This is not censorship, this is not about the First Amendment.
Freedom of Speech !== Entitlement to a Platform
And incitement of violence has never been protected speech. This has gone too far.
Freedom of Speech !== Entitlement to a Platform
And incitement of violence has never been protected speech. This has gone too far.
You can write any book you want - but no one is under any obligation to publish it for you.
I think it's shocking how Twitter has completely changed course from its "free speech wing of the free speech party" positioning, and I understand why people find it frustrating that you don't have to "choose between being a platform and a publisher". But you don't; that's not the law and it hasn't been the law for over a quarter-century. And that rule has mostly been a very good thing for online speech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#Background_and_pas...
Is the Post Office under an obligation to mail your book to your subscriber list?
No one is asking Twitter to put his messages on their front page, but anything who specifically subscribed should be able to see anything he writes.
No one is asking Twitter to break the law, nor host illegal content of any kind.
More broadly, Twitter is not obligated to keep tweets up from anyone to anyone. It would be rather silly if, for example, all tweets from north america got deleted and people got up in arms accusing it of "censorship" (in a hypothetical scenario where unbeknownst to them, there was a catastrophic infrastructure failure).
We have an established democratic process to censure (not censor) and if necessary, remove from office elected officials. That is the appropriate venue and the appropriate authority to deal with this, not Twitter.
Don’t get me wrong, Twitter is important, but not so much because it’s the only way for governments to communicate effectively with citizens. That’s absurd.
Government has long had the power to commandeer broadcast media when it needs to get a message to the people ("We interrupt this broadcast...") Do we want to do away with that?
For all its flaws, the government is still something every citizen of the US has a say in, however small. I'm not willing to trade that for rule by Twitter executives, however well-intentioned they might be at the present moment.
No, it hasn’t (outside of, say, the Emergency Alert System.) Government addresses (“We interrupt this broadcast…”) are a subject of requests for air time, which broadcast networks usually (but not always) grant.
A decent enough basic explanation with some historical examples is here: https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/major-networks-carry...
Generally, yes, I want private entities to decide whether or not to relay government messages. (The government should have its own facilities for basic necessary operational communication via the post, common carrier phone systems, etc., of course.)
The alternative is to surrender freedom of speech in favor of government direction of media.
There’s a very narrow space of cases where, with appropriate procedural safeguards, which start with legislation determining the need and setting the conditions of use, the government ought to be able to direct messages over private infrastructure that isn’t common-carrier; that role is pretty much covered by the Emergency Alert System [0] in the US.
[0] https://www.fema.gov/emergency-managers/practitioners/integr...
Delivering government messages does not preclude you from also delivering contradictory messages from others. Freedom of speech would involve delivering all messages, not just the ones you like. Requirement to deliver messages != direction of the media.
No, my freedom of speech and the press means I don’t relay speech or use my press to reproduce messages I don’t think deserve to be relayed.
That’s pretty well established to be the meaning of that freedom.
> Requirement to deliver messages != direction of the media.
Yes, the state mandating that I use my resources (such as a printing press, or its digital analog) to reproduce and disseminate messages I disagree with relaying is direction of the media and (outside the usual strict scrutiny terms for restrictions on essential liberty) a violation of my First Amendment rights.
1) The content of calls is not pushed to a dashboard mixed in with things you want to hear algorithmically. This core discovery feature of Twitter means that the content of the messages from people you are not subscribed to must meet some basic criteria of acceptability, or no one would use it.
2) We had common-carrier status applied to ISPs for a few short years before Ajit Pai got that rolled back for Verizon. You might have been able to extend that logic to Twitter and then I could see that as a fair comparison if that was how they were operating. But Twitter would never acquiesce to such an onerous mandate and would lobby hard against it.
If "This is a message from the President of the United States" does not meet the criteria of being something that a user might want to hear, what the hell does? And if the President is saying something completely insane then it's even more important that the people can hear exactly what he says! What would you prefer - you hear the President say an insane thing and you can say "yep, that guy is insane we need to get rid of him" or Twitter tells you "look, uh, just trust us this guy is insane, don't listen to him". In the second scenario, Twitter has all the power, and makes all the decisions about who gets to be an elected official, not you.
> We had common-carrier status applied to ISPs for a few short years before Ajit Pai got that rolled back for Verizon. You might have been able to extend that logic to Twitter and then I could see that as a fair comparison if that was how they were operating. But Twitter would never acquiesce to such an onerous mandate and would lobby hard against it.
"That's not currently how it is" and "Twitter wouldn't like it" don't strike me as particularly good reasons for not having a neutral carrier that accurately tells people the things their elected officials say.
If they changed their business practices to the model used by other network service providers commonly afforded neutral carrier status (i.e. SaaS, ISPs), then I think there might be a case for your second point.
Twitter is a publisher except for purposes of civil liability, and that only because Section 230 specifically, in an effort to promote largely automated, highly scalable, actively curated publication online, specifically exempts them and other similar online publishers from the liability treatment otherwise applicable to publishers.
Why would freedom of speech involve delivering all messages to you, including the ones you don't want? What a strange concept of freedom that involves ceding control to others.
no and luckily for you it cannot, because if the President of the US wants to speak on public matters he can do so through the White House press room.
However Donald J Trump, despite the fact that he thinks he is somehow synonymous with "The United States government", which he is not, can be thrown off any private platform that deems that necessary. Some people might have forgotten it over the last four years, but Donald Trump and his personal twitter account, and the office of the presidency, are not the same thing.
The US govt doesn't need Twitter to communicate with its citizens.
The fact that there was hate speech by a user, in this case the President, means that Twitter acted in support of its broader platform. It has no obligation to the President or to support his preferred communication platform for hate speech.
I don’t think the state has the Constitutional power to compel private parties to relay what officials say outside of exceptional cases, because of freedom of speech and the press.
The right to hear isn’t the right to commandeer others resources to have it relayed to your hearing.
One of those should be to refrain from using their power as a transmitter of information to manipulate the relationship between the people and their government. Maybe here, they have some noble purpose, do we trust that in the future they always will? Maybe in the future they would delete the accounts of Senators who call for antitrust investigations into Twitter. Who knows? Once they have the power, do you trust them to use it only for things you agree with?
A right to hear without any mechanism to enforce it is pointless.
We place reasonable restrictions on companies that serve the general public to ensure they treat all members of the public fairly. You can't decide not to serve certain customers because you don't like their skin color or religion, for example. Another reasonable requirement for a communications company would be that they accurately relay the communications that their users send, without interfering with or manipulating them to serve the company's own purposes.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you really did miss my point:
Twitter controls access to a very large audience, only rivalled maybe by Facebook. If you get banned from Twitter, you can't easily go and use a competitor. If there were tens or hundreds of Twitters in the world, then yeah, the "being thrown out of a bar" analogy would hold.
> censorship: the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
Nothing here says it's only censorship if done by the government. Legally in the USA there's a stark distinction between government & non-governmental censorship. Even then sometimes private entities fall under restrictions like in the case of the FCC & public broadcast networks (see Janet Jackson nip slip, the inability to curse during certain TV/radio programs at certain times, etc). Now whether all of this desirable or not is politically debatable & one we should have. That being said under the current legal structure Twitter is probably in the clear.
I'm generally more curious how these kinds of actions by tech companies don't violate section 230 though. In the early days of the WWW, that was the reason given for not moderating such speech - "if we start moderating any speech then we're not a safe harbor and we have to moderate all speech". Does this mean that these tech companies that are doing moderation expose themselves legally somehow? Or does it just mean that the previous arguments were done in bad faith? Or were there laws passed to refine section 230 in this regard?
Oxford English Dictionary definition:
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/censorship
Nothing mentioned about the government at all.
But did you follow your link? It says noun.
As it happens I wrote an essay on this yesterday: https://pontifex.substack.com/p/google-censors-talkradio , in response to an other act of corporate censorship.
My argument was that because of network effects there are only a few dominant platforms (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc) and that when these platforms take down content, they are in practise preventing that person's message from getting out, i.e. censoring people.
This gives them a lot of power: power to decide which ideas can be disseminated, power to decide which politicians can get elected. So if you favour democracy, you have to be against the power of big tech platforms to shut down discussions they don't like.
(My favoured solution would involve mandate interoperability using ActivityPub and similar protocols, which breaks the dominance of big platforms due to network effects).
I'm not sure that a communications network passing on their users' communications would amount to treason.
But let's run with that for instance, and assume it did, in law.
> Do they have a right to demur?
Clearly if a course of action is against the law, they have a legal obligation not to do it. True by definition.
As to whether they have a moral obligation, that's another question entirely, and a rather complex one, as one would have to define what is moral. I would say that a company that wishes to continue operating in a country is going to have to obey the laws of that country.
> Or must they participate in every crime that their users engage in?
Well, that all depends on whether transmitting other people's messages constitutes a crime. Realistically, no company is going to do things that would get it shut down (and if they did, they wouldn't do so for long).
Censorship doesn’t only occur by violation of the first amendment.
Unreasonable: Running into them full force, leaning your shoulder into their jaw and breaking it into three pieces
The line: somewhere in between
I'm sure that it is. [0]
> The suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.
Can you explain what it not being censorship has to do with freedom of speech not being the same thing as entitlement to a platform?
From Oxford dictionary: "the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security."
Silicon valley has done a lot of harm over the last few years, and redefining words to mean things that benefit big tech companies is one of the worst things they have done.
The first ammendment only applies to the government, however the government is not the only institution capable of censorship.
Trump is still free to say whatever he likes, and Twitter is still free to moderate its platform.
Do you? Really? Seems like everything would just be a spam-and-troll-filled wasteland...
There's nothing that prevents the President from being one of those trolls, and there's no strong reason for any given platform to give him special treatment forever if he persists in that behavior...
(Which is good, just like having a bouncer at a bar - punching someone in the face may be someone's genuine behavior, but it's not very welcome.)
You're very eager to weaken the private property rights of others, as well as to give a LOT of power to the government (legality as the only consideration) and I don't think these thing would work out for you like you hope.
While I have zero support for Trump supporters, aren't these websites protected by the government with Section 230? This isn't a right granted to these platforms by the constitution either, the fact that these social media are basically shielded from any civil responsibility when it comes user generated content, in fact that what made them thrive at scale... I'm just saying.
I saved and linked the video in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25668883
Whatever your position on this issue, it is certainly alarming that on hackernews intellectual arguments over the meaning of a word are sent down the memoryhole.
Doublespeak is really becoming an issue in our society, and a subset of our population is censoring those that point it out.
This is like the Post Office deciding not to deliver mail.
> And incitement of violence has never been protected speech.
I saw an incitement to protest, but I saw nothing encouraging violence. Do you have an links to anything like that?
Twitter isn’t a government corporation with a legally-mandatory monopoly, so, no, its more like me choosing not to pass on something I got from a politician a disagree with.
If freedom of speech and the press is curtailed precisely because the speaker or publisher has a large audience so the curtailment most efficiently gives government control of messaging, that doesn’t make it better.
Because, like a newspaper, they provide an actively curated compilation of information received from a variety of contracted sources to readers. Sure, much (but not all) of the curation is algorithmic, and the direct sources are mostly not under employment contract and not getting paid money for the content (either providing it for free or paying money for reach), while for most newspapers many of the direct sources would be under employment contract and they and others would be getting paid money for the input they provide into the curated product, but that difference doesn't seem particularly relevant to whether Twitter is a publisher. And, yes, a lot of the algorithmic curation is driven by explicit reader expression of preference, and some of the rest is driven by inferred reader preference from reader behavior. But that the curated product is highly personalized also doesn't seem relevant to how free expression rights apply to curation choices.
For purposes of civil liability, Twitter is not a “publisher” solely because of Section 230, but since we are discussing how the Constitution applies to them (which Congress could not change by statute) not how civil liability applies to them, that's not relevant.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/39/part-IV/chapter-3...
Enough of the Doublespeak. It’s censorship, albeit by a private entity. When it inevitably happens to the left, I’ll call it censorship then too and I’ll advocate against it.
https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-vi...
> 93% of Black Lives Matter protests have been peaceful
Does not contradict jimbob45's point that "BLM [...] incited a great deal of violence this summer"
Going by the numbers in your URL, 7750 demonstations of which 7% violent = 542 violent demonstrations.
I thought HN discussions were based on facts rather than political biases.
I very much hope they are.
Difference is, if doesn't fit their narrative it is not covered.
It's ok in the sense that they have every legal right to do so. It would lose them a ton of goodwill though, so they probably wouldn't do it. That's the free market at work.
You can't yell "Fire" in a crowded theater.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...