Free speech does not have the same meaning as before. Before it just meant that you could say whatever you wanted. Now people use it implicitly to mean that they can say whatever they want, but also that they are entitled to have their thoughts broadcasted at large using the amplification mechanisms I mentioned above.
While I believe free speech is a good thing, I believe free amplification is terrible.
If you think about it, before social networks, amplification was done through TV and newspapers, and those have editorial boards that filters the content they share. If a newspaper's staff is pro-environment, they can prevent any columnist writing anything that denies climate change, and it's not controversial.
However the problem is how do we decide who can get free amplification and who can't? Based on what? My preference would be that no one is, and we go back to uncurated things and to an internet where you have to look for the things you want to read/watch, versus getting content pushed onto you.
How many AOL users were there, total, in the 90s? Now, how many Twitter users are there, today? It's not even a fair fight.
That's only one metric, another would be trust, and clout, and others. The president tweeting is different from a random AOL user posting to a message board. Totally different beasts.
Also, I'm not comparing to just the USA twitter users either! It's a global platform. That matters. Retweets are not region-locked!
Global users, of course, Twitter trumps it in count, no doubt. I only assumed US users because the post was about US politics.
In addition, you have social media boosting other social medias, Facebook, Reddit, this place, each with their own individual brand of shenanigans. You didn't have that way back when (mostly because the alternatives were just as sparse)
When I log in to Twitter right now I get a message that Ariana Grande has a new album. I don't follow her, I don't care about her, but Twitter decided I needed to see that.
I have notifications disabled but I can only imagine what it pushes out.
On top of that pushing of unsolicited information, the social networks purposely push controversial topics to gain your attention. After a while those controversial and outlandish posts are legitimized and normalized.
A lot of people I know use twitter DMs as a primary communication method for people in their own families, even inside the same household. Twitter filtering communication between family members in your home is ... well ... a perfect excuse for me to strongly encourage them to stop using twitter.
It is a completely unavoidable artifact of our attention span and mortality, with no possible workaround. Hence why curation and bias becomes the value propositions.
I think people should be the judge for who they trust and/or want to listen to.
I don’t see the “but now we can’t control what they see” objection kindly.
Not only do the social networks allow you to amplify your opinion, they also nudge users further and further into bubbles where voices amplify even more.
Before social networks, if you got a pro-environment newspaper, the bias of that paper still had a bound on it. But imagine if the paper was constantly changing based on what you read. Were you interested in the article yesterday? Here is an even more biased article. Read it again? Try this article even more biased. Soon, the original paper would be so moderate that it would almost appear anti-environment.
The number of conspiracy theories floating around right now is alarming. And I blame a lot of it on the algorithms that these social networks are using to promote content people seem interested in. You get into rabbit holes and eventually land up reading extremist/fringe theories.
The infinite scrolling, sound-biteized, dopamine hit farming, engagement (and outrage) maximized social media is more like this: https://www3.pictures.zimbio.com/mp/7aRQwqq77srl.jpg
Key to this is that the objective isn't interest, it's "engagement", addictive behaviour and advertising consumption. It may be content that you hate, or-- better-- content that depresses you: Sapped of initiative you just keep scrolling and clicking, and some studies have show that depressed people are easier to influence and more vulnerable to advertising.
How would you determine what can fit on your mobile screen? What sorting algorithm would you choose?
If you sort based off of what the most recent submissions, you might not ever see things that interest you and you might leave the platform.
If you sort based off of most recent or the most comments, then the most controversial posts would be amplified above more moderate and well thought out posts.
You can think of any type of sorting algorithm you want, you can even provide options/combinations. However it is impossible to give all content the same access to free amplification.
Yes we can. You could make a transparent algorithm in which eg. 15 out of 15 posts in my FB feed are from my friends in chronological order, at most two per friend. Likes etc. are just graphics and a reply from a friend bumps the post.
And something similar for Twitter.
It is not rocked science if you don't want to make the site so bad you possibly can to make visitors stay longer and see more ads when they wade through the irrelevant crap to see the post they want to see.
Won't posts that encourage quick responses (clickbait, memes, controversial posts, etc) be bumped up much more frequently, thus making sure they are amplified more than other postings (while burying other posts)? Sure this might not be much of a problem on a site where you only are following a small number of people, but I find it hard to imagine it could translate to a larger site that inherently isn't just you following a few friends (i.e. Reddit).
Ye well one friend could spam alot and almost always show up in his two slots in the feed. But aslong as you have a finit number of annoying friends you could deal with that by maybe muting them from the feed or just live with it. It might be a problem since many Facebook users have 100s of "friends", but I see that as an user error. You could have a "favorite" bar with friends you easily could click on and see what they have posted. Ie. actively looking instead of a feed if the feed gets too spammy by 100s of friends.
Having absolutely equal and fair exposure would need some kind of normalized random selection of posts since last login but that would probably just get messy and confusing.
"Won't posts that encourage quick responses (clickbait, memes, controversial posts, etc) be bumped up much more frequently, thus making sure they are amplified more than other postings (while burying other posts)?"
Ye but atleast its deterministic, your friends find it interesting enough to talk about and the conversation can continue till it is done instead of disapearing in the feed. There could be a big cross to click to mute it.
I have no hope of having an algorithm decide what I want to see. That is my main point.
And the network can make that happen on its own, without an algorithm reordering content - if someone I follow is retweeting something that someone they follow retweeted.
You don't need to unplug the bullhorn if there is no bullhorn.
It shouldn't be up to absolutely obviously partisan corporations to decide which October surprise info dump is misinformation deserving of censorship, and which is the aok rough and tumble of presidential electioneering.
Finally, on the facts, the Steele dossier was far more obviously fraudulent than pictures of hunter smoking a crack pipe in the bathtub...
They are trying to claim control only when it suits them and not when there may be liability. Can't have it both ways.
Why? I pick up a piece of rubbish from the ground, so I'm responsible for everything that anyone litters? It doesn't make any sense.
Twitter isn't claiming they prevent every type of bad on their platform, they're just trying to prevent one type of bad for now
I guess the line is so blurred because often these aren't "people" but often institutions, governments and those intending to shape public opinion, even bots in some cases.
You're talking about it like Twitter is censoring someone specifically but it's so much more complicated and nuanced than that.
If I convince millions of people that Example companies widgets kills kittens, when I have no reason to believe that to be the case, I would be held liable for the damage to the brand.
But the pseudo-anonymous nature of the internet and most platforms, and even trying to avoid problems like the Streisand effect allow damaging speech to avoid consequence.
I'm not advocating for any approach to fix the problem, this is just a curiosity of mine as of late.
It depends what you meant. The law doesn't give carte blanche to say whatever you want, however you want, either. Your example above is what libel and slander laws are about. People make (probably millions) of false claims about companies daily and none of them rise to the level of a credible accusation largely because they're done anonymously. Someone who could actually "convince millions of people" probably has at least SOMETHING damning, and if they don't, the backpressure from everyone else is going to be pretty intense. That's actually _normal_. Desirable.
_Some_ speech _does_ require freedom from damage because otherwise the direct effect is the chilling effect. Political speech is specifically one type of such speech. The internet really has forced us to look carefully at what kinds of speech warrant that protection and which don't and we clearly haven't figured it out yet.
But certainly giving that power to private companies - and removing it from the hands of the people, the government, the law, the courts, and posterity -- is _definitively not_ the right way to do it.
I think the really difficult part about all of it is, the areas that don't require protections, aren't because the speech isn't damaging, it's that an uneven application of the rules can lead to worse problems. Or issues where it's impossible to find objective neutral parties (a jury) to decide on issues central to politics.
It's exactly what they were saying at the invention of the printing press. Amplification becoming too cheap. Maybe being on the side of censorship is always being on the wrong side of history no matter the issue. Can you remember one time in history where we now like "thanks god they censor these thoughts!"?
But you can probably find a sketchy, low-audience journal that would.
Well it's the same thing, a well known community was banned from Reddit to prevent them from using Reddit's amplification mechanism (/r/all etc), but they now have their own clone of it, with a smaller audience, that you are free to consult.
That's not why Twitter "censored" the news story. They removed links to a story that violated their published policies.
I am not sure that it matters 'why they censored'.
Put it another way, I do not think it matters if they applied their own ToS rules correctly, incorrectly, selectively or whatever.
I am not sure that their terms of service, allow them to claim protection under 47.230 [1]
I am sure that the position that the fed government investigators will take.
If Twitter folks (or their crowd-sourced moderators, or committees) gray-out/remove/comment on/hide/edit content that Twitter claims 'is not theirs' -- then it is hard to imaging they are compliant with the 'non-publisher' protections of section 47.230.
Imagine if one is a for-profit business, claiming tax code for a non-profit organization.
Their Terms Of Service mentions: 'Making the world better and being charitable. We do not do business with bad clients'.
Does that make that business less criminally liable for claiming taxes of a non-profit?
To me it does not.
Literally, wars were started because of this. Similar to today's information age propaganda wars and disinformation, physical media was used in a similar way. There are some valid comparisons here.
However, relative to the days of broadsides, the barrier to entry for dissemination of ideas has decreased by orders of magnitude and the potential reach of such ideas has increased by orders of magnitude.
It's like comparing slingshots and nuclear weapons. Yes, they're both things that let you hurt people from a distance.
Eventually people with power figured out how to mostly control the printing press and so created the heavily gate-kept institutions you describe. The transitions our society is facing now echo these past struggles.
We cannot simply hand-wave some of them away as "the struggles every new medium faces."
Printed materials were still pretty gate-kept. Sure, anybody could spend a modest sum and get a bunch of roughly-printed pamphlets printed up. You could walk around London and hand them out. People did, and I suppose some of these ideas got traction. And some of those ideas were even good.
That was still a lot of money and effort, and it was still a lot of work to establish some kind of credibility so that your ideas might actually gain acceptance. Otherwise you were just a crazy person handing out pamphlets along with all of the other crazy people.
Today, you can post insane and dangerous COVID-19 falsehoods to half of the freaking world via YouTube or Facebook and your message is indistinguishable from ideas presented by people who actually know what they're talking about.
The gatekeeping America used to have was... not great. Network television's self-censorship was often stodgy, at best. But you didn't have absolute fucking lunatics screaming about chemtrails and Bill Gate's 5G microchip mind-control scheme racking up literally millions of followers. That is a PROBLEM.
If you say to me that the ideal solution is to simply have a more educated populace, I wouldn't disagree. However, that doesn't solve things now. We need long-term solutions (education) as well as short-term ones (so we don't have the loonies electing other loonies who actually get to steer the most powerful militaries on the planet)
Even in the long term, how are you going to produce this more educated populace? Or rather, who are you going to entrust with the task? The same educational establishment that produced the current populace?
But even if you can produce your more educated populace, you still have the problem that the Russian trolls aren't going to stand still. They're going to be better, too, by then.
If you don't like certain ideas being distributed then who made you the boss of ideas?
Without a free exchange of ideas, you can not have a educated population, you only get programmed automotons.
Or rather, who are you going to entrust with the task?
The same educational establishment that produced the
current populace?T
Education, obviously, often falls short of this ideal and you don't necessarily need formal education to be a critical thinker.
I do think that's pretty achievable. When I went through school in the 80s and 90s we weren't exactly devoid of this sort of thing.
Absurd ideas like chemtrails and flat-eartherism don't last very long in the face of the slightest hint of critical thinking.
But even if you can produce your more educated populace,
you still have the problem that the Russian trolls aren't
going to stand still. They're going to be better, too, by
then.
Yes, them, but with adequate funding and a return of Civics and Home Ec required for all students.
Then, money you spend on education will get a ROI instead of being skimmed off the top.
Kind of an awkward take... this conversation is literally taking place on social media.
Do you have a concrete proposal for how to accomplish that goal?
As for concrete proposals .. it's a massive topic, and full of interdependent systems and feedback loops and it might be hubris if anyone says 'heres a single concrete proposal to address it all'.. but here's some thoughts more on identifying issues to address in the context of schools, and aligning the results of schooling to learning.
A natural process of learning, especially for children, is to copy an image/role model/idol and learn through imagining themselves as that role model.
What are the social aspirations, or role models, that children usually idolise in our current schools and society? Film stars, sports stars, super models, instagram 'influences' which are usually just models ..
Common themes amongst these: glamourous lives, big money, social capital.
Another common theme is accomplishment in those fields does not have a linear relationship to hard work, to learning, and to the cultivation of knowledge.
Instead it's about coolness, social gaming, and largely about genetic lottery of beauty or sporting ability - yes some hard work but that's not going to get you far without these other pre-requisites.
It's also about luck, so rewards are not linearly related to effort, thus the payoff for effort is very uncertain.
Actually accomplishment in those fields is mostly a winner takes all market environment, so most people can never find success, and the majority of people who realise that they can't ever succeed to their aspirations give up putting in effort, it's a cause of apathy.
So the mainstream kids who idolise mainstream 'stars' aren't incentivised to learn and apply themselves mentally, they are incentivised to try to be cool, play social games, preen themselves for physical beauty, and hope to heck they are lucky .. and the vast majority has to face the unhappy reality they will never be stars.
That's a problem. What if their role models were Einstein who had a talent for imagining and discovering interesting things about the world, even as he worked a mundane job as a clerk (in the patent office). What if social capital for the mainstream classes was accrued to people who worked hard and made sensible decisions and created useful things, instead of to playing social gaming and trying to look beautiful/rich/make other people jealous and 'influence'.
So I don't have a concrete proposal, or the 'answers', but (I think) at least this is asking some of the right questions!
This article is about blocking a story by the NY Post. It may be true or may be false, but it already passed the traditional gatekeepers.
But I don't think Section 230 is adequate to the task.
You realize, of course, that even HN is strongly moderated? The mods kill a lot of stories here. And HN is a better place for it.
By your logic, HN should now be liable for anything that anybody posts. Is that what you want? Does that seem like it's in anybody's best interests?
This article is about blocking a story by the NY Post.
It may be true or may be false, but it already passed
the traditional gatekeepers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Post#Style
It represents roughly the midpoint between a serious journalistic operation and the National Enquirer.
Should factually accurate information that matters to people be rejected or hidden because of style? Who gets to decide the correct style? Would you apply the same standards to alternately aligned publications of questionable style, like WaPo/HuffPo?
https://www.adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart-2...
The National Enquirier is NOT a reputable journalistic outlet.
Bu that argument doesn't apply here for two reasons:
1. The NY Post has existed in some form for 200 years, and has built its own reader base.
2. Twitter blocked even direct messages.
I completely fail to see how their rights are somehow being impinged here. They have their own mini-media empire and are part of a larger media empire.
How... exactly are they being stifled and why is Twitter obligated to amplify their voice?
I would certainly agree that this does fall afoul of Section 230, which I think was a great foundation but could use some serious rethinking.
and even their reporters didn't want to publish it
https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-nw-nyt-hunter...
> The New York Post’s front-page article about Hunter Biden on Wednesday was written mostly by a staff reporter who refused to put his name on it, two Post employees said.
> Bruce Golding, a reporter at the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid since 2007, did not allow his byline to be used because he had concerns over the article’s credibility, the two Post employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.
...
> Many Post staff members questioned whether the paper had done enough to verify the authenticity of the hard drive’s contents, said five people with knowledge of the tabloid’s inner workings. Staff members also had concerns about the reliability of its sources and its timing, the people said.
I bet the response of the Catholic clergy to the printing press was probably pretty similar to this statement. And the ideas of the reformation were certainly far more dangerous than any chemtrail conspiracy.
Chemtrail conspiracy theories are... pretty insignficant. If your goal is to eradicate all conspiratorial wrongthink of this magnitude or greater, you are going to run into ~a lot~ of problems. Epstein memes are very popular.
One, nobody is taking away your right to say or think things. This is about Twitter's obligation (or lack thereof) to broadcast your thoughts to others.
They are not burning you at the stake like a vengeful Catholic church during the Inquisition or outlawing your thoughts like "wrongthink" in 1984.
Two, the printing press analogy is highly flawed. Twitter is like the owner of one specific printing press, not some entity that controls all printing presses. If you owned a printing press, would you want to be obligated to print things you find factually and harmful?
I assume you'd certainly want the freedom to turn down printing jobs. Or do only certain freedoms matter?
These things are not true about Twitter. You can go post on your own Mastodon instance or the Daily Stormer or the Fox News comment section if Twitter is too restrictive for your liking.
Also, do you recognize the irony/insanity of complaining about this on Hacker News, a strongly-moderated platform? HN's centralized moderation is far more stringent.
You don't need to look very far to find other examples.
Interestingly, the Catholic church was very concerned about the ability to mass produce literature and wanted to have control over what could be published. They didn't want just anyone to be able to publish a book. Imagine giving people a platform to speak out against the Church!
There is an excellent hard core history podcast that somewhat relates to the topic.
It's a good episode. History is pretty gruesome.
The main difference is that people buy a newspaper for the information it publishes while people join a social network because their friends are there. A social network starting to editorialize content is therefore a problem since there is really no alternative ways to keep in touch with friends as effectively, meaning these social networks gets to force their opinions on people.
Who is forcing a private organization to adopt any stance? "Leaving alone" is not the same as "actively promoting." Twitter leaving alone a story does not mean Twitter is promoting that story, that is exactly what section 230 is about.
> not to force the existing ones to promote what we believe is right.
I guess they don't need to pay taxes either, or take a stand against violence, or racism, or....? They still exist within the society in which they function and that means both social and legal rules bind them, same as you or me. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, their status as a corporation doesn't somehow entitle them to a more special or louder voice than any one else's.
Absolutely, of course. Hate speech and Holocaust denial are censored in Europe generally, and a majority of people in those countries today do say support these bans (i.e. they say "thank god"). Because they saw the kind of hateful thinking that led to WWII, and how shockingly easy it is for people to be convinced of revisionist history, and don't want that to be repeated.
Similarly, libel laws function effectively as censorship, but are widely supported. I think most of us are happy that newspapers can't maliciously print lies about common citizens.
(Edit: love that I'm being downvoted for this -- apparently people don't like these objective facts?)
"It is really complicated" is the conclusion that early modern historians of information come to.
Well, the honest answer to the "can you remember" question is going to be misleading. By the nature of the thing we're talking about, the historical things like that are things that people aren't going to remember.
If you believe in "to the victor go the spoils" on the information front, then successful censorship (and more generally propaganda) is always on the right side of history.
But I can think of a number of examples of censorship that history has not judged poorly:
- Libel and slander. If I say "I used to work with 'hartator and they brought in KKK flags every morning and broke the build every evening, you don't want to hire them," it's generally considered reasonable for you to get the government to force me to stop and also force other people not to repeat what I said.
- Planning crimes. If I say "Hey, let's get together tomorrow evening and murder some strangers for fun," and we start talking about how to do it, it's generally considered reasonable for the government to consider that a crime.
- Trademark infringement and other fair competition laws. If I say "These headphones are recommended by Apple" and they're not, or I say "These apples are organic" and they're not, or I say "This is an all-beef sausage" and it contains pork, it's generally considered reasonable for the government to say that I can't keep saying that if I want to keep selling the things I'm saying them about.
- Employment agreements. If I say "Hey, new employer, here's a list of my old employer's customers and here's some of their source code," it's generally considered reasonable for the old employer to object.
(There are a number of cases of compelled action that are currently not considered unreasonable - prison labor, military drafts, etc. - but I think those stand a much higher chance of being on the wrong side of history, in the long term, than any of the above.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_and_antisemiti...
Nazism in Germany, post-WW2. And I'm okay with that.
Those editorial boards you speak of get things wrong constantly. Limiting who can respond to them in front of an (at least) equally large audience is dangerous and a disservice to all, especially minorities.
Limiting who can publish and the size of their audience is categorically a violation of free speech. There is no daylight there.
This amplification isn't magic. You can't build an audience on YouTube (or anywhere) unless people actually care about what you have to say. And doing that is hard work.
If I had to choose between advertising and free speech, I’d be happy to utterly abolish advertising. Even though that means completely tearing down the current media industry.
Obviously there’s middle ground to be found, but censorship is just treating the symptoms and in the dumbest possible way.
We’re just digging the hole deeper and deeper.
In today's world these folks get to have a strong influence over how people are influenced.
Handling this well is very important. If people misuse that position than they can and will cause people to be influenced certain ways because of it.
The "particular values, agendas and biases" you're referring to are just advertising revenue, not some political bias installed by the developer. If you WANT to believe there are such developers working at those companies, I can't stop you. But the evidence isn't really there. Make some friends who work at those companies and see what you can find out from the people who actually develop the tools you're accusing of having such political bias in.
Now, if we are talking about political bias in these platforms' policies, you might have something.
That's been happening for some time now, by algorithms that are optimized for outrage, engagement, clicks, etc.
Every form of media has that power, social media is not at all special in this respect. A post getting banned from twitter makes no difference to someone that gets their news from Fox News and talk radio. It's up to the people to manage their own thoughts, same as it ever was.
So let them read what you don't want them to. If it isn't illegal or incitement of violence, it doesn't need to be removed.
But it can be removed, because its one of many millions of privately owned websites on the internet... This is the great thing about the internet, anyone can create a website and run it however they want and users are free to visit whichever sites they like the most. This is a win-win for everyone except for those who want to control what site owners do with their own websites.
It's still an option to just leave it alone. What is this obsession our culture recently has that says "Just because I CAN do something, I MUST do something"?
A lot of the people yelling about the power of social media giants now are yelling because they represent the old status quo, not because they want democratisation of thought.
I get that you're asking this question rhetorically, but the "obvious" answer is the correct one: the people that own and operate the amplification system as their business model get to pick. Why should it be otherwise?
I don't want to be a pawn of the wealthy, or of governments, or powerful people in general. I don't trust my own government to do what's in my best interests, let alone foreign governments. I certainly don't trust the wealthy, either. That's why I think it should be otherwise.
Then don't. It's your choice to get all your news from facebook or twitter. You're here on HN, so I believe you already understand that the contents of facebook and twitter shouldn't determine the contents of your thoughts.
Yet very many of these people will continue to use Facebook and Twitter for news, rather than changing to an alternative. So your solution to the problem fails.
It's not up to you. People can visit whatever websites they want, your subjective judgements about the nature of the content on the website isn't relevant. If they have a problem with the website they are free to visit another one.
> Very many people will continue to use Facebook and Twitter for news.
That's their choice. Very many people will continue to use pornhub and there is nothing the church can do about it... yet.
Is up to me to stop it? No. Of course not. Obviously not. In fact, even if I had the power to single-handedly, unilaterally, stop Facebook from doing these things, I wouldn't. Because I don't believe that might makes right (that's my wider point, after all).
What I want is a popular, democratic movement to regulate the websites that people use, in the way that the informed population think they should be regulated.
Allowing countless to be made pawns of in the name of liberty seems foolish.
Too late. People are too easy to manipulate when you can amplify whatever you want.
yeah - this is the same sentiment out founding fathers had (in US obv.)
> I don't trust my own government to do what's in my best interests...
That's why we vote. The system created relieves us of worrying about being manipulated by powerful people, by letting the people run the government.
The truth is, your opinion only counts as much as your vote. That's how it should be. Your fringe opinions shouldn't count more than the rest of the people's opinions. So go vote. And let that be that.
It seems like there's a lot more going on than just faster dissemination, and the way information travels these days might have introduced new asymmetries and inefficiencies.
I think we’re overestimating the effect of social media. A certain group of highly educated urban liberals is shocked by Trump. (And I don’t say this pejoratively. My college educated friends were literally despondent after he was elected.) And they’re looking for an explanation. And it so happened that social media became a major force around the same time. But I think that’s mostly, though not completely, a coincidence.
Social media didn’t create Trump. Right wing populism is happening all over the world, in Europe, India, etc. Its a reaction to liberalism and globalism that’s been brewing for decades. And social media didn’t create Trump’s audience. My mom, a 70-year old Bangladeshi woman who has voted straight ticket Democrat since she was naturalized, thinks Trump is too unpolished, but loves his “energy” and “vigor.” She thinks he would be a “great President” if he could “implement his ideas.” My mom doesn’t have a Twitter account. (I think she’d love Boris Johnson, i.e. Trump with a bit more polish and competent.) She didn’t get this from Breitbart. She watches CNN in a loop all day.
Social media isn’t not a factor, but I think folks overestimate how much of a factor.
With stickier ideas, the marketplace becomes worse, because nothing ever gets pruned out of it. Too much energy is spent on limiting the growth of bad ideas than can be spent on refining the better ideas.
Have you ever entertained the idea that perhaps you're wrong and they're right? I mean it's at least possible that you've been lead to the wrong conclusion by systemic errors that have yet to be identified, and perhaps wont be for many years into the future.
Social media is happening all over the world.
> A certain group of highly educated urban liberals is shocked by Trump.
3 million more people voted for Hillary than Trump. Biden is polling 10 points ahead of Trump.
Switching to a popular vote could lessen the current extremism.
That’s absolutely ridiculous. Apparently you’ve never been to Wyoming, population 550,000. Pennsylvania has 12.8 million.
Thank you for affirming my belief that a popular vote system is just as ridiculous for America.
> 3 million more people voted for Hillary than Trump.
As I said, I’m not using this as a pejorative. I’m not just talking about folks who voted for Hillary, but ones who were despondent when Trump won. I worked late on election night and got home to an election watching party with DC yuppies and when I walked in the door I thought someone had died. These are the folks who were so stunned the started looking around for an explanation. And social media just happened to be rising at the same time.
Not all Hillary voters reacted that way. My mom and dad voted for Hillary. But they weren’t shocked by the existence of Trump. They didn’t see it as an indictment of the system. They didn’t go on the whole Russia collusion ride like all of my friends. (Not coincidentally, they supported Biden from the start. Meanwhile, I was shocked when Warren and Harris did so poorly, when it came to voting, because that’s who all my grad-school educated urban friends supported.)
And don’t get me wrong, he’s not fit for office, but the idea that there is anything “radical” about his agenda, before or after the election, is pure gaslighting.
He actually ran on a moderate Republican platform. He committed to protecting Social Security and Medicare off the bat. (Remember Bush and Gore fighting over the “lock box?” Even fricking Sweden has partislly privatized their social security.) Even though it was right after Obergefell he said pretty much nothing about same-sex marriage. He criticized Clinton for her past criminal justice stances. Bluster aside, even his immigration platform wasn’t nuts. Liberal darling Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand became prime minister by campaigning on cutting legal immigration by half. Trump didn’t even do that. He focused on stopping illegal immigration, which 60% of Americans worry about: https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro....
His agenda also hasn’t been “radical.” What has he done? He has banned refugees and immigrants from certain countries—all ones you would expect given the political status, such as North Korea and Yemen. The only one on the current list that looks odd is Nigeria, but Trump instituted that ban at the same as the EU imposed Visa restrictions on Nigeria (February 2020): https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/news/eu-plans-to-impose-vis...
He had a corporate tax cut, which is consistent with what the UK and Sweden had been doing, and Merkel suggested Germany follow suit: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-merkel-tax-...
He repealed a bunch of unpopular environmental regulations Obama pushed through in the last couple of years of his final term. This was after his 2012 campaign, where Obama criticized Romney for standing in front of a coal plant and saying “this kills.” https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/oct/16/barack-oba...
> Governor, when you were governor of Massachusetts, you stood in front of a coal plant and pointed at it and said, ‘This plant kills,’ and took great pride in shutting it down. And now suddenly you're a big champion of coal," Obama said.
See also: https://apnews.com/article/5dfbc1aa17701ae219239caad0bfefb2
> You wouldn’t always know it ,but it went up every year I was president,” he said to applause. “That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas that was me, people.”
So yeah, Obama waited until the last couple of years of his term to push through some unpopular environments rules such as changes to that would require farmers to get federal permits to drain ponds in their land, and things like that. And Trump repealed them just as easily. That’s what happens between administrations.
Then you had the First Step Act, which was a progressive step.
He appointed three justices who were prominent in conservative legal circles long before Trump came in the scene.
So what exactly about his agenda was “radical?” Even if he had succeeded in things like repealing the ACA, that would have taken us back to 2008? (And Trump genuinely didn’t want the total repeal option without any replacement. He was the one who crafted the repeal and replace idea, while previously republicans had just wanted to repeal.)
Only big thing you forgot was not starting any new wars and getting two more Arab states to formalize peace with Israel.
- increased military spending to Iraq war levels during peace time - trillion dollar deficits during boom times - fired dozens of cabinet members and other top officials whenever they didn't display dictator levels of obsequience to him - got impeached for using US diplomacy for personal political gains - tried to kick millions off of SNAP - had DOJ help states kick people off voter roles - reduced confidence in the election process - changed DOJ's long standing definition of civil rights to instead protect religious people and white and asian discrimination - pulled out of major international agreements with little notice including the Paris Agreement and the Iran deal - attacked european allieas and weakened NATO - cut legal immigration in a bunch of ways including cut refugee by 80% and cut H1B. And implemented draconian inhumane policies on illegal immigrants. - appointed hundreds of extremely ideological judges
(hopefully d ang doesn't slap us down for discussing politics)
> - increased military spending to Iraq war levels during peace time
The defense budget is significantly smaller as a percentage of GDP than under Obama: https://www.factcheck.org/2018/07/trumps-defense-spending-ex...
> - trillion dollar deficits during boom times
Bad, but not radical.
> - fired dozens of cabinet members and other top officials whenever they didn't display dictator levels of obsequience to him
> - got impeached for using US diplomacy for personal political gains
Bad, but not radical.
> - tried to kick millions off of SNAP
Clinton did way more welfare reform than Trump.
> - had DOJ help states kick people off voter roles
Cleaning up voter rolls is required by federal law.
> - reduced confidence in the election process
Bad, but not radical.
> - changed DOJ's long standing definition of civil rights to instead protect religious people and white and asian discrimination
Not radical. In Evanston, Illinois, Asian kids are now being held back from returning to in-class instruction: https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-school-be-antiracist-a-new-.... We can debate the merits of this, but it's not radical to suggest that discrimination against asians is a violation of civil rights laws.
> - pulled out of major international agreements with little notice including the Paris Agreement and the Iran deal
It's not "radical" to pull out of an agreement we had been part of for less than a year since its effective date: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement
Presidents change course on foreign policy all the time. Trump's foreign policy has been relatively successful.
> - attacked european allieas and weakened NATO
Are you talking about a concrete policy?
> - cut legal immigration in a bunch of ways including cut refugee by 80% and cut H1B.
Not radical. European countries have done the same thing recently, after realizing their 2015 actions on refugees were ill-advised. Calling a cut to H1B "radical" is hard to credit. Is every small shift to the right from a Republican President "radical?"
> And implemented draconian inhumane policies on illegal immigrants.
Very bad, maybe radical.
> - appointed hundreds of extremely ideological judges
No, just normal conservative judges. The "extremely ideological judges" are ones that think you can look at a 230-year old document and find new things in it that nobody realized were there before. We have normalized that gaslighting, but taking a view that the words on the page mean what they say isn't "radical."
Hm so, building a wall with a neighbor and having the neighbor _pay for this wall_ is a moderate position? Or is this bluster?
I'm not sure what anything else in your post has to do with the quality of ideas being better. You claim that right wing populism is a reaction to liberalism and globalism, and that ideas are getting better. This leads me to connect the dots and think that your claim is that right wing populism is a good idea.
We know now, in hindsight, that the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression led directly to the circumstances that led to the rise of Hitler. And indeed, Hitler was not alone. Fascist dictators rose throughout this time period. Was the discourse worse then? Was it better then?
This feels disingenuous. "Ideas are getting better." "Fascism is a natural reaction." Please, if you are trying to make a political point, say it. Don't tiptoe around it.
> Reading a dry article on police brutality (which let’s face it, people just skipped over in the past) is a lot less impactful than seeing something shared by a friend.
Attitudes towards for example LGBT people and on racial issues are have advanced significantly since 2000, and I think social media has a lot to do with that. (One of the major issues cited by people for why they switched their opinion on same-sex marriage was knowing people in committed same-sex relationships. Social media makes those things more visible.)
As to right-wing populism: it is not fascism, any more than left-wing populism is Jacobinism or anarchy. I don't think it's a "good thing" necessarily, but predictable and possibly necessary. I think Boris Johnson, for example, is absolutely what the U.K. needed, before it got swallowed up by the EU.
>> Reading a dry article on police brutality (which let’s face it, people just skipped over in the past) is a lot less impactful than seeing something shared by a friend.
> Attitudes towards for example LGBT people and on racial issues are have advanced significantly since 2000, and I think social media has a lot to do with that. (One of the major issues cited by people for why they switched their opinion on same-sex marriage was knowing people in committed same-sex relationships. Social media makes those things more visible.)
Fair enough. I disagree. I think social media has also helped radicalize folks, though I feel that nothing has really changed (not a positive change either). The press was, after all, hopelessly partisan and sensational for most of the West's history. We just had a brief respite. But fair enough and thanks for clarifying.
> As to right-wing populism: it is not fascism, any more than left-wing populism is Jacobinism or anarchy.
What's the difference really? I'm not talking about the boogeyman "literally fascist" thing. Fascist regimes themselves frequently started out as right wing populist representative regimes. Hitler is a fantastic example of that transformation ad absurdum, but there are several other simpler ones, like Franco. And these fascist regimes often started out quite popular.
And likewise with left populism. Stalin and Napoleon are left populism ad absurdum, but we have several more "mundane" examples, such as Tito or Hoxa. I think extremism is bad because of its tendency to flout the rule of law. I see that happening around the world all over again.
We’re still figuring out how to find the pearls but giving carte blanche to a handful of tech monopolies is definitely not going to work.
America used to be about quality. Sure, quantity was still a thing but the "shining city on the hill" image of America was about quality.
We've lost our way.
America has never been about quality. Quality is a result of vigorous and excessive competition.
Actually this is an interesting problem to think about; what, then, did these people believe before they could get access to crazier ideas?
I think you'll find the answer was still, "what they were told to believe". The answer hasn't changed from then to now, we're simply far more aware of being upset at the answer. In a way the problem that was always there has been revealed and some people don't like the loss of control over these people's opinions.
Me personally I'm an advocate of "let go, stop controlling, see how things turn out" and then fix the real problems that appear, rather than creating worse problems by squeezing the play doh too tightly. It has the upside of being morally defensible rather than having the air of "I destroyed your life for your own good."
[0] https://amp.reddit.com/r/teaching/comments/528u9w/teachers_o...
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/time.com/longform/teaching-in-a...
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/teacher-pay...
[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/u-s-schools-struggle-to-hire...
[2] https://www.bestplaces.net/cost_of_living/city/new_york/new_...
[3] https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/teaching-hours.htm
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/9m1d7k/why_do_ame...
Whenever the market idea is mentioned, it's always to invoked the principles of unregulated exchange, and not to remind readers of things like legislation about quality control for products to enter the market. And it is always argued that this market should have a constant and unceasing exchange (and more to the point that their particular idea should be given more space), so this isn't a market that works toward a consensus but rather a site that needs to be maintained in constant conflict.
As other have mentioned, I think however plausible that conception of speech was then, it's utterly ignorant of the problems we're facing today, where ideas spread for reasons that have nothing to do with merit. If anything, I would think you would want to agree with the person you are replying to that the spread of ideas is not due to good ones rising to the top in a marketplace that is selecting for quality.
I think it is the exact opposite. Maybe I have read too many dystopian novels like fahrenheit 451, or 1984, or read too much about Chinese govt's control of its population, but I feel that modern technology has allowed too much censorship power in hands of not just the govt, but a few corporations. And it is extremely important that we do not compromise on free speech now.
The net effect is that there much more misinformation than there has ever been before. Despite the best efforts of twitter, facebook & youtube they appear to have been virtually powerless to halt the spread.
The problem of social media CEOs having too much power is real, and has wrought real damage: Zuckerberg's naive ideas on speech have lead to far too much harm, and now that he's recovering from his free speech trutherism and implementing reforms it's too little, too late.
Lastly I would say that if you are looking at this state of affairs and seeing 1984 or fahrenheit 451, you're seeing things wrong. There are fair examples of that, e.g. Hong Kong, mainland China. But the western internet doesn't fit that at all.
Most efficient in generating engagement for selling banners, not in lifting up the most correct or useful ideas. Was it is, it's pure marketplace manipulation.
Can you cite empirical research showing that the process works the way you believe it does?
Turns out the most popular things will be the most inane -- by definition, because they appeal to most people. And so we amplify beige slurry.
This isn't really true though. Social networks have existed since the earliest days of humanity:
Twitter is blocking this story in Direct Messages (equivalent to a private email). How is that amplification?
Also, Twitter could de-prioritize tweets with the link on a global feed, while still showing them to people who follow the specific person.
And that too is not amplification - you asked to see messages from that person, you should be able to see them.
I saw an interesting comparison the other day. If this was a message board from the early 2000s, and the moderator was deleting posts, you move on, not throw a giant fit about free speech using some one else server.
Insofar as they're monopolies, they should be managed by the people as if they were a public space.
This would be similar to the central area of a mall or when companies provided housing to workers to prevent unionization efforts. Both places were upheld as places where the First Amendment must be upheld, despite private ownership.
A lot of people look at this issue and see two groups fighting over it. There are (at least) three groups though: for, against, and undecided. This is really a fight about how to convince the undecided, so solutions like "go make your own platform" aren't desirable; undecideds aren't going to know about the new platform, and won't automatically appear en masse on it, so it actually makes reaching them more difficult.
> You're still free to send a text, write a letter, call
Exactly. This is why free college and free medical care are not necessary.
You can learn from public libraries and go to the forest and apply herbs when you are sick.
Though tbh I'm not totally sure what point you're trying to make.
If I follow @NYPost then I want to hear what they tweet. Twitter may have every right to censure them, but it’s the wrong thing to do, and people are rightly incensed about it.
If I want to retweet a @NYPost article to my followers that is my business. And my followers can gladly listen or unfollow.
Twitter’s faux rationale about “hacked materials” sticks coming just days after NYTime’s story on Trump tax returns.
If these monopolistic social networks want to interfere in public & private messages on their platform to the benefit of particular political candidates they shouldn’t be doing it with the benefit of Section 230 immunity and/or should be scrutinized for making campaign contributions in-kind, like how National Inquirer got hit with charges for their buy&bury on Trump’s affair.
Use another platform if you don't like it. If you can't do that because all of the content producers and your friends have decided that twitter's level of censorship is ok, then you're just out of step with the rest of society.
It's like complaining that Coca Cola is an evil company and you hate them. If everyone else but you still likes Coke then your view on their practices, however valid it may be, won't be relevant
I think it goes against the stated purpose and core mission of their platform. So perhaps they are lying to their users, and even to themselves.
> The mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers. Our business and revenue will always follow that mission in ways that improve – and do not detract from – a free and global conversation.
It also may be an illegal campaign contribution in some cases.
I'm curious, how do you think twitter becoming a publisher would help you to accomplish your stated goals?
This seems to suggest a larger solution -- that these platforms do actually have within their power to implement.
Stop helping those two bickering ninnies by taking sides, and instead use the huge bullhorn society has handed them by screaming, "Shut up the both of you, stop bickering and maybe help the people you were elected to help!"
Who is right and about what are always less important than simply helping people. There is SO MUCH that is being left undone because we endlessly want to debate single issues for literally DECADES while people die in the streets.
Leadership was abandoned long ago and these gigantic bully pulpits could right the ship and instead they are being used as game pieces by their partisan owners. It's... sad to watch.
In regards to section 230, the whole point of it was to allow platforms to selectively restrict content from third parties. Before 230 some courts had ruled that if they restricted content from any third party, then they shared in liability for any third party content they did not restrict. So if I deleted spam for boner pills from my chess BBS, but did not delete someone’s accusation that a particular chess book was plagiarized I might be sued by the book author for libel. To ensure I would not be liable for that kind of thing, I would have to let the boner pill spam stay, along with anything else that was not illegal.
When television came we also had a few early decades where everything were great. There existed one or two stations, and that was it. Then suddenly a flood of people and companies started to use this new technology and harmful video nasty with violent and nude content started to hit society and people cried out once again for government to start censoring and determining whom aught to be allowed to speak to the masses. Several decades again and the enthusiasm for TV and movie censoring lost it charm.
Then Internet came and everything was fine the first few decades with only a few major websites like yahoo and myspace. Then 4chan and 8chan was created and quickly people want censoring again, but this time its not the government who should determine who aught to be allowed to speak to the masses but rather a handful of companies in charge of social networks and cloud services. This is where we are now. In a few decades, I predict the enthusiasm for Internet censorship will drop a bit as it done for all previous technologies that enables unregulated amplification of speech.
This is so abusable. Even the best of intentions won't stop it from being abused horribly. I value twitter much less. The same thing is happening there that happened to the declining legacy media.
Your argument somewhat makes sense for FB, depending on the details. But Twitter outright censored this content.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
I think your phrasing of this new problem for our society is very clear and objective.
By the power invested in me as a computer possessor with an internet connection, I declare this to be a good idea, worthy of amplification!
This thought is the exact reason the first amendment separately mentions freedom of "speech" (hard to accomplish much with it) and "the press" (much more effective).
Currently we have systems which make misinformation more dangerous (primarily via amplification) and a bunch of people conflating free speech with the freedom to say whatever you want. I think what we still need to explore is whether or not there is a responsibility on individuals to be factually accurate when engaged in amplified speech. What does that even mean? Do you simply need to believe what you are saying at the time? Or is the standard higher? Is this responsibility shifted if you provide a citation (where the responsibility of the cited source shoulders some of the responsibility for your derivative thoughts)?
It's a particularly thorny issue. One that isn't necessarily new, but is particularly acute in contemporary times. I am against censorship, but I also recognize certain trends which seem to be deepening divides and strengthening conspiracy theories in our society.
In this instance, the solution has already reached beyond the realm of "don't allow certain things to be amplified". You literally cannot share this information even in a private 1-on-1 chat.
> we go back to uncurated things
Yeah. The more I reflect on things the more I think social networks are just a thing that shouldn't exist. Although, of course, here we are on hacker news talking about it. So IDK. Maybe you just can't unring that bell and we're just screwed.
I keep ending up there too honestly.
We'll always build something "like" socializing online. Humans don't stop "humaning" if you get my meaning.
We really do need to figure it out though... either mostly agree it's a bad idea, or figure out how to do it without it being as destructive as it is.
What a well written response, my friend. Hats off. Perhaps EdgeRank truly was a pandora's box we should have left well enough alone. Who knew how much havoc a simple matrix determinant could cause?
communication is between two or more people.
You seem to be misguided as to what Free Speech means.
- Attention is a zero-sum game. In the past, we'd get more of our news from local papers, radio stations or lunch break gossip, resulting in a natural diversity of viewpoints. Nowadays, it's all the same social media outlets and handful of national newspapers (whose staff generally spend all day and form their opinions on Twitter, which thus winds up being upstream anyway) for everyone. Compared to what we had before, one side winds up getting free amplification anyway.
- I don't think free speech as a positive right for the speaker is necessarily the correct framing; at least, it neglects half of the issue at hand. I consider it at least equally important that "free speech" protects my right as an information consumer to get exposed to as many viewpoints as possible on a matter. Right now, my sense is that national newspapers all echo the Twitterati consensus, Facebook has developed in such a way that social and increasingly technological pressure would not allow even those people on my friend list who I suspect had interesting and generally well-thought-out non-mainstream opinions to share them with me, and the rest is all conspiracy websites that are unusable as a source because they've largely been cut off from the means of establishing credibility and separating wheat from chaff via social proof.
If I were a US voter (I'm not), I'd want to know whether Biden was involved in corrupt dealings. As it stands, it seems that if there were a compelling case that he was (and, well, I don't know if there is one!), the media and its allies would be working overtime to prevent me from learning about it.
But people are lazy. Why write a post when you "share" some crap that came through your feed with one click.
We will get to self hosted distributed social media when it becomes easier than Facebook or Twitter.
More important to you. Wanna guess what's more important to YouTube?
Those are all good points.
I didn't understand GP to be claiming that ML algorithms trump free speech, which may explain why we're actually in violent agreement WRT YouTube's recommendation algorithms.
I'd note that I avoid the big social media sites like the plague, and not even primarily for the toxic atmosphere. Rather, I find the business model to be inherently cynical, exploitative and destructive of communities (cf. sites like nextdoor.com).
As long as the incentives (maximization of advertising dollars) favor pushing for ever higher engagement, the cycle that creates increasingly fine-tuned filter bubbles and "targeted" advertising, we're going to see less focus on free expression from large corporations, because their primary goal is to maximize profit.
I believe that this model will eventually collapse and be replaced (with something better or worse, I don't know) with a different one. My concern is in the damage that this will do to our discourse and societal cohesion in the meantime.
Which points to larger problems with our economic model. Maximizing short-term profit is fetishized as all-important, regardless of potential downsides[0]. That focus legitimizes predatory behavior based on the (incorrect) idea that captialism is necessarily a zero-sum game.
This distorts the economy and the culture, pitting us against each other in surprising (and very destructive) ways.
I am most certainly not advocating that we abandon capitalism, as its had a largely positive effect on health, wealth, technological advancement and a host of other areas.
Rather, I believe we need to change the incentives around markets to encourage a broader, fairer capitalism that creates increased prosperity for everyone, rather than those already at the top.
[0] From a long-term perspective, focusing primarily on short-term extraction of value from the economy is self-defeating. Primarily because our economy's success is based on consumer spending (~70% of the US' GDP is consumer spending). Through wage suppression, rent-seeking and (a good thing) automation, we're reducing the ability of larger and larger segments of the population to contribute to that 2/3+ of the economy. If unchecked, we'll eventually get to the point where wealth and income are so concentrated that we won't be able to sustain that model and everyone will lose.
Because there are only so many pairs of jeans, lava lamps, snow globes, raisins, cars, houses or pizza pies that any one individual or household can use.
This argues for a much broader distribution of economic resources (wages, access to capital, safety nets, infrastructure, etc., etc., etc.) than we have now. This could provide enormous benefits to those who have the least and, in the long-term, those who have the most.
Beyond that, it can create a stronger, more resilient economy for everyone.
How is this any different to “you are free to speak but you’ll be murdered after you do”. You’re still free to “speak”, you’ll just die after. Freedom of speech right?
Why? So that poor people can't be heard?
And it's dangerous because when you equate speech with violence then how far are we from responding with a so called violent act with actual violence?
One thing they've gotten right is that discourses (how we talk about things) does in fact have a lot of power. So controlling discourses means you consolidate power. When you control how we talk about things then you can control what we talk about. When you control that, then you control how people think about things and you've now successfully won the culture and therefore seized actual, real power. Like being able to use a small minority of corporate activists to pressure a company into viewing certain content as violent or "problematic" and other content as orthodox and therefore appropriate to "platform".
This is how the church worked in the West for years, how it still does in certain places (Saudi Arabia) - by using dogma to determine what is right and wrong. To become the sole arbiter on what is knowledge and what is blasphemy and therefore the authority to discipline and punish.
This is where we are.
And the media, which is increasingly opposed to free speech.
Today we're seeing journalists talk about how other journalists should be banned from the public square by powerful corporations. They seemingly aren't bright enough to pause and wonder if this will ever be used against them. And this is being done under the banner of progressivism.
There are so many layers of irony here.
I think it's a very confusing time. A lot of people want to be "good people". They don't understand how the definitions of words have changed and what they're really signing up for. "Anti-racisim" sounds great - what reasonable, moral person wants to be racist? But you begin to read the text and you start to see it isn't what you think it is. That it isn't anything like what we've been working towards in terms of civil rights and equality.
I don't think "Progressivism" is the right word. There's not a good name for this philosophy yet other than derogative terms like "woke". Social Justice maybe but I find it unjust. I've seen "therapeutic totalitarianism" as one candidate.
No one has yet decided on the name for the force that has come to unseat liberalism. Some say it’s “Social Justice.” The author Rod Dreher has called it “therapeutic totalitarianism.” The writer Wesley Yang refers to it as “the successor ideology” — as in, the successor to liberalism.
At some point, it will have a formal name, one that properly describes its mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality. Until then, it is up to each of us to see it plainly. We need to look past the hashtags and slogans and the jargon to assess it honestly — and then to explain it to others.
The new creed’s premise goes something like this: We are in a war in which the forces of justice and progress are arrayed against the forces of backwardness and oppression. And in a war, the normal rules of the game — due process; political compromise; the presumption of innocence; free speech; even reason itself — must be suspended. Indeed, those rules themselves were corrupt to begin with — designed, as they were, by dead white males in order to uphold their own power.
[1] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/stop-being-...
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-fals...
But there are lots of people who want to do something but aren't going to dive full tilt into actually challenging the serious problematics of a violent police force. So there's a huge market for "do something small" which involves challenging fairly petty expressions of racism.
Basically, on "the left" and "the right" you have experts taking people's real grievances and turning them into "feel good" symbology. The idiocy of the social signaling is annoying but the way the actual grievances go unaddressed is a considerably worse problem.
One of the issues is calling media personalities who read from teleprompters, "journalists". Call them actors, call them media spokespeople, but they aren't engaging in anything that can be construed as, "journalism". Further, it isn't in the interest of corporate media outlets to hire people who are smart. They want people who sound articulate, look good on camera and repeat the talking points that they are told to repeat. What we see on cable outlets these days shouldn't be considered, "news" so much as infotainment. By now, most people, regardless of their political affiliation (if any) understand that society has largely gone off the rails, and in their desperation they are left with an appeal to authority to make things better and restore a patina of "normality". It is dangerously seductive to suggest to people who are desperate to end the chaos that if we just silenced the "bad" people things would be okay (leaving unsaid who determines who is bad and what we are allowed to think and say).
Some people consider a lot of speech violence but nearly everyone considers a small amount of speech violence or some equivalent. Telling someone to grab a electrified wire is violence by nearly everyone's standard. A mafioso directing a hit man to kill is nearly everyone's standard. The famous "shouting fire in a crowded theater" is mostly violence etc.
So you can't say the situation is "free speech or not". The situation is always where the boundary is. Of course, the question of where quickly spreading slander on the eve of an elections is on the spectrum of protected speech is a complicated question. But it's a bit different than the question of whether a given dogma can be challenged.
To my point though there is the idea that “silence is violence” which implies if you don’t actively work towards a certain groups objective then you are in fact committing violence.
Does this mean that when their social revolution is complete I will hang from the gallows pole because my named social media accounts do not account for me actively promoting their cause? After all my silence on the matter was a hostile act. Maybe I’ll just get a struggle session and be re-educated. Lifelong ban from participating in society but alive at least. If I’m lucky.
And who is "they"? Specifically. Not some amorphous "group" like "progressives" or "the left" or "SJWs".
I'm not being snarky here. It seems to me that one of the most damaging trends we're seeing is equating a hundred million (and more) people with the loudest, most obnoxious and nasty .01%.
Painting folks with such a broad brush is a recipe for division, conflict and mayhem.
Assuming that someone with a Trump bumper sticker is a dyed-in-the-wool racist and white supremacist fascist is stupid in the extreme. And so is assuming that someone with a Biden bumper sticker is a totalitarian monster bent on total mind control.
People are individuals and should be assessed and measured as such.
It's intellectually lazy to just stick anyone who doesn't share your beliefs about Trump or Biden or abortion or gun rights or any of a hundred other contentious issues into a big box called "enemies."
And when you do so, you play right into the hands of the tiny group of folks who want to profit (politically, economically or both) from dividing us.
You have the choice not to do so. It's up to you and me and everyone else to step up and judge people on their individual actions, not some invented "in" or "out" group.
Are you thinking of “clear and present danger”? That used to be the test in the United States, but since the 1960s it is “imminent lawless action.”
> I think nearly everyone finds this reasonable.
I don’t know about that. From what I can tell, the US legal system is extremely accepting of speech that incites violence relative to many other democratic governments. I think the current test is unreasonably lenient and likely allows a lot of speech that directly advocates and incites violence.
Yeah, certain kind of leftists are prone to over-the-top rhetoric. What does it mean? Not a lot given these aren't organized group, not even ineffective organized group but just individuals seeking attention for themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
The only speech I would consider to even approach violence is a direct threat. And even that isn't really violence - it's the threat of violence.
And credible threats of violence aren't protected speech either.
Nitpick: It's not "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" it's "Falsely Shouting fire in a crowded theater"
If there were a fire, I'd certainly want to know about it, wouldn't you?
How does this contradict anything I said? I said it was not violent. It isn’t.
Shouting fire is speech. Shouting fire is illegal Violence is illegal. Therefore spec is violence.
I don't even know where to begin picking it apart. It has the -form- of an argument, but...
These are strange times.
>...In 1969, the Supreme Court's decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio effectively overturned Schenck and any authority the case still carried. There, the Court held that inflammatory speech--and even speech advocating violence by members of the Ku Klux Klan--is protected under the First Amendment, unless the speech "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action"
Even Holmes seemed to quickly realize that the Schenck decision was odious since in the same term, he also wrote:
>...In what would become his second most famous phrase, Holmes wrote in Abrams that the marketplace of ideas offered the best solution for tamping down offensive speech: "The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out."
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
Think about it. How can calling for violence be violence? The violence is the violence, the calling for it is incitement.
Redefining terms like this is nothing more than subverting the truth to control a narrative.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...
> limitations on free speech balance rights to free speech and other rights, such as rights for ... protection from imminent or potential violence against particular persons.
The speech is not violent. However, we can say that speech that promotes such might not be allowed under "free speech."
Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is not violent though it can cause people to panic and cause harm.
People should be able to boycot people, free enterprises should he able to manage their media channels, the state should not.
That is not regulated in the capacity of speech.
>yelling "fire" in a crowded theater
That line is from a 1919 court case about whether you could oppose the draft.
>calling for literal violence against others
This is permitted under Brandenburg v. Ohio. Calls to illegal action are only prohibited if they are (1) intended to cause illegal action, (2) reasonably likely to produce such action and (3) imminent.
Violence is fundamentally a physical thing. Incitements to violence and threats of violence are bad, but they are not the same thing as violence.
Who is they?
The radical left as some name them. But more specifically the activist culture motivated by “critical theory” to dismantle scientific-liberalism and enlightenment principals/philosophy.
Can you also explain what you mean by scientific liberalism?
- Johnathon Rausch
1) no one owns the blessings of what is knowledge by virtue of any sort of implied authority.
2) all accepted knowledge is open to revision upon new evidence or proof
This is a good read that articulates this more than I can.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/703086.Kindly_Inquisitor...
Except if you claim that you're offended, you're suddenly given the right to control what others say. If you claim that you are fighting racism/sexism/etc, you're shielded from 90% of critique. So this "safe haven" has attracted all kinds of opportunists that just enjoy attacking others to feel better about themselves.
Look at your typical BLM protestors. It's not Black doctors protesting against being treated differently from White doctors. It's unhappy people from both races that have found an uncriticizable cause to justify their own disappointment in life.
If they make bad decisions, then people can go to competitors; it's as easy as typing in a different URL. That's how the Internet--and open societies in general--are supposed to work.
What it looks like to me--someone who has been on the Internet since before the turn of the century--is that a more recent generation of people grew up with these very popular websites as part of their lives, and they came to believe that these very popular websites are somehow inherent to the Internet and to society in general.
They're not. The Internet is more available to entrepreneurs, startups, and new ideas today than it was when Twitter and Facebook were started. They're not too big to fail.
When they can influence billions and shape elections, it's time to seriously review their power. This is how we treat ISPs and phone providers today, and social networks of a certain size should be considered in the same class.
Undersea cables, phone lines, and the radio spectrum are critical communications media. Private web sites with selective publication criteria by way of their content moderation policies are not.
Should private companies have any regulation at all? Should oil companies avoid pollution? Should ISPs ensure quality of service? Should medical companies ensure safety? Why is it that trillion-dollar companies that are larger and more powerful than anything else before should not be regulated when it comes to something as crucial as our freedom to communicate?
I find it ironic that another major HN story today is another instance of Google wiping out someone's account without any recourse, erasing their online presence and decades of data. Is that the new normal? Megacorporations ruling our lives without reason or appeal?
The world has changed. Social media is no longer just a website. It's communication fabric with network effects larger than entire nations that surrounds our lives. We either deal with it accordingly or risk losing much more.
The underlying physical infrastructure, sure, the underlying standards like the TCP/IP stack, DNS, Ethernet, etc, well those are too, but these are categorically not quite same as what you are arguing should also be included in that group.
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/28/arts/a-boycott-of-tv-adve...
You're dealing in fantasies from an obsolete era.
More people communicate over social media than phone lines today. Why is the former not equivalent to the later? Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey said that he believes social media is a human right - do you disagree with him?
Obviously Twitter is not because it has been down for about an hour now and life is going on just fine.
The critical question is if they ought to be allowed to wield that power unchecked, up to and including when that reach has progressed far enough to have real impacts on our political system, and so impacts on people's lives.
Remember, we're talking about what we'd like the law to be, not what the law is. These definitions are up for debate and redefinition.
News organizations have wielded this power for at least a century. Their decisions on what stories to publish obviously have political implications, and in some cases their editorial boards even explicitly endorse one candidate.
Facebook and Twitter are private entities, just like The NY Times or Fox News.
They don't create content as an organization and only facilitate communication, which is exactly why section 230 is being contested.
The First Amendment applies to everyone in the U.S.
This is not a strawman, I simply see no other way to interpret this comment.
Facebook and Twitter are just 2 of the biggest with many others like TikTok, Whatsapp, WeChat. It's the size and scope that should be used as a measure of when they cross over into public utility vs private project.
I can actually get behind no regulation for private companies, twitter can censor who they like as I can drive my favorite tank registered as my company vehicle and don't bother with taxes anymore.
I'm imagining someone who messes up badly enough to get banned from all those places and still somehow blames the stores rather than their own actions.
That’s exactly what antisemites say of Jewish expulsions.
Yeah, but it seems like FB and Twitter have been reviewing their power over the last four years.
They looked at the power of trolling-network, botnets etc to the influence elections. They basically triggered a circuit-breaker when a heavy hit-piece hit their networks.
Which is to say "the power of social networks" isn't just the power of the owners of the networks but also the power of groups embedded in the networks. Should these providers be fair brockers for all kind of manipulated viral content as well as for individual positions? Should they use their position of the ultimate kill switch to be the ultimate authority? I don't know but I don't think you put the most recent events as Facebook versus Organic Content - it's more Facebook versus Rupert Murdoch.
"In your darkest hour, when the demons come, call on me brother, and we will fight them together!"
Sure, but that's like "if the utility companies are cutting of your water and electricity, just make your own! nobody is stopping you from hooking an exercise bike to a dynamo and buy bottled water at the store". Technically true, practically not really a thing.
In monopoly situations (or duopoly, if you wish), there are generally different rules that apply, because you can't just go somewhere else to do business: there is nothing else. Hence utility companies can't simply go "I don't like your nose, no water for you".
I think creating new platforms has actually gotten easier since twitter's inception. Back in the day it was almost magical to have a website that performed at scale. Now you just hand a credit card to your favored cloud provider.
In your metaphor I see the internet as the utility not the platform provider. If akamai or level 3 decide that they wouldn't carry your traffic, then you might have a case that you're being censored.
If Apple can keep Epic out of the app store then @Jack can ban whomever he damn well feels like.
Other companies/platforms are free to advertise or offer services to entice users to switch. As conservatives like to remind us money is speech. You are not entitled to someone else's attention but you can try to buy it.
If they were banning Russiagate conspiracies, while letting conservative stuff run rampant, would you be giving me the pitch about how private property is more important than free expression?
Maybe there's a higher principle here than partisan warfare?
In this particular case, where there's a common carrier for information, we figured out the market failures and how to handle them long ago, the answer is neutrality to the message. There are some people in the thread making the case that it's different now, and maybe it is, maybe we need a different approach, but "just trust the market" is the dumbest idea ever.
The market is paper-clip-optimizing gray goo. Harness it, but don't anthropomorphize it and certainly don't "trust" it.
Don't impute principles to the market.
Those companies wouldn't touch gay rights with a 10 foot pole until one day all of a sudden they're beating their way to the front of the line at the pride parade.
Republicans have only won the popular vote for president once since 1990. Trump isn't even attempting to win the popular vote this year. The median income in 2018 was 10k higher in blue states than red states. And you wonder why advertisers (and thus twitter) value blue tribe users more?
Conservatives can't gerrymander the market. They are going to need to find a way to compete for relevance with the majority of the public not just their base.
They'll follow what's popular, and if that's liquidating jews, they'll do it (some of them did!).
In conclusion, I will say there is a way out of this morass for conservatives. They have to kick the neo-nazis, the proud boys, and qanon out of the party. They have to accept science and that the scientific method is the best way to determine objective reality. If they continue to call anything that falls outside of their accepted narratives "fake news", they will continue to lose the culture war. And thus, be more and more sidelined from the national discourse. Due the undemocratic elements of our constitution they conservatives may retain political power, but in the end, the consent of the governed is more important.
Don't trade principles for that, it's not worth it, the news cycle will be different tomorrow anyways. Certainly don't trust the corporations over individuals or the press for a one news-cycle 'win'. What kind of liberal values are those? "George W Bush liberals"?
(I'm a Bernie voter, not a conservative, btw).
They will go to the supreme court to fight for [a sole proprietor's] right not to sell cupcakes to gay people but then turn around and demand to control what [giant corporation] does with their servers.
This is a nonsense hypothetical.
Without limited liability, Twitter would not exist in its current form or size.
Correct.
I also mistakenly thought the cake baker was a sole proprietor. They are incorporated. I should have done a simple search before posting my original comment.
That said, I now mostly agree with the comment I was originally replying to.
> What does limited liability have to do with a corporation being owned by one person?
Correct, nothing. To clarify:
My position is that an entity enjoying limited liability (which in the US includes an LLC or corporation owned by a single person) has exchanged "rights" for indemnity and therefore can be compelled to - for example - bake a cake or not censor content hosted on their servers, but that a sole proprietor can do whatever they want re: refusing service or moderating content.
On the morals of it; I think that if twitter thinks that banning all conservatives will make them more revenue they can and should be allowed to do it. My value statement would hold equally if you :s/conservatives/liberals/g.
Conservative lawmakers have become very found of the Obama quote, "Elections have consequences." Well, the culture war has consequences too. And conservatives have completely gotten their asses kicked in the culture war in the last 30 years. Due to anachronisms in our means of determining representation this has not translated into a loss of legislative power. But if they want to hold sway outside of Washington they will have to make an effort to win back the hearts and minds of the public and more importantly the American consumer.
In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the owner declined to perform a creative service, that being decorating a cake for a gay wedding.
You might think that is also wrong, and that’s fine, but it’s a very important distinction. Legally compelling someone to perform a service that violates their religious beliefs is tricky to balance against non-discrimination. You have to consider the precedent that doing so would set. The supreme court recognized this in a 7-2 decision, so it’s clearly not a trivial or ridiculous objection. It only is to you because you don’t share the religious belief. But we must balance everyone’s rights, and that isn’t always easy.
You can say just about anything you want, but that doesn't mean other folks are required to listen to you or expend their resources to amplify your speech.
And that's a good thing. Because if you can force others to publish/host/amplify your speech, others can force you to do the same with theirs.
Cloudflare isn't as ideologically pure as you might think. To this date, they have only refused service to Daily Stormer and 8chan for political reasons. Real neonazi sites like stormfront dot org (unlike 8chan that had many apolitical communities like for games or anime) continue to enjoy their protection because it hasn't negatively affected their stock (the news on DS and 8ch broke before the IPO, but their launch might have been a failure due to bad press).
I know folks like to get all conspiratorial over social networks "acting in tandem", but it really shouldn't be all that surprising.
Individuals have vastly different tolerances for all sorts of things, but if you lump them into groups of tens of thousands, the average tolerance for things will be quite similar.
When the latest alt-right provocateur hits the threshold of bad PR for Facebook, he's likely right at the threshold for the other major social networks. No need for a shadowy cabal.
Thiel: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/peter-thiel-d...
Kaplan: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/05/facebook-joel-kaplan-kavanau...
Yeah, if what you are doing is obnoxious and a lot of people hate it, you are going to get rejected from the vast majority of spaces.
Amen. And my feeling is that we would be better off without them. This is why i'm in favor of slow computing, slower network speeds, and slower lifestyles. (I should state that this is not sarcasm)
Modern 4k monitors are awesome. Need a fast computer to drive them.
My phone shoots 20 megapixels photos. I only post them on social media once in a year or so, but have cloud backups and I need bandwidth for that. I watch movies sometimes, Blu-ray ain’t available at local physical retail, again need internet bandwidth and local storage.
Imagine I make a website where I censor everything except pro Trump memes. Is that a bastion of free speech, compared to a website where I allow, y'know, actual free speech and discourse?
I can't stand when people try to conflate the first amendment with freedom of speech. Nobody is (seriously) arguing that websites shouldn't have the legal freedom under our government to limit speech to whatever they desire. What we're arguing is that these platforms ought to value free speech as a principle and act impartially. Of course they have, and should have, the freedom to censor whatever they want for whatever reasons they want. But they should have the integrity not to.
But you're ignoring the fact that the corporations' value system consists of maximizing profit.
Anything that isn't pushing in that direction is both a distraction and a hindrance to the stated goals of the corporation -- making money.
Valuing free speech or having integrity are laudable ideals. I do my best to prioritize both. Sometimes I fail. But I do the best I can.
But my (or your) goals as an individual aren't relevant in this context.
Changing the incentives for these corporations to do whatever it takes to maximize profit would be a good thing.
That will entail the willingness of a majority of us to vote with our feet/wallet, likely aided with smart regulation.
But until we change those incentives/priorities, the status quo is what we'll get.
And they make editorial decisions constantly about what content each person sees. The fact that these decisions are scaled by computer algorithms does not mean they are not happening.
This idea that they are neutral and free communications channels is a marketing message that they invented and pushed, because they thought it would help them succeed in business. We don’t have to believe them.
They’re just private companies, two among millions. If they make unpopular decisions about how to operate, they will fail. They should be allowed to do that.
Conversely, if they make popular decisions that you disagree with, it doesn’t mean the whole concept of free speech is damaged. Again: just two companies.
Before the internet, the amount of damange a single guy with free speech could do was pretty limited. But with the internet, we're all force-multiplied. This message is probably going to be read by hundreds of people. Maybe thousands. In meat space, i'd have to be standing in a large concert hall for that kind of audince.
I still believe in free-speech, and frankly I also believe regular individuals should be able to buy machine guns. But I don't blame people for having some hesitation about that. Crazy people exist... and force-multiplying those individuals can cause a lot of harm to society. I'm very pro-speech, but I respect that we might need to have a conversation about it.
And dictatorship in what way? You mean that the president repeatedly asked mayors and governors to ask for national guard, as required by law, but couldn't do anything because they said no? You mean the president has no power over state or city jurisdiction so he could only yell on Twitter for opening the cities -- pathetic in a way. You mean the president has no authority to ban critical race theory so all he could do is to ban them in federal agencies, again under his full authority? You mean the president has no power over media so all he could do is to call them fake news? Or you mean that the first thing that Hitler did to gain power is to disband the police, just like many of our justice fighters have been demanding?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHb3xVqxcp8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EgMijMhS_U
I think you need a different perspective.
Is it because 1. I didn't state facts? I double checked videos 2. I took what politicians' words out of context? Again, I double checked the context. 3. I should not use a gun whatsoever? But then how do I protect myself, assuming escaping is not an option (of course I'll try to run first). 4. This is advocating violence? Then what's a better alternative?
"when politicians condoned publicly looting and robbery and violence and abolishing police"
AOC on looting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzlRVUJLOwo
Seattle council member on looting of stores: "Colleagues, I hope we’re all saying we understand why that destruction happened and we understand why people are upset", and "I don't want to hear is for our constituents to be told to be civil, not to be reactionary, to be told looting doesn't solve anything."
Minneapolis council woman supports "dismantle" police: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idw83kGmwzw
And didn't Don Lemon, the warrior of our justice warriors publicly called democrats to stop rioting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp7oPgIwpZ8? To be fair, being silent does not mean supporting rioting. I guess that the Portland government letting "protesters" destruct federal court building for 5 months is not condoning either. But hey, it is the righteous people who told us "silence is violence, not me.
> because the police in your community are perfect doesn't mean real problems don't exist elsewhere.
Of course not. But following the same logic, we should "abolish" or "dismantle" police for a few bad apples?
You know that the aphorism is "a few bad apples spoils the bunch", right? The underlying metaphor is that you have to get rid of the entire group because the infection has spread to all of them even if it's not immediately visible from the outside.
What is being said is that the police shouldn't be the instance to handle incidents where what is really needed is counseling, or social working. We're talking about shifting funds to those and let police do what they have been trained for.
On that, as an aside... I will say that as black-belt in Aikido, I remain flabbergasted that police officers are not taught simple techniques to subdue or disable people/threats without resorting to deadly force.
To your original post I will also say that owning a gun does not make you and your family impervious to crime! You cannot protect your family with a gun, it doesn't give your family a bullet proof shield. On the contrary you will likely escalate a situation.
I wish that's the discussion, but I failed to see that's what actually happened. I'm aware that many people argue that "defund police" means allocating fund for better use, but it sounds revisionism. The word "defund" means stop funding, simple and clear. BLM/ANTIFA's demand is clear too: abolish police. The word "abolish" does not mean restructuring, nor does it mean improving. The Minneapolis council woman was specifically asked for her view about "dismantling police", and I don't see how the word "dismantling" can be interpreted as routing fund to a better org.
So, no, the left populists did ask for reallocating funds to "handle incidents where what is really needed is counseling". They were asking for dismantling police. People may take "defund" as "reallocate fund", but that's interpretation that is not supported by facts.
It seems nothing I can say will have you reflect on your viewpoint, so I won't. Take care.
> BLM/ANTIFA's demand is clear too: abolish police.
Because that sentence is literally correct.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/07/17/black-lives-matte...
https://blacklivesmatter.ca/defund-the-police/
https://www.foxnews.com/us/black-lives-matter-philadelphia-l...
https://facebook.com/sometimesantisocialalwaysantifascist/po...
Why make such an obviously false claim? It already has in the past.
> it doesn't give your family a bullet proof shield
Non-sequitur.
A number of jurisdictions adopted steep police budget cuts in recent months (including e.g. Seattle and Portland - home to multi-month violent riots), and Minneapolis literally dismantled their police department. So I challenge this assertion.
I also don't get how cutting LE budgets is supposed to improve policing.
https://battlepenguin.video/videos/watch/9f81cd38-3ee9-4f26-...
I'm in contact with people in Seattle frequently. I'm still really shocked at how bad things have gotten. I knew police officers and defense attorneys there too. This defunding thing is not going to end well.
In a near-zero-sum municipal budget, funding increased homelessness assistance, increased staffing for mental health response, increased investment in lower income/higher crime areas would necessitate funds being reduced elsewhere; many suggest reducing police funding in places where those new services would step up.
If cops stop responding to certain kinds of emergency calls, is it not reasonable the funding for that capacity get shifted to the group that does respond? If cops were fighting fires and then a fire department was created, wouldn't you shift some of the firefighting budget to the new crew?
From https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-c...:
"The Police Department reductions passed Monday represent only about $3 million in 2020 savings; the department was allocated $409 million this year — more than the city spends annual on parks and social services."
Quote: "Though the council’s bills were expected to immediately slice only about $3 million from the Police Department’s $400-plus million annual budget — nowhere close to the 50% that seven council members in July vowed to extract — the council members described the trims as a crucial “down payment” on more sweeping changes to come."
Dig a little deeper next time. Don't fall for fake news.
> It frustrates me to no end that people will hear one boogeyman then start talking about the end of civilization.
It also frustrates me to no end that people will see one police brutality case, which was later challenged with tons of video evidence, then start talking about all cops are bad, there is this and that evil systemically, and then start rioting and looting with all righteousness.
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/why-i-no-longer-hate-the-...
Wear your mask, wear your seatbelt, get exercise and don't do drugs.
Police (and other law-enforcement) are an exercise of the power of government. The former exists to ensure the latter can continue to exist.
Therefore, police (and law-enforcement) exist to enact laws to preserve the status quo and whatever accepted social mores happen to be in vogue at the time via statute. Protecting you and your loved ones only occurs when your needs align with the desires of the state.
If you happen to be part of a marginalized group, often, power structures dictate that the desires of the state run contrary to your needs, or, more often, the desires of the state are literally enacted to make your life more difficult.
For example - Where I live, we have a saying, "No cops, no problems." This is because a) police take 45+ minutes to respond because we're very rural, b) police generally only respond by taking notes and harassing anyone they find on the scene, regardless of their role, and c) police, once they respond, are well known to run warrants on anyone around just to be able to say they've arrested someone that day (the second part of that is my conjecture, but I also can't come up with a reason they would run warrants on an innocent bystander, regardless of said bystander's past).
My need of having my car not be stolen apparently does not align with the government's need to ensure my father is prosecuted for low-level drug offenses from many years ago. (to use the next word too much, I think) Therefore, police do not have my interests at heart. Please apply this lesson to any other marginalized group to see where the problems with police come from, and why I called you naive.
For most people, these two things align.
Most. Not all. That is my point. I live in a community that the police absolutely have no interest in protecting. We are a problem to be dealt with, not a community to protect.
Not everyone has that experience, I understand that. But police are, by virtue of who pulls the purse strings, an extension of the power of government.
I never said all police don't care about protecting you. I said they absolutely care about protecting you, as long as your wants align with the needs of the state.
> If you genuinely believed the police are there to protect you, and not to ensure the status quo is enforced and continues, you are naive, or you are not part of a marginalized group.
Society needs an authority to turn to to resolve disputes or injustice and to maintain order, the alternative is chaos.
That authority may not be perfect, it may have certain biases that need to be worked on, but without it, disputes will be won by the superior marksman.
I guess, then, at the heart of the 'defund the police' movement is an attempt to move toward working on those biases.
That is what is lost in much of the conversation - we need to fix certain things in the policing of the US - because people immediately turn to 'what will we do if there are no police'.
I guess, how do we turn the conversation from 'defund the police' to 'fix this shit' without losing people along the way?
I don't have answers for any of this.
Allegedly the unions have positioned themselves as the chief obstacle to any & all reforms.
Deuteronomy 16:18
This is like the review site problem... people don't tend to walk around giving random anecdotes about good experiences with routine or common services.
But the polling is what I based my comment on. Even in minority communities, increased police presence polls significantly higher than decreased presence - and that's before proposing any reforms.
I'm not a minority and I grew up solidly upper middle-class. But even as a child, I knew that it was really dangerous to piss off the police.
Because the police were generally considered to just be the biggest and best armed gang. Because they acted that way.
Things have gotten much better in the ensuing 35-40 years here, but there are still serious, structural problems with police impunity -- especially if you're a minority[0][1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_Cit...
[1] https://theintercept.com/2020/10/13/nypd-stop-frisk-warrants...
Modern polling is what I based by contention on, and I don't think citing the most notorious counter-example (and reaching back before reforms to solve exactly the problem you allege) is much of a response.
Minority communities routinely poll in favour of INCREASED presence in their communities nowadays.
I'm pretty much with George Carlin (at least I'm pretty sure it was him) WRT the police: "It's not that I don't like the police, I just feel better when they're not around."
Do you know this is just regurgitated political theory from Karl Marx and wasn’t considered even remotely true for thousands of years?
Is it true now? Probably not, but you seem convinced it’s true...
Any guns you own are statistically more likely to kill/injure your family than protect them.
And from personal experience - I live in Minneapolis, and at no point during the unrest did I fear for my personal safety or my property. Well, except when the police with machine guns rolled through my city yelling and shooting "less-lethal" ammunition at anyone who dared peek out their front door.
I appreciate your point of view and anyone who didn't condemn violence should be roundly criticized.
However, my experience here in NYC was much different.
Not only did pretty much everyone decry the violence (a significant portion of which -- and there's plenty of video evidence too -- was instigated by police), but time and again over the two or three days that there was looting, the protestors took it upon themselves to stop the looters, because no one wanted that -- except the looters.
What's more, much (not all) of the violent actions against police property were perpetrated by folks from out of town.
I can't speak to Portland or Seattle or Kenosha, but here in NYC, even some of the police[0][1] stood (and knelt) with the protestors to condemn police violence and urged the protestors (to cheers, I might add) to kick the looters and other violent folks out.
There's nuance there and it's sad (especially in the context of discussing social media) that those nuances are lost in social media bubbles where the loudest and most extreme are given undue exposure, if not primacy in the discussion.
[0] https://www.newsday.com/news/new-york/nypd-chief-of-departme...
At this rate it will be the hill that the civilization dies on. The whole "absolute free speech is a sacrosanct human rights for everyone" is an ideal that simply would not scale with the 21st century civilization. Most users around here grew up firmly believing that value, and it is further reinforced by American/Western exceptionalism, so I can see how this comment will be very negatively received.
But we can all agree that freedom isn't free, at one point in the future the cost would be so high that the whole civilization would be facing a "give me freedom or give me death" moment. I can't predict whether that moment will come in the form of an anti-science misinformation campaign during a pandemic that is far more serious than even Covid or a mentally deranged, conspiracy theory supporting leader who has full control of the nuclear arsenal, but that moment will come one day.
The second law of thermal dynamics applies to more than just physical systems, entropy also plays similar role in a complex society that is getting ever more complex. Before our species can attain the ability to modularize our own society through interplanetary colonization to ensure survival, we have to face the very uncomfortable truth that we have to put in more rules and checks into our existing society to ensure the entropy doesn't snowball out of control too fast. That means we have to put everything on the table and re-exam all of our values, because there is no value to speak of in a dead world.
The unfortunate thing is it's very difficult to have this conversation, even with very intelligent people, without everyone getting emotional. After all a lot of these beliefs and values are something we hold very dear, and maybe that is the ultimate tragedy of our world.
You may not like that civilization, but saying a specie cannot survive unless we adhere to democracy and free speech is the product of your upbringing but not the product of objective reality.
Imagine a terrorist cell just unleashed a biological weapon that's far more deadly than Covid. Which country do you think will fare better in this scenario, China or the U.S.? Would Americans still be arguing about the superiority of democracy and free speech if a majority of the people died?
There are pros and cons to each system, do you really believe free societies has absolutely zero trade offs or drawbacks?
No country did that, why are you making things up? China stopped people from leaving their houses but at the same time provide supplies and delivered food through organized effort for weeks. That was well documented by even foreigners living there.
Hell, let's not use China's example, what about countries like Singapore, South Korea, New Zealand, etc all managed to be both democracies and selectively enforce rules at the same time?
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1703503427818
https://www.msn.com/en-ae/news/other/is-china-locking-up-ent...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/business/china-coronaviru...
>Hell, let's not use China's example, what about countries like Singapore, South Korea, New Zealand, etc all managed to be both democracies and selectively enforce rules at the same time?
Not sure what your point is here. If you're saying information is a virus to society and we need reasonable restrictions on it to save it...I don't agree and there isn't much if any recorded history to support that assertion. Information and expression doesn't kill, it's not a virus. It's not even a comparison.
What the hell? Are you serious? Yes, anti-semitism never killed anyone, anti-vaccine misinformation never hurt anyone, and calling Covid a hoax didn't cause any unnecessary death either /s.
>it's not a virus
It's not, because it spreads far, far faster than even the most dangerous virus.
Snowden and Assange are quite different, though I am also not opposed to whistle blowers, if it isn't reckless and endanger lives (such as giving up troop positions, etc.)
I grew up in a latin-american country, US interference in elections was a given, not a suspiction, a fact, million of dollars poured by the NED and the CIA, which proportionally meant a huge fraction of the electoral budget in the country and yet people still went to vote. Now I need to feel worried about the end of the civilization as we know it because the russians bought 500k or so of facebook ads and have bot farms? Go to reddit, specifically to r/politics and you will see there the blue wave doing the same, but there is not outcry. Hillary lost, because she was a lousy candidate and because of the EC system, luckily for Vladimir he also got what the wanted, but not because of the genius of his intelligence services.
1) Our elected officials suppressing the voices they believe are most dangerous to our society.
2) Donald Trump shutting down The New York Times.
This seems like a move that would jumpstart the entropy snowball, not slow it down.
Btw my original comment wasn't about the danger of free speech, it's about the danger of absolutely unchecked free speech from all aspects of society.
You can solve being saturated by noise on the listening side much better than on the sending side... much better because the listeners needs are diverse, because listeners must be robust against adversarial inputs (or otherwise the first madman with a random number generator floods you out), because the listeners time/sanity is what is at stake so that's where the incentives are, and so on.
The fight against entropy should be all of our missions but it can be accomplished without forcefully silencing people.
Quite.
And those who have no obligation to listen include Facebook and Twitter. They are absolutely under no obligation to deliver any message you wish to send.
I'm also dubious about applying that to private messages: Twitter isn't a party to those messages, interception of the content is an unlawful wiretap. Without unlawfully monitoring the content of the users private community it's not clear to me how they could be suppressing the content.
I believe that Twitter and Facebook have no desire to be regulated as common carriers.
There is no way this is an unlawful wiretap, as they own and operate the wires.
It doesn't matter who owns the facilities. Except for certain narrow exceptions (warrants, government officers, jails, incidental operations necessary for maintenance) any unauthorized third party interception of a private communication is unlawful. Common carrier status is relevant for liability but is irrelevant for § 2511.
In that case, I think they would be under obligation to not silence people like this.
But not people like you, of course.
> They're easily mislead.
That’s right. They need to be led by someone like you, instead.
> Those decisions effect me.
And your “stupid decisions” affect me. Which of us gets to subjugate the other, because the other is “stupid”?
See the problem, Colin? Where are you going to find these angels who will rule society for us? I’m not exactly eager to delegate the task to you.
If the only reply left is “Well, they can legally do it!” (assuming their lies about said censorship aren’t legally problematic), that’s very telling. It completely ignores the question of morality, especially when the platforms in question have so much control over society.
Lots of things are legal. That doesn’t make them right. In some cases, they’re very wrong.
I still wish you can express your views all over the internet without the risk of being cancelled.
I don't, especially if me spreading nonsense directly causes harm to a large number of people and the society. I do not believe my unlimited free speech rights is of higher priority the health and wellbeing of the overall society.
The whole "individual rights always triumphs over the interest of the society" is exactly the type of American exceptionalism I mentioned. It's a very strange notion in many cultures (and no doubt you'd say those cultures are inferior) and it's more or less another symptom of a culture that worships narcissistic behavior.
> Silicon Valley neo-barons and politicians, whose opinions are ACTUALLY dangerous and influential, and yet none of them will be cancelled.isnt it curious?
I see you failed on reading comprehension. They should be cancelled if they are proven to be dangerous to the society, such as anti-mask movement or anti-vaccine movement. I don't know why you are trying to trivialize "tin-foil brigade" when it literally killed many people this year.
That's an oxymoron, if we are irrelevant we then dont have the power nor the audience to affect society in a grand scale.
> I see you failed on reading comprehension.
Nice try.
> They should be cancelled if they are proven to be dangerous to the society, such as anti-mask movement or anti-vaccine movement
And yet they are free as a bird. From Jim Carrey to Boris Johnson, from Jack Dorsey to Elon Musk, from Mark Zuckerberg to Alysa Milano, they have spouted absolutely nonsense and they are as influential as ever.They should not be banned btw, but ridiculed.Alex Jones deserves the same treatment and not being hypocritically swept under the rug.
> I don't know why you are trying to trivialize "tin-foil brigade" when it literally killed many people this year.
This a global pandemic, a big portion of the deaths was sadly unavoidable no matter your location in the map or your political persuasion, it is juicy ammunition for political gains though. The other big part in the deaths comes from the clusterfuck of mismanagement of the crisis. The people responsible for that WILL NOT be cancelled. The influence of the loonies in their youtube channels represents at worst a minuscule fraction of the deaths.
“Proven” by who? You?
No thanks.
Do you agree that there are objective facts that should be accepted by the society for the well being of the society? Such as Earth is not flat, vaccine does not cause autism, and wearing a mask is helpful at preventing Covid spread?
If you do not believe such object facts exist, then we do not live in the same reality, if you do, then there must be some mechanism that raises certain statements into the status of "facts", and that's the same kind of mechanism we should apply.
Please explain what you think I’m strawmanning. If you demand that certain topics be banned from discussion, you must explain, as a matter of implementation, who gets to decide what is banned.
> Do you agree that there are objective facts that should be accepted by the society
What, concretely, do you mean by "should be accepted by the society"? To use an extreme but historically common example, does it mean that people should be executed for having different beliefs? You need to be more specific.
> If you do not believe such object facts exist
I do believe the Earth is round. I do believe it’s a fact. I don’t believe people should be banned (or worse) because they think otherwise.
In fact, flat Earth theories are interesting, because they challenge my assumptions and ultimately clarify my understanding of the subject.
This is why freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas is so important: It is the only mechanism by which we can correct our own epistemology and keep it in check, both at the individual and at the societal level!
> there must be some mechanism that raises certain statements into the status of "facts"
Sure. What does this have to do with censorship, though? The topic of discussion was policy, i.e. what is to be imposed on other people.
Where did I say discussion of certain topics should be banned? Where did I say people should be killed for believing different things? It’s literally strawman after strawman from you.
> you must explain, as a matter of implementation, who gets to decide what is banned.
No I don’t. I pointed out a problem, but I am not suggesting solutions, and I sure as hell don’t owe you an implementation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24797649
> Do you agree that there are objective facts that should be accepted by the society for the well being of the society?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24795296
> They should be cancelled if they are proven to be dangerous to the society
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24795078
> I do not believe my unlimited free speech rights is of higher priority the health and wellbeing of the overall society.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24793340
> The whole "absolute free speech is a sacrosanct human rights for everyone" is an ideal that simply would not scale with the 21st century civilization.
> But we can all agree that freedom isn't free, at one point in the future the cost would be so high that the whole civilization would be facing a "give me freedom or give me death" moment.
Feel free to clarify what you meant, which is precisely what I was asking about.
> Where did I say people should be killed for believing different things?
I explicitly said that was an example, not something you specifically said.
Some ideas don't deserve to be amplified, and there is no guarantee that anyone and everyone gets to have their ideas amplified by everyone else. I see far too much right-wing kool-aid being guzzled today, and it seems like about 40% of America would rather die by suicide than live in a world where compromise happens with liberals, and for no good reason except misinformation, disinformation, and subterfuge.
So you'd really rather watch the world burn than accept that Twitter has no obligation to amplify anyone's lies?
The mere fact you say that it shows you have 0 idea how a sect like that works and how it preys and works on people.
> I see far too much right-wing kool-aid being guzzled today
You are correct but it is highly suggestive you only mention right wing lunacies, sure, climate change denial, anti-vaccine movement and oil industry cheerleading are particularly popular in the right win and they will be very damaging to society. But how about left wing lunacy, no reason for concern? From opposition to nuclear energy to GMOs, blank slatism and denial of any significant difference due to sex or ethnicity, forced quotas across all areas of society, cancel culture, a strong government promoted censorship. I am going to be honest I am pretty left wing, for real, not the american variety, and with the exception of global warming and vaccines(this is not so clear cut politically) I find myself more often than not in the other side of the road from them,
Voltaire put it well: ""I disagree with what you have to say, sir, but I will defend, to the death, your right to say it."
Also there are de-facto monopolies on communications and social networks.
yeah because in practice free speech isn't black and white like these internet discussions like to pretend it is. Is not being allowed to host child porn a violation of my free speech?
there's nuance when defining free speech. Similar to the paradox of tolerance, you need to draw the line somewhere otherwise you'll be drowned out and taken over by speech that doesn't happen in good faith.
Every country has limits to freedom of speech. In the US you can't lie to a Federal Officer, you can't distribute or possess images of child abuse and you cannot advocate for a direct an imminent threat of an individual.
Those are all pretty reasonable. You CAN have a fictional representation of child abuse (writing/drawing) which is illegal in the UK, Australia and pretty much any other country except Japan.
Speech is tricky. Every country has limitations. China has freedom of speech in their constitution, so a law by itself is not enough to ensure you actually have that freedom.
But there's two layers here, does free speech apply to social media. No it doesn't, it's not the government. What would be free speech violation is if you criticized the government then had the government tell the social media company to remove something.
Then there's the hypothetical, if social media companies had to listen free speech. Is spreading manipulative false information protected free speech? That seems abusive to me, close to slander.That's not protected speech.
Slander isn't criminal, it's a civil issue. And social media companies don't have to worry about that _because_ of section 203 protections.
Under US law, yes, social media companies can do what they want in this particular case. But should they? They are massive and they control narratives. The fact that we have real freedom of speech proves this because we have other channels to discuss and bring attention to this issue.
There is another angle: Because of FB/Twitters massive size and control over their audiences, is allowing some stories and blocking others election interference? It most certainly is.
they might only control the narrative on twitter. only around 10% of americans would be a monthly active user on twitter. the world is not twitter, or social media. It might feel like that. Plently of people are still getting their news from other places. the article is still on nypost.
> is allowing some stories and blocking others election interference?
Lets say CNN decides to not publish this story, is that election interference? Now their viewers won't know about it.
You could also say its election interference to run an unfounded story in the first place
The online equivalent of the image I have painted above is, "You go on Twitter and you post something, and nobody is interested and it just gets ignored."
Twitter removing it is the same as someone pulling you off the box and shoving a sock in your mouth.
Until that actual public square exists online, Twitter, while they may have the legal right to silence you, have an ethical responsibility not to - because THEY chose to provide the platform that they knew everyone would use.
If they want ideological filtering they should make it part of the signup requirements.
You are under the misapprehension that Twitter (or Facebook or Google, or any corporation for that matter) has any ethics at all. They exist to make profit. And anything that doesn't align with that is unimportant to them.
I'd also point out that on Twitter or Facebook, you aren't the customer, you're the product. And they keep you in your little section of the feedlot (filter bubble) to keep you pacified and feeling good, as they profit off your PII and eyeballs.
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/the-new-era-of-corporate-...
Maybe you should link a real source instead of your own website.
Based on the description I would be interested to know which country we're talking about.
Voltaire did not say this.
Now it seems like half the internet is comprised of toxic people.
The “communities” are also huge and generic rather than smaller and topical. Back in the 90s/2000s moderators were usually enthusiasts with domain knowledge and insisting people stay on topic was a pretty solid moderation tool since the moderators’ on topic opinions usually had more value than some random troll.
Basically, free speech only works if we have reason to believe the people holding onto the "bad" ideas in the idea marketplace listen. It stops being a solution when there are no consequences to being wrong, when your reputation doesn't matter, and when you can be as immoral or insidious as you want without a care in the world. This is the result of automation invading human spaces.
and if you think that is real, then the example is everyone who think qanon is absurd.
> 10 people accused of being bots because the accuser can't cope with people who disagree with them.
If those 10 people aren't really talking, though, then I would consider them bots too. If they are stating one point, over and over, and refusing to listen to others or change their minds about anything, then...they're bots.
Respect/creditable is earned.
Then, newspapers were published once or twice a day. Magazines weekly or monthly. Publishers worked as editors, fact-checkers, and curators (with their various agendas, of course).
The original miracle of internet free speech was the promise that anyone could become a publisher - no more gate keeping by major media companies - no more financial barrier to entry to buy presses, paper, delivery trucks.
Then various platforms emerged to centralize online publishing -- Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LiveJournal, Yelp, ... and thousands more. They took the profit model of traditional publishers (paid advertising), exploited the structural advantages of digital publishing, and gave up the overhead and responsibility of curating and creating content.
Now we are trying to figure out how to manage real time publishing platforms that can't (or won't?) validate identity, won't take responsibility for fact-checking, are open to targeted manipulation by adversaries, and are capable of distributing damaging lies and propaganda with little oversight or financial consequences.
Speech is still "freer" now than when I was a teenager. The reach of an individual voice is massive in today's world compared to the 1980's. When I was young, my community was the people who lived within biking distance. Now it includes all of reddit, twitch, hackernews...
Can we sustain these advances while managing the mob-mentality inherent in human nature? Can we protect our forums from adversarial misuse? Are open platforms that shrug off responsibility for content while collecting advertising profits compatible with democracy?
Looks like we'll find out in the next few years.
The identity validation part is worth repeating. I'm not a fan of real names, but I'd consider opting in to an identity that follows me between platforms so I could build a reputation.
I'd also like to see more transparency from social media platforms. I'd love to be able to get metrics on a post. X% of likes came from these countries. X% of retweets came from known VPN IPs. X% of shares came from IPs in known botnets.
I'd also LOVE to filter out people that participate over a certain volume. If someone is spending 8h+ per day on Twitter, I want them hidden because IMO they have nothing to add if all of their experience is from social media and not the real world.
same.
consider scuttlebutt.
I hope I'm wrong.
Their article included personal information and was consistent with policies that have been in place for almost a year.
Twitter is not a public utility in the way that phone services are. They were (rightly) criticized along with others for letting mis-information run amok in the last election and beyond. They have (slowly) taken steps to listen to these concerns and this is what happens.
I full support Twitter in this. This is not censorship, this is limitation of deliberate mis-information and personal information.
Trump's taxes were repeatedly shared and there are photos of the content (not to mention the content itself, which is far more private than an email address).
This standard has never been applied like this, and you can still link to the Web Archive version without limitation - same content.
It's also not "limitation of deliberate misinformation" - that has never once been used on deliberate misinformation like the Steele dossier.
Ahmari of the NYP had a reasonably good counter: https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/if-unreliable-is-the-issue-why...
That's kind of comparing apples to oranges. One is a public figure, the other not. And is tax info comparable to email addresses? I'm not saying whether or not it's fair, only that it's very different kinds of personal information being compared here. Equivalency is hard to establish.
I actually abhor that the photos of Hunter were shared, but he's a public figure too. As this (and other recent reporting) has shown, he was using his father's name and implied access thereto for personal profit.
Note that there is no evidence Hunter ever actually got Joe to do anything for him. What is a matter of record is that Hunter was IMPLYING he could do so, which is scummy but probably not illegal. Johnson-Grassley investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe and I want to stress I'm not alleging otherwise.
That (to me) is valid in itself. I do wonder, had they redacted things properly then this would all be a non-issue.
To your example; my understanding is that Trump's taxes did not in the same way (by this I mean things like Trump org address etc isn't a private address). I have not dug deep into those articles to say that with 100% certainty.
Hence they don't ban the Web Archive mirror (which has a static URL), and they don't ban any of the previous leaks about Trump taxes, health records, etc.
Not to mention Wikileaks - by definition that is a trove of email addresses and completely uncensored private information that you can tweet with impunity right now.
The thing is, I would have thought by now that these companies would have learned from the past. The more you try to censor information on the internet, the more attention you draw to it.
HN is no different. I know this because I've been dinged by dang.
If you would like to know "what could go wrong" you need simply take a look and see what is going wrong now.
This whole sham of using Twitter is a freedom of private speech trick he uses to facilitate ambiguously mixing occasionally factual official statements with trash "protected" speech.
If anyone holds his feet to the fire for tweets, he can simply claim he was acting as a private citizen stating an opinion - obviously the president of the united states wouldn't use twitter for official business!
I look forward to seeing how history treats this embarrassingly incompetent era of american politics.
I'm calling/writing my congress-critter today to ask that they look into doing exactly this
Personal accounts should be subject to the same rules as everyone else. Give official government accounts special treatment; can't be banned, no censorship, etc..
Official government statements should come through more secure channels than a privately owned and operated web site that arguably resembles a 21st century tabloid where people's accounts are regularly hacked or otherwise taken over, and both censorship and access are arbitrary and unregulated.
Just today we have an example of a C-SPAN political editor admitting to having lied about their Twitter account being hacked to abdicate responsibility for comments they made on the platform [0].
Such claims would not only be unbelievable coming from secure government owned and operated channels, but would be damming to the administration should they honestly occur, incentivizing running such services properly without such vulnerabilities and with an immutable audit trail.
Furthermore, if a .gov provided forums for open public discussion in response to official statements, they would actually be protected under the 1st amendment. Unlike on private platforms like Twitter, where arbitrary censorship and blocking of discussion/access is perfectly legal.
All of this junk occurring on private websites like Twitter/FB is completely misguided and a tremendous disservice to the American public.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/15/media/steve-scully-cspan-susp...
> immutable audit trail
This would be amazing because knowing that something is un-delete-able might cause some politicians to take a pause and think about what they're saying. Some. Lol.
This can be done today. An application communicating via an open and federated social protocol can be stood up on government infrastructure/DNS namespace. These systems already exist and work.
This situation is very much a double-bind. In this case, someone gets to make noise about the "truth they won't let you see" and claim bias.
Sometimes I agree with things a lot of people here clearly disagree with and I'm fine with that. I can decide to either argue my/their case or move on and accept we have different views. Maybe sometimes seeing things heavily downvoted here changes my mind on subject as well and question if my views are right or not.
We can't all agree about everything all the time. Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm wrong. We all are, nobody is ever 100% right, 100% of the time. I sure as hell don't want somebody else controlling everything I see and read because they think it might give me the "wrong" ideas. I'm an adult and I should be allowed to make my own mind up and most importantly question things, as should everybody else, regardless of education level or where they "fit" into society.
When I think about all of the forums and comment sections I regularly interact with, the ones with the most open, democratic, free speech, with little to no direct moderation seem to be the most engaging, tolerant and frankly, nicer places. I've given up on engaging with anything that's heavily moderated or frankly, blatantly biased - Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and I feel a lot happier.
‘I would rather have questions that cannot be answered, than answers that cannot be questioned’ - Richard Feynman.
Well, besides the usual "who decides what's 'blatant spam or crap'?" response to the "it's only bad stuff that gets censored", I'd suggest you haven't really been paying attention, then. Take a look at dang's comment history[1] and you'll see a lot of warnings before ban but also plenty of bans and references to previous bans, usually for substantive, not spam, reasons.
If you were to take the above at face value, would this change your perception about the value of moderation in online communities?
Personally I think downvoting is the appropriate response to say "this is not interesting or relevant to HN", but many have realized flagging provides outsized influence.
Global conglomerates serving billions where moderation is controlled by a few individuals with absolute control and no accountability. This is a major issue as these networks are quickly becoming a critical medium of communication and expression in this century.
Sadly the above is a very common belief structure now. It's a product of utopian thinking where if just this one more enemy can be destroyed, peace will fall upon the Earth and all will be well. It seems to be that these utopian dreamers always end in the elimination of those who don't share their dream vision of the world.
It still has plenty of idea sharing but enough social friction to support proper filtering and decorum.
The real folly in all of this is the assumption that these tools will always be in their hands and will never end up turned against them. History shows that this is almost always a poor assumption and that the reversal of power often happens both sooner and faster than ever imagined.
The fundamentals of free speech are just easier to uphold when the forum (Internet) is much smaller and the participants (hacker culture, chat rooms) are more uniform. Both the size of the forum and the diversity of the participants has changed - that's what happened.
When each community is small, you have to put in a lot more work to say, spread disinformation so there's natural censorship on it.
The reality is that people were always saying what is being said today, but there were many more checks that reduced how far and how quickly the message would spread. You may have had right and left leaning media outlets, but they were typically closer to centrist views. This is more due to them having to maintain their reputation by checking facts than censorship, so the main thing that differed was their spin on a story. That pretty much left word of mouth and fringe publications. Fringe publications are just that, they had limited distribution. Word of mouth was pretty much restricted to social circles. Anything too far from reality (or people's perceptions) quickly died off.
Online business models changed that. Fringe publications are no longer fringe, at least not in the historic sense. Word of mouth is no longer word of mouth, since people have access to publishing platforms. Reputation is no longer a restraint, so fact checking is irrelevant. Rather than settling on more centrist views, we tend to focus upon the extremes. A lot of disagreeable stuff is being said at those extremes, which is why (I suspect) that a lot of the old-time free speech advocates have reevaluated their positions.
(And all of that is before considering how some people are actively manipulating what we are exposed to.)
If the Internet hadn't changed so radically, their viewpoints might have also remained similarly stale.
An orthogonal issue is social platform monopoly or oligopoly, and that we need more options and better competition.
If twitter wants to defer to users being responsible for their speech, the users should be having the rights to post what they want.
It turns out being able to lie at scale is a more credible and more immediate threat to society than nuanced restrictions on the flow of information.
If you play any Town of Salem style game, you know that being able to call out and dissuade low effort, poor quality information is a way to improve pro-social discourse. Are there issues with selecting what counts as anti social information? Yes. Which is why restrictions are typically exceedingly narrow.
However the ambit of what restrictions are justifiable runs along a spectrum; even amongst western democracies, there is a dramatic difference in what is acceptable and what is not. Germany, for instance, has exceedingly strong restrictions on pro-nazi speech. The US, by contrast, places a far higher immediate value on freedom of speech, to the point that it struck down campaign finance laws as being of lesser importance.
Times change and people are noticing that the result of the pendulum being so far swung in one direction on this issue has caused tremendously deleterious effects.
This is so spot on.
I also have seen "weaponized trolling" in the last ten years that seems to make the world a good deal worse. The way climate change denial has gotten legs from combination of the average person's poor thinking and the particular dynamics of electronic communication. I see bots on my FB feed activating now, pushing propaganda that makes me chuckle but certainly push some morons to actions.
Putting aside the point that Twitter/FB own the medium. Someone is going to manage any given medium. Is "throttling" censorship? Because the NY Post story never was made unavailable, it was just throttled, it just slowed down, slowed down enough that the rebuttal was made available at the same rate as the original story.
There are junctures where "free speech" can't really be a criteria - Oliver Wendel Holmes' "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is the epitome of such examples (and these can be misused, in fact Holmes' made his example to misuse it, justifying repression against those who oppose WWI). Is spread viral false news on the eve of an election in the "fire" or the "freedom" category? Honestly, throttling seems like a good compromise if we're looking for the simple free availability of information. But when information is the coordination, activation and/or manipulation of people at scale, talking about freedom stops meaning a lot.
Suppose there's a fire, and a hurricane, and an epidemic and an economic crisis and different things shouted will save some people and trample other people. What category is "shouting" "you don't need a mask, come shop before I go bankrupt"? Etc.
The problem with "some people only use facebook for news and so this means they are effectively censored" is "some people only use facebook for news". Fix that, don't try to force services to broadcast obvious harmful nonsense to people.
The idea of truly unfiltered free speech on a global scale is impossible, because you have to be heard and we can't let everyone broadcast to everyone: there is too much noise. Free speech does not—and has never meant—the right to every platform.
How does this relate to Twitter blocking private messages between two people for including the NYP article?
> because you have to be heard and we can't let everyone broadcast to everyone: there is too much noise.
How does this relate to Twitter blocking people from seeing an NYP article shared by people they explicitly chose to follow?
But this ain’t censorship; free speech is alive and well for anyone willing to find the right platform. This is a platform provider [belatedly] denying access to lies (they aren’t opinions) that have been weaponized to exploit those platforms’ recommendation algorithms for the liars’ own gain. It is more like how the internet started to develop defenses against spam in the late 90s, with spamsum, SpamAssassin, etc.
Yes, there are many platforms, but what is happening now is the 90s equivalent to be banned from MSN messenger, MICQ, IRC and Usenet at the same time, sure you could go to an obscure geocities page to express yourself there but it is not the same. Thankfully that did not happen then.
In this specific case is not about lies, it is just unsavory emails and pics, highly unethical but not very different from what all the rags do all the time, it's very disingenous to think Twitter acted on good faith and not because it was politically convenient for its CEO. If the leaks would have been about Trump people would be crying bloody murder about the censorship.
Humans, humans never change.
And with this specific case, I'm with you on your hill.
But more broadly we're usually not talking about the web from the late 90s. We're talking about a handful of modern social networks most of which use of anti-democratic dark patterns. And algorithms that are known to push a given percentage of users down a rabbithole, who can then be weaponized for who knows what purpose by who knows which nasty actors.
In essence, we're talking about factories which-- if there were a market for it-- could produce a version of the internet from the 90s with the slight difference that a sizable proportion of your 90s internet acquaintances happen to spout racist rhetoric and becoming walking, talking bioweapons this time around.
I know that's not the topic here. But that is a much bigger problem IMO and the answer of "more speech" is at most helplessly incomplete wrt it.
Why? Why can't the leftists push people down rabbit holes and make them rabid communists? Serious question.
One utilitarian-- it's a smaller market.
E.g., there was story on the intercept sourcing leaked FBI documents that showed the FBI's awareness and concerns about white supremacist infiltration of local law enforcement[1]. This was to the point that the FBI was cautious about sharing access to its surveillance tools for fear that they could be used by some local LE to target and harass minorities. (Not sure if that's in the same article or a different Intercept article.)
Racist rabbitholes can draw on a pre-existing audience of racists, which make them more widespread and effective, and that attracts more ad dollars.
Two-- emphasis on "rabid." There are racist groups where the membership is people from various ethnic backgrounds spouting the stereotypical white-supremacist rhetoric. The draw is apparently aggression and violence.
If someone on the left wants to "counter" that, the video content is going to need to be equally irrational and aggressive to sufficiently capture the audience's attention. Again, you've got a smaller audience here. But the smaller audience you gain is going to be equally irrational to the far right group.
So you've got a system that optimizes for irrational, rabbit-hole ideologies (hell, it could be bigfoot or flat earth for all they care), that tends to filter out more reasoned, thoughtful content. Hell, I can't even listen to a movement of a Brahms symphony without commercials interrupting a section. Even television isn't that fucking allergic to reasoned reflection.
Talking about free speech inside such an unhealthy, anti-democratic system is about as coherent as adopting one of that system's rabid, rabbit-hole ideologies.
1: https://theintercept.com/2020/09/29/police-white-supremacist...
1) Old school free speech advocate, changed positions since
2) Had to figure this out practically, so not just theory crafting.
Context: Part of a mod team for a forum, and we were torn between ideals of free speech and what was actually happening on the forum.
Important note, moderation may be the main service the internet/SM platforms sell - curation, removal of trolls, the cleaning and keeping viable an environment for exchange of ideas. Earlier ideas from 2000, web 2.0 etc assumed this would happen naturally. "The better ideas bubble to the top". The market place of ideas.
This metaphor doesn't work when someone is selling goods that destroy the market. If you have a vegetable market, and someone starts selling crack cocaine, then there really isn't something an egg plant vendor can do about getting people to buy the healthier vegetable/argument.
And thats what is happening. On our forum, people were introducing material that short circuits logic. Any long intelligent answer was displaced by an emotional outburst, or cat videos, or jokes, flame wars - on serious topics.
This makes the exchange of ideas moot, and replaces it with the exchange of emotions.
The market place of ideas does not work at the internet scale, even for web forums, unless someone is moderating.
---------------
Additional random thoughts:
First, things are much worse than you feel, because the act of speaking is almost entirely the act of being online. Censorship means you don't get to be heard (although you can speak), so it is, in internet terms, pretty serious.
1) This worked when the network didnt have centralized forces (as value collects in a network, activity increases, and the network will create some version of filters who become gatekeepers.)
Viral and malformed ideas will beat facts every time. Counter speech fails.
Moderation is what FB/twitter are doing.
Once the loudest champions of free speech because they were trying to break down the old power structures, the Left is now consolidating its power and sees no need to allow upstarts to criticize the new order.
Essentially, it's the ideology of those major corporation that want to ban all sexist and racist discourse because this sort of thing makes it harder for teams of people scattered about the world to work together. It's an ideology that's still OK with tremendous wealth disparities but which want those disparities to not be reinforced chauvinistically.
Maybe there's a part of the left outside of the USA that still stands up for free speech? Not here in the USA. That game is over. Except for a few voices in the wilderness like Brett Weinstein and Sam Harris, the left is comprised of those whose interests and actions now align with the tech giants.
BTW, I use to run “blue ribbon campaign” banners on my 90s era webpages. So I understand where you’re coming from.
The correct way to deal with this is probably twofold: to have a variety of organizations which determine what is untrue, and to somehow figure how to make them seem credible.
Those organizations should probably operate independently of the companies actually implementing their blocking algorithms, and obviously of each other.
Then we need a diverse enough set of communications channels that each can make independent determinations how they filter communications on their platform, referencing the analysis of various organizations in the first paragraph.
This would maybe make for more controlled environments while not having universal censorship of controversial ideas.
Twitter could declare support of Donald Trump a bannable offense today, and those people can promptly sign up for a site like Parler.
And Parler has even more censorship. Adult work is completely legal in the US, and pornography is a form of constitutionally protected free speech, yet Parler strictly prohibits it on "Decency" grounds.
I see no problem with social netoworks drawing a line in the sand. The big ones can draw a line at violence, hatred, and fascism. The little ones can draw the same line and stand shamefully on the other side.
And nobody loses their right to speak.
I'd say that if your views on what censorship is haven't changed as the actual social medium of thought has (over 20 years), then you're perhaps being dogmatic about censorship. Ideas around censorship came about when the social medium that mobilized thought were MUCH more viscous.
Like imagine a physical surface on some liquid medium, in which its initial properties were such that a small force rippled to such a degree due to viscosity. You'd generally know the forces other points would feel when event Y happened so much distance away. But if suddenly the liquid developed very different properties, and now waves travelled differently through it, you must respond by adapting (or at least CONSIDER adapting). Whatever science or activity or measurement was happening on that surface before, that would need to be adapted or changed or even discarded. One's views on how to navigate the environment must change to respond to such an important change in the mediating layer.
Sorry if that's a bit of mixed metaphor, but I truly feel it's more than light analogy. Anyhow, be well!
So suppressing free speech is only ok if it’s done by unpaid volunteers (never mind that free speech as such never existed, since you still had all sorts of restrictions include libel, defamation, fire in a theater, etc kind of restrictions).
I was born in 89, I don't remember things being this way. It feels artificial and forced, like some foreign state is having their way with public influence in our country and by extension the world. Sickening. Free speech should be free, and I'm surprised people in the tech industry feel opposite.
I wonder, do they really feel this way? Or do they pretend, to go with the flow and not be labeled a racist?
If you think free speech gives you the right to force your speech onto other people then you don't understand the concept of free speech.
You reminisce fondly of the old internet, but the old school forums were all heavily and completely arbitrarily moderated according to the whims and egos of the mods. Unrestricted free speech was never a thing there.
Web became centralized. Instead of visiting dozens websites you started visiting few conglomerates.
People thought that their opinions are unique and matters anything, so they started posting everything everywhere.
A large portion of conservatives convince themselves that the media has a left bias and therefore it's reasonable to ingest even trashier garbage uncritically. Very similar position - so long as their media is confirming their biases / hurting their enemies, they're cool with it, even if it's based on fiction.
We're in desperate need of a nationwide media criticism education and the free time for average people to actually engage in it. We should all be aware of various journalists, publications' biases, the think tanks they cite as "neutral" (often Koch-backed, e.g.), etc. The problem with garbage "news" in social media is that it convinces people of nonsense.
That's not really a problem of media outlets so much as a public that has no real response to it. Little familiarity with media criticism and no way to effectively push back outside of something like Twitter. Everyone tries to work within their extremely limited frameworks, many of which are systematically hampered by the forces that fund and profit from these camps.
The first steps to getting the boot off of our necks are (1) vastly improved public education with practical political courses that include media criticism, critically responding to statistical claims and graphs, and questionable forms of argument, and (2) a strong enough economic floor so that the average person can justify spending the time to actually pay attention to this stuff. If you're worried about your next paycheck and avoiding the stress of bills and incoming financial woes, you'd rather watch some TV than spend several hours learning about why Bari Weiss kind of sucks.
1. Creating a level playing field by setting clear standards of what is allowed vs what is now allowed for all social media. Gov bodies are the ones to do this as companies have proven they can't self police themselves.
2. Break up big tech - too much power in their hand that they are absuing. This would be painful though for the stakeholders and won't happen easily as there are lot of vested interests.
During the 90s information traveled slower and those with large audiences took the time to research reports before sharing it with the world. And if it turns out that they were wrong, the correct information can be spread across those few platforms to everyone.
Now, misinformation can be created way faster than it can be discredited and there are a massive number of surfaces where the misinformation can live without being corrected.
The entire Russian hacking the elections in 2016 narrative should be a black pill to every technical person in 2020. Did you ever even find out what that “back channel from Trump Towers to Alfa Bank” ever was?
When you engage discourse within an institution, you are subject to an informal, sometimes formal social contract. If you entered a christian church in 1789 making certain statements, you would be removed (censored) from the church at the minimum. That still holds true today. Only today, this private institution is no small church with a handful of people, but billions. Still, under our current framework it is a private institution with a social contract that its users have agreed to, formally, or informally. There has been no violation of free speech because it is not a public institution. If you feel there's a moral violation, you can either choose not to participate as is your right, or you can petition, as is your right, to have the state get involved with how this private institution conducts itself.
The hill I'd really worry about with free speech is when punk hacker types turn on encryption, the current ultimate guard ensuring free speech.
Edit note: I'm not pro the twitter blocking of the article, especially not in DMs as some have noted is occurring. I'm just slightly disillusioned to unlimited speech on the internet superhighway thanks to trolls, flamebaiters, frauds, and more.
> internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship
I don't see that having changed. Obviously I don't know the specific people you are thinking of, but judging by your comment here and the timeline you are mentioning, I don't see much as change beyond scope.
Honestly, if people think people are becoming pro-censorship, I think it's more a case of ignoring everything that was happening before.
I also don't understand how the tide turned so swiftly against freedom of speech, and in favor of authorities deciding what people should be allowed to hear or read. But it did turn, and I don't see the trend reversing.
While I don't like the prospect of an increasingly censored society, it will be interesting to watch the struggle between the big platform censors and those who want to say banned things. I expect this will only escalate over time.
Anyway, just wanted to say you're not alone. Watching some of your cherished values be discarded by society is something you have to accept as you get old, I'm afraid.
Freedom of speech meant freedom from /government/ control of speech. It has never meant freedom from the any impact. This article (facebook et al blocking/removing/deplatforming) is functionally no different than a newspaper choosing what to publish in their editorials page, a property owner having a bulletin board whose postings they control, or a shopping mall not allowing someone to stand up on a soap box and proselytize.
A society where "wrong" points of view are thoroughly suppressed by giant social media companies or angry mobs (or angry mobs on social media) might not violate the literal text of the First Amendment, but it lacks the spirit of free speech that inspired the First Amendment in the first place.
What I find most disappointing is not that Facebook is censoring QAnon (or whatever), but that the popular sentiment is they should be. That's a big change from the culture I grew up in, and not for the better.
But none of it has anything to do with freedom of speech because they don't . I'd 100% support the newspapers' decision to stop publishing them (while also criticizing them, since it was their choices that created the issue in the first place). I'd also applaud anyone who felt strongly enough to cancel their newspaper subscription, or even start their own local competing paper!
Without such protections people end up believing convenient lies at a much greater rate, which is destructive to society. We've tried the big experiment with unfettered flow of information and it resulted in people being less informed and more radicalized. Clearly it doesn't work, at least not at scale.
What is different these days is that we simply deny the facts, provide "alternate facts", or simply lie about facts. As a result we no longer agree on a basic basis of truth, truth has become a belief or a choice.
That is toxic, since it is used to simply avoid meaningful discussion. It is a fundamental change in how we conduct our discourse. And so new measures are needed.
Rather than censoring speech, I'd prefer fact checking, which may or may not amount to the same.
There are plenty of reasons that this new population may establish different norms than the old one: Some say it's because they're privileged, and don't understand the harm that Enlightenment liberalism does to the marginalized. Some say it's because they were free-thinkers and iconoclasts, and indeed, you'd expect any heavily-selected subpopulation to be less conformist than "all people". Others have claimed it's simply intelligence: back when the Internet was all educated nerds, support for free speech was higher because of the well-known correlation between intelligence and free speech absolutism[1].
In addition to the Eternal September effect, I think the broader retrenchment of liberalism we see across the world is very relevant. The cause/effect relationship between the Internet and this cultural retrenchment is unclear but IMO, almost certainly bidirectional. My model of liberalism has always been that its support in large populations is a fragile state, and that it's only supported by the masses when they've cargo-culted it from their civic religion. The minute this effect fades, most people don't have the moral reasoning ability to actually hold a principle, and can't be convinced that protection of an enemy under a principle is a protection of that principle, not of the enemy. They also don't appear to have the capacity to understand that the world turns, and the person on top is guaranteed to be someone they dislike, at one point or another. The only skew that rolling back Enlightenment protections is likely to have over time is against the _marginalized_.
[1] Note that this isn't a stand-in for "free speech is good", since the proponents of the privilege argument would claim that measures of intelligence are themselves just measuring privilege.
Moderators still exist even though we are not just on IRC anymore.
Your idea of free speech doesn’t exist in communal internet spaces as abundantly as you might believe. Perhaps it never did.
The internet I remember had “host your own website” type freedom, not “you can say whatever yo want anywhere you want” freedom. But then, people back then didn’t equate using some company’s platform with publishing. No, publishing meant setting up your own thing.
But the new generation of people, even here on HN and the internet
hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship
The (hopelessly naive) ideal many of us had was that, by breaking down communication barriers, we'd create an egalitarian "marketplace of ideas" and the best ideas would win. And by "best" ideas we generally meant principles of equality, science, and so forth.
Regardless of what you feel needs to be done... I'm sure you can agree that hasn't been achieved. Probably more like the opposite.
The problem is that by amplifying all voices, we've simply created another "might makes right" situation. Unfettered online discourse is dominated by those who yell the loudest. This includes a large number of woefully misinformed people, and genuinely malicious actors such as (for example) the hordes of paid internet trolls funded by America's rivals in order to sow discord and disinformation during our 2016 elections.
In effect, we've replaced the staid and conservative corporate self-censorship of decades past with something that is quite frequently worse.
I mean, free speech sure sounds good, but in reality it means that your racist uncle ranting about chemtrails on Facebook gets to be heard right alongside people who actually know what the fuck they're talking about.
I unapologetically do not know what the solution is.
Freedom of speech, as a concept, includes by extension the freedom to be wrong.
There is no solution to this problem that doesn't
involve unaccountable third parties setting the
ground rules for what is okay to say
You're confusing this right with Twitter's utterly nonexistent obligation to transmit and amplify your thoughts to others.
I do not think that law is adequate to cover the current state of affairs.
Personally, I'd allow curation/gatekeeping by platforms like Twitter as long as (1) it's transparent (2) there are viable alternatives, including totally unmoderated places where people can post all the coronavirus hoaxes and exhortations to "join the race war" they desire.
It's also worth noting that you are posting this on Hacker News, platform that is far more stringently curated/moderated than Twitter. Why are you here if moderation is so objectionable to you?
You are here presumably because you like the job they do. If that changes you can go someplace else. There are countless alternatives to both HN and Twitter and you can even start your own. Either from scratch, or just spin up a Wordpress site or a Mastodon instance or whatever.
Are you absolutely sure that this statement is correct?
Things have changed though. In the 90ies you would have been laughed off the internet if you seriously suggested the earth was flat. Conspiracy theories back then weren’t making people shoot up pizza places or plan to kidnap governors. Today we’re seriously seeing diseases we defeated come back and kill thousands of people because of anti-vaccine Facebook groups.
So yeah, people around you have likely changed, because free speech doesn’t work when it has no consequences. And I’m not talking about putting people in prison, I’m talking about laughing them back to their caves so their infectious collective stupid doesn’t ruin democracy. If it’s not already too late.
I used to be right with you on that free speech hill, but like so many other people I just got sick of all the anti-vaxxers, Holocaust deniers and whatever scumbags who cause harm, abusing it. And it’s not like they don’t have freedom of speech just because they get banned from popular platforms. Just like the 90ies, they are free to set up their own.
Web monopolies happened.
The more a platform has members (including HN) the harder it gets to have meaningful conversations.
Then come the rules.
You can always host your own website and say whatever the hell you want.
$TWTR $FB
You have freedom of speech. You don't have freedom to build a cult out of gullible people. Back in the 1990s when we were kids the only people on the internet were people smart enough to be there. Misinformation didn't have the reach it does now because the surfing public was mostly techie people with above average intelligence.
The bar has been dropped and now everyone is on the internet. There's "proof" of every concept on the internet. And no central repository for truth that everyone trusts.
There's a difference between being pro-speech and being anti-weaponization-of-falsehoods.
And then there's the issue of Facebook spending billions of dollars on code and infrastructure. How would you like it if you developed a social network, discovered that terrorists were using it as part of their deception campaign, and then have the government FORCE you to participate in the terrorist plot that you, your shareholders, and your engineers don't agree with? How is that fair to Facebook, who invested their resources into developing the entire platform? Maybe before the GOP wants to use disinformation campaigns they should have thought about developing their own distribution network beforehand? I mean you can't seriously be mad at Facebook for being good at capitalism, can you?
Also from the moment you not in this axis of the good anymore you'll be deemed nazi, fake news, banned by social media. it is crazy to see that all the newspaper took the russian collusion seriously at first (and even do it know while many investigations couldnt find it) but their first reaction to a biden article is to ban it.
We are living in a democracy of the good where the good is defined by a minority of overly violent only entitled personalities
These are curated spaces, and they are not run democratically, they are run capitalistically. Twitter isn't even in the business of providing a forum for speech. They're in the business of serving ads.
Your free speech cannot be infringed by a corporation, as the corporation does't gatekeep anything but access to their platform that they own. Your right to speech exists separate from their platform or their permission to use it.
And if you believe in the free market, you can't complain that the largest social networks gravitate towards political ideologies that are most friendly to their profits. You also have no obligation to participate in those networks if they don't offer you a space that you enjoy participating in.
Just because the social networks that cater to you are smaller doesn't mean your rights are being infringed upon. It just means your ideas are less successful in a free and open marketplace of ideas.
I don’t understand how the government enforces private companies to (re)publish content in a way that doesn’t infringe on the companies first amendment right.
So if someone takes the extra step and says they endorse Twitter's actions here, I think it's fair to call that pro censorship.
(Just kidding dang, please don’t ban me. I’m just salty about previous incidents.)
I still want to believe in the ideals of Internet as I've encountered it back in 1994 but that would require ideal people and we're not ideal. So some rules are needed.
I love free speech. I hate the outcome. I wanted a more literate connected world to empower truth, and did not realise the compelling power of falsity. It spreads faster.
I've lived in 3 countries. I've visited over 15. I had problems with America's foreign war involvement, and the corruption that bled from the Bush years into the Obama years. But I still came back, because despite all our issues, the Freedom to Speak is the bedrock of America and it is the only thing that can truly fight the type of corruption we are seeing today. I wrote this a few weeks ago:
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/why-i-no-longer-hate-amer...
Appropriate. Currently, freedom of speech is this climate technological sphere is freedom to amplify hate, lies, conspiracy and fear in seconds.
I don't have the answers, but you're not asking the right questions.
Time to have a word with your tech overlords, methinks.
All this to appease a fragile and spoiled generation.
The effects now show on the Internet, where "open" source projects implement similar oppressive tactics in the name of attracting new "contributors" (who rarely do anything useful).
Unfortunately, the boomers, who first raked in all the money and leadership positions in SV companies, support this cultural revolution in a last attempt to preserve their power.
[1] former East German surveillance apparatus
2016 U.S elections changed things a lot.
Spreading misinformation is not free speech.
engaging in fraud is not speech. If I told you that I owned a hedge fund and would make you 10x returns, that's speech. If I take your money with the promise of 10x returns and enroll you in a scheme, that's an action.
If I gave you money based on that speech it would be hard to argue in court that you didn't engage in fraud. I'm not a lawyer, so I'll agree with you.
The action there is separate from the speech. I imagine for these disinformation type campaigns, the action is voting
As a recent example Alex Jones reversed his conspiracy theories on the threat of a lawsuit. Spreading misinformation comes with penalty.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School...
If I sell you a bar of lead painted gold, and tell you that it's solid gold, I can still be held responsible for fraud. My words would constitute a crime.
Now, if I told you explicitly that it was lead, but you decided to pay the gold price of your own free will, then I would be okay.
It would literally be the words I used to that constituted the crime. Lying isn't free speech in plenty on contexts. Go file a false police report and find out what happens.
I'm not making any particular argument, only showing the weakness in your cognitive dissonance.