To be fully accurate, this is absolutely censorship, but it's not a violation of anyone's First Amendment rights. People often conflate the two.
We can argue about whether or not Google should ban certain opinions on their platform, or where the line should be drawn, but it is arguable that hey have the legal right to do so. And the Federal Government, just as inarguably, does not have this right.
I take your point about legality. But, I'd make the point that we don't have a clear moral or legal concept of free speech that relates to the current world.
"We can argue about whether or not Google should ban certain opinions on their platform, or where the line should be drawn, but it is arguable that hey have the legal right to do so."
At some point, the distinction between legal and moral breaks down.
In theory, google could legally do quite a lot. Say google decides to censor all mentions of the tiananmen square rising. They could remove it from search, youtube, android phones, chrome. Gmail could spam filter emails mentioning it. They could exert influence outside of companies/services that they own directly. None of that is illegal (at least not unconstitutional). In practice, this is very close to what China does with the great firewall.
It also wouldn't stand. Something like this would be too contradictory to the moral concept of free speech.
Constitutions are interpreted, and the supreme court is not the only interpreter. It's a cultural construct as well as a legal one.
We are effectively at this point now. Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc... These aren't platforms in the way newspapers were. They're not platforms at all. They're the level ground, in terms of speech, press, the right to petition the government or practice religion. The reasons that amendment was written runs through google.
I don't know. If Google decided to censor "hate speech" in GMail, could anyone stop them? Some people would applaud. Machine learning is good enough now that misspellings and euphemisms can be caught. So topic-based censorship could really work. Especially for Google, which has so much history on each sender, and so much experience with spam filtering.
1) Slang evolves.
2) Combining two languages, especially under-resourced languages, mean that a chunk of words fall outside the range of a hate-speech lexicon.
So maybe in languages which have huge resources devoted to it (English), its easy to figure out, but I don't know how well covered the evolving edge, and the code-mixed (language mixed) edges are.
In order for AI to become a more effective tool for detecting hate speech, it must be able to understand content the way people do: holistically. When viewing a meme, for example, we don’t think about the words and photo independently of each other; we understand the combined meaning. This is extremely challenging for machines, however, because it means they can’t analyze the text and the image separately. They must combine these different modalities and understand how the meaning changes when they are presented together.
Facebook is going for the really hard case, where non-hate images and non-hate text combine to induce hate. They already have a text-only system.
[1] https://venturebeat.com/2020/05/12/facebook-is-using-more-ai...
So when we say big players, do you mean FB or do you mean the National Govs?
Side note - the CCP also employs manpower to handle the task, so its not just ML, my point hovers on the ML aspect of it.
The argument was a closer look at the "market place of ideas" analogy.
There are actors in the market selling bad content. Content designed to addict, poison or over turn the fair functioning of the market place.
Earlier things were far slower, so this was not as pertinent a threat.
With social media, and virality, this is a clear and present danger for the functioning of the digital meeting places we enjoy.
Therefore, there is a need for action to prevent these market perverting actions.
<This ignores the class of locutionary actions that cause direct harm, such as hate speech etc. but the same argument can be made for them, and because of the clear harm they cause.>
Nathan Mattias at Cornell is someone who wrote/writes about it, while also working to help citizen run experiments to figure out what works for content moderation.
He had an interesting article which makes a better argument: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/18/a-toxic-w...
Other interesting articles: https://citizensandtech.org/2020/02/can-public-infrastructur...
They're really not -- or shouldn't be. Certainly not when you have a textualist/originalist majority on the court charged with deciding what is and isn't constitutional.
I get your broader point that societies and norms change. But the last thing any of us should want is a constitution that is lightly referenced and broadly interpreted because history shows such easily interpreted and changed documents benefit the oppressor far more than the oppressed.
Your final point is a strong one: Substantial parts (and, for some forms of speech, nearly all parts) of our freedom of speech runs through a handful of large social -media companies. There's little reason that can't be addressed with appropriate federal legislation but, if that's not enough, then let's get on with the heavy lift of actually amending the Constitution, rather than hoping our better angels prevail in interpreting it.
FCC regulation of TV broadcast comes close, but apparently obscenity isn't protected under the First Amendment (perhaps you can tell I'm not a lawyer, or for that matter an American).
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/obscene-indecent-and-pr...
The obscenity exception was largely non-controversial until the 20th century, because there was a broad societal consensus, among both popular and elite opinion, that obscenity and pornography did not deserve First Amendment protection. It was only in the 20th century that societal consensus broke down, and it was in that context the US Supreme Court decided to reduce the scope of that exception. (It still exists, and is still occasionally enforced.) The original authors and ratifiers of the First Amendment supported laws against obscenity, and didn't believe the First Amendment prohibited them.
Ultimately the courts have to decide what laws mean, even constitutional laws – but they could always have given them more guidance, by being more explicit in the text about which exceptions are valid and which are not
There is probably at least a little truth to each of those, although I think many of them are also effects of central causes (e.g., religious control over common people's lives declined because of increasing incomes, which increased due in part to advances in communications tech).
I think this evades the spirit of the legal protections here, at least.
Note: I'm not disagreeing with you, and don't really have a solution here. Just pointing out how the current situation feels like dangerous territory.
Or, more generally: given how subjective ideas about acceptable speech are, the only real solution is to break up giant gatekeepers like Google.
>> The fairness doctrine of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), introduced in 1949, was a policy that required the holders of broadcast licenses to both present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was—in the FCC's view—honest, equitable, and balanced. The FCC eliminated the policy in 1987 and removed the rule that implemented the policy from the Federal Register in August 2011.
But who decides what's true? And why should we let them? Majority consensus is an easy answer, but we'd need something else if we were to regulate truth at a level we could enforce on journalists.
I'm personally more worried about that question spiraling out of control than I am about offering equal air time.
What it means is not news, thats opinion.
Seems to me around the time that it was ended there were several other things going on.
The advent of cable news networks which gave a massive incentive to sensationalism and strong partisan ties as multiple players joined the space with a need to create a sustainable viewership.
Satellite feeds became common ensuring a single message instead of having a layer of abstraction in the form of a local or regional newscaster; instead of relaying facts, they can relay a highly opinionated version.
Local and independent news stations were being purchased and consolidated into national telecom companies with their own partisan editorial bends, a la Nexstar and Sinclair.
I have to believe that all of the above had a much greater influence on news discourse in the past few decades than the elimination of the fairness doctrine. Furthermore, if you give government the power to regulate anything; always expect the current party in power to use that regulation as a weapon. Can you imagine what our leaders would do given even more power to control and manipulate the media narrative? Ending this was a good decision.
On TV or radio, you can only have so many stations. But with the internet, people can make a new web site and publish there, they're not limited by the available spectrum. Therefore, the kind of regulation that was needed in a constrained environment (broadcasted TV/Radio), does not really make sense when those constraints are lifted.
As for alternatives, I think we just need people to collectively decide that some other platform (ideally a decentralized one) is better than the incumbent. Facebook depends on its inertia. Suppose every Facebook use went cold turkey and switched to something else instead (let's say Mastodon for the sake of argument). In a year, nobody would be talking about Facebook's monopoly.
Where I think things get sticky right now, though, and I'll even say -the- reason we haven't seen innovation in social media, is that incumbents on the scale of Facebook have the capital sufficient to either buy or sue any plausible competition into the ground before the competition has a chance at taking their market share. Imagine a world where Facebook had been blocked from burying Instagram and WhatsApp with money!
I think I would be in favor of greater regulation against these winner-takes-all tactics on a more economic level, although exactly how that regulation would work in a way that was both fair and non-trivial to evade I don't know.
Private companies can't censor "bad opinions"
But private companies can also arbitrarily refuse service for say, making a "gay wedding cake"
How is this disconnect rationalized?
couldn't agree more. it's so frustrating seeing this everywhere online. this isn't twitter, you can write as much as you want. I read comments online to try and understand other viewpoints, and I can't do that without substance.
The first hypocrisy is the defense of the right of a business to make arbitrary decisions w.r.t. service (not bake the cake), while simultaneously demanding that the business not have the power to refuse service (condemning private censorship).
The reverse position is not hypocritical in the same way, because condemning discrimination against customers on LGBT grounds is not at odds with censoring discriminatory speech - in fact, the two positions are aligned.
You could try to argue that private censorship is itself a form of discrimination, but most people who hold the second position would not concede that the people who practice hate speech are a minority worthy of protection - so for them, no discrimination is occurring.
If [large social media platform] doesn't want that kind of content, it's not unreasonable to simply make one to soak up that "ignored" market segment. Reddit can't shut you down for hosting your own internet forum for instance
I get why one might want to do that, but I don’t think it’s the right precedent to set.
I've thought about this statement for about a half hour now. What does it mean? That punishing individuals for ignoring public health mandates is a precedent we don't want? Or is it just the 'utility' being used that is problematic for you?
I don't get it.
It would be cruel and unusual to deprive a prisoner of water because they have no other means of attaining it when you withhold it. Turning off city water service to a property is different. The property owner has other options they can take to get the water they need to stay alive.
This also strikes me as abuse of power, one must not suffer arbitrary and random punishments. Whats bext, we will start cutting internet access to everyone who swears on the street, disabling electriciry to anyone who protests?
he's ineffective with the power he has, can't get the homeless off the streets, can't build housing or make it affordable, can't improve educational outcomes, can't reduce unemployment and underemployment, has no real empathy for regular people (despite his emotion-laden language, and spanish!), and yet he wants to reach into our private lives and coerce behavior at the margin (saying this despite wholly agreeing that house parties are a terrible idea right now, but let's persuade, not force, and have a dialogue).
the irony is that angelenos have been an exceedingly compliant group to his orders, adhering to both lockdown and _outdoor_ mask mandates at upwards of 95%. even if some of that is social signaling, that's startlingly high, making any a dictator proud. and yet he wants more.
This is true enough for Reddit. It's far less true of the Play Store, because the platform (controlled by the same people as the store) throws up scary warnings if you try to install any other store so that almost nobody uses them, and on the only other major phone platform third party stores are prohibited outright. Which means to get your users to follow you, you don't just have to get them to visit a different website, you have to get them to replace their phone with one from a different hardware vendor, switch operating systems, and replace all of their other apps -- if that's even possible for them.
And what when the only two platforms both do the same thing? It's obviously not feasible for an individual app developer to create their own phone platform and hardware and get everyone to switch to it.
The basic thesis of my analogy was "you want 'free speech' forced upon private companies, but also want to allow them the freedom to dictate what content they allow under their 'brand'"
Hypocrites are not limited to specific groups, they're universal.
The difference is in the legal definition of protected class. It is illegal to discriminate against someone based on their membership of a protected class -- ethnicity or disability for instance.
Removing an opinion or banning a user based on violation of an agreed upon term of service is not the same thing. Having an opinion does not make you a member of a protected class, and a private corporation is free to allow you or disallow you from use of their services to broadcast that opinion. Newspapers have been doing this since the dawn of print. Google could not, for example, ban someone for being Jewish.
You can argue about whether sexual orientation deserves status as a protected class, but it is disingenuous to claim that the two are the same thing under the law. It is a false equivalency.
Let's maybe spell out separately whether or not these two situations are equivalent or not a) legally, b) ethically, c) in principle.
a) As I stated in the argument about the difference between discrimination against protected classes versus hosting content on a private server, I'd say that legally, these are not equivalent.
b) Ethically is an interesting question. Since the ethics of denying someone service based on their sexual orientation is largely viewed as reprehensible, maybe a better question would be whether or not (freed from questions of protected class) the baker would decorate a Nazi themed cake versus allowing federated apps that are largely used for the dissemination of white supremacist ideology to be hosted?
c) In principle, I'd say they are not equivalent for the following reason: selling and decorating a cake is a business transaction between two entities. The cake (decorated or not) ownership moves from producer to consumer. The consumer is purchasing a physical cake. If the cake is ever made public, it is at the behest of the purchasers of the cake, and any consequences of that public display will be suffered by the purchaser. Essentially, the baker's name is not on the cake, and no one needs to know.
Hosting apps or other contents affects the reputation of the hosting company, and damages to their business reputation fall on it. Think about Facebook being recognized as a conduit for foreign interference in U.S. elections, or whether or not the New York Times will accept ad content from an adult video company. The name on the masthead is the entity that suffers the damage first.
Have you ever heard the term "strawman"?
People were fine when they were deleting spam and had a limited content restriction policies against things like directly promoting violence or posting gore/cp and other obvious tier stuff.
I haven't heard many people pushing for governments to force Google et al to not be able to delete things from their platforms either - outside of some tiny fringes who don't understand how the internet works.
Which is therefore still consistently pro-freedom. Likewise compelled speech + censorship of an arbitrary and ever expanding list of wrongthink is consistently authoritarian.
I really don't see the contradiction in either of these worldviews.
It's the classic centralized top-down puppet-mastery of individuals choices vs embracing the chaos of freedom of individual choice (within some limited boundaries). This battle has been waged for as long as society has been around and is a natural side-effect of power structures.
Both situations boil down to freedom of speech. Both have extra, specific laws that deal with their situations. Without a well thought out justification, a mismatch between the position on those is likely hypocritical, no matter which you are for or against. A well thought out positions may not be, but I don't think most people actually have a well thought out opinion on the intricacies of how these intersect, and what it means, and instead fall back on what they would like to be able to do in that situation, or on their impression based on the way it was presented to them (I think it far more likely contextual presentation is to blame for some of this than actual reasoning). It does little good to point out the hypocrisy of some group on a specific issue when that form of hypocrisy is widespread and rampant. We should also point out the cause of the hypocrisy itself.
The cake example specifically is more subtle (legally), since there's an argument that the cake is custom. I think this gets very tricky legally, but on the broader point, it isn't hypocritical to say censorship based on concept is okay, but based on speaker is not.
I don't know. I think that depends on how acceptable you think it is to censor based on the Islamic religion, or the idea of homosexuality, even if you think censoring Muslims and homosexuality is not. At what point does censoring discussing about homosexuality become censoring homosexuals? I'm sure some people would say immediately, and to them, there's no difference between censorship based on show they are and what they feel or believe?
That's why I say it requires a very well thought out argument. I can be convinced that it isn't hypocritical to distinguish these (I'm exploring my thoughts on this subject, I don't have extremely held opinions on it, other than that it's complicated), but nobody has to be satisfaction yet.
Let me give you an example: It is acceptable to enforce the rule that laws cannot favor Islam. It is not acceptable to enforce that Muslim individuals cannot hold positions in government.
The first is discrimination based on content, the second is discrimination based on, let's call it character.
> It is acceptable to enforce the rule that laws cannot favor Islam.
That's not even about censorship, so I'm not sure how it applies.
Again, this is why I think it's important to have a well thought out argument, otherwise it may be hypocritical. I'm not even pushing a different side, I'm just trying to get you to articulate specifically why these two things are different, and pointing to examples doesn't do that at all. It's just a list of value judgements that you assume someone else will agree with without providing the rational behind those judgements (presumably believing it's self evident).
If someone cannot distinguish why two separate situations are different but states as fact that they are, then they are being hypocritical, whether those situation are different or not. Nobody should be stating things as fact that they can't explain. Being hypocritical has nothing to do with the truth, it has to do with knowledge, actions and beliefs.
I'd argue that political action is a form of speech, so laws that prevent certain kinds of political action are speech. How do you draw the distinction between a law, which you're arguing isn't speech, and political donations which are, at least under the law today, a form of speech. I'm claiming these are all the same thing, because you can't draw a non-arbitrary line between a congressperson addressing congress and a congressperson drafting a bill and me asking a congressperson to draft a bill. They're all speech. You're free to disagree with that framing, but that is how I view speech. It's for this reason that I also don't agree with the common-in-the US excuse of "it's just speech so it can't hurt anyone", or similar. The only difference between your "just speech" and a law is who is willing to listen to the speaker.
Now, you can claim that we're talking about government representatives, so things are different, which may or may not be true, but I'll accept that. Perhaps people who have more authority should be given less freedom, an interesting tradeoff. But let's ignore the government entirely and just discuss what makes the two situations distinct.
So, it clearly isn't okay to censor Muslims, because that rule cannot be fair/equally applied. It will, by definition, be discriminatory against individuals, which seems to be the bad thing we want to avoid (or maybe I'm wrong and you're okay with discriminating against individuals?). However, censoring certain topics may be done without discriminating against individuals. It applies equally, for example, to a Muslim person wanting to extoll Islam and to a Christian wanting to demonize it.
If we bring this full circle: preventing Muslims from speaking ensures that they will not be represented [in the discourse, in the government, whatever]. This can, realistically, only be harmful to them. Banning discussion of Islam certainly has the capacity to be harmful to them, but also has the capacity to not be harmful to them (for example if the discourse is full of demonization of Islam, perhaps banning discussion of Islam is a net-gain for individual Muslim people).
Obviously this requires, like, an actual fair moderator, and it raises a bunch of tricky questions (like is the meta-discussion of whether it should be acceptable to discuss Islam, itself an acceptable discussion?), but it isn't, call it, implicitly harmful.
tl;dr: Removing people from discourse cannot be beneficial to those people. Removing concepts from discourse depends.
> How do you draw the distinction between a law, which you're arguing isn't speech, and political donations which are, at least under the law today, a form of speech.
No, it's not about censorship because it's not preventing speech, it's about ensuring equality. It's fundamentally different in the same way a law that gives a right is different than a law that prevents an action. There's a fundamental difference between reduction of something (or the increase of other things to match) and the elimination of something.
> discriminatory against individuals, which seems to be the bad thing we want to avoid (or maybe I'm wrong and you're okay with discriminating against individuals?).
Well, I did just say in the prior comment "We can agree it's not okay to censor based on an individual", so I'm not sure why it needs to be a question...
> However, censoring certain topics may be done without discriminating against individuals.
And censoring the types of cake you make may not affect individuals either, if it's over something like your dislike for dogs. Let's assume both cases affect individuals. If you think it fundamentally changes what the argument is to restrict the web services side to items that affect individuals, then that points towards some ambiguity in the phrasing of the things being compared on one or both sides. That's progress.
> for example if the discourse is full of demonization of Islam, perhaps banning discussion of Islam is a net-gain for individual Muslim people
I think we're on shakier ground if we're justifying specific actions based on perceived public opinion and actions, because that's extremely subjective. What one person views as fair and rational discourse on a topic another views as lies and slander (dog whistles are a thing, as is being accused of dog whistling when honestly requesting information).
> Obviously this requires, like, an actual fair moderator
That doesn't exist. By the nature of the items we're discussing, I think there's a good chance it might be impossible to exist. The fair moderator of today is the one seen as blatantly biased in the discussions of tomorrow. Social mores change.
> tl;dr: Removing people from discourse cannot be beneficial to those people. Removing concepts from discourse depends.
Does it? What's a concept that being removed from discourse is beneficial? I think this is a very subjective point, and can't be taken at face value. There are some people that believe no concept should be entirely taboo. Those people actually wrote our Bill of Rights.
While I agree that removing a subgroup of people from discourse is generally not beneficial to those people, I will note it's generally agreed that it's sometimes beneficial for society. That's what we do with criminals. It may be that it being okay for some groups and not others means the way you group (the attributes that make the protected classes) matters most here.
Why would you ever want to ignore Google in this situation? Unless you don't want to earnestly debate the real topic?
Their size, control, and the fact they run massive platforms for publishers to post content, whose consumers often can post their own content, with multiple centrally controlled areas for control for hundreds of millions of people at any moment, makes it pointless to ignore such important context and semantics.
Debating the role of these major gatekeepers at a cultural, rational, and moral level - in the context of the position which they actually hold in society - is an entirely valid, and essential to any useful arguments.
Just because there are some weak analogies to governmental constitutions, or small business's/independent publisher's/individuals website's freedom to choose what people post directly on their site/app, doesn't mean it's a useful position to judge what self-imposed limitations should be employed by major monopolistic companies who run entire portions of the internet.
Great power requires great responsibility.
The difference here is basic common sense.
The fact people keep resorting to these reductionist analogies, ignoring critical context and arguing from positions of fundamentally different levels of power/responsibility, in order to push some pro-censorship and expansive moderation of speech, shows the weakness in these arguments.
If you need to ignore significant amounts of context to make your points then you're being deceitful, whether intentionally or not.
I'd go even further to argue this intentional ignorance of context and semantics is a fundamental tactic used by pro-censorship activists - despite the fact context and intention are fundamental to almost all human communication, verbal or otherwise.
At a more local level it's commonplace for these activists to ignore the obvious intention and context of the speaker, and critically the tastes and tolerances of the specific audience itself - who are entirely voluntary consumers. Making whole words, phrases, and concepts totally off limits, regardless if it was used in intentionally and rationally derogatory or offensive ways.
It's basically intentionally missing the forest for the trees. All for some vague greater good. No matter how many false-positives, unintended side-effects, misunderstandings, or wasteful side-shows it creates.
Because presumably Google isn't special and doesn't lave laws and ethics that apply only to them? I'm trying to distill the issue to its essence.
> The fact people keep resorting to these reductionist analogies, ignoring critical context and arguing from positions of fundamentally different levels of power/responsibility, in order to push some pro-censorship and expansive moderation of speech, shows the weakness in these arguments.
If you think I'm doing that then you're making a lot of assumptions about what I was trying to communicate and why I commented, and you're way off base.
I'll make it clear, just because I pointed out a fault I see in a position doesn't mean I subscribe to the traditionally opposed opinion, it just means I'm willing to point out faults as I see them.
Additionally, hypocrisy doesn't care how correct one argument is over another. It's entirely possibly for someone to be a hypocrite and correct. We have a situation where some people believe A is okay and B is not, and some people believe A is not okay but B is okay. Unless they can actually distinguish why A and B are different, both groups of people are hypocrites, because they're either regurgitating someone else's opinion, or they're speaking before they understand what they're talking about. Whether one side or the other is "right" doesn't matter, hypocrisy isn't about correctness, it's about using the same knowledge and convictions to come to the same desired outcome with similar facts. Without the knowledge to distinguish between situations, how can someone be so sure that they differ?
And that's before we even go to the fact that there's actually four possible combinations of those attributes, not the two that have been presented so far (both negatively), and that the "right" way to view this is one of those.
A social liberal could argue on the point of protecting the rights of a marginalized minority. By censoring (for example) calls for violence, social liberals are protecting the safety of the targeted group. By requiring a cake shop to serve gay couples (or interracial couples, to throw in another example), social liberals are protecting a marginalized minority's access to services.
Now, I'd boycott the hell out of such an establishment, but as an abstract argument, I think compelled expression is a bad idea. It's really not that huge a step from compelled expression to re-education camps.
Twitter's service isn't that they write 140 character prose for you, and YouTube's service isn't that they create videos to your specification. It would be hypocritical to demand that YouTube be forced to create a custom video to your specifications (or a ghost writer forced to write a book for someone with whom they disagree) and yet the cake shop shouldn't be forced to write two same-gendered names on a cake. These people arguing against forced cake lettering aren't arguing for forced book creation or forced video creation.
Once again, refusing to make a gay wedding cake makes you a jerk and worthy of boycotting, but there is a consistent argument to be made simultaneously against forced expression and against forced silence.
Are we talking normal wedding cakes, that you can buy from nearly any baker, with some ordinary decorations, that just have two men's names instead of one men's name and one woman's name after the "Congratulations", and have two mass-produced little plastic men on top instead of one little plastic man and one little plastic woman?
Or are we talking something you'd get from a baker like Duff Goldman, which is a custom designed and made unique work of art specifically for you that captures the artist's interpretation of your wedding, and inherently is an act of speech on the part of the artist?
I don't believe he has a problem selling cakes to anyone, just that he refused to design cakes with themes.
Allowing speech on your speech platform is not the same thing as compelling others to speech.
Likewise, if you say you're a webhost, you host websites.
If there's a legal issue, you report it. That's it.
Google is arguably in a monopolist situation. If they block your app or opinion, you're silenced.
just because a lot of people rely on the google play store doesn't mean it's a public service in the legal sense. It's a very private piece of software that is NOT open source and is very obviously owned and managed by a single entity.
just like you get to choose who you let in your house. they get to choose how their software is used.
side note: monopoly is a separate issue.
The first instance is property rights. The second is copyright, a privilege granted by the government at the expense of others' property rights. When a private party leverages copyright to conduct censorship it's ultimately the government that is responsible for violating the victim's freedom of speech. Google certainly has the right to grant or deny access to their services as they please, but that is not the same as having a natural right to decide how the software they develop is used after it has already been released to the public.
If they have shown the ability to control speech on their platforms section 230 should be repealed and Google etc should be responsible for the content on their property like any other publisher.
If there's anything that is an indisputable fact, it's that no high-volume platform with user content can proactively police their platform 100%. I think that's a silly rationale to say that they should be prohibited from manually policing content that is brought to their attention afterwards.
There is no reason to give these censorious companies extra legal protections no other publisher has if they are censoring society. They have been protected by a regulation that is now causing intense centralizing of power in the hand of a few technocrats and it is actively harmful to the rest of society to so empower them over everyone else.
It is operationally impractical that society should be subject to Google's whims but Google not liable for Google's network content.
Yes, there is a very good reason.
Traditional publishers review 100% of content before they affirmatively publish it.
User content on most websites are published by automation, and are not reviewed by humans, like this comment.
So what? They choose to publish it. They can choose not to. Their own internal business practices don't require society to give them loopholes with which they get out of all liability and abuse the rights of others.
It's a good reason to the publisher, its not a good reason for the rest of society.
Who chose what, exactly?
In western legal systems, laws typically take into account the mens rea of the crime that has taken place.
It is not reasonable to make people guilty by proxy. Someone either did the crime, or they didn’t.
If you own a building, and someone writes a bomb threat on a bathroom stall, are you guilty of a bomb threat?
If there is no crime in publishing the content then overturning special protections in section 230 will have no effect.
>If you own a building, and someone writes a bomb threat on a bathroom stall, are you guilty of a bomb threat?
If you have a magazine, and publish letters to the editor that contain bomb threats, yes. A building isn't a publishing business, and these companies are in the business of publishing, but it turned into publishing on computers and suddenly they get a special exemption.
They choose what goes on their platform, who can go on it, what is said. They've demonstrated amply their ability to control speech and enforce policy. Let them have their platforms, let them have the liability like everyone else.
It's all just equal treatment under the law.
I think that’s precisely what’s starting to be discussed now at national levels, with investigations into Apple, Facebook and Google in the EU and the USA.
In many countries, utilities are commercial entities, but they can’t refuse to serve customers because of what they say. I can see a future where we think the same of the big players on the web: commercial, but still public utilities.
Problem of course is that many countries also fear a completely open internet. Providers already have to filter pornography, hate speech, etc. So, would we end up with commercial entities that cannot filter the content published on their platform to suit their norms, but must filter it to suit the norms of the government? If so, would that apply to all sites, including, say, Hacker News, or pro- or anti-abortus sites, or just to large ones? If so, what’s ‘large’?
There is only profit. The moment you become unprofitable for whatever reason you will lose everything. If tomorrow 51% of the world decided they hated left-handed people they would all find their accounts disabled, their website registrations suspended, their entire online presence forced into secrecy.
So far that's only happened, to my knowledge, to terrorists and white supremacists, but there is absolutely no legal reason why it can't happen to anyone else.
speaking of shutting off water, this is happening in meatspace too: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/los-angeles-mayor-eric-g...
The real world contains public spaces. It contains within it the recognition that some part of all of this around us, belongs to everyone.
And while that has been the center of much of the rhetoric about the internet since its inception, that rhetoric has never actually been true IN FACT. It's a mishmash of private entities controlling their piece of the puzzle.
I think, as another poster mentioned, if democracy is to survive, the concept of "some part of the internet and its services are a public good" must take hold.
Now, that's a scary-ass thing to say because unlike a piece of land, or drinking water, these things don't just "exist". They exist only as long as some entity pays for them, which means that such a statement implies things about who pays (government? subsidies? you pay but it isn't yours? special kinds of taxes?).
And yet I think avoiding dystopia requires going that way. I have no idea what it would look like.
Of course, there's an alternative.
Google/Twitter/FB/etc. can agree that they don't censor anyone unless that person breaks the law. That puts the discussion right back where it should have been in the first place: In the public, political sphere, where The People have the ability to influence the outcome.
But then, why would Google etc. do that? Too enticing, all that power.
The constitution doesn't apply to a location or a medium, it applies to an actor: the US government (and state/local subdivisions). The US government has to follow it everywhere, and nobody else has to follow it anywhere.
Americans do tend to run around quoting their first amendment rights like the whole world has them. As you say, it's strictly a US government thing.
While Australia for the most part enjoys free speech, it is not enshrined in the (AU) constitution. The government will occasionally order censorship[1], usually around whistle-blowing, investigations and court cases.
There was a protest in the major Australian papers last year about the erosion of press freedoms[2].
[1]:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/world/australia/australia... [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-50119559
EX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_v._Pacifica_Foundation
This would imply there are interpretations where it isn't allowed even in the cases of the worst most extreme content. Does any organization/group advocate such an interpretation? As far as I'm aware all groups either support an interpretation that allows the government to censor some speech or supports considering some speech as not counting as speech so it can be censored without censoring speech (using sophistry to hide censorship of speech).
I'm pretty sure you are able to interpret it as not allowing even in the worst and most extreme cases, you just don't want to. There's no need for an argument from authority.
I am anarcho-capitalist, and I have no trouble being absolutist about freedom of speech inside one's own property.
So there's that.
Fine.
> inside one's own property.
Ah. That's quite specific. i.e. it excludes much of what's being discussed here.
That would be the interpretation where someone actually reads the text of the Constitution instead of making up exceptions out of whole cloth.
> Does any organization/group advocate such an interpretation?
Yes, obviously. The Libertarian Party is one example:
>> … we oppose all attempts by government to abridge the freedom of speech and press, as well as government censorship in any form …[1]
>> We support full freedom of expression and oppose government censorship, regulation, or control of communications media and technology.[1]
Direct threats of harm are still actionable, of course. In that situation you aren't punishing the speaker for what they said but rather defending yourself in response to a reasonable expectation of imminent and irreversible harm. The speech is merely evidence of intent.
As such it’s common for groups to carve out what the want limited as simply not qualifying as speech. Aka we can ban spam because we are banning the medium and not the message. This then gets into issues like should flag burning be allowed which blur the line between message and medium. Thus simply saying you support free speech is a rather meaningless statement. People need to look at the specifics on what each group considers speech etc.
If your perjury gets someone else punished when they shouldn't have been, you are an accessory to that unjust punishment. Conversely, if your perjury shields someone from just punishment then you are an accessory to the harm they caused their victim, and potentially future victims who would have otherwise been protected. Once again it is not the speech which is the problem but rather the actual harm which you helped to cause.
> This then gets into issues like should flag burning be allowed which blur the line between message and medium.
That isn't even a question of speech, just private property. If it's your flag then you should be able to burn it, for any reason or no reason. Banning flag-burning on the basis of the message the act is attempting to communicate would obviously infringe on the freedom of speech under even the narrowest of definitions. If you're burning someone else's flag then that can be punished as theft and destruction of others' property independent of any speech which may or may not have been intended. Freedom of speech is not a "get out of jail free" card. If in the course of making your speech you also take actions which harm others then you can be punished for those actions; the fact that they were accompanied by speech is no excuse.
> Thus simply saying you support free speech is a rather meaningless statement.
I kind of agree with you here. Freedom of speech only takes on concrete form when combined with consistent support for private property rights, in which case you get freedom of speech as a natural by-product. The question becomes not "Is this speech?" but rather "Does this action cause injury or otherwise infringe on anyone else's property rights?"—something that speech per se can never do.
Unfortunately that doesn’t work as outlawing harm from speech ends up outlawing political speech because someone doesn’t get elected. Similarly, advertising your product is detrimental to your competition.
Effectively you need to define what kinds of harm speech is allowed to produce. Anti Vaccination videos for example actually get people killed, and we accept that as a valid trade off in the US.
Again, it’s really tempting to define something as outside of free speech but selecting what is and isn’t allowed is kind of the point. So, you can’t simply punt this issue.
However, no functioning society could allow unlimited free speech. There are many exceptions to the First Amendment – fraud, perjury, defamation, death threats, "shouting fire in a crowded theatre", speech in violation of privacy or duties of confidentiality, etc.
I don't think the original authors of the First Amendment meant it to be unlimited. They didn't intend it to legalise fraud or perjury or defamation.
But, given they didn't leave any guidance in the text as to which exceptions are valid and which are not, it is basically up to SCOTUS to decide. And which exceptions SCOTUS accepts as valid change as the moods of its majority changes – and will likely continue to change in the future.
The equivalent provision in the European Convention on Human Rights is Article 10, which says: "The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary".
I think that's better than the First Amendment in that it acknowledges in the text the reality that exceptions are necessary, and makes some attempt to outline what the exceptions are. However, there is still a lot of room for interpretation by the European Court of Human Rights as to the proper scope of all those exceptions, especially regarding what is "necessary in a democratic society" and what isn't. Few would claim the Court always gets it right. But, at least, the European Court of Human Rights is arguably a far less politicised institution that the US Supreme Court.
Even the line that you quoted demonstrates this when it says things like "for the protection of morals".
I really do not want the government infringing on speech rights, due to something as overly broad as "morals".
So does the US.
Not in comparison to the EU.
Most people can agree that restrictions on speech in the US are much less strict than those in the EU.
Most (if not all) EU countries protect the freedom of speech in their constitution. In addition ECHR protects the freedom of speech as well.
Not particularly well, as it seems when compared to the US.
You can just look at some of the laws that they have regarding speech, on their books, to see how there are definitely more things that are restricted that you can say, in comparison to what it restricted in the US.
While it’s been revoked the FCC fairness doctrine was considered constitutional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Lion_Broadcasting_Co._v._F...
There was no fairness doctrine applied to, say, newspapers.
Large general-purpose platforms should be forced do distribute all content which is not otherwise illegal, and only perform removal based through the standard legal system.
if it can't be done(yes it can't be done) so is forcing platforms be fair(that can't happen as well).
Who defines, and what are the definitions of "Large" and "General Purpose" in this context?
Am I allowed to moderate content as fits with my ToS at X number of users, but at X+1 users I become forced to publish all content which is "not otherwise illegal"?
In regards to what is "not otherwise illegal", which laws from which country apply?
How does one combat things such as excessive spam? If I am forced to allow any content which is "otherwise not illegal", and my service becomes literally unusable because of someone posting 10,000 cat pictures per second (cats aren't illegal, I'm forced to distribute the cats), what is my recourse? Am I still allowed to rate limit? Because that, boiled down, is censoring a users ability to post "otherwise not illegal" content.
In Germany, there were actually cases where courts have ruled that facebook is not allowed to delete non illegal posts:
https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Oberlandesgericht-Me...
One big part of the argument of the judges was based on contracts. When a user makes a facebook account, it creates a contract between the user and facebook. The user agrees to share their data for ads and stuff, and facebook agrees to publish their posts. Thus they have to do that, they cannot just decide to not publish some posts, that would be a contract violation.
Just like when you order a pizza with 10 toppings, the pizza service cannot deliver a pizza with 8 toppings and still expect you to pay the full price
And as second part, the court has ruled that a clause "we choose which posts to publish" would be invalid in the contract, because a contract must be fair to all involved parties and not violate basic rights like freedom of speech.
It's easy to hand-wave it to the courts, but there are many issues with that approach as well (e.g. non-technically competent people making decisions about technology, government not immune to corruption nor censorship, courts are slow by nature).
Your answer also conveniently side-steps the nitty-gritty implementation issues. How does a platform deal with spam posts if they are unable to delete content that is legal? If you don't like a website, simply post a few thousand Viagra advertisements to their front page for a few weeks and they either have to advertise Viagra or shutdown.
Speaking of advertising, why bother pay for ad-space on a website like Reddit, when I can just spam my product on every subreddit over and over again and they have no choice but to keep it up?
Will these rules also be applicable to other forms of media which also have a viewership above the arbitrary "large" line? Newspaper, books, TV? If not, why not?
These are just a few off-the-cuff issues that come to mind. I'm sure people smarter than me who take some time to seriously consider this approach will be able to find hundreds of such examples of why "forced to publish all non-illegal content" sounds great but is simply not a feasible solution to the problem.
As an aside, I find it odd that the answer to censorship by private companies is to offload everything to the largest centralized system with the longest history of censorship: governments.
As it stands now they get zero liability for speech they can clearly police. I see hate groups in Facebook that Facebook doesn't close if reported. Let them own it
In both cases, they're already providing the service to distribute it; they're simply leaving it alone and not acting at all.
Incidentally that's the best way for them to retain their Section 230 protection -- neutrality.
True. But while technically correct, it is becoming a more and more academic distinction.
Facebook-Apple-Google-Twitter, and maybe a few other tech behemoths, probably have greater ability to censor people and content than most governments throughout history. It's also true, in theory, democratically elected governments could reign them in. But it's also true they have unprecedented power to manipulate public opinion, if they chose to do so, to get people elected or legislation passed or blocked.
Decided to look, pretty clear.
"Google may make changes to this Agreement at any time with notice to Developer"
and
"Google may terminate this Agreement with You immediately upon written notice"
This is actually still a good Wikipedia article to educate yourself.
You're technically right, but in practice it really doesn't matter that the "government" can't censor you when the modern "public square" is held almost entirely by private companies. The government doesn't really hold any power in shaping modern public discourse anymore, tech companies do! Now the fact that said private company's ideals line up closely with one certain political party is just a coincidence, I'm sure.
Federated apps are trying to establish a commons, right? If Google can block access, then there is no commons. If the government can force easements on private land owners, I suspect the EFF could make a case for the same for App stores.
Nobody would be making Google host the Commons, just access. This is a much simpler case IMO than forcing Twitter or Facebook to carry messages they don’t want.
It's not censorship, its moderation and editorial discretion.
I think we as the society agree that child porn and child sexual abuse is a criminally punishable offense. A platform in a possession of it clearly is in a possession and distribution of child pornography, hence officers and directors should be charged under those statues.
Without those provisions no website could allow user created content, as they would instantly be sued to oblivion.
(Standard disclaimer of working for Google)
The rest is up to the users.
I want to make it clear that I do not have a problem with a safe harbor what so ever.
If Google wants to prevent its users who ask it from being able to access some portion of internet, Google absolutely can do that. That portion of the internet should not be able to go after Google for acting on behalf of the users.
What Google is doing is preventing users that did not ask for that from being able to access that portion of the internet. It is akin to Verizon deciding "that content is bad so we are going to block it in our pipe". If Google wants to do that, then fine it is providing the "clean internet experience" and it should absolutely be punished when it fails at doing that (hosting child porn)
They want it both ways and what we're seeing is the outcome. The solution is simple - don't have it both ways.
This is just plain false. The dictionary definition [1] disagress with you, Wikipedia explicitly mentions private private organisations [2]. Religion institutions have censored a lot of things in the past [3]. If what you said were true, government censorship would not be a phrase people used as it would be a pleonasm.
> As the owner of private property if someone were to graffiti my walls without permission
This is a false equivalence. You're not allowing anyone to paint on your walls, so it's not a place where expression is allowed. Censorships is selectively suppressing expression.
If you would open your walls for public painting, and then remove a few of them you don't like, you're indeed censoring those artists. That doesn't mean it wrong/illegal, it's just the definition of censorship.
[1] "censor - a person who supervises conduct and morals" from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censoring
[2] "Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies" from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
[3] https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-fig-leaf-story...
> This is just plain false. The dictionary definition [1] disagress with you, Wikipedia explicitly mentions private private organisations [2]. Religion institutions have censored a lot of things in the past [3]. If what you said were true, government censorship would not be a phrase people used as it would be a pleonasm.
Nice strawman, but that wasn't my argument. My statement was quite clearly not about the definition but the historical position of the censor. Let's first take the etymology of the word and examine it in context shall we? The Roman Censor was a magisterial position that in addition to running the census in regular intervals also responsible for morality laws also known as regimen morum. It was under the regimen morum that Socrates was found guilty of corrupting the youth and his censorship which led to his sentence of drinking hemlock and ultimately, death. We can look at early China and see similar themes arise in that the position of the censor was typically a governmental magistrate with high authority in place to regulate moralistic behavior.
When the enlightenment philosophers started espousing free speech movement they were fighting against monarchical tyrants who were trying to quell the dissent from a relatively new invention, the press. Sadly during this time the Catholic Church was also engaging in the Spanish Inquisition, the slaughter of Jews and Non-Conformist counter establishment churches. Freedom of Conscious, the ability to choose ones own morals, religion, method of governance, the denouncement of the absolute authority of monarchs were all part of the boiling pot that made free speech thinkers and ultimately those who wrote the US constitution encode the rights of all people to speak freely without consequence from governmental authority.
However, that is not to say that what you say is without consequences, a spoken threat can still be grounds for civil or criminal prosecution, likewise so can libel or slander be grounds of a lawsuit. Furthermore, while the enlightenment philosophers who espoused free speech are often credited for those freedoms we currently enjoy, not many of them endorsed the concept of universal toleration. You see, there is a difference between freedom of conscious, speech, expression, and religion vs universal toleration. Universal toleration is the idea hate speech, the suppression of minority opinion, community persecution of morality, pornography of all forms regardless of the level of exploitation involved including but not limited to child porn, and snuff films, must be tolerated without let or limit.
There exists a boundary, a line of demarcation, which can be used to separate what is tolerable with what is not and that line is consent. Can the parties involved in an activity consent to that activity? Two gay people aren't hurting each other, but threatening to beat them up certainly is. What is the age of consent vs the age of maximal maturity? Are sex workers a blight on society or are the conducting business on their own terms. Do people doing drugs deserve prison? These are intellectual and philosophical quandaries, some of them I fall into one side or the other on. Personally I would like to see voting, drinking, drug use, age of consent, what age you can enlist at, etc all be raised beyond even 21. But the one thing I think we can all agree on is that if you do something, with the intent and purpose to harm another then that is intolerable.
So where does that make me fall on the corporate censorship debate? Well there are different kinds of corporate censorship, the kind that I abhor and the kind that I endorse. I abhor the idea of a corporation censoring press about them when it shows them in a negative light despite uncomfortable truths. But if I am running a platform and people are spreading content that is contrary to my intent, that I could consider harmful to my business, specifically hate speech that is intended to suppress a group or ideal then that to me is not even censorship, it is moderation of content and editorial discretion, and I fully endorse that.