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Comment by dave_b | Hacker News Reader

Progressives of the past were all about the principle of free speech. Now that they have the power to control the public space, all they seem to care about are the technicalities of the first amendment.

Arguments like that in the comic revel in enforcing groupthink because the author thinks it will be used in a way he finds favorable. If you take a step back, it’s obvious that every censorious organization has very strong reasons for silencing badthinkers, and they use the same type of self-righteous language when justifying it. Just look at how The Chinese government talks about Hong Kong.

edit: Point being, either you uphold the principle of free speech, as argued in the linked article, or you end up with those who control the platforms dictating their own worldview. They will always come up with some smug justification for why society will fall apart if they don’t, and anyone who’s silenced deserves it anyway.

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We cant have it both ways.

On the one hand, Twitter, Facebook, et al. are "basically" town/public squares - they are also private companies. So we either regulate and minimize private companies ability to silence speech as they see fit, which is their right - or we allow them to exercise their own rights, thus bending to the masses and appealing to the lowest common denominator through censorship.

Or we move on. Mastodon and the like seem to show promise. Reddit is around for something in between Mastodon and Facebook/Twitter, although it is ultimately susceptible to the same problems as the latter. Snapchat isn’t nothing, and while TikTok has problems stemming from its country of origin, it also isn’t nothing.

I would say we have a lot of choices of platforms. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn aren’t the end of all social networks and social platforms, they’re just parts of a larger ecosystem.

So maybe we can have it both ways. Maybe social platforms can regulate themselves into being the places they want to be, and we can move on when they don’t serve us anymore. Free markets are actually pretty wonderful in that way insofar as they provide us choices and we can take them or leave them.

What we have right now is due to a largely unregulated free market.

A large number of choices in how we choose to socialize online? I can post this reply to you as easily as I can text my best friend or mother.

The problem I have with these discussions is that we aren’t talking about it in a more nuanced manner. The problem with Facebook and Twitter and their kind isn’t their size, magnitude or shape on the public discourse. If it weren’t them, it would be partisan newspapers and newsletters and cable networks pretending they have integrity and objectivity that they don’t. I’m sure they have some measure of integrity, I’m sure they strive to be objective, but I vastly prefer when people And networks fess up to where their biases lay.

Well Facebook and Twitter destroyed what was status quo, fine, I have no problem with that. Have they contributed to negative polarization? That’s much less clear, but I’m leaning towards no. Negative polarization is near as I can tell, an old English tradition and near as I can tell, runs through Catholics, Protestants, Barkers, Quakers, Whigs, Jacobites, Revolutionaries, Loyalists, Federalists, Anti-Federalists, Federalists 1.5, Democratic-Republicans, Democrats, Whigs, Republicans, Unionists, Confederates, Progressives, just to name a few off the top of my head.

If there is a problem Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. it’s that they collect enormous amounts of data, not just directly but they buy and sell with data brokers and use that to confirm or reconfirm identities. This by itself wouldn’t even be an issue except that they are bad stewards of our personal data. That’s a problem, and one worth focusing on, but let’s not pretend they are anymore powerful than they are, or that they are a cause of our society’s rifts.

The splits in our society are real, but they are older than Silicon Valley. Technology will not fix them. Social media will not fix them. The only thing that will do anything about them, and only then, very slowly, is actual factual dialog between people like you and I, and the fact that you and I are even having this discussion is because we have a choice in how, when, where and with whom we would like to talk. This isn’t Facebook, and this isn’t the Post Office or the Forum in Rome and somehow we’re able to talk anyway.

I’d say that’s at least one point in favor of the free market.

What happens when there is collusion to exclude between all these supposedly separate platforms? I seem to recall a certain Jones guy who was deplatformed by nearly all the major social networks in a single day. Any holdouts (twitter) were thereafter hounded into submission by the media. The market aint working like it should I think.

Alex Jones.

He still has his radio show. He still has his website. He still has a Wikipedia page. I’m not going to go trolling through a bunch of social networks I don’t use to see if I can find the guy, but presumably he has a means of asserting an online presence somewhere besides his website.

I think his podcast was removed from the Apple Podcasts Directory, but if there’s a valid feed URL, then there isn’t anything stopping you from pasting the URL in to any podcast app.

That’s just online. Again, I don’t know the guy’s life, but there isn’t anything stopping him from having an active social life or a prolific writing career. I don’t like the guy, but are you going to tell me the guy has no options just because Facebook and Twitter kicked him out of their gardens?

I’m confused by your first paragraph. In what way do progressives control the public space? Republicans are far more powerful than progressives in all branches of government (and remember Democrat != progressive).

Corporations obviously dominate corporate space, which is a large sphere of life in the USA, and not at all “public space”.

So what’s left?

Media and entertainment. Leadership at social media companies (which control the current public square).

By “public space,” I meant the predominant avenues for public discourse (maybe not the best choice of words). Mainstream media, tech platforms, and universities are the specific things I had in mind.

We usually call that whole complex "the Cathedral". It fits with progressives' historical origin in the gradual politicization of new religious movements of all sorts.

Who's "we"?

Well given the setting, I'd assume it's the royal we: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_we

Probably the Dark Enlightenment.

It's a good term though...

The mainstream media is overwhelmingly owned by the rich elite, with deep connections to conservative politics.

The idea that the mainstream media is somehow overwhelmingly progressive is something conservatives like to parrot, but I've never found it to have any basis in truth. The "leftist" big media outlets are really centrist, at best.

As long as their politics is total control, their brand doesn't matter.

> The mainstream media is overwhelmingly owned by the rich elite, with deep connections to conservative politics.

I'm going to have to ask for a citation for that. Unless you are suggesting that supporting the interests of the rich elite is an essentially conservative position (a claim which both the rich elite and conservatives would deny).

If you look at the politics of all the people (executives and rank-and-file) working in the institutions of media, entertainment, and academia, you'll find that a significant majority are left of center given the generally accepted notions of left and right as they are used in contemporary American politics.

Supporting the rich elite is literally the basis of the current Republican party platform. Along with a not insignificant amount of xenophobia and distaste for the poor working class.

All of the major media outlets (which is what I am talking about, not academia or entertainment) are owned by big backers of the Republican party. It's publicly available information, look it up yourself.

> politics of all the people (executives and rank-and-file) working in the institutions of media, entertainment, and academia, you'll find that a significant majority are left of center

Where is the evidence of this? I know of no surveying so broad as to include the executives and 'rank-and-file' in media and entertainment.

Even if your claim is supported, we have 2 problems. The first is basically the "vegan waiters at steak restaurants" retort, which is to suggest that below the top executive level of the hierarchy employees have increasingly little power over their organisation, such that those at the bottom are like vegan waiters at steak restaurants who have no power to change the menu despite their politics.

The 2nd problem is basically that "left of center" != "progressive". The majority of the ostensibly left-leaning medial is still broadly pro things that progressives are against. Some examples would include single-payer healthcare, animal rights, public higher education, the Green New Deal, and anti-imperialism.

Ok fine, but I hope it's now a little clearer that it's weird to refer to actually private, corporate space as "public space".

It's I'd venture a symptom of a culture dominated by capitalism and corporatism, such that the former two things become so dominate that their presence is invisible. Malls and Facebook pages become "public spaces" in the minds of citizens even though they are spaces, public regulation notwithstanding, controlled by the rich and existing in the main to profit them.

It’s just a confusion between two different valid definitions of the word public, not some indication of the state of the culture.

Public/private can refer to government vs commercial, or it can refer to “out in the open for all to see” vs “the privacy of your own home.” “Public space” is a common phrase that uses the latter definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_space

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."

Which "principle" of free speech do you mean?

Absolutism: no speech is off-limits.

Maximalism: the range of ideas expressed must be maximized.

Those two ideals of free speech are incompatible. Variety of expressed views suffers immensely when people show up to attack all groups other than themselves.

And somehow, those people always show up.

Well said. There is certainly a place for the xkcd comic. It can be used to argue for the right of free association as well as corporate censorship. That progressives picked the latter as favourable shows a staunch regression in the quality of thoughts.

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