Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Here comes the real deal government-on-server censorship, not the fake stuff that they’re complaining about.

Censorship platforms, even the “good guys” who only censor occasionally or predictably or “according to law” (or whatever), are all vulnerable to this. The state can threaten them with guns and imprisonment, ultimately, and they have no immediate recourse. The content comes down. Maybe it gets restored later, after the election or war is over. Maybe it doesn’t. Either way, it comes down today. Neither Jack nor Sundar are going to jail to protect your hosting account showing videos of war crimes.

This is an inherent danger in all censorship platforms. Whether you like Jack or not, trusting him not to censor arbitrarily (while Twitter always has the technical capability) is not a reasonable choice for the society-wide message bus.

This failure mode is inherent in these censorship-possible systems, and it must be addressed if we are to maintain publishing that cannot be suppressed by the state during emergencies.

https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/

Yes and the opposite of that is censorship by drowning the opposite message

Non-censorship platforms: drinking water mixed with sewage

Why does your email has an anti-spam filter again? Isn't that censorship?

> Why does your email has an anti-spam filter again? Isn't that censorship?

Spam Filtering is not censorship because it is acting on my behalf on the emails that I receive. As a private person, I have the right to apply any filters on conversations I am a direct part of.

What I don't have the right is to apply my filters/opinions on others without their consent. Doing this would be censorship.

You may not realize that there is filtering occurring at the infrastructure level that you have no control over. Unless you run your own mail server and somebody sends mail directly to it, bypassing any other parties relays, you are most certainly not in control of all the "filtering" that occurs.

Further, a lot of the major infra providers will shut your sh down if they think you are being a bad citizen(complaints, bounces, etc). Sure, you can find _some_ provider that won't; but DJT can find _some_ blog platform that will post his all his BS without fact checking it as well.

If the state is threatening the operators of a platform with guns, because the supreme leader does not like the things said about him on it, whether or not that platform of choice is censoring arbitrarily has long stopped being the most pressing problem for speech.

They never threaten with guns directly. It’s always “regulation”, which is code for “do what we tell you because if you don’t, then the men with guns will show up and shackle you”.

The guns are implicit. The threat rarely needs to be so direct.

Imagine what happens if Twitter continues to do the legal publishing things that Twitter does on twitter.com, and the state arbitrarily changes the liability protections of the CDA out from under them, and Twitter tells them to piss up a rope.

Next, Twitter’s bank accounts will eventually get looted, and if they opt out of the traditional state-controlled no-burden-of-proof banking system[1] to continue operating and paying staff, you can bet your ass that their resulting shutdown will be at the point of a gun, because payments outside of that system are already illegal without a special license.

That’s the only authority the state ultimately has: the claim to legitimately use violence to enforce the law: the law, as we are about to see, that can be changed arbitrarily by corrupt politician edict.

(The last time I recall him doing so was by an EO that overturned decades-old published and written BATFE interpretations of existing federal law (and assurances related to same) regarding bump stocks. The lawsuit proceeds, but good luck to you while you rot in jail for years if you are in possession of a bump stock (which were legal for decades) in the interim.)

[1]: https://sneak.berlin/20191119/your-money-isnt-yours/

Twitter is being threatened because they are arbitrarily censoring people.

It's a private platform

Yes, they are an unaccountable private platform that influence public elections.

Which enjoys a high degree of unaccountability that other publishers don't have because they don't editorialise the content submitted by users. But if they start, and they started years ago, they should lose that protection.

No, that's not why they're being threatened. They're being threatened because they did something Donald Trump did not like.

Twitter's been arbitrarily censoring people for years, myself included (I lost my account of twelve years recently). That's bad, though you can make the argument that they're entitled to do so on their own website. However, that's not at all why this is happening.

Twitter didn't even censor the president, they just added a link below some lies he posted. He's been breaking their TOS habitually for some time and rather than ban him as they would anyone else, they made a special public TOS-exception for "newsworthy" bigwig public figures like him in their rules. The president gets to tweet things that would get you, a non-president, quickly banned from Twitter.[1] He's explicitly whitelisted as exempt from Twitter's usual control over twitter.com.

Now, the federal government is going to actually censor Twitter on his order, simply because they had the audacity to amend information to tweets from an account that they declined to suspend out of courtesy despite it breaking their rules for years.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/01...

>The president gets to tweet things that would get you, a non-president, quickly banned from Twitter.

This is exactly why Twitter is an editor.

> the federal government is going to actually censor Twitter on his order

Wrong. They will instruct the FCC to treat Twitter like a newspaper.

By the application of this logic, every single web host that disables accounts serving malware or remote access trojans (legal to publish, mind you) is editorializing as well, because they are discriminating arbitrarily against legal content, even if it is UGC.

If you remove section 230 protections for UGC from companies that "editorialize" under this definition, what will happen is that the only hosting companies that will remain in the wake of that are the ones large enough to be "too big to fail" (or friendly enough with the feds) like AWS and Azure and the existing social media giants.

That makes the point-and-click censorship situation much worse, because then the only places you can reliably host are already integrated with the angry despot's military for realtime censorship as we saw demonstrated for us in the case of Wikileaks, and ongoing across the world.

You do not want to live in that world. Already we have companies like Facebook disabling links in comments on Instagram to control the flow of information and attention. I don't want a web where all of our communications flow through 4 companies who can disappear our accounts and 100% of our private or public communications down the memory hole with no audit trail or legal recourse whatsoever.

I don't think you should use Twitter or Facebook anyways if you're concerned about the free flow of information. They censor stuff and try to make walled gardens. I'm not sure what the good alternatives are... I've heard of confederated Twitter and Facebook clones but they all suffer from losing out on network effects.

If 4 companies control the internet, having the government restrain from censoring them doesn't fix the problem. What do you think we should do? I'm at a loss here.

But they are not censoring the president.

Yes, and?

It is most certainly a form of censorship. Similar to a decision to put all "lies" in red. They editorially add a "fact check" addendum to posts that they decide need them.

The emperor have no clothes. Pointing that out is freedom of speech. The fact-check is itself substantiation.

Labeling and providing context on objective propaganda is not censorship; it's a "use it or lose it" responsibility.

Let's keep the context of this label around the post on mail in votes "would be a free for all on cheating, forgery and the theft of Ballots" in mind. This is attacking democratic constructs with goal of subverting it. There is no ideas to improve the very system that the current steward of our democracy should be owning .. just throwing mud to cement power.

Twitter has to try to provide context to these anti-Democratic government broadcasts or least it loses any notion of private free press. I.e it might as well be state run if it does not have the freedom to structrue the presentation of platform participation.

There's also the inconvenient fact that all of the USPS anti-fraud protections are mostly retroactive and involve special sections of US federal law with big penalties for abusing the mail or committing fraud through it—after the fact.

The US Postal Inspection Service (the mail has their own feds, did you know?) would take well beyond the window of the election results being declared if some criminal decided to take the same blatant measures to defraud an election by mail as they did to defraud the electronic voting systems the last election, which were fraught with actual issues of undefined electronic voting integrity (which, of course, fails unsafe, because you're not going to re-do an election when the numbers don't match). It's entirely plausible that the last US presidential election was stolen electronically and the perpetrators simply got away with it because computer security sucks.[1]

Ultimately, voting is a hard problem, and it's not really solved presently (in person, electronically, or by mail) from a technical/attack perspective. There are so many ways to straightforwardly attack the system right now if you're willing to risk a billion years in jail if you're detected, most of them related to the ways that electronic votes are collected[2] or the ways that votes are transmitted to central tabulation.[3] These systems fail unsafe, even when discrepancies are detected.

(My own personal theory about this is that if election results take too long to become "official", people will lose faith in the process itself, so getting to "done" is in general more important to most involved than getting to "perfectly accurate".)

Vote-by-mail has a different, but also still large and present, attack surface, especially if you (as above) are willing to do Big Deal Federal Crimes Involving The Postal Service to subvert it, which I believe is entirely on the table for the highest office in the land.

I don't care for the president or his tweets, but to call this one in particular anti-democratic might be a stretch, too. The US presidential elections simply are not secure in any meaningful way right now, and switching to mail won't fix (or worsen) that. (I know it's not a popular thing to point out that the US election security emperor has no clothes, but it's unfortunately true.)

It's not antidemocratic to say that it's fairly likely that elections have been, and will continue to be, successfully hacked. (The tweet in question is, of course, using the concept as a weapon to further a specific antidemocratic agenda, but that is another matter entirely.)

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/17/17582818/election-softwar...

[2]: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-voting-machine-...

[3]: https://time.com/4599886/detroit-voting-machine-failures-wer...

Finally,

> might as well be state run if it does not have the freedom to structrue the presentation of platform participation.

Totally with you on that one.

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