Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies
necpluribusimpar.net
necpluribusimpar.net
I also see far too many 'work from home' adverts in discussions in the Independent newspaper's comment section (on unrelated articles), and if they took a more censorious approach to such comments then the comment section would improve.
To an extent I support censorship, and according to what I believe censorship to be, almost everyone else supports it.
If this very comment had been about some unrelated topic, such as giving an opinion about who to blame or not blame for problems in the Middle East, it would be right for the comment to be censored from this discussion, and it would be censorship from a private company, censorship of a political viewpoint no less.
It's obtuse to pretend that it's confusing why one is acceptable and the other isn't. And it's not helpful to say that the lack of an unambiguous, unanimously accepted definition means that certain clearly reasonable actions can't be taken.
Opinions I don't like = legitimate moderation
-- John Stuart Mill
New realities need new quotes.
A lot is lost when a book-length discussion is reduced to a single sentence. In his work, there's a very thorough discussion of why this liberty is essential. I don't like how the grandparent used the quote so flippantly. Without the supporting context, it's a baseless statement that encourages low-quality discussion.
One of things Mill did really well is that he thoroughly described his opponents' position before arguing why it was incorrect. You haven't done that, which is why it's unclear what part of his argument is invalidated by improvements in communications.
>Now in recalling John Stuart Mill's passage, I drew attention to the premise hidden in this assumption: free and equal discussion can fulfill the function attributed to it only if it is rational expression and development of independent thinking, free from indoctrination, manipulation, extraneous authority. The notion of pluralism and countervailing powers is no substitute for this requirement. One might in theory construct a state in which a multitude of different pressures, interests, and authorities balance each other out and result in a truly general and rational interest. However, such a construction badly fits a society in which powers are and remain unequal and even increase their unequal weight when they run their own course. It fits even worse when the variety of pressures unifies and coagulates into an overwhelming whole, integrating the particular countervailing powers by virtue of an increasing standard of living and an increasing concentration of power.
(From https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repr... published 1965.)
The context was someone saying they have no problem with users flagging stories, as long as it's not the mods. I disagree, and I might just as well have said "personally, I don't like it either (when some of the hoi polloi take it on them to decide what the rest should discuss, insted of using the "hide" feature)". Instead I said it with a quote.
That doesn't "encourage" ignoring that context, a non-sequitur slogan like "new realities need new quotes", and equating any verbal or written statement, even lies or auto-generated spam, with persons holding an opinion.
Spam filters in particular are not censorship because they are ultimately just labelling devices. Because of their accuracy many people often accept and act on those labels automatically, but they don't have to, and actually recently Gmail's filters got terrible and so I have to check my spam folder all the time now.
In some cases spam filters flat-out reject messages and don't even show them to the recipient, not even in a spam folder. I understand the technical reasons for that (full storage and processing of spam is expensive), but, that gets much much closer to the border of censorship, with the only real difference being one of intent.
Sure, we can probably find one statement that most contemporary people would agree is wrong and shouldn't be allowed to be said. Like 99.99% of contemporary people.
But what percentage do we cut it off at? 75%? 30%? And why is it a popular vote to begin with? Is morality or ethics something that is relative to popular ideas or are there some concepts that are just plain right or wrong?
I'm not afraid of people saying stupid stuff. I'm afraid of people with the power to curtail speech. Because that invariably gets used against the public.
And "the freedom to do what is right" is not really freedom. You must have the freedom to do something stupid.
If it’s a political forum we expect all civil exchanges to be treated equally. So a proponent for Owls and a proponent for sawmills both get their say and one doesn’t get “deranked” or de-monetized because it’s not the popular opinion or the au currant opinion. We don’t expect one political candidate to be artificially ranked and another artificially buried in the results.
Now, if I’m on the Hillary blog, yes, of course I expect the org to manage the commentary to fit their narrative. I don’t expect Zuckerberg or Pichai to turn their orgs into the Hillary blog or the Donald blog.
Define civil :)
Take any hot button issue like guns, abortion, etc. where your stance on one side of the issue can be seen as immoral or life threatening to the other side. Take a passionate / borderline tweet from one side and you'll probably get a 50/50 disagreement on wether or not it's "civil". Now what? Block the tweet? Warn the user? How many people need to complain before it's considered a problem?
Now go a step further and look at the Westboro Baptist Church. They think that they're doing a public good by shaming those who have died (because they believe God punishes sinners and their families with death). They believe it's a sin not to tell the families that the recently deceased is a sinner. They believe they're communicating God's message. Now you'll probably get 99% agreement that it's uncivil. But now what do you do? Silence an unpopular opinion?
The problem is finding out where the line is for defining what's appropriate on a platform and what will be censored. Is it 50% + 1 consensus? 95% consensus? And who gets to decide? The users? The CEO? A board of censors?
These are tricky answers and different countries and companies draw the line in different places. But the devil is always in the details.
It would be nice if everyone agreed on what's civil and what's not, but unfortunately that's not the case.
But we’re seeing issues where things are not problematic but because people are guilty of thinking “wrong”. If I want to discuss international politics and think we should liberate/invade country X or conversely we should leave country X well alone, I should not get penalized for articulating a point of view.
One thing I don’t understand is, if I follow janeblow@ I should not get offended by her tweets. I have the power to unfollow her, I can block her. I don’t see why people’s reaction id to get janeblow@ suspended.
There are some people on the right and left that think that advocating for foreign war is problematic and counter productive. Some foreign wars in history have been justified and others have been out of greed or racism.
I think the point is we all draw the line in different places on what speech is appropriate which is why censorship itself is problematic.
That’s actually a great example of why viewpoint censorship is a _bad thing_, for everybody, including Twitter, you and me. Look, you and I both know that there are facts that are true that you can’t express for fear of being kicked off of public forums. In fact, even stating that there exist facts that are true but that you can’t express is toeing the line, even though nobody disputes that this is the case. Since you seem to be more or less pro-censorship, I’ll assume that you’re a bit left leaning, so here’s an example that’s suer to make you agree with me: imagine if publishing climate data somehow became (even more) controversial and people sharing (true, undisputed) global temperature readings found themselves being kicked off of discussion forums.
Now we have a situation where we have two sorts of people being deplatformed: the Westboro baptist church and people who think that the world is getting hotter. This paradoxically makes the WBC seem _more reasonable_ by association. Remember, censorship is retroactively self-justified - since it was censored, you don’t know what it is, just that it was something really bad, so it was bad enough to get deleted. We’re better off if anybody says whatever’s on their mind and, if it’s ridiculous, it gets mocked.
Does that leave some people who agree with ridiculous viewpoints anyway, no matter how often or thoroughly they’re debunked? Sure, but there are two possibilities: one, they’re in a small minority in which case they’re harmless or two, they’re actually a majority which suggests that they might actually have a point - and you, representing the intransigent minority, attempting to control them through censorship is EXACTLY why censorship should be opposed.
What gave you that impression? I was raising questions to show that any censorship (or definition of civil discussion) is problematic.
It's a tough problem because bad ideas can lead to bad things, but stopping good ideas can lead to bad things too. If we all agreed on what's good and what's bad this would be easy, but we don't.
I'd much rather live with the consequences of free speech than live with the consequences of censorship. But neither side should project claim it's a utopia.
HN doesn't ban discussion about encryption, which is a political topic. HN doesn't ban discussions about non-state-approved search engines, social media, and VPNs, even though in some parts of the world they're so "political", that they get people sent to "re-education camps".
Twitter's ban on political advertising suddenly reminded everyone how many things besides wars and elections are political. You can't advertise switch to green energy now, because that's about climate change, and that's political.
In practice "politics" ban means you still allow things that are political, but only ones that are ideologically aligned with the status quo.
The problem here is that bad actors intentionally take advantage of this by supplying an endless stream of 'civil' arguments for entirely abhorrent stuff. This includes usually feigning ignorance and claiming they're 'just asking questions'† when objections are raised, even though it's the tenth or fiftieth or five hundredth time the same thing has come up.
Of course bad actors can abuse this; though I've always felt it would be good for the derailing comments to be removed with a polite dm message explaining that the topic had been discussed previously with links to said discussion.
† https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/19/neo-na...
So while many vile groups like the nazis and others seeking power, there are many other groups who hold unpopular opinions even unpopular and illegal outcomes (as presently held by the public), I’m not sure we want to suppress that. Much of what we have today as acceptable discourse and so on is because we allowed those voices which were considered degenerate or unacceptable one way or another.
We don’t need a new dogma telling us the way to think correct.
Immediate thought: merging topics is drastically different from closing or deleting them.
Slightly off-topic below:
Generally speaking, I would love a technological solution for QA redundancy. Saw way too many long forum threads that have asked same/similar questions over and over. Not politics and not from bad actors, but e.g. reviews of new devices etc, where everyone and their dogs asks about, say, battery life, every 10 pages. StackOverflow-like QA platforms provide some structure to this, but are limited to objective answers. For example, there's no SO for book plot reviews/discussions and SO format isn't really appropriate there.
"I give a Catholic school leeway censor its students or professors to have a Catholic bias. It's on the label.
"It's another thing for USC to censor on a political left or right bias, without disclaiming such bias, or even professing a lack of bias. It's simply a dishonest influence on speech."
For instance, if there were a forum specifically about penis pills, and the discussion centered around penis pills, if the moderators selectively expunged certain pill brand mentions or alternative ideas about penis pills from the forum because they personally preferred a over b, or had a personal or business investment in a over b, that is censorship. If you wanted to discuss canaries or automobiles in this forum, they may tell you to move it back on topic. That isn’t censorship.
Similarly, many broad online platforms allow political speech already, it’s just some ideas and people, typically conservative, are being selectively filtered out of the conversation because they don’t want the greater exposure to the alternative but legitimate and contextual ideas or opinions.
That is dangerous. If the shoe was on the other foot politically, it wouldn’t diminish the severity it.
By that same logic, we should censor your comment, because this article is not about filtering bot/adspam from small niche forums; It's about mass censorship and manipulation of organic political opinions on platforms with billions of users.
IMO if you can't even try to use an alternative microblogging platform for fear of being labeled an extremist by "polite company", that's indicative of a much more serious societal issue.
The quote included in this article from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty explains the danger rather eloquently I think:
> Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.
If you don't care about "good"/"bad" decisions and just care about the legal bounds, just say so and dismiss the article out of hand. Your roundabout question just drags discussion down.
So where's the argument? Where's the discussion? Forgive me, but I don't find the above assertion interesting to discuss when virtually everyone agrees with it. The actual topic of interest is: how can we prevent Facebook from making such decisions over its own platform?
That's a pretty big question with a lot of angles. So I chose, for the sake of argument, to focus on what the parent commenter highlighted, because its specious premise raises issues with the author's overall premise:
> For instance, if you’re a journalist and you want to promote your work, there is simply no viable alternative to Twitter at the moment. No other microblogging platform comes even close to having the number of users Twitter does, and most of the alternatives are hotbeds of extremism, so that anyone who joins them is thereby disqualified in polite company.
In the history of our society there has never been free or equal channels of promotion, i.e. advertising or being featured in mainstream media. It has always been the case that if you didn't pay, or otherwise get noticed by mainstream media, you were unheard and/or considered to be part of a "hotbed of extremism".
So I ask of the author (and those who agree with him), if you want to argue that Facebook/Twitter should be compelled to not censor, then what sense does it make to assert people (journalists are not) have a right (legal or moral) to have their self-promotion be noticed, when that precedent does not exist? Moreover, it's just a flawed premise because I can think of journalists big (e.g. at the NYT) and small (e.g. former students of mine) who have paid careers in journalism without being active on Twitter. I contend that this is not just quibbling over minor facts, but an example of how the author's argument only makes sense by ignoring details of how the world actually works.
What does this one point have to do with the article's overall premise? He wants our society to change in a significant way, but he neither accepts the legal consequences that would follow, nor proposes an alternative framework that would be feasible. I don't disagree with that Big Tech Censorship is of huge concern. But I believe that if we want to change this status quo, we'd have to agree to give the government greater powers to regulate private industry and wealth individuals. The author doesn't want to grant this, rendering this entire discussion to be an inane impotent exercise.
You're proposing something that will kill the literal forum that you're posting it on.
The reason why the Founders – and subsequently, the courts – enshrined freedom of speech from government censorship, is because that is the most the government can enforce without violating other limitations and stipulations of the Constitution. It's not as if the Founders completely forgot to consider "Hey wouldn't it be nice if everyone had a right to be heard in our society?"
If the author wants this ideal to become reality, then he needs to accept giving greater power to the government (or propose a completely different paradigm). The fact that he apparently can't – possibly because he recognizes that increased powers would end up undermining freedom of speech – is the reason why things are as they are right now.
I downvoted you because this is a ridiculous claim. If you use a platform like Gab that embraces bigots and extremists perhaps, but that's not the only other platform.
Edited to clarify my opinion that only one of these two claims is ridiculous
You have to realize that most things can be viewed as bigotry and extremism. Look at how feminism and lgbt are viewed around the world - as extremism. Would you say twitter "embraces" bigotry and extremism because they allow feminism and lgbt on their platform?
It's a question about monopoly and fairness and the cultural values of america. Free speech is both a legal and a cultural concept.
If no one can restrict what gets published in their venues then as soon as a venue starts discussing stuff I don't like, I can spin up a shill call center or a guy with a thousand accounts and a copy of GPT2 and flood that venue with so much divisive moronicism that the voices that threaten me will be almost completely drowned out.
Worse, large open venues being flooded with low quality communications already happens even without any intentional censorship-by-flooding attack. ... providing great cover for these attacks. Especially savvy attackers can leverage the pre-existing populations of well meaning fools by shaping their messages to motivate fools into carrying on the disruption on their own.
If you think about it-- the classical view of censorship where someone outright silences you is nearly impossible online today in most of the world. It is extraordinarily hard to completely stop the spread of information that people want to spread. But at the same time, censorship that works by flooding out an idea or discrediting it by association with abusive nutballs has never been easier or more effective.
When we worry too much about private parties shutting down conversations in their own venues we risk improving the situation around an outmoded and somewhat ineffectual model of censorship at the expense of making a modern and highly effective model much worse.
The best I think we can do is foster an internet structure where everyone can have their own venues which they can operate under whatever rules they think are best, and everyone is free to move among them at the lowest cost possible. That way, effective moderation can shut down flooding attacks and voting-with-your-feet can shut down overly censorious (or overly passive!) moderation.
Unfortunately, the highly centralized world created by the popularity and network effects of sites like facebook, twitter, and youtube are the opposite of this. Instead of people being empowered to self-regulate abuse and migration being easy, people are disempowered and migration costs are high.
We can't have censorship free platforms because someone might spin up a thousand accounts. We need the NSA to monitor all communications because terrorists use the Internet. We should arrest 12-year olds for making finger guns because of school shooters.
But in this case as in so many, it's an off-topic argument, merely a distraction or an excuse for overreaching authority. No one here is arguing that someone who makes a thousand accounts shouldn't be restrained; that's simply not the topic under discussion, even if the word "censorship" can be stretched to include that topic.
In my opinion, yes, but I'd like to know what you think.
But in theory a platform could ban such content impartially. Should they? Should such speech be universally suppressed? I'd have to say no; if it were, who could criticize Wahhabism or Scientology?
Now I'd like to know what you think. Should "hate speech" directed at Scientology be suppressed?
Free speech as it is understood in the US applies to the government and the government can and does limit your rights when it comes to violence and time and place (e.g. you can't yell during a session of Congress). It's absolutely morally fine to do so and it does not infringe on freedom of speech in any way.
By "ignoring the unclear phrase 'hate speech'" you've ignored the very issue under discussion.
There are largely uncensored forums, like 4chan. That's actually what you get when you go there rather than having something that is heavily moderated but only in ways that you agree with, where you then pretend it isn't moderated.
And in fact, I'll fully support you having your own platform which is as uncensored as you want it to be. I wish you the best of luck.
What I don't support is you arguing that other people can't have their own platforms which restrict publication on their own platform however they see fit, including ways that you or I might disagree with.
People arguing that private parties can't limit the material posted on their own property are absolutely taking a position which is contrary to free speech. The power to exclude is just as important, if not more important, than the power to include.
If you'd like to argue that the dominance of a few platforms violates my assumptions and changes the tradeoffs, I'm not sure I'd disagree. But I think we should instead worry about fixing the monopoly problems rather than limiting private parties ability to exclude speech they disagree with on their own properties.
And when the mechanisms of communication are privately owned, freedom of speech can't exist if the owners censor those mechanisms.
Platforms (as opposed to publishers) should be treated like telephone companies or the mail or ISPs. They shouldn't even read the messages they carry, let alone censor them.
On the other hand, sites aren't required to be a platform, but if they choose to act like a publisher then they should be held responsible for the content they publish.
What then is the author's solution? One is never given.
Should FB resume its banning of sexually explicit, beheading, animal torture, and ISIS videos when it is a "utility"? And how will the product of FB change as a utility? In what sense is FB a utility other than a very common place people like to go to, like concerts or a sports stadium or something?
What is actually meant when we say "regulate technology companies built around communication as a utility"? How large before you become one? Is any app that has chat or public posting a utility now? What classifies? Is the only goal to make them dumb pipes? What other roles and responsibilities would the government hoist onto FB and require it do?
As soon as we can start suing them for the content they provide the sooner they will find resolution to it.
The same way they will get sued if they censor content that might be deemed socially important.
The NYT isn't a public utility nor a public broadcaster. I'm curious what you think would happen to the New York Times if they were to get sued in your imaginary hypothetical?
Editors can and have been jailed. They are ultimately personally responsible for what the paper published.
https://archives.cjr.org/opening_shot/opening_shot_july_augu...
And in any case, a publisher is different than a utility or a platform. Social media users are already punished for publishing illegal content (libel, copyright violations, etc). How does making Facebook a "utility" change that?
Same as newspaper vs postal service.
Only block content that is illegal, and do it on demand - so back to the days when the services like facebook were just a content aggregator, where filtering and curation was done by user, not for user.
Here’s an obvious one: break up Facebook. Easily splits into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
This is a conversation where people are not acting in detail but on generality.
What does moderation entail.
What are the rules needed
What rules for what type of conversations?
What does moderation mean.
What is an acceptable level of service ?
What is “service” in a web forum?
What’s actually wrong?
> Indeed, as conservatives often point out, the existence of a market imperfection doesn’t mean that government intervention is justified, if only because it may actually make the problem worse. But as many people don’t seem to understand, especially among libertarians, the fact that government intervention is not warranted doesn’t mean there is no problem.
If any “platform” censors beyond removing illegal or copyrighted content or spam, they should have their “platform” status revoked, and they should be considered a publisher.
This prevents such companies from using “platform” status as a cost saving mechanism to help them become large monopolies. Companies like Facebook would not have been able to take over so much of the market if they had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on curating content to prevent lawsuits, etc.
I also don’t think of this as some kind of punishment. It’s perfectly reasonable to want to set up some kind of publishing company that has user-generated content; it’s just not reasonable to expect such a company to grow to such a global scale as Twitter or Facebook.
Edit: added “spam” to reasons
What about spam?
And would this extend to marketplaces? If a company allows users to sell educational resources for kids, what would happen if they start removing items that clearly don't fit?
> And would this extend to marketplaces?
I believe these are already considered publishers ? In any case it's no different than how traditional bookstores work
People say this, I don't think it's true.
I think there is ambiguity around when marketing crosses into spam. If you look at different communities, even HN and Reddit, you'll find different opinions about what kind of promotion crosses that line.
Individual communities need to be able to make their own decisions on that, they don't need blanket rules applied across the board to all platforms.
Is it OK to do that to a marketing post?
(Incidentally i started using twitter in "view latest" mode and i prefer it - turns out their expensive algorithms were pretty useless for me)
I couldn't disagree harder. I'd go into detail, but a) I'm at work, and b) the fact that we disagree is evidence that there _is_ ambiguity.
For an example to the contrary, look at how many Wikipedia articles get deleted as 'self-promotion' even when they're just simple informational entries about a business or semi-notable person.
Generally (and perhaps ideally), I like the idea of more visibility/transparency into what algorithms (and human moderators) do.
But I think it's worth noting that, pragmatically, there are at least a few minefields here...
- Providing full transparency into what gets flagged as spam is going to make it a lot easier for spammers to model, evade, and notice changes in the spam-identification code and practices.
- Perhaps you were imagining this being temporary, but the operational feasibility of keeping all of this spam in-platform ultimately depends on signal/noise ratio, scale, profitability, and time horizons. It's one thing to bear the burden of storing 1% of your plaintext post volume for one year--it's quite another to store 20 or 30% of your video upload volume in perpetuity.
- I'm having a hard time imagining the proceedings of the court-of-legal-vs-illegal-spam-filters. Without a lot of technical training (or a lot of reliance on expert testimony), the simplest way for an average person to grasp whether a spam filter is biased or not is going to be either looking "back" at what it did/didn't flag, or "testing" it with some sample corpus. In both cases, this process will be fraught with interpretation and sampling bias issues. This may hinge on a judge, panel, or jury being able to see through a bombastic argument that trots out the most respectable {ideology} opinions from the discard pile--they have to realize that nothing in the discard pile can be interpreted without a really good understanding of the input pile. (They'd have to be so good at this that they could spot someone who is trying to score political points and manipulate opinion by intentionally mounting an adversarial campaign that intentionally crafts seemingly innocuous ideological content that also gets flagged as spam).
- Likewise, there's probably no great way to make a litmus-test corpus. Spam looks very different in different contexts. A useful Amazon review or tweet may both look like spam if someone emails or DMs them to you. Even if you can create a set of corpora that cover the bases, they'll probably be useless if they don't evolve, and very vulnerable to political and ideological manipulation if they do.
- If there's a lot of legal fear around getting sued because your spam-filter has a taste for how {ideological subcommunity} likes to phrase its opinions, I'd expect spam filters to accumulate safe-words and rules that cause them to back off of charged topics. It'd only be a matter of time until legit spam/manipulation ops infer the existence of those rules and move to exploit them.
but how would this "solve" spam in any case where the ratio of spam-to-signal crosses whatever threshold it takes to start breaking a platform's network effects, reducing engagement, driving out existing users, warding off new ones, shifting how the community views what the platform is for, etc.?
This is partly because email isn't "for" anything except communication. The idea that platforms must stand for something is new and wrong. A good platform stands for nothing and is open to everyone.
It's one thing to have the platform equivalent of a spam folder for new top-level posts that smell like junk. But these platforms have more significant design challenges: to cleanly handle replies, retweets + commentary, mentions, comments, threads, and anything else that is sort of inherently contextual (including the possibility that there are legitimate non-spam posts that interact with a spam post to quote, comment, reply, warn others, and so on).
I'm a little skeptical about how well anyone can meet that design in a way that makes it easy to see what was flagged as spam and isn't also sensitive to the ratio of spam to legitimate posts...
Its possible you're imagining that spam posts don't show up at all in a thread unless you hit a single toggle that re-renders the thread with any pruned replies and branches in place. Interfaces like this don't spiral out if the ratio changes, but I also don't think they make it easy to spot the flagged posts.
An interface that marks the posts in-thread can make it easier, but they're sensitive to that ratio. Very sensitive if they shows the full post, and a little sensitive if they replace the post with a clickable indicator that there's suspected spam there.
My point is a more general one: people argue for censorship as the only way to maintain a workable forum, but, I don't believe that, based on my prior experience. I'm not saying it's easy to build a really great spam filter for social forums, but Slashdot proved out a lot of good techniques, and anyway censoring stuff en-masse just creates a different set of problems: social rather than technical.
The second is that Facebook doesn't have to censor you to censor you. They just tweak your post so it stops showing up other peoples feeds. Youtube does this all the time, they don't censor anyone, they just make sure no one can find the voices they don't like. Meanwhile the content they like gets boosted, we've seen this all the time where you go to youtube for a video about puppies and thanks to autoplay 4 hours later you're hearing about how feminists are destroying western civilization from within by Jordan Peterson.
Youtube should be required to enable alternative modes (view all latest) and should be held liable if one can prove that they are e.g. suppressing a legal viewpoint in their searches. I see this as win-win for transparency
One thing that comes to mind is how do you define "illegal" content? A huge hangup here tends to be free speech - lots of legal free speech is not legal in places like Europe - e.g. there generally isn't a concept of hate speech in the US, and in the US inciting violence literally means "lets go over here and beat these people up right now" - anything less tends not to be inciting violence. Europe tends to be a lot more restrictive on these fronts.
And if you want the bar to be "illegal anywhere", then places like China would make a lot of things illegal that everyone in the west would be fine with. If you want to say that of course we wouldn't pay attention to China, now you're back to picking and choosing countries likely based upon arbitrary metrics.
The obvious solution, for a US company, is to follow US law and accept that some content will be blocked in China, strict theocratic states and possibly Europe.
edit: What about downvoting? Does that not count because it's by users? However the algorithm for ranking and matching is controlled by the platform, does that count as censorship since it will promote some posts over others?
That's not an issue with reddit - moderators are not paid, nor is reddit responsible for them - and when users subscribe in a sub, the contract is that they 'll abide by moderation rules and downvoting rules. That's not corporate censorship. The problem is when the company itself starts censoring what the users have voluntarily subscribed to read.
How do you square that circle? Surely you should object to what HN does - in fact why would a believer in no censorship even have an account here if HN are censoring (moderating and limiting) what everyone is able to say?
However, HN could instead be subreddit in reddit's platform, with HN (or preferably an unrelated external entity) paying the moderators.
Were HN and FB a publisher, and had a UK office (and similarly in other countries with strong laws in this area) they would be liable as well as the individual posters. Those laws are why when things like Snowden and Cambridge Analytica broke they were published both sides of the Atlantic.
You've now created a problem potentially far bigger than the one you fixed.
FB And HN are subject to US law where they 're based.It's up to the UK to block access to them if they think they 're illegal - Or preferably to fix libel laws.
If Fred Smith writes a piece in The Times that libels me, I sue the newspaper, not Fred Smith.
FB and the other globals are subject to the laws of every place they operate. e.g. See all the US companies causing controversy changing their policies within China.
The fact that stories like CA and Snowden have been jointly published in the US, rather than say Canada or France makes me suspect that chances of a successful suit are low in the US. That's probably the point. :)
https://towardsdatascience.com/understanding-k-means-cluster...
The property "interesting" is an individual decision. A forum like HN could implement K-Means Clustering instead of having dang madly moderating stuff. Over time, those HN users interested in "technologically interesting stuff" would aggregate together, and generally only see posts that are "voted up" by others in their cluster.
All the other crap would be seen by all those HN users that migrated over from 8chan.
The problem with this, of course, is that HN would be full of all sorts of sickening crap that you and I would never see (or, at least, until a small sampling of us saw it, and all down-voted it into the 8chan netherworld).
The great thing about this -- the FBI, et.al. would have much better tools to do their jobs: they could troll these seedy underbellies of HN, etc., and actually spear-phish and destroy the scum that is posting repellent garbage.
Or, we could carry on doing what we're doing, even though it can't work. Our choice.
The companies can still choose to remain nonpublishers, i.e. platforms - but they have to be impartial. That doesn't mean that censored communities can 't exist in their platforms - but the censoring can only be done by an entity unrelated to them. I think it's a good compromise to separate the platform from the censors.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190613/03172142391/once-...
this whole thread is about the hypothetical situation in which the two are linked by new laws
Note that under this setup, a forum like HN would be basically impossible to maintain. How would you set up a publishing content that included user content without having a human pre-vet all of that content? And HN has, like, 3 moderators?
The practical end result of this would be that the Internet would split into a bunch of 8chans, and a bunch of TV stations, with nothing in-between. If you care about free expression, making businesses scared of user content is counterproductive.
Slashdot also had a rather sophisticated moderation and scoring system, that allowed spam (hot grits etc) to be downranked and appear auto-collapsed, whilst longer form content was upvoted and expanded by default - even if it was a reply to negative ranked content.
You may feel a personal preference for HN, or not, but they were essentially the same from the perspective of any lawyer.
In other words HN could easily keep its distinctive feel without ever banning or erasing anything, just by implementing sufficient controls that let users see what they want to see: in fact it already does via options like showdead.
If I have upvotes and downvotes, weighted the way I like, and I limit who can get an account in the first place, I can probably achieve the speech outcome I want relatively easily "without" human intervention.
I don’t think it’s too fuzzy, as long as companies don’t arbitrarily define “things we don’t like” as “spam”.
For instance, if a climate scientist provides concrete evidence and analysis showing that climate change is happening and is problematic, we wouldn't dismiss them for not simultaneously offering a solution to the problem.
The author supposes that there are some mustache-twirling masterminds behind the scenes at Google, Twitter, and Facebook, picking and choosing what content is promoted. But the algorithms, at their most basic sense, promote what is popular.
Based on voting records, in absolute numbers, there are simply more left-leaning people (at least in the US) than there are right-leaning people. Gerrymandering and the electoral college, etc don't reflect this in the government, but it is the case.
The left-leaning viewpoints are more promoted then, simply because there are more people who want to see them. There's no reason to posit a nefarious conspiracy.
We could argue that it would be beneficial to promote less popular viewpoints more to expose people to new ideas. It probably would be a good thing. But these companies are in the business of making money and people generally just want to see things that confirm their own biases. Just look at how upset conservatives are that they can't find enough content like that ;)
Hardly. The algos have programmers thumbs on them heavily. A hilarious example was when Reddit was trying to deal with the_donald successfully spamming reddits hot algorithm. But someone screwed up the new weighting and instead of pushing td posts down it pushed them up, the whole front page was nothing but td posts for a day. They eventually fixed it, but never think that there isn't a human jury rigged mess of if else statements at the core of the algorithms.
It proves that reddit admins didn't like right wing shit posting and were willing to rewrite the algo to deal with it. Which is completely the opposite of the point you were making that these algos are somehow neutral.
If their content was so compelling, why did they have to spam it? Why wouldn't it just attract users organically the way other content does?
[[citation needed]] Would you like to present proof that t_d did not grow organically in 2015/2016?
So far you're heavy on claims and light on proof.
> A hilarious example was when Reddit was trying to deal with the_donald successfully spamming reddits hot algorithm.
- buzzkillington in Hacker News comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21463480
You were the one who stated that /r/the_donald spammed Reddit to reach the front page. Are you changing your story and now saying they reached the front page organically? Are you confused about what spamming is?
If there really were a large number of people genuinely interested in the_donald, it would have reached the front page without spamming. The reddit algorithm is probably also biased against posts trying to sell penis enlargement pills. Do you think that is also oppressive?
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Uh, no, he points out, accurately, that the mustache-twirling "masterminds" are actually kicking people off of the site for having unapproved viewpoints.
For me personally, since I run my own incoming mail server, there is no platform censoring those emails. I use my own tools, trained on my own emails and my own choices about what to block, to do the filtering.
When a platform entirely blocks some speech, that is not my choice; it is theirs. That is the critical difference.
This is still not a bright shining line, because there isn't one. But it's sufficiently clear to be a guiding principle. If you want to lock yourself in some particular filter bubble, that's your choice, but nobody else has the right to force you into one.
Have you never encountered a phpBB forum, or a wiki, or a social network, that doesn't have spam blockers? In my experience, such sites are inundated with spam, occasionally to the point that signal is hard to find over the noise. Your "solution" only touches on email. Filtering spam from such diverse sources would require a much more intrusive technology. Also, you're putting a wholly unreasonable burden on website owners to preserve abusive content -- if somebody uploads a flood of junk data, are you legally required to retain and redistribute it all? And are you forcing users to download gigabytes of garbage, and filter it down to a kilobyte of content?
We're not talking about a phpBB forum or a little blog with a few thousand commenters. We're talking about single companies with very significant fractions of the total discourse flowing through them. If Facebook blocks something, it affects a massive number of people, and "just go make your own Facebook" is not a suitable recourse. Scale matters. Small entities can do things without being a threat to the body politic that large entities can not.
As I've said before, I'm not entirely convinced that something the size of Facebook can actually work in the long term [1]. Trying to jam everybody into one set of rules may simply be infeasible, for reasons not entirely related to "rights". If you look at the current conflicts over Facebook through this window, you may find it makes sense over the conflict. Especially if you are one of the majority here on HN who are kinda lost over the idea of why so many have become anti-Facebook, when you just see Facebook imposing your perfectly sensible, obviously correct values on the world, why is everyone complaining? Well, it's that whole diversity thing you may have heard rumors about. It's real. It may not be the case that you can get everyone into one community with one set of standards, regardless of how "obviously right" those standards are.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20146868 - in fact, I'd amplify the original post I made by also pointing out Facebook is international, so we're not just trying to stick the diverse cultures of the US in there, but trying to stick all the diverse cultures of the world in one big pile. When I put it that way, does the idea that such a thing could work in the long term even pass the smell test?
I listed examples including "wikis" and "social media sites" which categorically contain the largest websites in the world. You'll find websites of all orders of magnitude from tens to millions of users -- where do you draw that line? But more importantly, are you under the impression that large-scale sites are somehow immune spammers?
> As a pragmatist on this matter, I believe the solution here is scale. The control I have over a phpBB forum is that if I don't like their spam policy, I can leave, and either join another or form my own.
I'm not understanding something here. You think that it's okay for spammers to implement a "heckler's veto" by de-facto shutting down every single niche website that (by law, presumably) accepts/rebroadcasts any and all submitted content -- that you'll be able to "vote with your feet" and move/create a site or forum that will somehow be immune to this onslaught? At what point is "scale" the answer? Bigger is better?
> As I've said before, I'm not entirely convinced that something the size of Facebook can actually work in the long term [1].
I'm suffering whiplash. You gotta help me here. You're happy to feed small websites to the spamwolves, yes? But you're not convinced that big websites are good either. Do we just cancel the entire internet?
I'll grant that I'd probably get more work done.
Yes, this doesn't deal with things like "is YouTube ranking biased" but it's a start. You posit that sites would be obliged to publish onslaughts, but many spam filters are pretty good at filtering such attacks. For instance that's where CAPTCHAs came from (there are better technical solutions than CAPTCHAs but you get the idea).
Though for the benefits of others, I'd point out that a careful reading of my post reveals that I did write something that implied strongly that small forums have more freedom in their spam blocking than large ones do. The idea that I'm obligating websites to never filter anything is some bizarre idea klyrs has gotten a hold of and apparently doesn't plan on letting go of.
You can think this, but it's not borne out by legal precedent. Odious speech is protected in public spaces, so if the KKK wants to impose their speech on my by disrupting my morning commute they have that right as long as they get a permit.
And if an anti-abortion activist wants to shove gory images of fetuses in the face of everyone going into a Planned Parenthood to get their prescriptions refilled, nobody stops them from doing that either.
I think (note that phrase) that in the 21st century, this is an exceptional historical case for the rare communication medium that attaches communication directly to physical location. Almost everything else we do nowadays has personal control involved, and we should consider that the more common case.
It also is not as unregulated as you may rhetorically claim. They are allowed to say odious things, but, at a reasonable volume level (or they'll be shut down for being a public nuisance regardless of the contents of their speech), and they are not allowed to jump in your face and stay there (in which case it's assault, again, regardless of the content of your speech). Moreover, I'd observe that you're mostly hypothesizing, as indicated by your own phrasing, and I'm a lot more pragmatic on this matter, so I don't feel the need to solve problems that don't (currently) exist. I don't think anyone's been more than mildly annoyed by public speech in a long time. (Being annoyed by the content that someone disagrees with you is part of being human. Trying to "solve" that produces worse problems than the original problem.)
One is fraudulent spam, the other is not.
There's also a clear (direct) profit motive, and it's depriving people of property. There's lots of ways this argument changes. When you censor political views, you're depriving people of their rights. Shutting out a swindler isn't even close to the same thing.
One is that people arguing about politics in political discussion forums are using the forum for its intended purpose whereas spammers are abusing it (in fact, stealing from it, since it makes its money through advertising). I’ve yet to see anybody oppose removing political discussions on forums about woodworking - that’s not what it’s for.
You can do better than this:
> you may think that you’re very sophisticated, but actually you are just being ridiculous.
> Sure, you can say that if you want (though I don’t think that’s how the word is actually used by ordinary people), but only idiots think it shows that it’s not a problem.
> I know that some people, especially among libertarians, think it makes them smart to believe that, but they clearly have not thought this through.
Annoyingly they conflate actual corporate censorship concerns with their persecution complex. DMCA abuse is actual corporate censorship for instance. Same if say Comcast blocked Netflix. The government using a cudgel to make corporations do their censorship when laws would be struck down in an instant is censorship and a messy semantics arguement of corporate vs government origin. These complaints boil down to "they aren't giving me an audience how dare they!". There is a world of difference between not given any attention and cannot publish.
I suspect that the author's concern isn't censorship per se, but censorship of viewpoints he happens to uphold. If Twitter's suppression of conservative content is bad, then so is The Federalist's suppression of liberal content.
You're about to argue that one of these is a social media platform, while the other is a news outlet. In that case, what do you think is the essential difference that makes it okay for one to censor certain ideas but not the other?
That being said, social media is just that: something users can post to. Twitter users were not hired to promote a particular point of view, they were invited to share their own point of view. To then go through and cull the people you invited to share based on ideology while still calling yourself a social media platform is where a lot of the complaints (rightfully) come from.
Twitter, per its own website, is "what’s happening in the world and what people are talking about right now." Is there any way to revise this sentence—or any other aspect of the Twitter brand—such that Twitter would no longer be subject to these complaints of censorship?
I would say no. It's a service designed from the ground up to allow people to speak their mind. When they start editorializing who is allowed to speak their mind, people will rightfully complain of censorship.
I suppose they could change the tagline to:
"what’s happening in the world (that we approve of) and what people (we like) are talking about right now."
I don't think many people would be excited to use that service though.
It's pretty rational to focus more on the sites that have the most traffic when discussing bias, isn't it?
I feel that if a person is making an argument from principle, then that principle should apply everywhere and not just where politically convenient to them.
> ... although it can be leveraged against big tech companies that are biased in favor of liberals, this line of argument also has implications that conservatives may less readily welcome. For instance, it means that how rich people use their money to promote their ideas may also be a problem, insofar as it distorts the marketplace of ideas.
The principle he's arguing is that when an organization that has a de facto monopoly on a type of information stream (search, microblogging, and social circle media) uses that monopoly to favor one political viewpoint, that is harmful to society because it "distorts the marketplace of ideas" by preventing equal access to said marketplace.
The Federalist is not in this position. For every conservative magazine like The Federalist, there's a liberal one like Mother Jones. This is the "marketplace of ideas" that the author refers to in action, not a distortion of it. So the author is, in fact, arguing from principle, just not the principle you're using.
The phrase "hoist by their own petard" seems appropriate here.
Microblogging platforms aren't the only venue for journalists to promote their work.
But, even if that wasn't the case, that's not an argument that private censorship is bad but that private monopolies are bad, and that censorship by monopolies on essential communications mechanisms (public or private) is bad.
You don't want to discuss it here because you don't have a detailed analysis backed up by solid data. If you did, you'd lead with it.
Trust me, most people here can handle an article full of graphs and stuff.
I agree with much of what the author wrote. It's time for change. Classic liberalism may be best.
If you value freedom above all else, Google being an independent entity, should have the freedom to ban / veto whomever they want.
You can't have it both ways: let people be free to say whatever they want AND force the owners of communication channels to spread all information.
Thats not libertarian, its freedom to do whatever you want that doesn't affect other people.
I’m not sure how I feel about it, but I think I’ve summarized the best version of the argument.
A great example of how many people don’t care about right and wrong, just winning.
We hold newspapers or TV station legally liable for the content they serve. This is fair. Situation in which they couldn't be sued for the stuff they air still making money on it -- that's the current situation with them. It's even worse because they can somehow censor the content they don't like for their own political reasons.
It's like with banks. Yes, we can make money. And yes when times are bad we can get money from the government/tax payers too. This is not freedom this is fascism.
And who decides what is responsible?
This may be helpful https://www.popehat.com/2019/08/29/make-no-law-deplatformed/
The stance is absurd - tt is akin to saying that Kinkos should be liable for anything printed beyond "they knowingly used ink laced with weaponized anthrax" - and should be charged with terrorism because a customer who quietly printed a bomb threat formatted to look like a resume - just because they kick you out for openly printing Goatse.ck and every other old shock site which scares away the other customers.
No one has the right to turn off electric grid on your house because they are "private company". No one has the right to turn off "running water" from your sink because they are "private company" and if you don't like it, you can go somewhere else or open your own. The same way, no one has right to censor me because they are "private company" and if I don't like it I can go ahead and open my own Youtube. They should be and will be regulated as utilities.
You may have a right to receive water. But you don't have a right to pee in the water supply.
Nor should the private water company be obligated to ensure that your pee goes into the tap water of every household.
https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/public-and-broadcasting#OBSC...
> Indecent Material. Indecent material is protected by the First Amendment, so its broadcast cannot constitutionally be prohibited at all times. However, the courts have upheld Congress' prohibition of the broadcast of indecent material during times of the day when there is a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience, which the Commission has determined to be between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. Indecent programming is defined as “language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory organs or activities.” Broadcasts that fall within this definition and are aired between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. may be subject to enforcement action by the FCC.
And, does this imply that slavery comes with blissfull carelessness?
And yes, if you have no freedom you cannot be considered responsible for what you do or don't. A slave cannot be held responsible for actions he's been ordered to perform. This might not be "blissful carelessness" but certainly is lack of responsibility.
Responsibility is both a way of acting that is mindful of the consequences, and simply the fact that people will ask you to respond of the consequences of your actions.
The two are strictly connected but are not the same. You "act responsibly" when you are prepared to answer tough questions about your actions. The simple fact that you will be asked to answer those questions, independently from your actions, is the fact of "being responsible".
So responsibility as virtue is not required by freedom; but as a simple fact of life it is its consequence, people will consider you responsible for what you do.
So there's no contradiction between "Google is wrong to censor" and "Google should be free to censor".
Not so if you value freedom of human beings above all else, and even less so if you would wish to maximize human freedom across the population.
Unregulated capitalism maximizes the potential for freedom, if you win a lottery ticket, at the expense of diminishing freedom for all the losers. Libertarians tend to either already be rich or believe they have a significant shot at winning the lottery ticket.
A practical example: lack of worker rights in the US corresponds to more freedom in the abstract, but in practice creates a society where the average worker is much less free than, say, the average European worker. For example, workers in more regulated labor markets enjoy many more days of vacation on average, leading to literally more freedom to explore the world and pursue personal interests.
Money.
Money allows for buying advertisements, essentially allowing you to buy a platform to spread your ideas.
Having money typically has a pretty clear bias: protecting the money of those who have it. This comes at the expense, many times, of those who do not.
That typically equates to conservative policies.
I'm not convinced that the market distortion caused by supposed bias in social media moderation is even close to the distortion created by allowing money in politics. In fact in many (not all) cases of purported bias, the true impetus for action was due to hateful or otherwise harmful speech.
Nor do I agree that if we disagree with state censorship, we should disagree with Facebook censorship.
Being thrown into the legal system with threat of monetary penalty, jailtime, etc. is worthy of much more scrutiny than speech that gets you banned from a social network.
The Internet was supposed to be a democratizing force, and it was, for awhile. To an extent it still is, but as the convergence of content continues to pull people into the various Platforms™, all of which are supported by advertiser dollars, the content itself is diluted. Some not so much, some so much it's not recognizable, others so much that it's no longer there.
YouTube is a great example of this. Once a monument to the power of democratized content, it's slowly but surely pushing out real creators in favor of advertising companies producing advertiser-friendly and oh-so-clickable content, much of which is complete and utter trash. It's not just marketing companies though, a new breed of creator has spawned since roughly 2010, determined to soak as many advertising dollars out of the platform as they can with as much vapid and soulless content as it will suffer.
And all of this is sponsored in turn by equally vapid and soulless corporate advertisers, determined to make sure their precious brands are not associated with anything as uncouth as an opinion or a real person.
Hell, there's a great argument to be made of how the "pivot to video" and the resulting catacombs full of gutted and destroyed media websites can be laid at the feet of corporate marketers who wanted video ads. Nay it was not any Internet citizen who claimed the future was video, we didn't ask for it, and we certainly didn't like it.
The whole thing is gross, and far from isolated to YouTube, it has plagued them all, save perhaps for Twitter and I think the only thing saving Twitter is that it's just not as easily monetized. But, Twitter has a different problem, which I believe Jack is trying to solve; the influx of automated bots, bought and paid for by other marketers, more often trying to sell politics than products. But it's just a different kind of feces from the same anus and indicative of the same core problem: advertisers suck, at everything. And they have more power than ever on the Internet, and so the Internet sucks more than ever.
A big reason is that advertising is a tax deduction. If I fund my content with advertising, the advertiser gets to deduct the money they spend from their income tax. If I sell content to users, the users don't get to do that. Between the employer and employee halves of FICA, federal withholding and state income tax, that's typically more than half the money. To make it even we would either need a tax deduction for purchasing content or to get rid of the one for buying advertising.
Then you have companies like Apple taking a 30% cut of the creator's revenue. The customer has to pay $1.43 in order for the creator to get $1. That's obviously making direct purchases less competitive against advertising -- and it multiplies with the tax treatment. If you're paying 50% in tax and then 30% to Apple, the customer needs to earn ~$2.86 for every $1 they want the creator to get. If two content creators start with $1 and use it buy each other's content, by the time the money goes to the other person and back one time, what's left is only ~$0.12.
It would be a lot easier to sell content if the creators actually got the lion's share of the customer's money.
Censorship deletes things: it reduces the size of the marketplace of ideas.
Money adds things: if I spend money tomorrow to buy some ads it doesn't affect you unless either (a) you're also spending money and trying to buy the same ad slots or (b) your views are very weakly held and you become convinced to change sides by my witty advert.
The "get money out of politics" position is based on an unstated assumption that if you buy, say, 1 million adverts, then it's practically guaranteed that (say) 5% of those adverts will successfully change people's minds regardless of how bad your arguments are, and so if you keep spending more and more then you can eventually buy whatever outcome you want.
But is that assumption true? I don't think it is. There have been studies of this which showed political advertising is pretty ineffective in general, beyond informing people that there's an election and who the party candidates are. And there have been two high profile cases in 2016 of votes that were won by the side that spent by far the least (Trump and Brexit). If money was so powerful they should have had no chance, but it didn't work.
Additionally if this really worked, you should see taxes always fall as rich people buy ads supporting politicians who support lower taxes, which in turn frees up more money to buy ads, ad infinitum (ho ho ho). But this isn't what we see: ignoring occasional spikes to levels so high they were totally ineffective at being collected, the tax burden and size of government has gone up over time rather than down. Rich people seem to be doing pretty badly at buying the sort of policies they're supposed to want.
On the other hand, if people don't know a position, idea or possibility exists at all they can't possibly support it. You can ignore voices you disagree with but you can't pay agree with voices that don't exist anymore.
No. What money does is redistribute limited attention.
Information may (or may not) be freee, and nonrivalrous. But its complements, attention, distribution, discoverability, access, reach, are all rivalrous. Time is the ultimate rival good: a second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year, decade, lifetime, spent on one thing is that interval not spent on all else.
"Money doesn't talk, it swears." Bob Dylan.
Money is an amplifier, or at least, provides access to amplification. It can also be an eraser, a gate, a gate keeper, which determines who shall and shall not pass.
The more I read on the nature of monopoly, the more I'm convinced that the critical element of it is not prices or "consumer welfare", but of role as gatekeeper. The monopolist (or monopsonist) faces a constant queue of approaching supplicants. Each supplicant has the best alternative of ... no service. Or at best, extraordinarily reduced service (fewer capabilities, higher costs, most often both). The monopolist, particularly if already at or near capacity, though even at levels of service far beneath that, need only consider the next supplicant.
What people miss out on with money is scale.
The typical US household would be hard pressed to meet an emergency expense of $500. When Facebook purchased Instagram for $19 billion in cash and stock, it expressed a liquidity of nearly 40 million such households -- about the population of California. That is, a single corporate entity, and more significantly, the single individual effectively controlling that corporation, Mark Zuckerberg, has a greater effective voice than the entire rest of the state.
In a land dedicated to the principles of liberal democracy, that seems inimical to its very foundations.
As to the touted ineffectiveness of political advertising, the arguments would ring far truer if 1) the parties claiming such reflected the belief in their actions and 2) would not protest so loudly efforts to either curtail or 3) clearly identify those doing the advertising and spending.
1) This is the case, isn't it. In America the Republicans were far more relaxed about the ruling allowing unlimited US campaign money, then spent around half the amount the Democrats did and won.
If they were really being duplicitous about it you'd have seen major freakouts amongst Trump supporters about his very low levels of spending, but I don't remember much of that. You saw far more angst amongst Democrats about the "free" news coverage he got by virtue of saying popular-but-unpopular things.
I'm not saying people are totally consistent on this, but at least in the last election, Trump's behaviour appears to have matched the overall right wing pattern of not really believing political spending is a big deal. The US needs a pretty high baseline of political ad spend just to communicate "there's an election on day X, vote for candidate Y" to 350+ million people in a very short space of time. Beyond that it doesn't seem to matter.
2) Why shouldn't they protest? It's perfectly possible to both believe that government control over speech is bad on principle, and also that political advertising isn't as powerful as your opponents believe.
3) Why should people doing political ad spending be forced to be identified, but people posting political views on the internet not be? A good reason to not force identification of such people is to stop retaliatory attacks by extremists designed to silence people, a very real problem. This is especially important in elections where there's a risk whoever comes to power will try to get revenge on people who supported their opponents. Not normally a risk in US politics because of the First Amendment but it's been seen elsewhere.
In terms of conservative complaints about leftist censorship, I have to simply roll my eyes. The conservatives complaining about big tech don't care about censorship, they only care about the dominance of their own political messages. This is obvious when you ask them about "democratizing speech" on platforms they already dominate like cable news and talk radio. Remember the fairness doctrine? They hated the idea of having the government dictate the political composition of the airwaves, but when it comes to big tech, suddenly they want to nationalize the platforms to their own benefit. I find the effort extremely disingenuous.
Also, something something downvotes something something censorship!!
Though the real question is, at a certain size of user base, does a private space not become a public one? Or rather, if there is no alternative of not having censorship, no place else to go, does the censorship not become a problem then?
I am not sure what the solution here would be, actually, but while I think if people don't like facebooks/twitters censorship they should just go somewhere else, I would not hold the same view for example on email providers.
> at a certain size of user base, does a private space not become a public one
I think that's a question worth exploring, but I think any honest discussion of this idea has to acknowledge that most of these social media companies are essentially trivial entertainment sites and that if we are really trying to designate access to twitter as a basic human right we must first consider why life saving drugs, housing, and healthcare are not human rights.
See, here we go: he says “X is bad” and you immediately respond with “what do you mean the government should outlaw X?!” Nobody’s talking about government intervention - he actually spends a lot of time explicitly saying he isn’t.
IMO it's bad to have places where only one side is heard, the other is not. Further, there are too many places where people might feel they're a majority in their opinion, while they're not. Usually people would notice they're the odd one out. That's not the case in various places (e.g. subreddits).
Note that I'm from the Netherlands and do not agree with freedom of speech above everything is a good thing. There should be some limits to it. These reasonable limits should be in place.
Making distinctions between right/left and complaining that more of your stuff is questionable.. yeah.. so? The "left"/Democratic party I consider pretty conservative and not looking out for its people. As such, it's always strange to see the complaints, what is right/left for e.g. US to me is "right wing" vs "even more right wing".
I also do not see the restrictions; there should be way more limits on reddit/twitter/facebook. Further, I think the companies should be held responsible for this.
The problem is that companies want the flamebait and toxic content to drive enragement engagement ad impressions, but don't want to be accountable for the stuff that's just too edgy for advertisers.
Controversial is subjective. Would you like FB/reddit to promote holocaust denial?
Imageboard style websites where every shit comment has as much visibility as the other is vastly superior for having an interesting discussion. The downside is that you have to wade through the bad comments.
No, we really don't. In fact, we have mechanisms in place to keep ads away from certain categories of content. Do you have any evidence to support your statement?