Hacker News Reader

Comment by wait_a_minute | Hacker News Reader

The retort about "private companies" is usually a dishonest one, because whenever I drill into the views of the people making that retort I find that they are leftists (even far leftists) who only pretend to care about private companies when it's convenient to do so. The aim is clearly censorship at all levels of information distribution. We must end the trend now before it is too late.

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.

View on HN

This isn't a phenomenon specific to the left. The number of people on the right that refuse to wear masks in private establishments that request is revealing.

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.

It does run in both directions, but notice which side has the predominant position and representation at the top tech companies that are doing the information policing. It's certainly happening in conservative communities, but the established information channels are almost all controlled or dominated by the left. And they never call out their own. When was the last time you saw reddit for example shut down propaganda, say, on r/sino? Or prevent it from affecting other subreddits? It's blatantly obvious that pro far left astroturfing and gaslighting are the norm on most of the popular social media.

I don't disagree with your assessment, but I don't know enough about it to take a strong position on it. That said, I'm concerned about the idea of policing information. On the other hand the amount of manipulation I see via media, on both the right and the left, has me concerned too.

If it were so "blatantly obvious" then it should be easy for someone to provide statistical evidence of such behavior. Why don't you provide any references to support your claims?

This really would require these sources to be more transparent about where accounts are coming from and who is spending money on their platforms, and why would they be if they agree with what is happening? But at least we know how many accounts they delete.

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.

That does nothing to support your narrative of "It's blatantly obvious that pro far left astroturfing and gaslighting are the norm on most of the popular social media."

I mean didn’t Reddit literally ban ChapoTrapHouse during the same wave they purged /r/TheDonald?

Meanwhile r/politics and r/worldnews are completely one-sided, with far-left brigading being the norm and questionable accounts/gilding spreading garbage all the time. I'm pretty left by American standards but it's still garbage.

There's a big difference between r/politics and people downvoting and r/conservative which insta bans you and has turned into the new Donald.

The purpose of /r/conservative is for conservatives to talk about conservatism. If somebody is not conservative then /r/conservative is not the best place for them.

The 10 top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages are almost always right to far-right. Whoever is behind this liberal conspiracy must be really bad at their job.

https://twitter.com/facebookstop10

Or they're spending their money on the "front page of the internet" like Reddit. See the links I shared in my other post for examples of clear nation-state activity linked to Reddit and Twitter. Facebook certainly does skew more to the right, but note that it's popular verified personalities like Franklin Graham or Trump himself who are getting those likes/hits. Whereas with these other sources you never know who is behind the accounts (is it Russia? China?). This being said I will not excuse this behavior from the right or from Facebook.

I think its absurd to me how this is somehow seen as a novel thing. You say something awful in kindergarden, you will be suspended. You try and write something awful in an op ed to the local paper, and it won’t ever get published. You call in to a radio station and say something awful, and you are taken off the air.

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.

It's simple - just think about how quickly you'd change your mind about this if it was your worldview that was getting shut down by these platforms.

Maybe I’d question why my worldview was so widely considered in the wrong

Make sure to keep in mind that # of people holding a worldview has no bearing on whether or not it is true. Billions of people believe in an ancient supreme fairy ruling over the cosmos - there being billions who would consider non-belief wrong does not in itself contribute anything meaningful to the conversation.

I see a lot of people calling censorship a "left" thing and I really don't see it. Like, all the "protect the children" anti-encryption laws for example are being pushed by "the right" / "conservatives". We see a lot of "left-wing" "censorship" in tech because most of the companies have younger, more liberal CEOs. At the same time, information is entirely controlled by mainly conservatives in government and traditional media.

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.

I wrote this comment a good few times, and did not send it because its a can of worms every time, but I'll just say it as at is, and try to be as objective as possible. So, here goes, or rather, how it looks from the outside:

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com