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Comment by allendoerfer | Hacker News Reader

Does anybody have a solution to the bigger underlying question of de-platforming and censorship on online platforms?

As far as I can tell, there are two general viewpoints:

a) Censorship is bad, free speech is good. You should counter bad arguments with better arguments.

b) There are types of speech, which are proven to lead to violence in the long-run. Also, some things can be proven as untrue. Lies are bad.

I have to say, I agree with both of those points. I think group A is missing the point, that there are echo chambers and people radicalizing within their filter-bubbles up to the point of literal terrorism, while group B is missing that the power to censor can be misused by bad actors in the future and that silenced people will not just change their mind.

Is there a proper answer for someone like me? Where should I stand on this? I am leaning towards group A, while acknowledging that radicalization does happen and dearly worrying about perversion of words like "truth" or "fact" ("your/my truth", "alternate facts").

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> You should counter bad arguments with better arguments

We've witnessed the fallacy of this argument. It assumes a level of rationality that has been proven to be unreasonable to assume. The problem isn't that "better" arguments aren't reaching people. Rather, we have watched people exercise an incredible ability to discard overwhelming evidence and embrace narratives that have literally zero evidence to support them (or, in fact, have been repeatedly disproven and debunked).

In that kind of environment, "counter bad arguments with better arguments" is hopelessly naive.

In Dutch we have a saying, which roughly translates to "a lunatic can ask more questions than ten philosophers can answer". I feel it's quite apt here too.

Not weighing in on this thread, but just for those who haven't heard of the Gish gallop before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

“The effort required to refute bullshit is at least an order of magnitude more than it is to produce it.”

How can you tell a lunatic from a philosopher? Am I sounding like a lunatic now? You can refuse to answer, but why stop me from asking?

No one stopped anyone from asking. This wasn’t Trump’s first offense; it was his last.

The alternative, which is to prevent the spread of "bad arguments" is dystopian

That's hyperbole. If taken too far, sure. But, if we took our attempt to eliminate murder too far, it'd be equally dystopian. Your statement is not unique to speech.

Murder is quite easy to define, whereas bad speech/bad argument seems so much more nuanced. I don't think it's an hyperbole moreso than the logical consequence of such a thought.

> Murder is quite easy to define

Is it? Would someone refusing to wear a mask, provably resulting in them asymptomatically infecting someone with COVID-19 be charged with negligent manslaughter? This is something that people have been debating.

Many actions humans can take could kill another. Only a subset of these are regarded as murder/manslaughter.

Not to mention the fact that our modern definition of murder is based on hundreds of years of trial and error. Is dueling murder? Is killing your slave murder? Is it murder if you get drunk and kill somebody with your car? etc. etc.

>Is it? Would someone refusing to wear a mask, provably resulting in them asymptomatically infecting someone with COVID-19 be charged with negligent manslaughter?

It is not murder. There's a concept called "Negligent homicide," but even that is relatively well defined and requires intent to cause harm.

Don't want to get into the rabbit hole, and I am not in agreement with all the laws the US has, but the point is that "bad speech" is way harder to define than murder/homicide. Not only is it harder, it is arguably impossible to attain a good consensus on what it is.

PS: I don't agree with the premise that we should regulate speech, but if you were to want to do it it would most likely backfire or be counterproductive because of these reasons

>Requires intent to cause harm

Does encouraging people not to wear a mask (or just not wearing a mask) in the face of clear evidence and recommendations to the contrary count as intent to cause harm? That is, if I know doing something will cause harm but do it anyway am I engaging in negligent homicide?

That's not hyberbole. The difference is that death is well defined, "bad argument" is not.

The definition of murder is not simply death. In fact, what counts as murder and what type of murder is quite complex and varies by jurisdiction. It was not as simple as saying "no murder". We arrived at this definition of murder over a long period of time.

Is it dystopian? There are plenty of bad arguments one could make on this very site which would get your post hidden or removed or even your account banned, and it doesn't feel very dystopian. I wouldn't come here if this site didn't have that kind of filtering and moderation.

> There are plenty of bad arguments one could make on this very site which would get your post hidden or removed or even your account banned

Popularity doesn't imply correctness or legitimacy.

He didn’t say it was popular, he said it was not dystopian

I find constantly being lied to pretty dystopian. There's a significant cost to parsing, filtering, and refuting lies at both the individual and social levels. Perhaps we should consider trying to quantify that.

It's clear to me that our current unprecedented interconnectedness is sending us into a dystopia anyways. 50 more years of this, I simply cannot imagine.

"The Belcerebon people used to cause great resentment and insecurity among neighboring races by being one of the most enlightened, accomplished, and above all, quiet civilizations in the Galaxy.

As a punishment for this behavior, which was held to be offensively self-righteous and provocative, a Galactic Tribunal inflicted on them that most cruel of all social diseases, telepathy. Consequently, in order to prevent themselves broadcasting every slightest thought that crosses their minds to anyone within a five mile radius, they now have to talk very loudly and continuously about the weather, their little aches and pains, the match this afternoon and what a noisy place Kakrafoon has suddenly become."

Douglas Adams, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Despite what they show on the news, the situation on Earth is actually improving each year.

Each and every day things are getting better. Do not fear.

Progress is not a straight line, and many things can get better or worse for different subsets of people. This is a generalization that does more harm than good as it minimizes the real trouble people may be facing today or in the near future that they weren’t yesterday.

To pretend that there are arguments that it is not socially acceptable to promote is to pretend that the Overton window doesn't exist. Who does that help? People outside it.

You can't think of any ideas which began well outside of the Overton window, but today are commonly accepted as true?

On the contrary. But it's not reasonable to expect to bring them up without consequences, and specifically in the case of Popper's paradox, those consequences are healthy and those specific ideas should remain unacceptable.

I find it funny that many people are constantly posting " Twitter censorship bad" on Hackernews, a moderated web site.

It's like the people who describe how utopian things would be without government, but for some reason don't want to move to Somalia.

I'm sure there's some unmoderated site filled with Nazi's high fiving each other you could be posting these thoughts on censorship. I don't belive there's any other kind of unmoderated site.

> I don't belive there's any other kind of unmoderated site.

Moderation of a public space after consensus has been reached long it's members is fine, moderation before dissenting opinions have had their opportunity to be voiced, discussed and their merits disproved through consensus is not. The former is democratic, the latter dystopian.

I don’t think hacker news’ guidelines were assembled via consensus... I believe they were mostly a priori and the community formed around them

It's how the world worked before Facebook and Twitter (fine).

It wasn't when the FCC established standards and it isn't now.

The idea that every possible opinion should be allowed (and that anything else is "dystopian") is quite recent. Have we forgotten about all the alleged communists being persecuted during the cold war? Or people like Bertrand Russel for "sexual deviancy"? Blasphemy laws? Flag burning laws that were common up to ~20 years ago? etc. etc. etc.

There were definitely problems with all of that, but it was hardly dystopian.

Er well I think those are all bad examples -- they all seem pretty dystopian to me, a non-straight atheist with some criticisms of capitalism.

But I think it's a slippery slope to go from seeing that dystopia where some opinions are off-limits to imagining that having any opinions at all be off-limits in polite company makes a dystopia. There's long been norms against stuff like libel, holocaust denial, disregard for human life, etc. Those as norms hardly seem dystopian.

It also takes far more time and energy to craft good arguments than bad ones. As the saying goes, a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth is done tying its shoes.

Ideas are edifices, they have to be constructed on a foundation. And, once trusted, they becomem a platform, on top of which more ideas can be constructed.

I think the main problem is that the lies people believe today (i.e. that the election was stolen) are constructed on a deep foundation (which, like anything, is some part factual and some part counterfactual).

To refute a lie, you have to not only tear down the lie, but the foundation on which it was constructed. And because life is complicated, sometimes we construct many verifiable truths on top of complete lies. We have to be careful deconstructing these.

So, to correct a superficial lie (election was stolen), you have to deconstruct the lie recursively (state electors, mail in voting, behavior of senators/congresspeople). This is incredibly hard, because people trust the platforms on which the lie is constructed.

This is why we don't bother trying to reason with the "lizard conspiracy" people. It's also why PhD students can't be bothered to explain their work to people outside their field.

It's a real conundrum.

So much this. Drives me up the wall in somewhat scientific discussions, e.g. about climate change. A bogus statement is easily made, but disproving it, if you don't already know the answer, is really hard work - sometimes could take weeks of sincere research, if you want to use proper scientific thoroughness. And of course, there are statements which basically cannot be disproved as they are completely discoupled from reality.

Amen to that. Especially since a very popular tactic is to just bombard you with so much nonsense in rapid succession that it simply becomes impossible to discuss (and research!) each and every point.

And yeah - some of it is so far out there it's not even wrong.

The so-called bullshit asymmetry principle: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

The fact that people can be mistaken, led astray, propagandized, etc. doesn't contradict the original statement that one _should_ counter bad arguments with better arguments. In fact your argument is falling victim to the is-ought fallacy -- Things are a certain way, therefore they shouldn't be another way.

The fact of the matter is that its true that bad arguments _should_ be fought with better arguments; that's a necessary assumption at the base of any philosophic discourse, and doesn't magically disappear when some section of people are disagreeing with you.

It's ironic that you call the OP naive, as your line of thinking leads directly to censorship, and history can attest to where that leads.

Sind he wasn't being censored and better arguments were presented, factual ones, how come we ended up here anyway?

You argue like Trump been censored for 150 years, when he really wanted to censor those who actually been censored for over 150 years.

> Rather, we have watched people exercise an incredible ability to discard overwhelming evidence and embrace narratives that have literally zero evidence to support them (or, in fact, have been repeatedly disproven and debunked).

How can you then justify that these people have the right to exercise real power and vote?

> hopelessly naive Yet, it’s the only way to protect their democratic rights and lead them back to a better path.

Also most platforms make sure arguments can only even reach people who are already receptive to them. If you disagree with someone you have almost no chance of getting a message to them unless you privately message them.

> Also, some things can be proven as untrue. Lies are bad.

We've also witnessed the fallacy of this argument. It assumes that there is an authority that we can all trust to be objective and not a vested interested that either ignores or skews evidence and narratives one way or the other out of self-interest. Who should be the ones determining what is "true"?

> We've also witnessed the fallacy of this argument.

I'd like to hear some examples.

Do you really think Facebook should be the arbiter of truth? If not, which authority should be choosing which information is not ok?

“Who watches the watchmen”

And what makes you think that forcefully silencing such narratives will make those people change their minds? That strategy is also hopelessly naive.

Nobody is being “forcibly” silenced. They’re still free to exercise their first amendment rights on their own website, in public spaces, friendly private spaces, etc.

What they aren’t is entitled to force a private company to host and promote their content.

Precisely. And that's what people already do when mainstream social media sites won't host their content. Meaning you can't stop misinformation from spreading, not this way. If anything, you're achieving the OPPOSITE effect by turning people who get cancelled into "martyrs".

And by "forcefully", I meant between the walls of the specific media site. (Though good luck explaining the difference to an angry mob.)

You’re missing a big key concept: Trump wasn’t on Twitter because he couldn’t afford a website. He was there because it gave him a much larger audience than would otherwise seek him out. The right-wingers who complain about the terms of service being enforced are doing so because they know they aren’t going to build anywhere near the audience without considerably more work and time.

It probably won't, but it makes it harder for such narratives to reach other people that may otherwise get radicalized.

Reducing the audience of these narratives can help with reducing their impact. I don't think this is a great solution, but not having people locked into alternate realities in the first place does not seem naive.

Rationality is only half the issue. Not only are some people extremely irrational, many people are dishonest and knowingly feed bullshit to the irrational people to use them as an amplifier. That can be used to promulgate a false idea, or simply to steal the time of people in refuting it.

So we should all defer to the superior rationality of who exactly?

It also assumes a fairly-sized platform and counter-platform.

Everyone reads Trump's nonsense. There's an exponential dropoff in the count of people who read replies.

Doing the right thing is one thing. At times, doing the right thing and expecting it to work out well is where it becomes naïveté.

But that still doesn't make it a fallacious argument.

Sometimes doing the right thing is ineffective. And the aftermath of that crossroads has generally been a place that has not gone well in history.

What's naive is thinking that anyone, once empowered to define impermissible speech, would not eventually expand that definition to include inconvenient speech.

Freedom of speech exists to protect the rights of minorities: the opinions of the majority are tautologically safe to speak. It's unpopular opinions which need protection, and nothing is more unpopular than an inconvenient truth.

Federal courts are already empowered to define impermissible speech, and the worst-case scenario you describe has not happened.

This is a hypothesis in want of evidence.

Federal courts are restrained by the defining document of this country, and by the other branches of government. This is literally the reason why all power is not vested into one branch: to restrain each other from the known corrosive effect of power.

So no, they are not empowered to do this, and they don't have much power (comparatively) to be shielding from free speech in the first place.

They have constraints, but yes, by their judgments they define permissible speech. Consider the Larry Flynn obscenity case.

And what restraints are in place on social media or app platforms when they police speech? Only the ones they place on themselves, so this analogy is broken.

So you're saying, if I understand correctly, that private orgs (not anyone), unconstrained from what constraints they are allowed to apply, will eventually include inconvenient speech.

Probably, but as long as the government isn't putting undue constraints on, the market solves this problem. Parler is right there if a person doesn't like Facebook.

When we didn't ban these people in the 00s and early 10s we didn't get people attacking the Capitol.

Within 3 years of starting serious censorship in most major platforms we have had a near coup.

Sounds like the new system is less effective then blood letting and the only thing that it has going for it is that it makes the people supporting censorship feel better about them selves.

People getting banned for all sorts of stuff certainly isn't new. Before there were large social media platforms that tried to serve everyone, there were lots of forums ran by random people, and you could get banned for pissing their admins off in any way. Large platforms that are neutral to a fault and super hesitant to ban are only a recent part of the internet, not an immutable fact of the internet.

Correlation doesn't imply causation.

Trump wasn't President in the '00s and early '10s either. We didn't have a President advocating sedition to maintain his power. We didn't have a President soft on white supremacy as an acceptable political position.

If anything, I'd call the causation reversed---people using social media to organize violence has the companies in charge questioning their own culpability in violent outcomes.

> Correlation doesn't imply causation.

And it doesn't not imply it.

And did you not pay any attention in the 00s? Bush was a white supremacists and made racism federal policy in airports.

I have no doubt in my mind that if the Charlottesville rally had happened in '02, Bush would not have claimed the are fine people on both sides.

So you're saying that as long as you say the right words you can be as objectively racist as you want?

Like the current VP who did as much as she could to ruin the lives of as many blacks as humanly possible?

I'm saying if you say the right words you don't agitate others to sedition and therefore don't catch a ban.

Trump doesn't know how not to say the quiet part loud.

I'm squarely in group b, however, I don't think it's an actual dichotomy in the way you present it. I think American's fetishize "free speech" which leads to a "hyper group a" that argues since censorship is scary (which it is) we'd rather face any other conceivable consequence rather than wrestle with the hard questions of what is appropriate vs. inappropriate public speech. I believe we're seeing examples of where the pendulum has swung too far, in the US, towards "say what you want" and we need to bump it back a bit. If it swings too far the other way I'll quickly switch my thoughts on the matter.

Also, there's another dimension which I think gets immediately thrown on the floor when these discussions come up. Very rarely are people calling for controls on what can be said at any time. Instead, it's controls on what can be said to large amounts of people. Group b folks, such as myself, are not saying that we're concerned about dinner conversations. We're concerned about speech that is being amplified in a way where there's a civic responsibility to ensure that the harmful messages are not being amplified.

> I think American's fetishize "free speech"

I find something deeply satisfying about the idea of someone generalizing 333-million people in one comment, using the word "fetishizing" to describe their view of a principle which has generally been regarded as essential to the vast majority of advances in human rights anywhere progress has been made, and while commenting thusly has done so all in the service of making the central point that it is they who overly-value free speech.

> Group b folks, such as myself, are not saying that we're concerned about dinner conversations. We're concerned about speech that is being amplified in a way where there's a civic responsibility to ensure that the harmful messages are not being amplified.

So public speech should be further limited, provided La Résistance is still permitted to speak freely as we enter an era with an ever-increasing number of state-aligned location-aware microphones in homes, workplaces, vehicles, pockets and (on) wrists?

What could possibly go wrong in that scenario?

A typical argument pattern is to use free speech as a full stop in any discussion. Engaging with the content of something is rejected straight away, it’s always the principle of the thing.

That’s a tiring argument and describing that as a very American way of fetishising free speech is entirely appropriate.

Free speech is hard. And there are many difficult questions around it where you have to actually engage with the content of something.

So I get why people want to take shortcuts, but that is just so tiring. This unwillingness to even engage with content is extremely tiring.

There's a very simple line to draw. You police actions, not speech. Someone talks about building bombs? Fine. Talk never blew anything up. Someone builds bombs? Time to arrest them. It's not very complicated.

People are responsible for their own actions. "But he incited me to violence!" is not an excuse for violence. Maybe in the case of a superior giving a subordinate a direct order (in which case both are responsible), but "the man on Twitter told me to do it" should hold about as much sway as Son of Sam's "the neighbor's dog told me to do it".

This is too naive. Should a 9-year-old black girl be forced to endure racial epithets yelled at her as she enters her school on a daily basis because free speech is so sacrosanct it outweighs the abuse? Obviously not. The truth is in the gray -- free speech isn't an absolute.

Screaming in someone's face is an action, not speech. Should the person be stopped from expressing the same sentiment by writing a letter to the editor or posting it on their blog?

Even if someone is saying something supportive to you, you would probably prefer they don't scream it in your face.

Posting a statement to a Twitter account that people are free to follow, ignore, or block at their will is not even remotely comparable to physically forcing yourself into their presence to yell at them.

These hypothetical statements are just garbage. Demeaning other humans is wrong and nothing about it is “free.” The abused pays for that speech with their own identity.

Now, how we determine demeaning language and what the punishment/cost is for using it is a worthwhile discussion. We _already_ have a system for when someone’s _character_ is attacked publicly: libel/slander.

Libel and slander would actually be a good model!

1. Requires actual damages. The speech cost you money or demonstrably harmed you in some way. No, "you hurt my feelings" or "I paid with my identity" doesn't count.

2. Both parties have an opportunity to plead their case to a neutral adjudicator. The proceedings are generally public record and there is a process for appeals. The rules governing the system (laws) are public record and citizens have a say in electing the representatives who write those rules.

3. The speech must be not only demonstrably false, but intended to be believed and also be something that reasonable person could possibly believe. Opinions generally do not meet the level of libel or slander.

Yeah, that's not bad. Compare that to Twitter's system where an opaque set of rules are applied inconsistently by an unaccountable party with no appeal process.

That subtle jab at my opinion in the first example is a nice touch (/s) and the rest of your reply completely contradicts the point that demeaning someone is wrong. We need to better tackle punishing misuse of speech as a society.

If you can think back to a time when you have been verbally abused, use that as a model. For some folks, this happens routinely on Twitter and real life (usually for minorities in a group). Nobody said Twitter’s framework is the correct system, but suggesting that demeaning someone is “free speech” has me scratching my head.

Demeaning someone is free speech. It is speech. People are not obligated to like you. They're not even obligated to have a good reason to dislike you. They're allowed to say that they don't like you for whatever stupid reason they have. That's freedom for you. The alternative is worse.

Suggesting the alternative is worse is a straw man.

I can’t say certain things and that’s totally fine. Disliking someone doesn’t mean that demeaning them is necessary. It’s already not legal in the workplace in the US when it is prolonged or severe.[0]

The alternative already exists today and is being applied unevenly globally.[1] I brought up examples of free speech exceptions already. I believe demeaning someone should also be an exception, and yes today that isn’t an exception in the US. Perhaps we need very precise definitions for these concepts to avoid over application, but hate “words” and the like are easy first passes.

0: https://www.eeoc.gov/harassment

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

That's not what strawman means.

Harassment is not illegal in the criminal sense. It is a cause you can sue people for. That also means it requires evidence and convincing a judge and possibly a jury. Again, there is a due process. It's not at the whim of a corporation. It also requires real damages such as a negative impact to someone's career, not just hurt feelings.

That's the case with all of the exceptions to free speech: there is a tangible, real world impact such as loss of income or risk of physical harm. "Feeling demeaned" is none of those things and is something that anyone can claim about anything. How you feel about something is also a choice. You can choose whether or not to let speech affect you like that.

I'm not sure whether you're saying I'm taking that shortcut in my comment, or the person to whom I replied is likely conditioned by seeing too much of that lazy way of avoiding discussing difficult issues.

I'll assume it's the latter, and say that's very fair. I'll also say, respectfully, it isn't terribly relevant to my observation of someone who made their point by collectivizing an entire nation of people, and did so in a pretty ham-fisted way, while availing themselves of the thing they seek to restrict.

Maybe I just find the complete absence of self-awareness in that comment to be oddly charming.

Personally, as the author, I didn't find myself particularly lacking in self awareness. I did qualify it with "I think" meaning it's a personal interpretation I was sharing. Rather than attacking my character, perhaps you'd like to try and understand why I'd have such a view?

> Personally, as the author, I didn't find myself particularly lacking in self awareness.

That's exactly how a lack of self awareness works.

I missed an /s I guess.

Thanks, I was pretty lost without that.

I also hope my efforts to make it clear it was a commentary on its poetic formulation and potentially a road toward something much worse than the ill which we seek to eliminate, and not an attack on the character of someone I don't know personally (which I try to refrain from doing), were not similarly inscrutable.

That said, I thought it was a point I understand somewhat, however it was made. I just disagree with it.

I am not the person who wrote: > I think American's fetishize "free speech"

But I agree with that statement. "Free speech" is often seen as absolute. But it is not absolute. Not even in the US. It never was. And it should not be. There is always a trade-off.

Limits are (copied from Wiki because I am lazy), for example: "libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury"

For the record, I do not believe free speech is absolute, nor have I since I was taught that it is not absolute as a child. I think every item listed in the passage you cited is difficult and necessary and should exist in some form that comes after much spirited and reasoned debate.

With that said, if you want to see laws have any effect, enforcement is required.

Calls for both an increased number of laws and enforcement of said laws (which is implicit in the assumption that these new laws will have a positive effect on a bad situation) is cause for pause, as, again, that has historically been the means by which states have worked actively against things that many observers would reasonably consider to be essential inputs to securing fundamental human rights.

As an American, I agree. US citizens take the First Amendment as a virtue without a lot of exploration into its origins or practical utility.

It has a LOT of practical utility... But it's really important, I think, to know what that utility is and what its limits are.

And the limits exist and are quite noteworthy. Restricting someone from saying something defamatory is legally challenging relative to, say, the UK. But repeat someone's story verbatim and claim it as your own? Oops, you violated copyright, and no amount of bleating about your First Amendment rights will get you off the hook for the money you owe them, even if you didn't charge for your copy.

I wholly agree with your second two paragraph, but for perhaps different reasons: I find those calling for restrictions on free speech often don't sufficiently understand the nature of existing restrictions and what the implications are of either expanding or adding to said restrictions.

> We're concerned about speech that is being amplified in a way where there's a civic responsibility to ensure that the harmful messages are not being amplified.

Who gets to pick what is harmful, though? Why can we not choose our own gatekeepers, rather than having them foisted upon us by corporate oligarchs?

The big problem here is that it is completely unreasonable and unprecedented to assume that this will be done in a transparent, consistent, open way. There will be no clear appeals process, and there's no reason to believe that the censorship won't be ideologically biased in favour of whatever is marketing best at the moment.

> it's controls on what can be said to large amounts of people

It's controls on what the working class can say to large amounts of people. The elite can still just go buy a newspaper or a broadcast media network, or start their own website, etc. and issue forth opinions on a grand scale. Regular folks will have to go through censors, which will end up being some combination of AI and outsourced farms of moderators in other countries or some other such Kafkaesque nightmare of business process.

> there's a civic responsibility to ensure that the harmful messages are not being amplified.

"harmful" is a social construct, and what is "harmful" to one group might not be to another. Which groups will be prioritized for this? How will you pick sides fairly without imposing a new dimension on whatever underlying group conflicts already exist?

The problem is that what you want to do cannot be done fairly. It can only be done in a draconian way, and the result will be an even wider fracturing of dialogue in a way that doesn't result in what you want, at all.

> If it swings too far the other way I'll quickly switch my thoughts on the matter.

I’m also in group b, but the danger is that if it swings too far the other way, we may have already lost the ability to speak out against _that_ and restore balance.

Yep, it really feels like people are actively and willingly giving away control and free speech rights to the government and a bunch of corporations. Once the power is in their hands, it will be very difficult if not impossible to get it back.

> Does anybody have a solution

Yes. Get rid of newsfeed algorithms that optimize recommendations for engagement.

It won't solve our current problem, but that's what cause it. They took pg's Fluff Principal and weaponized it.

>Get rid of newsfeed algorithms that optimize recommendations for engagement.

A reasonable proposition, and it would indeed fix the problem of clickbait/outragebait content. Locally.

People who profit from clickbait/outragebait content would migrate to other platforms that do optimize for engagment, and the cycle begins anew. Thus it doesn't fix the problem globally.

A hybrid solution might be possible if all (or most) service providers agreed to certain baseline restrictions on algorithmic optimization for engagement. Probably unrealistic, because there would be all incentives to cheat any such agreement in subtle ways.

While I don't like various problems associated with it, I support the principle of freedom of speech.

I think to fix this sort of thing, it all comes down to a person's principles. I think we've failed to teach young people about what is right and wrong and why. You can have the government applying blanket control over things to prevent bad actors and disinformation in society. You can also teach people from a young age what is right and wrong so that when they grow up and are in positions to make these decisions, they won't need blanket decree by the government saying "no you can't do this". The topic may come up in a boardroom and everyone ideally would say "what the fuck? That's not a good idea. Let's not do that because it's wrong even if it makes us money".

This is more of a bottom-up approach which can take a few decades to show results. With that argument, I'd be inclined to look back on the last 20-60 years. What have we been teaching/instilling in our population when they were young? I look at the stuff that's happening as a symptom of a long history where we dropped the ball repeatedly.

Agreed, that is a significant cause. However, that must coincide with a updated monetization model for the platforms to account for the inevitable drop in user engagement. This free platforms model is a hot mess.

Leaders convinced people to do terrible things before newsfeed algorithms, seems like it’s only a contributing factor, but not the fundamental issue.

Feels like it’s a ‘mind of humans’ issue.

Group A fails to address the fact that emotionally loaded speech severely dulls the rationality of most listeners.

Group B requires someone to take a stand on what the different types of speech are, how we recognize them, and how each should be handled, and also what the threshold of proof for untrue statements should be.

I think group A is ideal as long as the speech holds a certain level of rationality, but that limitation sort of moves it into group B since it's now subjective.

I think it boils down to: If we are unable to agree on even the simplest rules for our discourse there's no way to prevent the discourse from collapsing.

A platform is demonstrably different than speech in real-world terms. It is simply not possible to 'say' something while you are sitting on the toilet to 70 million people within a few seconds.

The idea that 'a platform' and 'speech' must be treated the same is ultimately a kind of class warfare -- its a false comparison that serves to benefit the rich (in this case, rich in terms of platform reach) by pretending that any attempts to place restrictions on the use of mega-platforms must necessarily imply new restrictions on the speech of the vast majority of people without such reach.

We could start by not ignoring recommendation/amplification algorithms, especially when they clearly amplify bad arguments and obscure better arguments.

I believe the classical meaning of "free speech" as it pertain to government, democracy, and as has roots in Ancient Greece is great. The government shouldn't be able to restrict the flow of ideas or persecute people for them.

I also believe that same meaning of "free speech", that binding of the government, can't also be applied to private citizens and entities. That's a paradox; you inhibit their free speech by trying to force them to be a party to others speech.

I believe in very, very narrow exceptions to the above in the vein of what we currently have.

I also believe private citizens and entities being able to decide collectively on what is and isn't acceptable and not giving quarter to what they deem as bad actors is.. Both good and a type of free speech. It's not perfect, and we don't always agree with it, but it seems that over time we've been living in more and more liberal, socially, times while government has become EVEN MORE tied on the subject of free speech(Larry Flint? etc).

I believe it's also okay, even though I don't necessarily agree, to think we should do nothing within the public to restrict or discount others speech and opinions. But then, I'm also betting on society working that out on its own based on the above :)

> Is there a proper answer for someone like me?

Honestly, I don't think there is one. The problem with A is that it will lead to violence, anarchy, or brutal dictatorship if left completely unchecked and certain groups start to counter (verbal) arguments with death threats and violence.

There is a school of thought that says that a free society has to accept this and basically live with the fact that it's constantly in danger due to this.

But even this school of thought has one fatal flaw - its proponents lacked the information that we have now. Social media enabled psychological mechanisms that prior to its inception and widespread use were really hard to trigger.

In the 20th century, mobilising the masses was hard work and required a lot of resources (printing was expensive, organising large rallies to reach many people was expensive and dangerous, ...)

Today, everybody can - even without owning a smartphone or a computer or having internet access - reach literally billions via social media (e.g. by using an internet café). A single Facebook post or Whatsapp message can lead to riots and mobs that kill people [1].

These are means of communications and psychological effects that are simply unprecedented in human history. We opened Pandora's Box without even realising it.

When the US constitution was written, no one had social media in mind when they wrote about free speech. The very concept that a single man could within the blink of an eye spread their message to half of mankind, unchecked, without any immediate consequences, completely anonymously was just unthinkable.

The amplifying effect of digital echo chambers that suppress dissenting thought and nip constructive discourse in the bud, was yet unknown. FOMO and social media addiction didn't even enter the scientific community until just five or so years ago.

It's a really complex and difficult problem and I would love to see some constructive discussion about what to do with it (especially in the mainstream media) - preferably without reducing it to an unfruitful us-vs-them.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/21/how-misin...

We have no right to Twitter's platform. Maybe if the US made a messaging platform we could complain about government censorship on there.

For (b), why should individual companies and platforms do anything but follow the law? Many countries have laws against inciting hate speech. Others, including established democracies, have laws against sedition and such which would address this. Wouldn't someone bring a legal action based on such laws and thus end such behaviour via the proper channels, such as the Courts?

> Does anybody have a solution to the bigger underlying question of de-platforming and censorship on online platforms?

the still sitting president of the USA could open a channel in telegramm (no censorship at all right now), or he could use a russian service like livejournal or vkontakte (they wouldn't have a case to ban him), but I guess that's all he could do right now.

Update: he can no longer use parler, that has been removed from both app store and google play. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/parler-removed-fro...

it seems like banning platforms wholesale is the logical next step; so usage of alternative platforms might not be a solution.

As your link says, it has been removed from the Google Play store but not the App Store.

the title "...Apple App Store suspension reportedly looms". Some paranoid souls might be suspecting some level of coordination here.

I will say the real challenge with true free speech is the people who abuse the meaning of it compound that with people who make money on viewership. They have no incentive to tell the truth since they make money on getting the most attention. It really leads down a disheartening future where truth doesn't matter but viewership volume does.

I'd like to think most people take the quality of their content (i.e. truth and thought) as important to how they consume. All data currently points to the latter in terms of quality of content. I am concerned for the world my children and my children's children will be raised in if this trajectory keeps going.

> You should counter bad arguments with better arguments.

When the people making those arguments, and the people consuming them, are not interested in "better" or even "factual", then this is an exercise in pointlessness.

People are motivated to disseminate and believe in things which fit their worldview, and they will continue to do so regardless of little things like counter-arguments or even provable facts that outright contradict their fantasies. They will continue to disseminate things they know to be false as it fits their narrative.

The marketplace of ideas is a failure in the age of social media.

I think there is too much equating free speech with consequence free speech. What we are seeing recently is (mostly) consequence free speech. The trump camp has been able to make blatantly false claims without any accountability (mostly, there are some threats and actual defamation lawsuits now). The bar needs to be relatively high, but I think there needs to be more consequences, especially for public officials, in spreading blatantly false information.

We already have this in some places anyways, like courts. Why can’t we apply this more stringently for government officials?

I like to think about these issues as "website moderation policies" because that's all it boils down to. Almost all sites have moderation and for good reason. Besides all the spam and trolls good moderation helps build a community. That's why we're all here, and also why I'm selective about what subreddits I join.

If a company is so powerful that their moderation policies are effectively censorship, then there is definitely a serious free speech concern. The solution is to break up the monopoly so that no one company is that powerful.

Break-up doesn't stop collusion

I'm more interested, for now, on the platform issue itself. Barring blatantly illegal stuff, when and why should a platform like this (especially like this) itself enforce its self-made policies and act as a censor?

If it's an open vox populi platform, and if something isn't illegal (as in quotable in law), why should a platform have its own police? Leave it to, err, police? Of course, that opens up a question of whose police and laws if the platform is global... However, my point is, if the platform is non-moderated, why censor on your own?

Their argument is that it is borderline illegal since it could be perceived as incitement to violence given past events.

The other thing is that we need to recognize that the law allows for immoral, unethical and antisocial action. "Not illegal" is an incredibly low bar, and we shouldn't necessarily strive to have the legal system get involved with community morals.

News papers have published letters from readers for many years.

They've had editorial standards. I don't know if this is much different -- it's faster for sure, but crazy people haven't always had a huge platform.

In fact, it's seems reasonable to let people say whatever they want so long as the audience is small. And I wonder isn't that pretty much how it works today?

I doubt Twitter would ban my account, if I tried to incite my 5 followers to stage a coup :D

If you seem to serious about it, you should be more worried about the FBI & Secret Service than Twitter

Imagine there exists a perfect AI, that can tag all tweets as “true, somewhat true, somewhat false, false”, I think it would be in the public interest to allow all tweets, but tag them accordingly.

We have laws against defamation, slander, incitement of violence; but no laws against lies. And I don’t think we should.

There are not two legitimate viewpoints. There is one, and many very smart people have spent a lot of time and resources figuring it out. Just like practically everything else in existence being something in the middle, it was decided that free speech is good with exceptions (your “b”, as it were). Language influences people, literally and figuratively. The mere act of knowing a different language changes how our brain works. So it’s not a stretch to understand and acknowledge that speech is powerful and can cause bad things to happen just as sure as if you did them yourself.

My understanding is that censorship is currently the only known way to tackle untruths leading to violence on a platform that enable viral sharing of information.

In any other instance, censorship should be (is?) inconstitutional.

The next step, I think is to ask yourself: if the problem cannot be solved, which world do you want to live in: the one where (a)'s downside comes true or (b)'s? I'd rather (a)'s.

I put myself in the camp of 'free speech is good, with the singular exception of intolerance.'

But it's pretty complicated. Defining intolerance, eliminating bots, etc. Not an easy task.

A is demonstrably and blatantly dangerous approach for society. Thus we must consider option B, and due to all risks associated with that, we must be damn sure that the institutions responsible for managing the discussion are and will stay accountable and transparent towards the public. Are we there? Hell no.

The constitutional scholar perspective: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/28/trump-is-...

The criminal justice system has very fierce teeth to address B.

Inciting violence and conspiracy are both crimes.

This is an attempt to intervene on a different level and I’m unsure why exactly we feel the FBI, DOJ, Secret Service, etc. aren’t up to this task.

Hold platforms accountable for the radicals they create.

Imagine how different the world would be if Facebook faced consequences for the genocide it helped facilitate in Myanmar.

These companies will only ever respond to a loss of revenue, which is why you are seeing these bans now instead of 5 years ago.

Twitter helped create this mess, and now people have died and our country was a few guards and a chair barricade away from an actual coup.

this

Maybe chill out about deplatfoming? Any one can put up a website for about $10 with whatever text on they want and if twitter.com or facebook.com chose not to have the text of your choice go to another site.

History has shown that censorship leads to violence in the long-run.

We will see violence almost immediately.

(c) the policies of private companies that are not subject to public utility-like regulation never amount to censorship in a way that is worth wringing one's hands over.

Sure, free market, when someone communicates in manner that does damage to it that company will deal with it.

Free speech always requires qualifications: to foster a tolerant society you can't tolerate intolerance. Where the balance is, is hard to determine. Will Trump's supporters follow him to a new social network? Will more active moderation stem disinformation and restore civil, good-faith discourse? I don't know if platforms taking a more active role in shaping online discourse will be successful, but I know that it's essential to our society that we keep experimenting to find that balance.

Regardless of any principles one may hold, how could banning Trump from Twitter achieve anything positive?

They're forcing Trump to join some more right-wing friendly site. Those are way more saturated with conspiracy stuff. In effect, Twitter is inadvertently exposing his audience to way more false information, achieving the exact opposite of what is ostensibly the goal here.

Extremists will view it as positive because it reinforces one of their chief rallying cries. It will been welcomed by many as an acceleration towards violent civil unrest.

in response to (a). I think too much censorship is bad, but there is some amount of censorship in every country in the world.

We do censor speech in the USA. IMO we could go a little further without being at all "Orwellian".

Many countries with very high levels of freedom from government intervention and freedom to vote and express themselves (mostly in Europe) have much stricter views on what constitutes speech that should be censored around hate speech and overly nationalistic speech.

FWIW, while many of those countries take a stricter stance on hate speech, most of them also have a much _less_ strict stance than the USA on other forms of free expression, like nudity and swear words.

Here’s the solution, lost in noise.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24263815

I think it’s called up/down voting.

most Americans never lived in a totalitarian state. Totalitarian state starts when the freedom of speech is gone.

It would be a humongous loss to weaken or lose freedom of speech.

As someone who lived in USSR, I am am always on the side of the freedom of speech. Of course I never supported Trump, but I think the consequences of normalizing censorship will be far more damaging then whatever he has to say.

Once you’ve lived in a totalitarian state it is obvious. I hope people who didn’t live in such states would look at the world history and learn.

In Germany you cannot advertise nazism, which you can in America. This restriction of free speech in Germany is exactly put in place to prevent a totalitarian state.

It's a bad idea to do that. To prevent a totalitarian state, there should be general and abstract rules that prevent advertising things that lead to a totalitarian state.

Having specific restrictions for nazism can have the opposite effect: people think everything is fine because there is no nazism, but other groups, using similar dangerous schemes will not be regarded as dangerous.

I found it interesting that the last time I was in Berlin, about a year ago, I kept finding the same stickers everywhere being used for vandalism, initially with an anti-fascist message and then just as many cleverly scratched over to change the message to anti-Semitic hate speech.

Equally interesting was that these things were everywhere and none of the locals I was with had ever seen them before. Out of sight, out of mind.

I am not convinced that it helps preventing totalitarian state, quite the contrary.

De-platforming is not removing freedom of speech.

It is simply one private entity using freedom of speech to say that it will no longer act as an amplifier for another private entity's speech.

Trump can (and likely will) continue to speak freely.

I totally understand that Twitter is a private company which can do whatever they want.

But the world changes and they (and too few others) are becoming de-facto platforms for speech exchange. And this needs to be properly regulated to make sure freedom of speech is not in danger

Freedom of speech is a means, not an end. It's a tool that we can use to shape society as we see fit.

Either a) (US way) or b) (EU way) are fine, but the problem is when they’re applied unfairly - supporting Antifa riots is treated as a), supporting right-wing riots is treated as b).

So you are effectively argueing for a).

I think everyone is ignoring the nitroglycerin that's been poured onto what was originally just embers. Every single one of these social media platforms has had an enormous incentive to broadcast viral mind destroying rage-bait to everyone 24/7 for the past decade.

People say that free speech needs to go, but free speech has been working fine for centuries, and allowed formerly incredibly unpopular opinions to take hold, opinions that we now take for granted. There's also plenty of historical precedent for horrible shit promptly happening right after it gets removed.

The solution is not to ban wrongthinkers, or get rid of free speech. The solution is to build our civilizations communication systems in such a way that they incentivize actually productive discussion, rather than this.

This seems like a paradox since broadcasting viral mind destroying rage-bait is... free speech. So what you're suggesting seems like it necessarily involves curtailing free speech.

>Does anybody have a solution to the bigger underlying question of de-platforming and censorship on online platforms?

Well as far as politics is concerned.. the US Government (and other governments) should make their own twitter like platforms which every active representative has an account, and ANYTHING (barring pure illegal) can be posted.

It doesn't even need to have an actual user base, it can just be somewhere to go to see what your politician is thinking.

In terms of the average person? There is no solution for one that is owned by a corporation. An offshoot of the above is the government could make a social media site that is covered under "free speech that the government cannot take away" and anything not blatantly illegal can be posted/said. I would not advocate for this though.. I think we have plenty of options.

But the one for politicians only is something that should be seriously considered.

This exists. The government provides the President, the executive departments, and each Senator and Representative with their own websites. They may issue any kind of communications there, including setting up blogs or microblogs.

That's a bad idea, because you are cementing power. It would be hard for contenders to get into office. The incumbents already have a bigger platform they can leverage.

I was also getting at the fact, that Twitter, being a private company or not, basically became infrastructure and was thinking about how it should behave, whether that would be enforced by laws or not.

A highly scaleable free Twitter clone for the entire world run by the US government could be built in a year or two on AWS. If you don't need to build the giant ad network, it's much simpler.

> Well as far as politics is concerned.. the US Government (and other governments) should make their own twitter like platforms which every active representative has an account, and ANYTHING (barring pure illegal) can be posted.

> It doesn't even need to have an actual user base, it can just be somewhere to go to see what your politician is thinking.

That's just called a blog. The value of social media for politicians is the "social" part.

>That's just called a blog. The value of social media for politicians is the "social" part.

Actually no, the "value" in Twitter for politicians is

* Short succinct messages - people don't want to read a book from their politician for every issue. If it's important and does need more, then they tweet the image of more text or whatever. But most of the time a simple headline does suffice. Otherwise twitter wouldn't be where it is.

* The tweet can be linked from anywhere else on the internet, and everyone "knows" what it should look like and can basically distinguish reality from fake stuff

* Like the above, it's uniform and simple. Someone else commented to me that each politician has access to a website or something. Did anyone else know this? I sure didn't, yet I've seen a billion links to twitter for politicians.

* It would be really sad to learn that politicans are reading replies to their tweets. I don't know how they could get anything else done. Have you ever scanned through a twitter thread from any one of trump's tweets? There is nothing of value, and it's so invaluable that I bet you everyone in the world would be better off with read-only tweets from politicians!

maybe deplatforming politicians (all of them, no matter their role) it's not a bad thing.

there's an entire industry devoted to collect and spread their words, they certainly don't need twitter to be heard.

Politicians aren't the only ones spreading dangerous misinformation and conspiracy theories. They also aren't uniformly doing it; what prominent left-wing politicians are doing so? This is just a lazy both-sides position but this isn't something that both sides are guilty of.

aren't we talking about Trump here?

I never said right or left though, I've said all of them, even though from an American point of view I would be described as a "communist" (it wouldn't be far from the truth TBF ...)

I am as far away from Trump as the Star Wars galaxy is from us.

Politicians already have a platform, and the platform is "being a politician"

It's a big leap to go from <Trump gets banned for inviting violence through deliberate misinformation> to <while we're at it, let's ban all politicians because they're similar>. Most politicians have nothing in common with what Trump is being banned for.

Politicians are some of the people most engaged with politics, and I don't think such a large chilling effect fully across the subject of politics would be good for people. There are policies and changes from the status quo that I think are very important to improve society (healthcare for all, addressing climate change) and I don't think removing the most influential voices discussing and pushing these would be good for these kinds of goals, or improve sites like Twitter.

that's not what I've said at all.

Elected officials shouldn't be in social networks not because they are all like Trump, but because they represent the people and don't need to be influencers or to have followers, they serve the people.

if they want to be heard, they can speak with their actions and their messagge will spread on social networks through the people that supports them, the press whose job is to report what they do and official press conferences that have a wide coverage on media outlets.

politicians shouldn't talk "directly to the people" because it's a lie and a distraction, we spend (waste) more time talking about what they tweet and policing what they tweet about than about what they actually do!

they are not common people and shouldn't be treated like they were.

they can have a social network account for their party and for their press office to report on their activities and that would be it.

you would be surprised to know that Angela Merkel has closed her Facebook account with more than 2.5 million folowers.

Also, social network accounts are one of the best way to leak private (or secret) informations.

back to Frau Merkel, her Instagram account (which is actually the official account of Die Bundeskanzlerin) has ben targeted by Russian hackers from day 1 and they've also stolen documens from computers in the German Parliament.

why risk it?

last but not least, social networks are private companies and don't treat users equally, they offer their propaganda platform to some but not to others.

for example Hassan Rhouani, Xi Jinping, Bashar Al-Assad, Kim Jong-un, they are all on Facebook, but not their oppositions and people of those countries are severely limited in the access to social networks or internet in general.

so why give them a global platform? because they can pay?

I say let's ban politicians and solve it.

great powers -> great responsibilities

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