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Comment by A4ET8a8uTh0 | Hacker News Reader

Sigh, I guess I am one of those lonely voices that says let em say whatever they want. FB should be little less than a dumb platform for anyone to run their mouth.

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Likely because a lot of people disagree with your stance for substantive reasons.

But you won't be the only voice saying it. HN and the tech industry in general has a consistent presence of people espousing the laissez faire view on free speech. It might not be the popular view, but it has plenty of mindshare.

>>HN and the tech industry in general has a consistent presence of people espousing the laissez faire view on free speech.

Pre-2016 I would have agreed. Today the tech industry DOES NOT in any way have a "laissez faire view on free speech" the Tech Industry in general has a one sided political bias that is very clear, and the goal to suppress any speech not aligned with that political bias for the purposes of influencing elections

If i ask people if they think the tech industry has a very clear political bias i'd expect the majority would agree, if i asked which way the bias leans i suspect the majority would disagree.

To put this to the point which way do you think the bias leans?

It is not a matter of thinking or belief, there is documented Evidence of this political bias from many sources and from many Tech companies.

The debate comes into place because the Tech companies will still ban people for clear rules violations even though they are on the "correct" side, direct calls for violence as an example

But the even the rules themselves on most of these platforms show a political worldview toward one side.

This is also influenced by the massive shift in the overton window over the last 4 years, so much so that many people on one political side seem to have whiplash.

So I do not doubt you will find people that will disagree with what way the bias leans, however when you have documented and video evidence of the bias in one direction then the debate is much less valid

You would have to live in a ridiculous echo chamber to disagree on the political leaning of the industry based almost entirely in San Francisco

Really? Because there's a lot of talk that the tech companies were (partly) the reason Trump was elected. How does that fit in?

That means they messed up, not that they don't lean left.

Oh, it fits simply:

* greed: there's buckets of money to be made during election season selling voter info and ads to campaigns

* hubris: they never thought she'd lose, she was a terrible candidate (just like Biden this time!)

My comment specifically states Post-2016. Trump was elected in 2016 and as a result of this the Tech Companies "woke" up to become political entities instead of platforms, many many tech executives were filmed/recorded publicly saying would would do anything in their power to avoid "another 2016"

>many many tech executives were filmed/recorded publicly saying would would do anything in their power to avoid "another 2016"

Wow, "many many?" Like not one, not even many, but many squared by even more many? That's a lot.

And each of them of was filmed and recorded individually making the same statement too. That's shocking.

I don't suppose you could point us to the mountain of video and audio evidence implied by this comment, could you?

AFAIK that's one Project Veritas video dealing with Google.

One of my exes believes that the tech community suppresses all left-wing discourse.

The President of America believes that the tech community suppresses him personally.

I mean, sure, you could say “both are in their own ridiculous echo chambers”, but the walls of both those echo chambers were built by the tech industry.

This is a real wat. You think the tech industry is almost entirely based in San Francisco?

Only about 1% of tech workers are employed by companies headquartered in Silicon Valley, let alone San Francisco. The absolute vast majority of technology employment is at companies that don't have a direct technology product. Software engineers working at traditional businesses like banks and retailers far overwhelm the employees at FAANG and startup type companies.

You're buying into an echo chamber concept because you don't realize the extent of the universe you're characterizing. You're mistaking the echo chamber for the reality, kind of how people mistake what people say on twitter for what people actually think.

I think it's pretty clear that we're talking about the American social media industry, and the major players are certainly located in the SF Bay Area.

Obviously the context of the discussion is regarding the monopoly of political information by the FAANG. Why would software engineers at banks have any relevance here?

I don't think you need to ask around or play dumb. Just read what gets boosted in feeds.

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/402495-twitter-ceo-jac...

@jack says one thing in interviews but does another.

https://www.projectveritas.com/news/undercover-video-twitter...

What types get a pass on speech and what types get deplatformed?

https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jun/24/carpe-donktum...

Imagine what the world would actually look like if that were true.

I mean really imagine that.

If the tech industry wanted to suppress a particular presidential candidate, not only with that candidate have no account on any social platform, but links to their websites or to news articles that sentiment analysis decides are pro that candidate would be blocked by search engines, and videos of that candidate or pro that candidate would be flagged and removed.

That's like rebutting systemic racism by claiming "if there was racism in America, you wouldn't have had a black president!".

Maybe there isn't a blatant set of acts that is "biased" on tech platforms that you could point to and say "look see, bias!". Perhaps it is just systemic bias and there is structural suppression of certain viewpoints on the aggregate level.

No, that would have extreme backlash. It would influence the election in a wrong way. They know this

Infact one of the best things the opposition should be doing is promoting other platforms, if high profile political candidates would abandon mainstream platforms and signal boost alternatives (like the new comer Parler) then it would reduce the power of the platforms

No the platforms want the HIGH PROFILE people, then they suppress the supporters of those high profile people, that is how the game is played

That is how the population is influences, they get the High Profile people to speak on the platform, then only allow dissenters to respond that gives the observing public the idea that the majority disagrees triggering a band wagon effect

There is only one substantive reason I am aware of: power.

Suppression of speech, especially political speech, is a raw power play by the suppressors.

That's a losing game though. I agree with GP, only dumb (aka honest) conduits last.

Should HN be completely un-moderated? There's a decent chance that the quality of the forum would drop and users could move elsewhere.

I firmly believe that Facebook is responsible for shaping the tone of their platform (every social network does this in one way or another). A platform that allows anything may not attract the audience that Facebook desires.

Arguing that Facebook cannot set the tone of their platform is a losing game.

HN is probably as good as it gets in terms of striking the balance between comteting interests. You may be right in the current environment, but were the 4chans of the world not constantly shooed away maybe there would be no need for heavy handed approach.

I didn't say it cannot. I said it should not. It should stay as neutral as it can possibly be.

Moderation is great, I can SEE dead posts on hn if I opt into them. Taste is a good thing. I like the choices about what hits the main page on hn most days, that's why I come here.

I cannot opt into a deplatformed political person's speech on Twitter because they're absent. So, no, I don't conflate taste and moderation with silencing political speech, in an election year no less, like you do.

HN bans people too as well as just marking comments as dead.

Not for political speech. One is not like the other.

Depends on your definition of "political speech."

People have been flagged and banned for anti-semitic and racist speech as well as "nationalistic flamewar," all of which are linked with politics which get people deplatformed elsewhere.

Even so, while I disagree with banning happening on hn, it is usually prefaced with warnings about the rules of the site by the moderators. There's decent human beings at least trying to keep the peace here and steer discussions back on-topic.

That is NOT what's happening on Twitter. Rules are not evenly applied based on politics. #acab is just fine but the gentle ribbing of "learn to code" is suspension and ban-worthy.

All depends on which group's butt is being made to hurt.

Seems like it should be possible for users to self-moderate, no? In the old and wild Usenet days there were plenty of popular, un-moderated forums with incredibly rich, thoughtful, vibrant discussion. Yes, you would get some unpleasantness on occasion, but you had kill files for that. It should be possible to do better today, we are much better at AI and online anonymity is no longer the norm.

There is only one substantive reason I am aware of: power.

I'm sure you can find more substantive arguments if you try.

Wanting to suppress discourse isn't a substantive reason. Saying that's the "substantive reason" that people want more content moderation is just a fancy way of calling those people bad people.

Surely I find that power is the one thing that leftist ideologies covet.

Don't like someone's politics, or are they too effective at counter-narrative? Cancel them. Destroy. That's the message. Maybe you are not such a wrecker personally, but the mob you may belong to always is.

Nobody escapes the mob, and they always end up eating their own. Don't step outta line, comrade!

There are countless venues on the internet for your speech, but a platform deciding not to promote a wider broadcast of certain types of content is a substantially different thing than suppressing that content. The neutral default would be "let it be shouted into the void" which is not where we are right now; right now Facebook programatically promotes and distributes a lot of stuff to a far wider audience than we see it organically.

If you believe only hands-off platforms will last, then you have very little reason to be concerned with a particular platform's policy anyway.

One question for the many people that believe Facebook should be a completely unmoderated communication channel is... Why are you active on Hackernews? Hackernews has a variety of community and moderator driven censorship tools, and does not encourage free speech in this manner. Would you call for a completely unmoderated Hackernews, maybe with local down votes and upvotes? Eventually the system could serve as a per user spam and filtering system, but arguably that's still censorship because an individually trained AI is still hiding and removing content. Or.. alternatively is Hackernews ok because if you have showdead on you can generally see the full set of content on HN?

Uhh, if we elected local officials by playing soccer, I would be playing soccer. For the same reason, if I want to have discussion ( albeit moderated ) HN is not a bad place to go.

My personal opinion is that HN community voting and active moderators are a solid, definite net negative for me. I would indeed be happier if neither of those elements were present. Voting pulls conversation strongly to the mediocre center of the bell curve, and moderators only work if they're willing to strongly profess their own biases.

But it's what's here, so it's what I read. Though I rarely read the comments any more, it's mostly a link site for me at this point.

If you removed the voting and moderators, then the site culture would rapidly change. It wouldn't surprise me if it rapidly approached the culture of other tech sites with similar systems. If that's fine with you, then you could use those sites instead now.

I do.

It is possible to think that a particular platform should be moderated heavily without thinking all platforms should be. It would be chaos if no forums had any heavy moderation, because some discussions can be easily derailed, and entire forums can be derailed with content not relevant to the topic. There is still value in having places where you can communicate and spread ideas online without certain views and opinions being censored. There is value in both approaches, and it is reasonable to prefer one approach on a targeted forum like Hacker News, and prefer another on a global social network like Facebook.

Moderation has to be neutral, and there's proof FB is not.

The problem is that a great many people believe everything they read on FB. As these people see it, "they wouldn't let them say it if it wasn't true."

And so what? Seiously, if a person told you they have a permit from pope to mine black holes would you be inclined to believe them? If so, I maintain that the person provides a valuable service making people less gullible.

Respectfully, Covid statistics and mask defiance in the US are rather good counters arguments to your point.

I am willing to admit that there is strong current of anti-government tendencies in US society ( in the old country they gvmt prolly could tell you to glue your passport to your windshield and people would obey ). Minor anecdote, a person at my wife's place said he won't wear a mask, because gvmt, but he will ( after some talking to ) submit to company policy. Go figure.

I don't want to make a glib statement as I know lives are at stake ( mine and my SO too; we are in high risk group ).. but the more I am watching the ensuing aftermath , the more I am leaning towards just letting retards roam free.

> And so what?

We've already seen what happens. People fall deeper into their echo chambers and stop thinking rationally.

Extremism increases, Trump gets elected, COVID-19 conspiracies run rampant, white nationalists are emboldened, fools believe Antifa is a terrorist org, etc.

The “so what” is related to the fact that people aren’t telling others they have a permit from the pope, where the implied consequence is that the gullible person loses some money. They’re telling people that, for example, immigrants are the cause of all their problems, and that climate change isn’t real. The result of that isn’t that the gullible people are inconvenienced. The result is that they vote, en masse, for people who are actively hurting nor only them, but also the non-gullible people who are part of the same city/society/country/world. They do this based on information that is often provably false, but that the gullible people still believe, especially when it comes from someone in a position of power.

And that valuable service you mention, where gullible people become less gullible, never materializes if all the gullible people ever see is their own echo chamber, which continues to be disconnected from reality. The person with the pope permit to mine black holes has convinced enough people that he's definitely legit, and now he's digging a mine beneath your neighborhood, which will one day cause it to collapse, because there's gold in there and he can get rich selling it on the side. If you're willing to live with that in order to maybe, eventually, teach the people who bought into his permit a lesson, well, that's your call.

You made a compelling argument. I tend to think of those interactions as if they were one to one as opposed to the megaphone provided by social media.

I am not am in agreement, but I will sleep on it.

The type of gullible person that accepts these false beliefs about issues such as climate change and immigration isn't going to change their mind simply because Facebook starts censoring such content. Many people held such views before the rise of Facebook and other social media empires. Such views have been transmitted over old school media such as conservative talk radio shows for decades before the popularization of the internet.

All that is happening is a change in medium used to propagate such views. These people in question are only engaging with such social media channels because they find views that support their beliefs. Should such views be censored, they'll simply seek out other mediums.

I think the core problem is that many of these issues have been too highly politicized and now people can only engage with such issues on an emotional level. They only ask whether a view supports "their side" on the issue and care little for the actual facts.

Note, I don't even believe this behavior is limited to any side of the political arena. I've seen friends ostracized for simply considering positions such as the leftist argument for strict immigration standards to ensure a country has ample resources to care for their existing citizens and only takes additional members that will be a net positive contribution to societies available resources.

All in all, I think it is beyond the ability of social media empires to help gullible people become less gullible. All they can do is decide what content for gullible audiences they will allow on their platform. The more they restrict content, the more their user base will shrink as people seek out alternative mediums to find the content that supports their existing beliefs.

Well your argument proves it's about control. You justify your control by saying the opposing viewpoint is too dangerous.

Just realize you are not really changing minds nor preventing ideas from propagating. Ideas will propagate, people will believe ideas because of their mindset and upbringing, not because they read it once in some forum. The only thing censorship accomplishes is the Streisand effect.

So moderated facebook content has led to 9,000 people testing positive for corona in Florida today alone. Unfortunately people are too stupid to be trusted to decide what is real, and I can't allow them to ruin my life/the world.

A community that tolerates abusive behavior can be exploited to become a community that fosters abusive behavior.

Facebook is in control of what type of community they want their social network to be. At some point users may make a decision that they no longer want to be part of a community which tolerates certain behavior and Facebook will need to make a decision between a hands-off approach and a community that people want to be a part of. Facebook is reaching this point now.

I don't like to default to 'andsowhat' approach, but this type of conversation tends to lead there. If we are go there, what is this abusive behavior?

Abusive behavior is behavior which Facebook decides turns away the users they want to keep.

So basically no standard. Can you see why it is a good idea not to try to keep pipes as dumb as possible?

Facebook has over 2.5 billion monthly active users, which is not a "community" under any definition of the word. In my view, the fairly intuitive human instincts for being in a community simply can't be applied to such a diverse range of groups, cultures, and languages.

2.5 billion, in which each individual only sees its own echo chamber. Implying it isn't smaller groups makes it sound as if everyone see's everyone else's posts, which is not the case.

Unfortunately, FB also notices the most controversial posts and rewards them by advertising them. Engagement, clicks, etc. That's the part that keeps me from subscribing to your view. If there were a regulation that prevented social media from automatically hyping "high-engagement" posts, I might agree with you. Just bring back the reverse-chronological every-post behavior and give people tools to do their own filtering and subscribing.

I disagree, you can't have no moderation AND advertising optimizations at the same time. Because radical positions increases engagement metrics, advertisers will push users towards their most extreme content at all time. We need to put a ceiling on how extreme that content can be.

> you can't have no moderation AND advertising optimizations at the same time

So the convenience of advertisers and the ad-supported business model should override free speech?

There is no free speech on private platforms.

If that is the case, then the post I was responding to is wrong when it says "We need to put a ceiling on how extreme that content can be." If Facebook is just a private platform, "we" have no right to dictate anything to them.

That's a pretty slanted interpretation of what I said, what I meant may be better spelled out as:

"Because social media platforms demand extreme optimizations in favor of advertisements and general engagement, social media platforms cannot also be a conduit for free speech or un-moderated content as this combination will naturally favor extremist content and deliberately steer users towards extremist views that favor such optimizations".

Yes, it should be a dumb platform if anonymity is not possible in any way. So if you want to have a FB account, you need to provide everything that makes it possible to identify you in physical space.

If anonymity is required then it should be a heavily moderated platform.

I guess these two are the only feasible options.

Problem is, more and more of FB's advertising customers would prefer not to have their ads run on a dumb platform.

Even if it results in groups like anti-vaxers and anti-masks wearers?

Yes, These groups are totally fine. Everyone is entitled to their and opinion and to voicing it, even if I personally disagree.

I guess "I personally disagree" with genocide.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook...

This position is unpopular because Facebook is a platform for manipulating many people at least effort. Highly insecure, naive, and gullible people vote. People that want to feel like they belong to anything completely superficial still vote. People that cannot form an original opinion still vote.

In a strictly laissez-faire sense platforms like this become amplified beacons for a few manipulators. It’s not the fault of the platform but rather many people seeking emotional comfort in opposition to actual solutions and confusing one for the other at very low effort. I find that rather anti-libertarian, which is a democracy eating itself. I much more preferred the world where if people wanted to congregate into group thought they had to put real physical effort into it.

Facebook is not a person.

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