- Aaron Swartz
It's not that Aaron was plagiarizing—the quote is from a documentary interview (https://www.reddit.com/r/aaronswartz/comments/dpo2ot/both_th...). In that context it's not common to make attributions and the editors would probably have cut it out in any case.
Recent example from the banning of Bret Weinstein from Facebook: https://twitter.com/Liz_Shepherd/status/1319451084859953154?...
This is a Facebook communications person responding with an official reply to this incident. She describes herself as "Facebook comms, formerly @TheDemocrats and @SpeakerPelosi".
This is an example of power leakage. These institutions do in fact (i.e. de facto, not de jure) have elements of sovereign power given their relationship with the political/ruling class, it's just that they are not directly accountable in the same way that a government is. They engage in censorship for the benefit of the ruling/political class and use political formulae as a mask (TOS violations, "community standards" violations, exhortations to the first amendment, section 230 protections, etc) in the same way governments do.
What's most f-ed up about that one is that Liz posts from her personal account. The appropriate thing to do is to post from facebook comms or something.
Overall though, its a continuation of the grand old tradition that appeals to SV tech companies must come from "important" people or trusted sources (like Twitter or here) or they don't matter. It is super disturbing though.
What you're doing amounts to an ad hominem attack: you're criticizing the person delivering the message, rather than the message itself.
Liz Bourgeois would be an example of such a person.
She was Assistant Press Secretary at the DNC and prior to that was a Legislative Correspondant for Nancy Pelosi and Debbi Wasserman Shultz.
Now she works as "Director, Strategic Response Communications" at Facebook.
Don't pretend those two parties form an ideal set of alternatives; they have many common problems maintained by their duopoly.
"Thiel is Silicon Valley's most outspoken Trump supporter" [1]
I didn't know this was happening, but I guess I should have.
Consider that an overwhelmingly partisan ownership and stewardship of the majority of media, (whether left or right - currently, as the example in the article it's liberal left) has a more insidious power to control the narrative and push counterpoints to the margins until they die naturally, partly because there is in that situation a de facto monopoly.
Government-censored material never actually dies, and has a habit of being leaked (or released on change of government) and causing scandals; Silicon Valley etc-suppressed material has a habit of being sidelined into the anaemic and eccentric irrelevance of the cancelled and the crackpots, and by the time we realise some of them are actually worth listening to, the damage is done.
Especially in the context of a society where "speech is free", and egregious censorship is assumed not to exist, this is arguably even more damaging - the idea that suppression exists is itself dismissed by the mainstream and chattering classes; that isn't necessarily the case in a country under authoritarian, censoring governance.
Agreed, their narrative shaping capabilities far exceed governments'.
> As proof, consider that we are having this conversation right now,
That is a very poor way of judging it for several reasons; a) we are not currently on Twitter or Facebook, we don't have the same reach nor subject to same corporate normativities b) past performance is not always indicative of things to come.
> You can disagree with Twitter's editorial choices,
Except they claim they are not making editorial choices, and can't be held up to that standard, which a great chunk of the problem.
Those private entities can censor in excess of the government. They are scarier.
If every single private website threw you, and your views off the internet tomorrow, you'd return to the age of tyranny and darkness... That ~every human being on earth lived in prior to ~1995. The horror!
In contrast, your government can kill or imprison you, if you say something it doesn't like - but for some strange reason, nerd culture spills gallons of ink on the thesis that private censorship is scarier.
This is a serious case of misplaced priorities.
The platforms can deny me a voice, can allow lies about me to circulate in my absence, and can cause a mob with pitchforks to metaphorically show up outside my door. Job, career, ability to support my family, place in any community? All gone.
My government owes me constitutional behavior and is answerable for violating it. The platforms owe me nothing and are answerable for nothing.
Then Amazon refuses to sell your books. And VISA refuses to let people buy them, if they find them in an alternative outlet. What's the big deal, you're only rolled back to the 1980s. And then they go a step further and say, if you're assisting in the distribution of these books, we'll cut off your AWS and payment processing services as well. Hey, you're only rolled back to the 1940s. People can still photocopy the sheets they got from a friend manually as long as the companies they rely on don't find out, right?
The problem here is that a small number of large companies are being captured by extreme left-wing political activists who don't recognise disagreement as being legitimate. Trying to figure out how much private sector censorship is OK is a distraction. The problem here is the ever increasing power of Marxists inside large powerful institutions, often smuggling their ideologies in under the guise of 'diversity' or 'inclusion' programs (which are inevitably about conformity and exclusion).
That's why in 2020, when you go on Facebook, you can't even talk about conservative ideas, like Laffer curves, owning guns, reducing entitlements, pooh-poohing (non-police) unions, voting for a republican, the virtues of surprise-billing and of having your health insurance tied to your employer, starting wars against yet another state that most of us can't even place on the map...
But, wait, you can.
If that's how Facebook erases conservative ideas, they are doing a pretty poor job of it.
While this may be true of the rank and file, the policy people (like Liz upthread or Joel Kaplan) are always political activists/lobbyists because the gig is talking and convincing political organisations of things.
And please note that there's been a bunch of stories about Facebook particularly, intervening on the right-wing side a bunch - how does this support your theory about left-wing activists?
The discussion of other governments will probably lead this thread into a swampy delta and it will lose its motive force.
Get back to me when twitter can order an airstrike against an minor and enjoy qualified immunity.
If these allegations are not true, then the public conversation has been censored & the story of censorship overshadows investigation which would absolve the innocent parties.
Either way, the public deserves to have direct access the truth.
In the past, I would have said that Posse Comitatus would have prevented such behavior from being directed toward American citizens, but after seeing the mutual-law-skirting nature of the Five Eyes approach, as well as the presence of Federal troops in law enforcement roles in US cities over the past year, I'm no longer confident.
The very same sorts of people with the very same views are also in government institutions in abundance, as we've seen in recent years with the descent of the various left-wing elites into conspiracy theories about Russia - theories that were then used to try and effectively block implementations of public votes, on the belief that surely the public could not possibly reject their enlightened governance unless they were being manipulated.
This isn't purely a US thing. The UK has the same problems. Recently one of the government's advisors on COVID was complaining (on Twitter!) that the BBC had agreed to unfairly rig a debate she was involved with, but hadn't properly enforced that rigging:
https://twitter.com/SusanMichie/status/1311234012283899904
A lot of the British political class lost their minds over Brexit. You saw incredible things, like politicians running as candidates of the party saying they'd implement the decision, and then switching post-election to the party with saying they'd void the vote and never leave. They had flat out lied to voters about their intentions. That happened quite a few times. There were many other tricks deployed too. They fundamentally didn't believe in the legitimacy of their political opposition and were willing to manipulate the electoral processes to try and "win" despite having lost at the ballot box.
Those two things aren't remotely the same. The legitimacy of the right in the U.S. is an open question when they participate in direct voter suppression, gerrymandering, continually lose popular votes but still gain controlling power of the strongest apparatus of the government, have used that power to appoint (shortly) 16 of the last 20 SCOTUS Justices going back to 1969 using rules they are quite literally making up on the spot. "Consent of the governed" is a valid question under these scenarios.
But you need to provide some very strong evidence "they [the left] do not believe non-leftists should be allowed to exist." You're using some very strong language based on very weak arguments.
The fact you, presumably, pass off things such as Russian interference in fair and free elections as "conspiracy theories" should, god willing, be absolutely damning to your credibility. Or that "herd immunity strategies," as mentioned in the tweet you link, should be presented as a valid and equal alternative strategy to NOT LETTING PEOPLE DIE; you're arguing flat-earthers should be given equal footing in a debate with NASA.
At least one very recent example: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/oct/12/keith-olber...
> "The hate he has triggered, the Pandora’s box he has opened, they will not be so easily destroyed,” he said. “So, let us brace ourselves. The task is twofold: the terrorist Trump must be defeated, must be destroyed, must be devoured at the ballot box, and then he, and his enablers, and his supporters, and his collaborators, and the Mike Lees and the William Barrs, and the Sean Hannitys, and the Mike Pences, and the Rudy Gullianis and the Kyle Rittenhouses and the Amy Coney Barretts must be prosecuted and convicted and removed from our society while we try to rebuild it and to rebuild the world Trump has nearly destroyed by turning it over to a virus."
The implication "should not be allowed to exist" is very different from "prosecuted and convicted and removed from our society." So even taking a marginalized voice talking from his YouTube channel, arguing that the left believes the right "should not be allowed to exist" is a ridiculous stretch.
You need to read more than just the headlines.
you need to provide some very strong evidence "they [the left] do not believe non-leftists should be allowed to exist."
You literally start by saying:
The legitimacy of the right in the U.S. is an open question
Perhaps you're using an odd definition of legitimate, but generally for a political movement to be recognised as legitimate means it is allowed to take part in the political process, to be supported by people without suppression and so on. Terrorist groups are not politically legitimate, political parties with voters are. It gets tricky in the unusual cases where political parties and terror groups become closely related, as was seen with Sinn Fein and the IRA.
You yourself are now arguing that maybe the right isn't legitimate because of a bog-standard list of leftist talking points, none of which are obvious or uncontroversial, for example what you call "voter suppression" is more obviously interpreted as enforcing existing laws that define who can vote; calling this "suppression" implies that no such laws do or should exist. But nobody is arguing that, are they?
But you need to provide some very strong evidence "they [the left] do not believe non-leftists should be allowed to exist."
This thread is literally about Twitter shutting down a conservative newspaper that has reported news relevant to an election in which conservatives are competing. The NY Post and the story it reported no longer exists on Twitter. How much clearer a piece of evidence do you want?
And again - hold a mirror up and look at the reflection. Your post ends by saying that I should not be given "equal footing in debate" i.e. that people with those views should be (debate-wise) wiped out, not allowed to exist at all. You are the embodiment of what I'm talking about.
By "not allowed to exist" I don't mean literally executed in a mass genocide of half the voting population. Using such an interpretation is very bad faith, assuming that's what you're getting at.
I mean not allowed to be visible, to play any part in the public sphere, not allowed to "exist" in the sense of mattering to the structures of power in a country. Being forced to be invisible, forgotten, erased from the written and spoken record. And with that far more rational interpretation you can hopefully see that your views definitely qualify.
We're discussing western first-world governments for the most part, and short of some crazy world-altering event or war, they most certainly do not have the actual power to do this.
As long as you control what a large segment of the population sees, you can orchestrate peoples actions. Censorship has never been absolute or complete and doesn't need to be in order to be effective.
Is it then mods enhancing the freedom of expression by unflagging something, or censoring the community self-moderation? You decide!
Yes, technically the info is still available.
It's the kind of rule you have since, well, ever.
Does anyone expect to force a private publisher such as the NY Post or even NY Times to publish content against the will of their editorial board just because you see fit?
This issue has absolutely zero to do with censorship. A random publisher not posting something is not censorship. It's literally the editorial board's job to decide which gets published and which is left out. Not posting false or deceitful information forced upon by third parties is also not censorship. Just because you have a personal view that is not aligned with an editorial board's mission statement that doesn't mean the editorial board is engaged in censorship.
This topic seems to boil down to some people wanting the benefits of abusing a publisher's reputation and readership to force-feed their own personal opinion on the public. Not being able to perform that kind of abuse is not censorship.
However, it is still a scandal and worth bringing everyobody's attention to. I don't think we've ever seen such naked politicking by a tech company in the West. This is a concerning new low for Silicon Valley.
> Reddit was founded in 2005 by two college friends.
> Steve Huffman, Co-Founder/CEO
> Alexis Ohanian, Co-Founder
I'm aware that PG has called him a founder, but seemingly the Reddit guys never thought of him as one.
If you were so inclined you could find some alternative points of view in the right newsagents, but mainstream mass-media generally represented a single perspective, and that was the filter through which most people saw the world.
People back then complained that the "Republocrats" were a cosy duopoly. There was no culture war because a large majority of Americans were part of a single culture. (As long as you were white, of course. If you were anything else then nobody cared what you thought).
My children’s schools requires the use of Microsoft Teams From home (and associated TOS) for them to attend class. There is also a parent WhatsApp group for urgent messages to parents. And as of the pandemic, there is also mandatory Zoom classes.
This is a public school. If I sue I could possibly avoid these - I am not even sure of that. But either way, I and my children will suffer if I don’t comply.
Microsoft. Facebook. Zoom. Coerced de facto to follow their rules; they might cancel my accounts if I don’t behave accordingly - Facebook and Google have certainly done so before.
Getting banned by Google/Facebook and losing all your data in the cloud is just the modern equivalent of losing everything when your hard drive dies. The way to mitigate this danger is the same.
No it's not. A HDD failing or getting lost? That can be guarded against with backups.
With getting banned by Google or Facebook? When all your accounts, your identity is tied to that address/account and you get banned, you cannot be reached anymore by people who don't know that you got screwed over.
The obvious solution would be to self-host an email server, but unfortunately that's impossible as it will be mercilessly assaulted by spammers and hackers on the inbound side and you'll be having issues with deliverability on the outbound side.
The real solution would be for legislative and regulatory action that recognizes the importance of identity and forces all email providers to adhere to due process. But unfortunately, worldwide legislators are too old / too incompetent or in the pockets of other people who don't care...
Exactly. Back up your cloud data.
> With getting banned by Google or Facebook? When all your accounts, your identity is tied to that address/account and you get banned, you cannot be reached anymore by people who don't know that you got screwed over.
I thought the fact that I consider this perspective to be absurd was kind of obviously built in to my statement.
You can use a new email to contact people. Especially when you have your backups.
No recourse, no one to talk to; my solution was to switch from a small but reputable ISP I had used for 17 years (and which never had a single spam complaint or blacklist entry in any list I can read) to fastmail for that domain; because Google decided they didn't like something about that setup; already spent a couple of work days no one was paying for to troubleshoot and eventually gave up.
Google+Microsoft+FastMail likely cover 95% of your recipients. If they don't like you, you're going to have a very hard time reaching people.
It is not absurd, it is reality. With emails you at least can manually walk through the hundreds of sites you have stored in your password manager, hope that the password still works and you did not encounter a site that got hacked and reset all the passwords, and change the email address... but with "sign in with Facebook/Apple ID/..." you are at the mercy of the target site having a fallback login mechanism. (Hint: many don't or it's buggy because never tested)
I end up having to reset forgotten passwords a lot (maybe dozens of times per year) and don't think I've ever encountered a reset situation like you describe. If it's important I can always call them to resolve an account problem. If it's unimportant I can make a new account.
A friend of mine has been unable to convince a credit agency to reset their password as they are out of the country and cannot fulfill the requested authentication task. Wouldn’t be a problem in normal times, as they are back and forth every other month. Except it’s been 7 months since corona disrupted that. They can’t just “sign up for a new account” as it tied to their identity.
I’ve never had this problem myself either. But it’s a real problem.
First class mail is working internationally, by the way, to almost every country. Unless they're in Yemen or something perhaps. Keep in mind we were comparing the dangers of corporations to governments. So being in a developing country during a pandemic when there's a communications breakdown with the US also presumably means you can't access a US consulate either. So you'd have the exact same difficulty if it was a govt agency you needed to deal with instead of Google/Facebook/Microsoft.
And, yes, a government agency would cause the same issues. The thing is, government is (supposedly) accountable to the people, but GoogFaceSoft is accountable to their shareholders. The incentives do not align -- but many of the powers (and abuses of power) do.
The companies which seem to benefit the most from the government's power are the ones which would suffer the most from losing the government's current favor. They must bend over backwards to stay in the government's good graces, not the other way around.
I'm sure courts can properly resolve this, after a few months, if it did happen ....
It's the government coercing me to comply with Microsoft's TOS that's the problem.
> They must bend over backwards to stay in the government's good graces, not the other way around.
Of course, but they pay for the government's good graces by e.g. giving them free access to all hosted data -- not by making sure the users are well taken care of..
If the government points their guns at me and says eat at that restaurant or else, the restaurant owner has done nothing wrong. It is the government forcing me to wear shoes, not him. Even if he lobbied for a law that made dining at his restaurant mandatory, the government still decided on its own to go along with it - the restaurant owner had no power to make them do it. Forcing the restaurant to allow me to take my shoes off will only make the dining experience of everyone else forced to eat there more unpleasant.
It is dumb that the local school chose a setup that relies completely on Microsoft. You and everyone else negatively affected should be sure to show your dissatisfaction with the school board on election day. But there's nothing wrong with Microsoft having the ability to kick you off if it doesn't like you.
Unfortunately, said restaurant owner can (and has) kicked people of for sharing recipes that owner thinks it owns (but doesn’t have to prove)
The problem was never with the shoes off crowd.
My point is, it's not overt like government suppression, but pressure can be applied nonetheless.
Companies ultimately have shareholders and customers they are accountable to. Even fairly awful companies like Facebook have to meet some minimal standard of conduct to keep advertisers on the platform.
> They have no constitution to answer to.
Do we seriously believe any government follows it's constitution? What is the mechanism for redress should it fail to do so?
> They’re not elected.
Neither are most operators in the government. And even for those operators that are elected, the role of government has expanded to the point where any given elected official has authority over so many concerns that the one you care about is going to be diluted to the point where you may not even want to vote for the thing you care about the most.
Absolutely. Many do. Look at America and their second amendment: there's no way that would fly today if it wasn't in the constitution. Luckily it is and power hungry politicians have to accept it.
Same with the first amendment. Some of these are even are powerful today than before and I hope the fourth amendment will soon see a renaissance.
> What is the mechanism for redress should it fail to do so?
Courts.
Also it affects politicians directly. There was a petition here to give a mountain on the Finnish border to the Finnish people. Many people advocated for this but in the end it was struck down because politicians aren't even allowed to give away land and they know it.
In America the right to an abortion is more respected under our legal system than the right to a gun despite what is written in the Constitution.
The law is downstream of culture, and that document only says what 5 Justices say it says.
For the second part they seem to be lucky to get a good judge now that will not let her own ideas interfere much with her job and instead interpret the constitution as it was written.
Does this mean she'll be ruling that owning people is ok, removing the vote from women, and striking down the 2nd Amendment?
13th: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
19th: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
2nd: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Any political and / or legal discussion should start with at least a vague understanding of that document. All our laws and institutions are founded with it.
"was written" would not include "amendments".
Perhaps it was meant to be "is written" and that would definitely include the amendments but then you absolutely do not get to call yourself an "Originalist" because, e.g., the 19th was passed 130 years after the Constitution was written and for damn sure none of the framers were still alive then.
Originalists interpret the applicable parts of the constitution as they were written, when they were written.
Search Scalia on the topic and watch some videos. He goes into pretty interesting depth on the subject. It's pretty fascinating.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?292678-1/justices-breyer-scali...
Anyway I think this should be obvious. The subset of people who has long time accounts on HN and who also are for slavery is really small, possibly non-existent.
If the people demand they answer to it, it’s that or off with their heads, usually.
The hard part is getting people to demand they answer.
Lots of cool gadgets and the belief we’re making each other better to dispose of.
I guess being banned from a forum is much much worse than being sent to the re-education camps.
Tech has made it impersonal, clinical, obfuscated, random and ubiquitous. There is no need to "send people to gulags" or torture them in order to suppress their ability to sow dissent amongst their peers. That is the sole purpose, even if it's algorithmic and emergent without a central "dictator" controlling what can or can't be said. Essentially only approved opinions and movements are allowed to gather steam, no different to the movement of dissent and mistrust of the government that had to be stemmed previously using gulags.
So yes, you are 100% right it's not the same and we are not being sent to re-education camps. But that doesn't mean certain individuals are not being persecuted through "random" algorithms that target and marginalize them. As another poster here mentioned, censorship does not need to be absolute for it to have an effect. You also mentioned network effects earlier: I would urge you to consider what "network effects" are occurring due to mild and moderate censorship that is not absolute.
If the sole purpose of tech and social media is opinion and thought control and dissident suppression, it doesn't seem to be working outside of the obvious authoritarian places like China.
> I would urge you to consider what "network effects" are occurring due to mild and moderate censorship that is not absolute.
Subtle network effects and mild censorship exist everywhere - we typically refer to these networks as "society", "culture", "religion", "family,", "employer," etc. Certainly social networks can modify behavior, but typically it's easier to undermine that effect on social networks (through alternate accounts) than it is in real life, and typically the negative consequences for breaking norms on social media are less severe than in real life.