It's sad to see how servile about censorship so many hn readers are. Yes, we all know the baseline retorts about private companies, but there is a general climate that is extremely worrying for those of us who are paying attention.
If their views were the ones these companies were shutting down, they'd be up at arms about it. The evidence is in the response to Coinbase recently instituting a No Politics policy. Plenty on the left construed that as being censorship, ironically enough.
To the right liberal judges are "activist judges". To the left conservative judges are "activist judges".
As a "liberal" (I'm not sure what that even means anymore) in his mid 40s I've been appalled at the portion of the left turning their back on the idea of free speech.
The hypocrisy, lack of critical thinking and myopia runs in both directions. And, unfortunately, it runs deep.
https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-removed-130-accounts-linke...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/01/20/154481/cybersecu...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jun/12/twitter-d...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/twitter-shuts-down-200000-chin...
You can find many more sources like these. They do also delete accounts from far right troll farms, but the amount of astroturfing and gaslighting with the intention of pushing civil unrest, especially during this election, is palpable. Right now I'm looking at Reddit where garbage posts are somehow getting massively upvoted and gilded (with real money), pushing encouragement for civil unrest and paranoia about our democratic processes and whether or not they work.
It's state-sponsored. I don't have the keys to Reddit's back-end so I can't prove it, but there are plenty of sources on nation states trying to spread this type of garbage. Proceed to Google to find further sources beyond the ones I already gave.
I don’t see why a private company with a website is any different than the above situations that no one bats an eye about. No one is entitled to grab any available microphone and say something awful. The only privilege you have is that the government shouldn’t go after you for this. Not that you shouldn’t get the privately owned microphone removed from your hands. And the government is not throwing alex jones into a jail cell despite the hysteria.
Doing the math: the "side" that holds power in a certain sector is the one wanting to control information. The best conclusion from that has to be "those in power want to control information to keep themselves in power", which makes a lot more sense than trying to attribute something as simple as "controlling information" to any particular political leaning.
The political spectrum in the US is fascinating in the worst way possible. If there is a range of the political spectrum that more closely reflects reality, it contains a part of the blue, but almost everything else is outside it. So, if one were to sensor dishonesty, and preserve what's more factual, it would really not surprise me that, from a political point of view, its very biased against the right.
Then the question is if its correct to focus on the political nature of it, or the factuality of it. Imagine if one were to sensor a press conference from the White House based on factual correctness. Not much would get through, and one would say it is "Liberal sensorship".
In any case. I should know better by know that comments like these are not welcome. But, those were my two cents.
The past 5 years have shown us that as a society we have lost our common basis in fact (alternative facts, fake news etc.) and the whole thing worries me. It worries me even more that i can't see a way out of it other than censorship. Short of a massive change in education to focus on critical thinking and evaluating received information, but that takes years and the problems we have now are destroying western democracy.
This is not reasoning for censorship by the way, its reasoning for systemizing trustable sources of information. Someone will care enough to get it right and fair so we should promote them and ignore the others.
Please rest assured that there's nothing you can do about it and that is a beautiful thing.
It also worries me that so many people have been so pickled in today's ubiquitous leftist policing of what must and can't be said, what mustn't be reported, what must be publicly proclaimed (or you're a "literal nazi") that they literally can no longer understand the arguments of old fashioned leftists like Noam Chomsky about how silencing opposing opinions, regardless of what justification you claim, is utterly corrupt.
A debate where one party gets to decide what both parties get to say is a sham. Whatever it pretends to be about, it's not about trying to determine actual facts.
This seems to be the goal of any divide-and-conquer strategy.
Yep. In the old days you had a killfile in your newsreader (NNTP client), problem solved.
Personally, if [company] wants to filter or censor, go for it if and only if a) they disclose it and b) I can turn it off. We have a model for this already, it's called "safe search"
When you filter without disclosing, you're stealing my agency and creating a situation for near-undetectable abuse.
> We have a model for this already, it's called "safe search"
An interesting position, keep in mind that many people consider the act of ordering to be a form of censorship. That is, it is "censorship" if a site is pushed to the second page of the Google search results. You can't opt-out of that.
Imagine a church emailing its members before Easter saying that Jesus rose from the dead. Since that's impossible, it's a clear violation of this misinformation rule. But I doubt MailChimp will ban it because their "sole discretion" is obviously going to be biased political opinion, not anything objective.
Just because there are network effects at play does not for a second mean that a private business loses the right to regulate who it has as a customer.
your analogy doesn't even begin to apply. I can go to another mall if I'm banned. there isn't another dominant social network. Getting banned from Facebook and Twitter is like having your phone line cut off by Ma Bell in 1950, not like getting kicked out of a mall you incredible dunce
I'm waiting for people to go after someone's electric company.
Either way it is a slippery slope.
It's when they are vague and applied unevenly that the line between platform and publisher gets crossed.
For example, I find it fascinating that Twitter doesn't put warnings on the leader of Iran's racist tweets (or even bans him for clear TOS violations) but peppers the US presidents tweets with warnings. With a straight face you are going to tell me that politics has nothing to do with it?
“There has been an increased amount of criticism of the platforms. But it’s not accurate. There’s a First Amendment distinction between publishers and distributors. But since Section 230’s been in place, that’s not really been an issue for the internet.”
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/21/18700605/section-230-inte...
Therefore you wouldn't see any problem with regulations or laws that restrict the rights of companies to enact this sort of policy that Mailchimp is.
In other words, someone posting dangerous content could threaten my deliverability, even though I didn’t do anything. Therefore, if I purchase services from an email provider, I will want them to moderate it.
You also solve the coordination problem by making all businesses accept minority customers. Southern racists couldn’t boycott all businesses. Likewise, left wing activists can’t boycott you for allowing conservative speech if all of your competitors also have to allow it.
Stop comparing conservative speech to people who were actually oppressed because a large number of people want to use services that have someone moderating the content. It’s offensive.
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...
Section 230 was implemented to ALLOW for moderation, not to prevent it.
If platform published their content rules and publicly demonstrated how they apply them equally I doubt we would be having any of these discussions.
Instead we have "moderation" that always favors one political line of thought. That's not moderation, that's editorial control and at that point I think it's more than reasonable to argue you have crossed the threshold from platform to publisher.
Usenet survived for decades and still does without some central bureaucracy lording over it. Have an issue with them? Plonk!
Freaking snowflakes. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and this is the slipperiest road yet. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Remember when that used to be a catch phrase of the left? What a bizzaro time we live in.
They do (or at least the publishing part). Who decides whether or not they apply them "equally"? The government? Like you want the Trump administration to have decision making power over whether or not Twitter is fairly moderating content?
> Instead we have "moderation" that always favors one political line of thought.
This is certainly a claim made. I view things differently: right-wing media and pundits have been treated with kid gloves for decades now. The shift to treating them "fairly" is viewed as discrimination, much the same way as certain groups on the far right have viewed every other example of "objective" fair treatment as discrimination, since they ultimately feel as though they've lost some privilege.
You may view things differently, but you're clearly biased (and perhaps, so am I). So why should I trust you to make objective decisions here?
I'll believe it when I see it and in the meantime this is just political posturing.
most of us have corporate jobs that pay well compare to the majority of the people around. That isn't a recipe for fermenting rebeliosness , it is more of a way for complacency and being content, at least deep inside, with the things they are.