of the thing, e-mail isn't centrally hosted. Mastodon has attempted this with a Twitterlike social media platform.

>* Email's operation is totally independent of irrational mobs/corporate interests/whatever

E-mails killer feature, for sure.

>In short, I think the core problem with this situation is in your first line: social media has become a "main communication provider" and it's fundamentally unfit for purpose. Email and other protocol-based communication independent of platforms (IRC is another good example) is still the best solution for a primary communication provider.

Agree, and I think this is why lots of online communities treat traditional social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat) like little broadcast hubs where you basically show the world your best in little snippits. On Twitter: post a joke or a funny thread; on Instagram: post your outfit, or your view, or your dinner; on Facebook: post your graduation and family photos; on Snapchat(/Instagram Stories): post about the little things you encounter throughout your day. Once you deviate from this framework – e.g. posting "politically incorrect" or intentionally controversial content – then you are subverting and ultimately trying to dismantle the cultural expectations for those platforms. The culturally accepted place for controversial content is in private conversations: Discord, WhatsApp, iMessage, e-mail, phone calls. Because then your victims have a way to defend themselves.

The argument over "free speech" on Twitter is undertaken, almost 100% of the time, in bad faith. Twitter is a bullhorn, P2P messaging is where free speech is truly (and should always be) protected. If you take a megaphone into Union Square, and start hurling slurs and threats at people, you will be removed or arrested the same way you'd be removed from Twitter for the same actions.

On Twitter you're not talking to "somebody", you're talking to "everybody". If you want to be controversial, take it to private conversation. Causing people pain in public isn't related at all to free speech – it's just another form of harassment.

So how do you feel about blog platforms or other service providers that allow posting user-supplied comments on their platform? Should companies and non-profits all be required be to expend resources to keep your hateful comments available to the world?

How do we determine what's spam? What's advertising? What's XSS? You have a first amendment right to type any of these things into an input box. Does that mean the organization receiving your message legally has to post it, even if it fails to meet a basic requirement of not breaking their platform or insulting their user-base?

Are terms-of-service a violation of someone's first amendment? In my case where I am the only employee of my small platform, do I not have a first amendment right to not host content I disagree with on my domain with my own servers?

>So how do you feel about blog platforms or other service providers that allow posting user-supplied comments on their platform? Should companies and non-profits all be required be to expend resources to keep your hateful comments available to the world?

Yes.

And "hateful" is a weasel world, assuming in advanced what the comments that would get censored are.

The comments could also be unpleasant but not hateful, unpopular but not hateful, not to the taste of some group (e.g. evangelicals or vegans) but not hateful, stuff societies want to ignore and hide (e.g. past crimes or system injustices) but not hateful, sexually explicit but not hateful, out of the mainstream but not hateful, and several other categories, including hateful, but rightly so (e.g. "let's bring down this fucking oppressive dictatorship and put these bastards in prison" written referring to a country under military control, or the same such against some company's like Monsanto bad practices, etc).

>Are terms-of-service a violation of someone's first amendment?

I could not care less. That's a provincial US issue. We should care what the world should be, not think in the confine's of century old laws.

In the 21st century, some terms-of-service, especially of powerful players, should be considered a restriction on freedom of speech.

Even if one still has the freedom to open their own platform, or take a box, step on it, and say what they like to the crowds in the middle of Central park...

And some if it is plain hateful. Distasteful, and inflammatory. [1]

Not all words need to be respected. Sometimes people need help, and sometimes they ask for it in subliminal ways.

And of course it's a provincial US issue. The entire internet as we know it cannot exist without provincial US law holding it together, and a provincial US economy to keep it online. We own the internet. We own Microsoft. We own Android. We own Google and Apple and Facebook and Twitter and everyone else who matters. There are competitors in these fields, but they're not concentrated enough in any other nation to make a difference. If America fell off Earth tomorrow the internet and all the technology that connects to it would be useless. Full stop.

And that should be a good thing. Healthy for your point. You don't want the internet governed on the world stage, especially if you're American.

Grab your soap box and try that "easing of restrictions on freedom of speech on a global scope" bullshit in China. Even Chinese citizens will laugh at you. They don't care about their freedoms nearly as much as you do.

[1] https://cdn.hillreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/gab-...

>And some if it is plain hateful. Distasteful, and inflammatory. [1]

Saying what's "distasteful" is about arbiters of taste, and we shouldn't allow that. John Waters was "distateful" at some point, Rock music was, famous painters were, Henry Miller was, tons of movies, and tons of other things besides. Inflammatory stuff, doxing, etc, should be punishable under common law (libel, privacy laws, etc). Hate on the other hand is one of the basic human sentiments. Why censor it altogether? Besides, usually the case is that some hate is OK (if it's towards our enemies) but other hate is bad (if it's aimed towards our side). Again, arbiters of hate, like arbiters of taste.

>And of course it's a provincial US issue. The entire internet as we know it cannot exist without provincial US law holding it together, and a provincial US economy to keep it online.

Given the state of the modern internet, I'm not sure if that's for the better.

I'd take an old-style, CERN-invented internet back, any day of the week.

>We own Microsoft. We own Android. We own Google and Apple and Facebook and Twitter and everyone else who matters.

You say that as if it's a good thing.

>Grab your soap box and try that "easing of restrictions on freedom of speech on a global scope" bullshit in China. Even Chinese citizens will laugh at you. They don't care about their freedoms nearly as much as you do.

Well, if they don't, then I don't care about their freedoms either. I care about my freedoms, and of those countries that do care about their freedoms.

I don't want to "bring democracy" to places that don't want it (resource-grab style). I want to enjoy democracy (and fuller than today's theater of it) in places that do want it.

> You say that as if it's a good thing.

From just a practical perspective, if your goal is an increase in unfettered speech on these platforms, or the Internet in general, where would you want them to be besides the United States? Since you're talking about what would and would not, (or should and should not) be allowed, I assume some form of government is enacting and enforcing this as law.

I'm not aware of any nation that takes as close to absolutist of an approach to free speech other than the US. Even in the US we're currently in a relatively anomalous period of expansive free speech protection, historically speaking.

Relevant to this conversation, "hate speech" itself is a particularly common subject of bans in other nations otherwise generally considered equal to or greater than the US where "freedom" is concerned.

That's a good point.

I think such platforms should be publicly run, perhaps something like a UN-project, and follow absolutist rules of free speech.

To me, something as crucial as a 2 billion strong method of communication (like FB), or the primary platform for web search for 8 billion people (Google, that is) shouldn't be run from a single country, nor be run for profit, nor be subject to private interests.

Especially regarding e.g. Google search, the global political, economic, public opinion shaping, etc power this gives a single private company, and to the country where it resides, is absurd.

Such services should be more like a "total archive" than a reflection of seasonal/regional/private interests, ideologies, and wills.

> Well, if they don't, then I don't care about their freedoms either.

I was making the comparison because you were comparing the internet to the world. You can't (read: shouldn't) really do that. The internet is an American invention built with selfless American principals and ingenuity. Gifting it to to the world is one thing, but assume it's for the worlds benefit (as you did in your OP) is naive. The internet, as the free world knows it, is an American invention built in an American image using American resources in an American economy with American resources. It isn't compatible with Chinese or Iranian or Russian politics, and they struggle with that. That's their problem.

When I said "they don't care as much as you do" I meant to say "they don't care as much as you do about them." In other words, you're fighting for the rights of a populace that won't fight for it's own rights. Instead they'll stand by and watch you die in vain. There is no martyr-ism in giving the Chinese civil rights. They don't understand it and they don't want it. They want a strong labor market. They want cheap goods. They don't care about being able to call out jews on some insecure gab loaded with technical debt that prevents them from being secure. They simply don't fucking care. So you making any argument on their behalf is wasted. Especially on someone else in the US. Lets talk about the internet we created for ourselves and when the Chinese get off their asses and contribute to it we can worry about them. Banggood and Alibaba doesn't count. They never will. They are B class companies and in the absence of an A class company they would still rather look for another A to shadow than become one themselves. That's their business model and it ensures their survival in an unstable market. We don't worry about those problems because we don't have too.

So worry about us. You're trying to assert your first amendment right as a consumer over mine as a content aggregator. Our rights are equal in the scope of the law. Maybe because Facebook is publicly traded there is recourse for you, but demanding FB "switch off" content moderation for the first amendment is short sighted. You signed a fucking agreement. Period. If you want to post about how jews are awful, do that on your own dime. Not Zuck's, and certainly not mine.

If your shit didn't stink so bad maybe someone with a brain and money would come hang out with you.

The big, ostensibly neutral, communications monopolies need their censorship practices heavily regulated.

People with private blogs needs to be absolutely free to control commenting however they would like.

I believe that we can respect both of these positions easily, 99% of the time, with our court systems deciding on some of the grey in the middle.

Twitter doesn't even remotely have a monopoly on political communications.

What counts as a "private" blog? That seems like an arbitrary distinction.

Seems like a very pertinent distinction to modern democracy / society.

Unlike in the 1800 when everyone could just go the the town square or publish their own pamphlet and have almost equal reach, today most discussion happens in 2-3 outlets: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

Whether those started as private companies, whether those are not public goods, etc, should be irrelevant. They have de facto captured a big chunk of the conversation that shapes the public opinion.

I'd argue the same was true for TV and newspapers in the 1900-2000 -- they had a disproportionate power of shaping public opinion, and a monopoly of control on it. That was bad -- and it was already said that "he who controls the mass media, controls democracy". Even if people still had the "first amendment right" to open their own newspaper (as if that's practical), or whatever.

But at the time, at least, newspapers and tv stations had limited pages and run time, expensive production costs, and it was at least reasonable that they couldn't include everybody's voice.

Today, services like Twitter, Facebook, etc, not only have small marginal costs for including another voice, but they encourage and actively want to add more (all) people in their platform. So there's no excuse (from that point) of censoring people.

There are a lot more than 2-3 outlets some of which have completely different and less restrictive acceptable use policies. For example I understand Reddit is huge, although I don't use it myself.

And there's always email.

The most popular websites in the U.S. where users share content are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram (Facebook's subsidiary), Reddit, Twitch, then arguably Imgur which is more a hosting site of images for other services, and maybe even iTunes for podcasts. You can monetize your content on most of these sites but if you get banned from say YouTube, your audience just dropped from the whole country to say half of the country. To compare to the real world, imagine if you were banned from speaking where half of the country lives. Besides the fact you can't get your message out even to those who want to hear it, but that your income is earned from speaking and now you can't reach your audience. These are real concerns for most content creators now that their voice and livelihood relies on these services. There is a point where we can decide these companies have too much control. Whether it be by site visits, % of total internet audience, or number of accounts/reach... YouTube has more accounts than the entire population of the U.S. Maybe that could be the threshold where we consider a company should be a 'public forum' or subject to meet certain free speech standards/regulations with their policies.

I have zero sympathy for entitled content creators who whine about getting demonetized. Earning some money from Youtube or Twitch might be a nice bonus but only a fool would rely upon it to live. If someone needs income then get a real job or start a company.

And for those that just want to get their message out, well it's never been easier or cheaper to start a web site on any number of different hosting services. If they can't manage to gain an audience on their own site then their content is crap. The percentage of traffic on other sites is completely irrelevant; any user can jump to another site with literally a single click.

I think you are underestimating the size of these companies. You say get a "real job" but YouTube pays millions upon millions of people and may be the largest employer by number of people paid. It is already a real job. There are many insanely huge YouTubers who have started their own websites and they have all failed with them. Even being the largest creator on YouTube they couldn't move traffic to their own website.

I'm not underestimating anything: traffic and revenue data is publicly available for most of those sites. Only a tiny fraction of content creators earn any significant income. Everyone else in the long tail are just picking up crumbs.

>There are a lot more than 2-3 outlets some of which have completely different and less restrictive acceptable use policies. For example I understand Reddit is huge, although I don't use it myself.

That's mostly a reason why Reddit (and others) should also be included in the list.

But even if we don't have all outlets, enforcing freedom of speech to say, the top-3 by users, is good enough for a start...

>And there's always email.

Yes, just like one is always free to think what they want inside their head, or tell it like it is, within their home.

I'm not talking about that, nor care about that "freedom".

It seems perfectly reasonable to set a (somewhat subjective) threshold and start treating companies that exceed it (in some way - e.g. number of users, % of coverage, revenue) as "public services" and controlling them more tightly. The precedent is well established (e.g. GDPR, breakup of Standard Oil, ...).

I’m confused. What technology did twitter replace? Oh it didn’t? This is completely new, the ability to communicate to this many people at once? Okay so what ancient rights are being trampled exactly? If anything we probably need to be censoring people on Twitter right now as it doesn’t seem to convince anyone of anything other than that the people on the other-side of their argument are sub-human.

Edit:

Also, it always riles me up when someone refers to social media as a “main communication” provider. What fraction of the population gets its political discourse off of Twitter?

In Q1 of this year, twitter had 68 million monthly active users in the US [0]. Hard to tell how many of them follow political discourse. But that’s 20% of the population (give or take) and it’s a substantial fraction.

I’m not sure how but I want that fraction to get before appropriate rights are defined and adopted.

The US common carrier rules were only enacted in 1934 [1] so it took a while before phone companies were forced to respect some US rights. Twitter is only 15 years old so it’s likely that this private company (and others) will be regulated just like the private telephone companies were regulated.

I had hoped that technology had advanced enough so respecting human rights would be embedded into the design. But now I think it will take laws and regulations which will inevitably, and sadly I think, also squelch innovation.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274564/monthly-active-tw...

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/201

Twitter does a loose definition of MAU, as most do. If it’s just logged in users in the past month, that’s going to include a boat load of duplicate/2nd/3rd accounts and bots.

Twitter themselves say monetizable active users are around 40% of worldwide monthly active users. Your statista link links to that. That takes your percentage of US down to 8%. Account for Twitter exaggerating or missing out on anything and the number of users who don’t follow political discourse and you’re likely below 5%.

I have no idea what the real MAU numbers of actual people are but I would think it's maybe a quarter (5%) of the population. There are so many bots on twitter along with company accounts, meme accounts, IFTT automation, etc. that I can't imagine it's 20% of the US using twitter each month.

If you count the number of people indirectly reading twitter through other media the number is much higher than 20%. And it's not just media directly quoting and crediting twitter; I imagine journalists get a very high percentage of their leads and sources through twitter.

I don't buy those numbers for a second, and I certainly don't buy that everyone on Twitter is following political discourse. I have a Twitter account, but I only follow a very narrow slice of systems programming news.

Even though Twitter and the like might be new technology, they are still replacing the old. People only have so much time in the day and all the other ways that people engage in politics compete with Twitter and the like. And it seems that Twitter and the like have won that competition. This means that a large chunk of political discourse now happens on services like Twitter.

Yes, but why isn't Twitter allowed to curate political content? They have a 1st amendment right to do so. Just like every newspaper before them got the right to curate who got published in their editorial section.

There is a difference between a platform and a publisher. Publishers can curate, platforms aren't supposed to.

As I understand it, whether social media companies are platforms or publishers forms the actual core and substance of this debate about "free speech."

edit Apparently there is no legal distinction between a platform and a publisher? It looks like this article may explain the confusion that I myself had. => https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190613/03172142391/once-...

> As I understand it, whether social media companies are platforms or publishers forms the actual core and substance of this debate about "free speech."

This is wrong. There is no such distinction between platforms and publishers and the opposite is actually true. The law explicitly states that website owners are not responsible for content provided by other parties and are also explicitly permitted to curate their platforms for what they deem to be objectionable content.

I don't think people are arguing that what Twitter is doing is legal or illegal, but whether it's morally good or bad, and whether it will promote a better society. These are understandably much less tangible problems.

There's still no difference between "publisher" and "platform". I see Twitter as a giant expansion of the Op-Ed section of the newspaper, not a telephone party line.

To whom is Twitter responsible? If shareholders/investors then it should do whatever seems most likely to make it the most money. If "users" then it should do whatever seems most likely to make the most users happy.

There are valid moral arguments on both side of the censorship debate, and ultimately it comes down to subjective judgement and a gut call by twitter management. There's a lot of people claiming moral imperatives and "what is right" as if "right" was an absolute and not like, their opinion, man.

They are clearly both, just as newspapers were before them (heck they had classifieds and personals while I was alive, that's a platform). The editorial section of a newspaper is a platform, but a highly curated one, because of resource constraints that a platform like Twitter doesn't have.

>>Even though Twitter and the like might be new technology, they are still replacing the old.

Which "the old" specifically? What did my great grandfather use to directly contact the Henry Ford and get into a flame war with him about how his newfangled "horseless carriage" was killing his equestrian breeding business?

>I’m confused. What technology did twitter replace? Oh it didn’t? This is completely new, the ability to communicate to this many people at once? Okay so what ancient rights are being trampled exactly?

What bizarro ideas people have.

Rights exist outside of technologies, technologies, media, etc are just different spaces to apply them.

Twitter, for example, can't treat people of color differently, just because it's a "new technology" and "thus" they should not have any expectation of equality there.

They have the right to be treated as equals, regardless of whether it's a new technology that does the treatment or an old one.

(Note also that what century/decade old laws based on a 3 centuries old constitution that's held as some holy scripture say, are not the be all, end all, and are not necessarily the same thing as what should be right in 2019. I say this cause Americans have the tendency to view everything under this lens, as if they can't possibly conceive of any improvements there, or as if that's even relevant to a global discussion).

>Also, it always riles me up when someone refers to social media as a “main communication” provider. What fraction of the population gets its political discourse off of Twitter?

A large enough for it to be actively targeted by political figures, political campaign advertising, and polling companies (heck, even foreign agents), and a large enough for it to have a big share in shaping public opinion.

So there's that.

I agree with you except for the last part about dismissing the power of social platforms to influence people through consumption of “news” and current events.

The president of the United States.

Expression is not public communication. Are you not conflating freedom of speech with freedom to be heard/reach an audience? Even 2 centuries ago, the US government wouldn't intervene to force newspapers to publish the op-eds of hateful people looking to grow their followers. Why would Youtube or Twitter have to?

> I can’t imagine anyone going through tweets from 2010 and actively reporting them, so it seems more likely that they must be using some algorithm ...

Moderation tools have been weaponized in the troll propaganda war.

Post an insightful and highly liked reply to a controversial topic, watch the likes roll in, and then suddenly go dark after about three minutes.

View the thread incognito, and the popular comment cannot be found.

Trolls brigade-block-and-report views they don't like, and your reply gets memory-holed until a human moderator can review it.

Hours or days later your comment gets restored, but the damage is done.

Of course troll armies are mining old tweets for any violation, so they can remove you from the conversation and manufacture the illusion of consensus.

> Why would Youtube or Twitter have to?

Comparisons with the old media always neglect to mention the unique protections these platforms enjoy. Unlike the old media, they aren't responsible for the content they publish.

If they'd prefer to be treated like publishers, not platforms, they should also have the responsibility of publishers, not the protections of platforms.

But as long as they remain platforms, they have a unique responsibility to respect the freedom of speech of everyone.

Because there’s no objective definition for “hateful”. It can easily be defined as “content I don’t like”, leading to arbitrary silencing of voices.

As always, the question becomes: who decides which people are to be silenced?

>Why would Youtube or Twitter have to?

Because combined, Google, Twitter, and Facebook have an effective monopoly on modern public discourse.

No they don't. A huge section of the population is not on Twitter and gets their news from old media.

"gets their news from old media."

which extensively quotes Twitter and gets much of their leads and sources from Twitter.

No they don't. Those companies can't erase you from the internet, only from their own individual platforms that they own and operate. A "monopoly" would imply that without the use of these sites you could not be heard, but this is obviously false, not only because there are many other similar sites out there, but also because nobody is stopping you from creating your own blog or platform or whatever you like. No, your site won't be as popular as twitter, but so what? Your hyperlinks work just as well as twitter's.

I don't think the monopoly the previous user mentions implies you can't speak but it implies you can't be found. For instance if you don't show up on Google, yes you can tell your friends to visit your website but you can't tell everyone where your website is. If you get banned from one or more of these websites, it is like there is a town square and 99% of people are huddled in one side of the square and you are standing in the far corner where no one can hear you even if you shouted. Maybe you can tell your friend to go walk over to that side and tell people to come over to this side, but no one wants to come over to this side because they want their voices to be heard over where the rest of the town is having a conversation.

I would also argue that unfettered access to incorrect information is also a massive problem for democracy.

Unfettered access to information requires unfettered access to incorrect information.

The power to decide what's "correct" will be abused to block correct information that damages someone powerful.

Nobody is well informed on all issues. You just can't be. You can't fact check everything.

We live in a world where the authority we defer judgement to has split up, into less balanced partisan entities. Not saying pre-internet news were unbiased, but public sources tended to be better curated. (At least where I live, I'm sure Fox has always been this horrid)

This is why filter bubbles and building psychological profiles for everyone to target them with political messages and free access to all information, correct and incorrect, does not work. It's a net negative to democracy and this neo-greek ideal of the marketplace of ideas is a sham.

I have no idea how to fix this, but it needs fixing.

A lot of partially informed individuals en masse may act more "informed" on the whole than what you're giving them credit for. It's also a less brittle organizational structure than having a few authorities who are supposedly totally or mostly well informed. If any of the authorities aren't actually as well informed as you'd thought, it has a large impact. It would take a very substantial number of peers in a peer to peer system to create the same sort of miscalibration.

And yet, look at how well the average Trump voter is informed about Trump.

This might work if you leave the system undisturbed, but there are other forces involved in this process your model doesn't account for.

It's the equivalent of buying out EC2 instances for an hour or so and "recalibrating" your P2P mesh. And it wouldn't fix itself.

Precisely, the marketplace of ideas has become the cesspit of lies and we need to pull ourselves and everyone else out of it.

What comes after we pull ourselves out of the "marketplace of ideas?" With no marketplace where will original thought come from?

The whole point of the marketplace is to sift through all the bad stuff and find the diamonds in the rough. You can't have a market without bad stuff, and the benefit of having a market is that it finds good stuff.

A world with less bad ideas is a world with less good ideas.

It's not impossible to create. It's not necessarily bad. But it would make our society much less dynamic.

I'm pretty sure people like Steven Crowder do not contribute to any diamond discovery process, can YouTube deplatform/demonetize him yet?

And don't start with "but how do we tell them apart" - sometimes it is very clear cut.

And what is access? Access of parties to shove information down my throat? Access for parties with deeper pockets to drown out real information?

If information would be in a book and I could go to a library and seek it out - don't ban anything!

But if messages are replicated in covert manner with lots of money thrown at news anchors, op-ed writers, sponsoring, bribes, syndication, SEO it is a different story.

And money is not the only problem. Cognitive psychology has progressed a lot and it is possible to engineer "information" that is very likely to spread in a viral manner. Push the right reader gratification buttons and off you go leveraging the social networks.

It is important I believe to distinguish between information and data. Information must be accessible but what is happening is we are flooded with replicated data containing almost no information. It used to be that volume of data was often a reasonable proxy for importance - not anymore so. I think people are catching up to this but unfortunately it also makes it easier to sell crackpot theories.

Stop being so dramatic. No one is shoving information down your throat. You can log off Twitter.

“You can log off Twitter” is not an argument that is compatible with the idea that Twitter is so important that moderation is tantamount to censorship.

But Twitter isn't that important, so the whole argument is moot.

Right, so the hypothesis is that we can’t have unfettered access to information.

So who do you propose gets to spoonfeed the masses with their okayed content?

That is a terrifying argument.

Even if one were in favor of unfettered access to information generally, it doesn't logically follow that an individual publisher such as Twitter is obliged to offer or facilitate unfettered access. The WSJ isn't obliged to offer access to fake stock listings alongside the real ones.

And unless you are okay with your bank providing unfettered access to your ID, account number and PIN, I'd imagine that you are not in favor of general unfettered access either.

Democracy may require access to information but civilization requires that information not be universally shared.

That's a straw man to suggest anyone is arguing for divulging all passwords or pins. Likewise no one is arguing twitter should facilitate access to PHI, etc. There's a clear and obvious difference between political statements and passwords and its bad faith to argue otherwise.

The difference between WSJ and Twitter is that the WSJ has competitors (NYT, Politico, even Fox News and crazies like Infowars) whereas Twitter does not. We live in a world (unfortunately) where the President of the United States and his administration heavily relies on Twitter - it's no longer someones backyard social group. For Twitter to play the censor is no longer acceptable, although we still expect twitter to keep its users safe from harassment and mobs.

So yes, it's unacceptable for Twitter to play the censor or ban people from public service announcements or policy statements by their elected officials. If Twitter is going to facilitate administration statements and my local government agencies letting me know critical information, they are no longer an entirely private platform.

I’m not sure what the solution is — it’s possible to identify a problem (that humans don’t seem to be able to properly process the amount of information we currently have access to) without knowing the solution.

I agree that having restrictions on information access and communication is a slippery slope in the non-fallacious sense, at least with the solutions we usually discuss.

But I’m optimistic that the failure conditions might be more specific than they seem to the current state of affairs — self curated social graphs of unlimited size and bandwidth. Perhaps dramatically limiting scope, connectedness, or agency over whose views you have access to (think true random, not AI) would lead to less or different issues. I don’t know, because these experiments would take a lot of investment, but the point is that it may not be as black and white as you make it out to be.

pre internet weren't the masses spoonfed okayed information by network tv and newspapers?

Obviously the natural answer is the companies who started first and developed these products that are now super widely used.

I’ve only heard two arguments- let Twitter do what they want (viva Capitalism!) or have government regulate (viva Socialism!).

I wish there was more thought given by Twitter, and others, to just self apply free speech rights and stick to using the current legal system to restricting speech. There’s a ton of law to protect people from damaging speech (harassment, slander/libel, dangerous threats, etc). It’s quite possible that Twitter can just use a more rational standard for their process.

It's not a binary switch. The government frequently regulates entities and restricts them, especially large monopolistic ones - "Hey Spectrum, you can't impose bandwidth caps because you swallowed all the competition". There's no reason the Government can't allow Twitter to still operate as a private, for profit platform (Capitalism) and restrict their limiting or banning of accounts (recognizing that they're used widely for disseminating official policy positions and governmental information among other things and there's no competition).

What the Government can't do is tell Twitter what statements it is or is not allowed to publish (authoritarianism).

Who? People who believe as I do politically, of course.

Is it okay to put plans for building nuclear centrifuges on the internet? No.

There are hundreds of scientific journal articles and patent applications available for nuclear centrifuges. The US government even publishes some of them. Plans alone are useless without the raw materials, parts, and tools.

Exactly this. Therefore it logically follows that democracy depends on access to incorrect information.

Clearly the mods should remove andy_ppp’s comment immediately, if not be held liable for hosting it in the first place. </s>

Absolutely correct. Incorrect information is a huge problem for democracy.

The best technology that we have right now to fight incorrect information is an educated citizenry of people free to decide the facts for themselves and debate them openly.

We can invest in this proven technology by improving that education, freedom, and open debate.

>incorrect information

This is easy for "world is flat vs round". There is much more nuance to, for example, "this is discriminatory vs not".

Which in part stems back to anonymity. Information becomes easier to filter and fact check when the purveyors and the sources are not anonymous. People also tend to act more civil when not anonymous.

But, a lack of anonymity brings a whole host of other problems.

Removing anonymity doesn't solve anything. People post and share all sorts of lies and fake news under their real names. They just don't care.

Preserving anonymity is essential for whistle blowers and other vulnerable people.

Anonymity is the keystone of free speech. There is no freedom of speech without the freedom to speak anonymously.

And if I run a 10,000 bot network - should my speech be free?

Have you heard of the Federalist papers?

Sybil attacks are a consequence of anonymity combined with low cost of identity creation, and inability to distinguish between different identities.

The fix for Sybil attacks generally involves making identity creation more expensive, or providing a means for distinguishing more valuable identities. On HN, for instance, the karma score is one such mechanism.

These systems can work without removing anonymity.

And I never said anonymity was easy or without trade-offs.

I don't want a Ministry of Truth filtering what I'm allowed to hear. In a functional democracy, education and robust debate are supposed to be the defenses against misinformation.

Most western democracies long since scrapped proper education because it's easier to win the support of the population with propaganda^H public relations than it is to make a reasoned argument.

Unfortunately looks to me that if you do not have a Ministry of Truth, you end up with a society where private actors pump people with soma[1]. Personally, I am willing to accept a restricted version of Ministry of Truth to avoid that outcome.

[1]See Huxley, Brave new world.

>Unfortunately looks to me that if you do not have a Ministry of Truth, you end up with a society where private actors pump people with soma

This is not a new phenomenon. There have always been snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves. Societies that have very strict control over what people can and cannot say (think the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea, where you could be jailed for counter-revolutionary speech or misleading the people) still had lots of problems with snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves, but they also had a problem with people going to jail (or worse) for saying "the state is the cause of this famine", "the state killed a bunch of innocent protesters", "I disagree with the current economic system", "I am angry that the state took my land from me and gave it to someone else", "the rent is too damn high", "maybe we shouldn't build so many nuclear weapons", and "I don't support Chairman Mao/Uncle Joe".

I will assume that any Ministry of Truth that you would support would set out to be expressly non-political at its inception, but giving any one organization the power to restrain the expression of ideas is openly inviting those with an agenda to attempt to co-opt it into suppressing opinions and arguments critical of their agenda. This is an inherent drawback to giving anything power - it inherently becomes political even if the original intent is for it to not be political.

I would rather live in a society where snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves are punished after they commit their crimes than have a single person's freedom to say "fuck the government" suppressed because they misquoted a statistic.

>Personally, I am willing to accept a restricted version of Ministry of Truth to avoid that outcome.

Every loves this idea right up until the point they realize that their own and the Ministry's opinions do not align.

The Ministry of Truth has coercive power. They can arrest you, jail you, torture you, or kill you -- legally -- for the content of your thought and speech.

Private sector actors cannot do that.

Sorry, not answering all comments, but we do already have this kind of restricted Ministry of Truth. For example, there are libel laws and you may end up in jail for the content of your speech. And that is in my humble opinion a good thing. (With the painfully obvious disclaimer that I guess needs to anyhow be added in these kind of discussions, no, not all restriction of speech is good, there are really murky waters there when you want to draw the line, And that is why we have a thing called Democracy.)

We do not have a Ministry of Truth that restricts and punishes people before for what the have not yet said. We have the rule of law that gets involved after the fact.

It's a scylla and charibdis problem to be sure - though personally, I'd prefer we err on the side the Soma.

But what's wrong with what we do now, private actors who try to build reputations as having possession of truth and we muddle along with those who sound most plausible to us? Sure, some people choose the wrong sources, but that seems a smaller risk than Everyone choosing the wrong source.

How would that work in practice? The Mainstream Media is obviously partisan and serves to protect the strong (e.g. Iraq WMD, Epstein). The government (and associated institutions, e.g. jails, court, FBI, NSA.) as well (e.g. Epstein, Snowden, Assange). Who would you "trust" to pick and choose the information you're allowed to see?

In BNW it was the government that established the system with soma for workers. It wasn’t a function of private industry.

IIRC, Soma was voluntary, a recreational drug akin to marijuana. So I'd err significantly on that side.

That point of view works in a perfect world, but there are some ideas that don't deserve a seat at the table.

Drinking bleach will not cure autism, but their are desperate parents out there ready to walk into that bear trap and opportunistic people are ready to spring it.

>there are some ideas that don't deserve a seat at the table

Is it possible to enumerate the set of all ideas that cannot be expressed, and if so, how do you enumerate this set, and who has the power to determine the members of this set?

Advocating that someone should have their child drink bleach to cure their autism is a despicable act, and is likely criminal after the fact, but that's the difference here - it's criminal after someone takes action on it.

Quoting Justice Brandeis from Whitney v. California:

>Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. To justify suppression of free speech, there must be reasonable ground to fear that serious evil will result if free speech is practiced. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the danger apprehended is imminent. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the evil to be prevented is a serious one. [...] If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.

They should still be allowed to be seen but should be heavily caveatted as NOT TRUE if we know they aren't. Another good one is the reporting on vaccines causing autism, but we all know vaccines save millions of lives.

I can’t think of any entity whose NOT TRUE label would mean anything to me. And I think that I try to understand topics.

I can’t imagine the flack that would come when some robot labels trans people’s gender identity as NOT TRUE based on biological grounds.

I think that any group labeling things TRUE and NOT TRUE will only make things worse.

Twitter obviously should be the ones to determine what is true and false.

> there are some ideas that don't deserve a seat at the table.

If you don't like an idea you're free to ignore it. Freedom of speech is really about the freedom for each of us to hear. What you're really advocating is that you don't want other people to have access to ideas with which you personally disapprove. This is such an authoritarian notion that I don't understand how it has become a socially acceptable idea to espouse.

> I don't understand how it has become a socially acceptable idea to espouse.

We got fed up of people being murdered because they're black, Jewish, gay, trans, female, etc etc.

Yeah, suppressing free speech is NOT going to help with any of those tragedies. In fact it contributes to them. The reason gay people were able to come out of the closet was because of free speech. Being able to talk about the issue.

You want to cut out the only escape hatch people have. You think we have it all figured out... what is right and wrong. That we are able as a society to correctly label what speech should be allowed, and what shouldn't. But we aren't. We need free speech in order to figure out right-from-wrong. To hash things out verbally and in written form so that we DONT act out horrible ideas.

A lot more will die because you decided amoral corporate entities should have total control over national discourse. My ancestors killed to prevent a situation like that.

Do you think the education level is adequate enough to protect against people constantly propagating lies?

If you want someone to decide what's true because you believe the people aren't capable of doing so for themselves, you've already given up on democracy.

I would like there to be better education and yes, some kind of authority that we can warn people that the information has been reviewed and is likely to be incorrect or lies. Objective reality does exist as does scientific concensus on for example climate change.

Fact checkers and scientists already exist, but in a democracy, the people have the right to choose whether to listen to them or not.

Are you saying you'd prefer that people be forced to follow their decisions? Or that information they declare "incorrect" be banned? That's not democratic, that's authoritarian.

Per my parent post:

>Most western democracies long since scrapped proper education because it's easier to win the support of the population with propaganda^H public relations than it is to make a reasoned argument.

In my mind, the correct response to the rise of FAKE NEWS (aka: yellow journalism, sensationalism, propaganda, public relations, advertisement) is to focus on teaching critical thinking skills, not to have a censor that says 'You can say this thing but not that thing'.

Will bad people have harmful, self serving opinions? Yes, they will. That's part and parcel of living in a free society.

I think you can start a competitor but the lack of censorship is actually an anti-feature for most people as, at least in the modern internet, it seems to get your site filled with white supremacists. The social space is actually fairly crowded right now with Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Discord, the chans, Twitter, and a ton bunch of smaller ones (like HN) and they almost all fall into similar "censorship" models and I think that just reflects a the market right now (which is an interesting balance because neither side is really happy).

You're missing the obvious solution ... not being authoritarian vile people that censor what others legally say and do in public.

It has been disconcerting to me for a long time now, even back when I was told that I do not know how the internet works when I foresaw the very outcome we are currently in, back about 20 years ago now. What has really happened here, is a kind of fascism (the alignment of state and industry) not by the grass roots so much as it was approached in the past, but through a top down consolidation, concentration, and now ever increasing and tightening control over all aspects and manners of freedom and liberty, under the guise of doing things for others' best interests, which of course always align more closely with the interests of the power seeking than the blissfully unaware recipients of this benevolent good intention of the power hungry.

I do not foresee a positive future at this point, because the very mindset of the trend curve has solidly crossed with the power broker curve, and there is ever weaning realization that the only way to resolve these matters in anything but a violent manner is that everyone be allowed the God given rights that the US Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to the Constitution) prohibits the government from violating.

Those include free speech and assembly (of any kind, regardless of whether you agree with it), freedom to arms to protect yourself from the very government mob that demands to take the right to protect yourself from it (it's a self-fulfilling and self-validating argument that is rather genius), and other inalienable rights that are innate to actual Americans (and anyone who were to adopt the same) and God given (which you presumably should not and do not prescribe to if you do not believe in God from which they are unavoidably and declaratively derived) that are not necessary to be listed here for reasons of brevity and their only tangential relation to the topic.

It has always surprised me, and it is one of the most interesting questions for me, how that a presumably extremely logical and systematic cohort of humans as the ones assembled in this forum, would seemingly lack any semblance of a capacity to understand the consequences of making fundamental changes to a system, in what appears to be some bizarre and inverted assumption that no change to a system will in any way result in negative outcomes. Unless of course the very prime assumption is a desire to sabotage the system, whether you are a knowing and willing participant, or just a placed saboteur ... a rube, not in any way understanding that he was placed to spread his negative impact on the system from within.

Even the most rational people can get dragged into systems of reactivity and emotion. There are very few truly rational voices left today, since the new description of "rational" is non-religious and liberal.

The problem that all “We should have unrestricted free speech” (and the more general case of “unrestricted freedom to X”) proposals must always solve, is what to do when a group of individuals acting in bad faith use that freedom to effectively deny other people that freedom.

Lots of fascists demand freedom of speech. And what do they do with that freedom? Assemble mobs online to harass people who say things they disagree with. Or take control and then ban books and “intellectuals” and so forth.

If you don’t like the example of “fascists,” there are plenty of other examples you could pick, like press barons. History abounds with examples of people using democracy to acquire enough power to uninstall democracy.

This is a hard problem. There are no easy or simple or ideologically pure solutions. Absolute freedom of speech leads to people using that freedom to deny other people that freedom. Absolute freedom to own a weapon leads to people using that freedom to deny other people the freedom to live, much less own a weapon of their own. And so on. And so forth.

TL;DR:

There are no simple solutions to problems involving systems where people are prepared to act in bad faith to abuse the simple solutions.

My personal claim: The above does not mean, of course, that there are no solutions, or that the only options are “unrestricted and absolute freedom” versus tyranny. It’s just that there are no simple solutions.

——

There is a reason that we are having this discussion on a forum that explicitly does NOT grant unrestricted free speech.

Let’s ask ourselves this question: What would Hacker News look like if we turned of spam filtering, moderation, flagging, banning, sorting comments by votes, greying out downvoted messages, &c.?

What value would it have as a community? As a source of information?

Would you find yourself feeling smarter and better educated about an issue after reading the comments on a subject? Or would you feel like you lost 50 points of IQ to toxicity?

Would you consider it a good use of your time to independently verify each and every claim people made? What about disproving known rubbish claims?

How would you feel about logging in every day and having the exact same debate with the exact same people who seem to have an infinite amount of time available to make false claims?

> If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), us normal human beings need the right to appeal, public auditing, bright line rules, and due process rights.

At least in Germany, people can sue Twitter and Facebook to have their accounts re-opened. Of course, this option reduces the value of due process rights as one has to be able to fund a lawyer and the court fees...

Twitter is not a democracy. They are a public for profit company first and foremost. They can censor, modify, change anything they want at any point in time. Expect that. Cash is king.

It is not a company operating in a vacuum but a public company in a democracy and is subject to the laws (and in general, political will) of the society. If companies were free to "censor, modify, change anything they want at any point in time", then we would not have anti-trust laws or close scrutiny of dominant companies.

Ultimately, companies don't exist in a vacuum. If they don't adhere to the political will of the society they operate in,

Vacuum has nothing to do with it. Twitter is a platform, you are not compelled to use it. Don’t like it that is fine but popularity doesn’t imply it requires to operate any way other than the way it decides as a company. Why do we expect companies to act like a government we have control over?

If POTUS communicates via Twitter primarily, there’s no option to ‘not use it’. Twitter crossed the line between just a company and a utility a while ago, together with Google and Facebook.

People don't have TV, how did presidents ever give addresses to the people before? There most certainly is an option to not use twitter, I know lots of people in that demographic. What line did twitter cross?

Verizon is a public company would you allow them to block you from making a call because of a text you’ve sent 9 years ago?

Your question implies you consider Twitter a common carrier. Verizon as a phone company falls under common carrier rules. Twitter (social media) does not and therefore, its not the same.

If we want to reclassify social media as common carrier we need regulation to do so but that is not how the internet or social media companies work today. Sadly the internet in of itself doesn't even fall under common carrier.

I understand I think when you have a monopoly over a communication medium common carrier laws should apply even without legislation.

The problematic case here is that all other common carrier are funded through service chargers where social media is funded through advertising and other revenue streams.

That said it’s not like social media companies aren’t at fault here too they hide behind the notion that they are a common carrier or a publisher when it suits them as in when they don’t want to be directly liable for the content on their platform.

On the other hand they moderate content to appease advertisers even when there is no direct pressure to do so like in this case.

My personal opinion is that Twitter should not ban anyone, if the Twits are sufficiently offensive (not in a personal manner but rather a legal one) then law enforcement should handle it like it would handle any other type of abusive or offensive communication.

If I send you a death threat via the post the postal service won’t ban me the police might come tho if you report me.

> when you have a monopoly over a communication medium

Twitter does not have a monopoly over internet communication.

It’s like saying that Time Warner doesn’t have a monopoly over the electromagnetic spectrum, while technically true in practice in some areas they do.

Twitter is a crucial social communications platform for large enough portion of some societies to treat them as a monopoly.

How is twitter in any way "crucial"? Just because twitter is popular does not mean it's crucial.

Twitter doesn't have a monopoly over communication. Whats app, facebook, gchat, skype, word press blogs, reddit, there are a slew of other communication mechanisms beyond just twitter.

> I understand I think when you have a monopoly over a communication medium common carrier laws should apply even without legislation.

Twitter is not a monopoly or a common carrier. They are a website with a complimentary app that will show you website data.

If they have become the de facto public square, an integral location to participate in public society, then they should be subject to society's whims.

There's no reason that those whims must be executed through market instead of through government.

> Why do we expect companies to act like a government we have control over?

Because people always have control over the companies serving them, as it should be. Without people exerting control, we won't have - antitrust regulations, civil rights legislations, ADA, EPA regulations, Clean Water Act, Financial regulations etc. And I believe those regulations were essential towards making a better society.

Mind you, I am not advocating for a communism-style abolishing of private property. But neither do I want to see a libertarian wild west of no government control. That is just other extreme. What we have currently seems to be a good trade-off, where companies have a lot of freedoms but political will can step in occasionally to demand changes to the way they operate.

>It is not a company operating in a vacuum but a public company in a democracy

The US is not a democracy. It is a Constitutional Republic. The Constitution limits the Governmental Powers to make laws restricting speech, the Constitution does not give individuals the right to use corporate places of business or platforms to disseminate their speech.

It isn't just a place of corporate business, though. That's why Trump was not allowed to block people.

Twitter shouldn't be able to, either.

> The US is not a democracy. It is a Constitutional Republic.

This is facile: it is both, and there is no contradiction.

> the Constitution does not give individuals the right to use corporate places

Certainly it does: the right of free association. But that's not what you meant; you meant that the Constitution does not compel the corporate place to allow individual speech. Which is true but incomplete, since we have other laws currently about a related concept, "common carriers". The debate is much higher level than the Constitution: it's about how far to extend the idea that a private conveyance has become so essential to public use that it is subject to regulation. (Meaning, yes, that some of the private entity's rights are curtailed.)

>This is facile

It is basic 7th grade civics, Section 4 of the Constitution:

>The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government

Founding Father John Adams:

>"No determinations are carried, it is true, in a simple representative democracy, but by consent of the majority or their representatives."

The word "democracy" appearing in the Constitution: 0

Extra fun fact, the US is not the first Constitutional Republic, it is the 2nd behind San Marino.

> there is no contradiction

If you used democratic republic there is not, where the people vote and elect the representative leaders, then there is no contradiction. But democracy comes from Ancient Greece where all citizens with a right to vote directly decided the issues with votes, issues were not decided by elected representative. Its a significantly different form of government not just a typical HN pedantic point.

>the right of free association

The right to associate has nothing to do with accessing corporate property to disseminate your speech.

The comment was made specifically with that in mind. The parent was saying that therefore, given their influence and ability to manipulate participation and discussion, that's a problem for democracy.

I don't know what your comment added to the discussion. Does anyone know?

Twitter do not seem like a firm motivated primarily by profit. There are lots of things they could have done in the last decade that would have had nothing to do with censorship but which would have resulted in far higher revenues.

Lies. Governments and critical institutions publish information, and court feedback, on Twitter.

Everyone is compelled to use Twitter. Its success, influence, and profit, derive largely from its semi-official adoption by so many corporations and government actors.

It isn't private, and if it wants to be, it can't be used for public business.

If there were no alternatives to twitbooktubeit perhaps you would have a point. However, if you don't like the policies of twitter, go to reddit. If you don't like the policies of reddit go to voat. If you don't like all the terrible people on voat, host a forum on a VPC instance.

Your position is basically "I think platforms should be compelled to host every bit of nonsense emitted by every user." The freedom is provided by the multitude of choices!

I think the idea you can make rules for speech that are impartial and universally accepted is an insane idea which shows no signs of being tractable [1]. Despite attempts to quantify speech, every moderation decision is arbitrary at some level, and preserving choice of moderators seems much more important than arguing over rules.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/world/facebook-moderators...

Gab is trying that, and keeps getting shut down by hosting providers and payment processors that are believing outright lies.

The most recent one I'm aware of was Apple removing them from the app store, which here was a worthless virtue signal because Gab is now entirely on the Fediverse - the app was a clone of a common github repo, of which there are dozens not being removed.

So it really does seem like any real competition is not allowed anymore.

> normal human beings need the right to appeal, public auditing, bright line rules, and due process rights.

Why? Who cares if someone gets banned from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc? It isn't a big deal. I can see it as annoying, but it doesn't truly matter to anyone without some type of social media addiction. If "censorship" is the problem, we should support the establishment of government run internet forums that would be legally obligated to the serve the interest of the people rather than trying to arbitrarily steer certain popular websites into moderation strategies that don't align with their business or political prerogatives.

It matters to me.

Linking to the people behind the design is a recipe for violence.

I already know people in security who get death threats. I can't even imagine what it'd be like for people in moderation.

It's like how the New York Times has always published everything anyone sent them.

Oh wait.

(They aren't quite directly comparable, but they are for the point you are making, where one side of the equation is popular attention...)

"The market", however, is not some magic entity than can fix things. The market is you, me and him and her. The market is people. If people would be talking about gab.ai as free-speech alternative to censorious Twitter, it would work as such. If people would insist that gab.ai is a neo-Nazi site where only violent psychopaths about to commit mass shooting are visiting, and should be banned everywhere, then "the market" would not fix any problems. The market is us, so if we want less censorship, we should be actively supporting platforms that have less censorship, and actively fighting platforms that have more of it.

> If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms

We're not "going" to have it. We already have it. Well, maybe not ISPs, but definitely "Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc."

> It's not wrong for Twitter to have rules to protect the weak from the strong, and individuals from the mob

When Gandhi was asked "what do you think about Western civilization", he reportedly said "I think it'd be a good idea". In the same vein, it might be a good idea (not sure, but maybe) for Twitter to have rules to protect individuals from the mob and weak from the strong, but whatever Twitter has now definitely does nothing of the sort. I am not sure if it is possible at all to have such rules, but even if it were, Twitter does not seem to be interested in the least.

This is a great comment, I never could've worded it so perfectly as you did.

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