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Comment by danijelb | Hacker News Reader

Real censorship means that the government prosecutes you for speech, no matter where or how or to whom are you saying it. That was happening in parts of Europe from 1945 to 1990. This what is happening in USA right now is nowhere near that. It's just free market. If you're banned from a certain platform you can reach your audience in another way. No one is censoring your speech. It's just a certain company not wanting to serve a particular user. If it was actual censorship then you wouldn't be able to even print it on paper and distribute in your neighborhood.

Free speech != guaranteed access to a company providing access to a big audience

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Censorship has a very simple definition, and it can be conducted by private companies. From Wikipedia:

“Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient." Censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies.”

“Real” censorship is just censorship, and that’s the definition.

The reason I used the word "real" is probably because of my environment (ex-communist european country). I was born after the fall of communism, but of course the environment has a big influence on the lens through which you see things (family, friends, stories, history classes, etc.)

So when I see what is called censorship in US, it seems a bit funny and strange to me. I immediately think how people in my country during communism would be happy if only that was called censorship and if they had a possibility to use alternative channels to exercise free speech. But of course, I accept that this might be my biased eurocentric view of things and that from a different cultural perspective "real" means something else. Perhaps it will be like that even in Europe in a few years, who knows. We don't have much problems for now because we all use US social media and they don't really react to foreign languages, except a few universal "trigger" words like antivax. At least for smaller languages and countries (central and eastern europe)

Present-day social media censorship in the US is not "just free market", and is markedly similar to the kind I experienced growing up in a now-ex-communist eastern European country in the 1970s-1980s. Outright bans were not politically tenable by then, but forcing the opposition to express their views on fringe "alternative" channels was a popular strategy [1].

WeChat does not let you share Winnie the Pooh. Nominally, Tencent is a privately owned company freely choosing who they provide a platform to [2]. But in reality, they have no choice but to ban Winnie the Pooh, unless they want a state apparatus to make their lives increasingly difficult. Just because something is censored by a private platform doesn't mean that it's the "free market" of ideas and not a state or the government wielding its power.

Large US companies are also part of an industrial–congressional complex, with lobbying and political contributions on one side, political approval and threats of regulation on the other. Large tech companies are deeply and inseparably intertwined with the state and the political parties (both of them), based on the granting of reciprocated privileges. They know full well that if they ban the wrong speech (or refuse to ban the "right" speech), they face being regulated out of existence. Indeed, seeing this threat, we see them scramble to align with the incoming administration.

The kind of social engineering that led to the present bans was very popular in communist Eastern Europe as well. Did you recite an anti-government poem at your barbecue? You might find yourself banned from your favorite pub permanently! Why? Nominally, it was the bartender exercising his right not to serve you: after all, he shouldn't have to suffer potentially vocal ("verbally aggressive") imperialists in the establishment he runs. But behind the nominal reason was plain, state-mandated censorship. They'd have risked a bunch of misfortunes by not banning you. These could range from relevant, like the next few beer shipments "mysteriously" getting damaged during delivery, to completely random gaslighting-esque punishments, such as the bartender's daughter not getting admitted into the local high school. A plethora of plausibly deniable, no-outright-ban social mechanisms existed to make life difficult for people who disagreed with the official narrative, and to encourage people to ostracize the disagreeable. It required only a few well-placed entryists, made sure that ordinary citizens had skin in the game, and was a lot easier to handwave away than the black cars and heavy-handed approach that riled up the opposition in the previous years [3].

[1] https://meanwhileinbudapest.com/2020/09/11/klubradio-going-d... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-40627855 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_German_uprising_of_1953 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Spring

Taking this to its logical conclusion, if you used the “login with X” feature (X being Apple, Google, Facebook), and you suddenly find yourself deplatformed, what are the knock-on consequences?

I don’t have a huge problem deplatforming itself. I do have serious problems when it suddenly cuts you off from other unrelated websites or paid-for assets. These knock-on effects aren’t immediately obvious and can be quite severe at the individual level (eg FB locking you out and now you can’t access the local Oculus content you paid for).

In my opinion, the solution needs to be a guarantee of transfering your account to another provider. We can do it with phone numbers, we can do it with banks (at least in Europe). I don't see a reason why we couldn't apply the same on social media and auth providers.

Banned from "login with apple"? I should have a right to transfer my account to "login with google/facebook/my own server" and it should work. The same way I can call my friend when he transfers his phone number to another phone network.

Trump banned from Twitter? He should be able to transfer his account to Parler and I should still see his tweets in my Twitter feed, be able to retweet it to my followers, interact with it, etc. Twitter wouldn't be able to influence tweets from Parler so it would show in timeline. But they could decide to not display it in proprietary parts of their system (search, trending topics, whatever)

This way we would prevent echo chambers and deplatforming, while simultaneously allowing companies to maintain their freedom to moderate their own space.

You might be interested in the "fediverse" then. One instance can ban you but you can make an account in others and still interact with people from your old instance.

Why is the fediverse / mastodon not picking up all these users? How did Parler even get the jump on them?

I made this comment in another thread but I think we are few year from it being forced by the Supreme Court as it has ruled very close to this in the past.

> ... noting that ownership "does not always mean absolute dominion." The court pointed out that the more an owner opens his property up to the public in general, the more his rights are circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who are invited in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama

Twitter is going to be forced to unban most if not all people if they want to be a general open to the public social network.

I hope everyone else walks away before then.

This actually isn't the case as long as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act exists [1].

The section has two parts, the first of which protects the platform (Twitter, Google Play Store, FB, etc) from prosecution for user-generated content on the platform.

The second part, more relevant here, ensures the right of the platform to moderate it's users anyway it sees fit. If r/conservative can ban anyone for saying anything on the subreddit, or Parler can ban you for dropping leftist talking points, the Play Store can ban your app for enabling domestic terrorism.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230

If the Supreme Court chooses to go down the route I have described the content of section 230 has no bearing on the discussion as ruling on this matter as a First Amendment issue would invalidate the needed parts of the Communications Decency Act.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25728005

For the sake of our freedoms let’s hope Twitters right to decide who gets to use their property and distribution remains. Otherwise it’s a tragedy of the commons as every platform devolves into the lowest common denominator.

There are more recent cases that go the other way. I don’t think that ruling is as expansive as you think it is.

> Free speech != guaranteed access to a company providing access to a big audience

If that's what were happening you'd probably have a point, but it isn't. "Not deleting" something is not the same as providing the audience, nor amplifying.

And, by the way, yes free speech does imply some obligations on the rest of us. Speech is not free if you are not free to exercise it; "you're free to talk in a prison cell" type of thinking isn't productive because it avoids the entire conversation.

Free speech has absolutely nothing to do with the government, by the way. Just because one country wrote down something called "The 1st Amendment" doesn't mean that somehow free speech only exists in that country and only when the government gives it to you. Free speech is a natural right that we all have and nobody has the right to silence anyone else: The 1st is simply one aspect of that.

The fact that society at large has lost that value cannot be viewed as a good thing and all the people in this thread defending the silencing of millions because they disagree with them politically is beyond shameful.

You have never had the right of free speech on someone else’s property. This is not new in any way.

I realize that there are some court cases that do guarantee free speech in extremely limited circumstances, but saying that society at large has “lost that value” doesn’t line up with any history that I’m aware of.

> You have never had the right of free speech on someone else’s property.

Wrong. You always do. They simply have free speech too.

This is a good point that isn't emphasized in this thread. A lot of people seem very upset about one mechanism of dissemination no longer being available, and treating it as though the content of the message boards are now illegal.

Sometimes I feel that the free market argument doesn't apply to media platforms. This is because the effectiveness of a media platform (or any mass media, for that matter) is largely determined by its market/usage share; in other words, smaller or alternative media platforms cannot be considered as a working substitution to the dominate platforms. And since the user distribution of social media tends to follow the power law (i.e. the "can't switch 'cause all my friends are using it and they won't switch due to the same reason" phenomenon), it is almost inevitable that a single platform will eventually monopolise the sector if left unregulated. banning a user from using the most popular media channel would mean he/she is no longer able to communicate his/her opinion effectively even he/her is able to choose a less popular alternative.

tl;dr: one can always switch their phone if they don't like Apple because the usefulness of a phone doesn't depend on its popularity; one can't practically switch their social media platform if they are banned because the usefulness of the social media depends on its popularity, and the most popular platform typically dominates due to the power law.

> This what is happening in USA right now is nowhere near that

It's going to happen. These platforms are so large they encompass a signification amount of the communication market .. and I don't say that lightly. Look at how Facebook has literally gobbled up all its competition and now is pushing policies that make WhatsApp and Oculus useless without handing over full control of all your accounts and devices?

These companies ARE STATES! They may not look like governments, but the communication power they wield is stronger than many nations.

You can no longer just say "They're private companies" when you literally cannot buy a well supported Mobile device unless it runs Android or iOS, unless you have the skill, ability and time to run something like a PinePhone or PostmarketOS.

Why this assumption that you need a smartphone? That's patently silly. Your life and liberty do not depend on you owning a smartphone. This is an app on an app store. Do I think it's a great precedent to set? Not really, despite my political beliefs being heavily progressive. But this overblown reaction is bananas.

Like, my life is proceeding just fine without either WhatsApp or Oculus products. Or a Facebook account that I use, for that matter.

(edit: For the record, the reason I am not happy with the precedent is that isolating communities like this seems to usually just serve to increase radicalism rather than remove it.)

> Your life and liberty do not depend on you owning a smartphone

Modern life absolutely depends on being able to connect to the Internet in some way. For a lot of people, that's a smartphone, which is cheaper and more mobile than a computer.

> Why this assumption that you need a smartphone?

I got my first smartphone in 2019 because I watched the world around me gradually change to the point where an Apple or Android phone was expected and became inconvenient not to have.

It'd be a good idea to read through these threads from a day or two ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662215

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25669864

Apparently WhatsApp is so integrated into several countries' cultures, you cannot live without it. Like literally - some examples I remember are food deliveries (during lockdowns) are only available through WhatsApp, as are scheduling hospital visits, anything involving schooling, I think I remember lawyers sharing documents, and so on.

the solution to this, obviously, is to break up monopolistic companies, not to force them to be mouthpieces for fascists.

I think the solution is to simply break the network effect by mandating a right to transfer your account and a guarantee of interoperability. This would reinvigorate the competition

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