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Comment by hackyhacky | Hacker News Reader

I respect Swartz a lot, and he makes many good points. But let's not pretend that Twitter and Facebook hold information monopolies with equivalent power to the government's ability to censor. As proof, consider that we are having this conversation right now, about an article that was published and is freely, legally available online to anyone with a web browser. You can disagree with Twitter's editorial choices, but (as long as we prevent a literal technological monopoly, a prospect that seems increasingly probably) the consequences thereof are in no way similar to government censorship.

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The lines get blurry when there is a revolving door between Silicon Valley tech companies and DC.

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.

"Power leakage" is inevitable. Everyone has political opinions. Most cops are Republicans. That alone doesn't mean that they're incapable of doing their job competently.

What you're doing amounts to an ad hominem attack: you're criticizing the person delivering the message, rather than the message itself.

I'm not talking about political opinions, I'm talking about highly connected political operatives in positions of power within these companies.

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.

This would be a valid criticism if these companies didn't hire top tier operatives from both parties and donate substantial amounts via their PACs to both.

It's not clear why this would be the case. Why should we care which "party" somebody is from when then issue at hand is a revolving door between DC and the Valley? The military-industrial complex has done fine under a two-party system and so presumably will the private-public corporate surveillance state. Everybody in power in the US has to pick one of two letters to put after their name, but they're all part of the same ruling class.

Even if completely neutral with respect to the two parties, the effect of social media as a transport for political information means it has a high involvement in political activity.

Don't pretend those two parties form an ideal set of alternatives; they have many common problems maintained by their duopoly.

Do they? As far as I know the only example of any identifiably Republican person high up in Silicon Valley is Joel Kaplan, and we know from leaks that Zuckerberg spends a significant amount of his time trying to stop his workforce from lynching the guy.

> As far as I know the only example of any identifiably Republican person high up in Silicon Valley [..]

"Thiel is Silicon Valley's most outspoken Trump supporter" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel

Another one just popped up in my mind: Condoleezza Rice @ Dropbox

Would it be possible to compile a list of all of the political operatives (current and former) in tech? Can we make them register in the future?

I didn't know this was happening, but I guess I should have.

And Joel Kaplan, head of Facebook Public Policy was one of the people involved in the "Brooks Brother Riot"[1] that shutdown the recount of the 2000 election and took over from Karl Rove in the GW Bush Whitehouse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot

It’s not limited to DC - Former UK deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg @Facebook VP, Global Affairs

> Recent example from the banning of Bret Weinstein from Facebook: https://twitter.com/Liz_Shepherd/status/1319451084859953154?...

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.

I think that is an optimistic view.

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.

> But let's not pretend that Twitter and Facebook hold information monopolies with equivalent power to the government's ability to censor

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.

> But let's not pretend that Twitter and Facebook hold information monopolies with equivalent power to the government's ability to censor.

Those private entities can censor in excess of the government. They are scarier.

Get back to me when Twitter has the power to round up everyone who read a given story and have them executed in the street, because that's what government censorship can look like. It's not limited to some partisan nerd toggling a flag in a database somewhere. I think you should probably take this opportunity to re-evaluate the relative powers of these entities.

I think the discussion is focusing on levels of the US government and what has been experienced by the public under that government since its founding. Actual exercised power by US governmental entities.

The discussion of other governments will probably lead this thread into a swampy delta and it will lose its motive force.

I'm not sure why the artificial limitations on comparison; Twitter and Facebook are wholly active and engaged in markets with governments with such histories. Anyway, if you want such examples, look to the Mexican Dirty War for many, as well as the Banana Massacre. The latter of course was merely a threat to deploy the Marines, but the reasoning announced was not strikebreaking but because the strikers were "subversives"; that is, the US claimed to want them silenced not for what they were doing but for what they were saying.

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.

> I think the discussion is focusing on levels of the US government and what has been experienced by the public under that government since its founding

Get back to me when twitter can order an airstrike against an minor and enjoy qualified immunity.

The Chinese Communist Party is being accused of many human rights violations against the Uyghurs, Falun Gong, Christians, factory workers, etc. There are also allegations that the CCP is interfering with the United States government & election process. If these violations are true, then Twitter & the Big Media is complicit in obfuscating evidence of collusion & hidden business partnerships between the Vice President via his family & the CCP.

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.

People are alarmed by these moves because they represent a wider trend in which the left increasingly does not recognise the right as politically legitimate, i.e. they do not believe non-leftists should be allowed to exist. Tech firm activist censorship is merely one visible (or not so visible) aspect of this. But it's not the only aspect.

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.

> People are alarmed by these moves because they represent a wider trend in which the left increasingly does not recognise the right as politically legitimate, i.e. they do not believe non-leftists should be allowed to exist.

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.

>>>But you need to provide some very strong evidence "they [the left] do not believe non-leftists should be allowed to exist."

At least one very recent example: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/oct/12/keith-olber...

Keith Olbermann, currently hosting on the mainstream news channel of YouTube (/s) after being evicted from actual mainstream news, is the opposite of strong evidence. Further:

> "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.

His YT channel is small....but he has ~1M Twitter followers. Put in context, that's 2x the followers of TYT's Cenk Uygur, 4x as many as Jimmy Diore, and just a few hundred k short of Steven Crowder. That is not indicative of a "marginalized" voice IMO, and your only defense of his position boils down to "Hey he's not advocating for genocide, just mass incarceration of our political opponents." That strikes me as a tone-deaf position to take on a social media site where hand-wringing over the fate of the Uighurs in China is so en vogue...

Unless you have better evidence than Keith Olbermann to back your statement, I think we're done here. I'm not going to go back and forth about Twitter followers as a valid metric for gauging public opinion on genocide...

I think you need to re-read your own post.

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.

"not allowed to exist at all" doesn't mean what you seem to think it does. Nothing you have said bears any more discussion.

It's the other way around.

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.

> "[...] have them executed in the street, because that's what government censorship can look like."

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.

All that a private entity can do is toss you off their platform.

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.

Sure, so Chrome and Safari blacklist your websites. You're only back to 1995, the horror.

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).

> 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.

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?

Ah, yes, our means of communication have been captured by the extreme left.

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.

I do not worry about my particular government unjustly killing or imprisoning me.

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.

This is a forum sponsored by multimillionaires, therefore not responsible to advertisers. Also heavily moderated.

> As proof, consider that we are having this conversation right now, about an article that was published and is freely, legally available online to anyone with a web browser.

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.

You missed the part where this thread was flagged by HackerNews earlier.

If it was flagged, and then became unflagged, it may have been flagged by the users of HN and then may have been unflagged by mods.

Is it then mods enhancing the freedom of expression by unflagging something, or censoring the community self-moderation? You decide!

Personally I look at it as a barometer for where peoples sentiments fall on a linear path. Who is doing moderation vs censorship has little consequence if you acknowledge that the entire system is distributed and the outcomes are the same.

I think the perspective of Schwartz is much better developed instead of just ignoring the negative effects of well visited social media sites removing content on political grounds.

Yes, technically the info is still available.

They're unaccountable and significant centers of power (unaccountable to the public), yes maybe not with the power of the government, but approaching it. Is that the kind of rule we want?

> Is that the kind of rule we want?

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.

They can either be editorialising, in which case they're a publication, or they can be censoring as a platform. They're not currently regulated like a publication, so they must be censoring, then.

Yes, it is better for power to reside with people who are easily replaced and/or ignored if necessary. I'd rather have Twitter go off the rails than my local council.

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.

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