Hacker News Reader

Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

I have a different kind of thought here.

Doesn't this make you think about how dependent (or interwoven) our government is on private / commercial companies to communicate with us?

I.e. for an entity with such a role in our lives or organization of society, it actually has very few ways to disseminate information of its own, don't you think?

If the government didn't have access to TV, newspapers, internet provided by companies, how would someone in charge tell us something?

Telephone chain? Emergency broadcast system? Town crier? Post office?

I think actually it tells you how little day-to-day power the government has over our lives aside from when you run afoul of the law.

View on HN

It's definitely a take away for me as well, it shows that private control of communications is a powerful weapon, and it also is revealing how self-serving the politics of most people are.

The "right" typically, is in favor of less government, more private industry, etc. They typically feel the government intervening in the dealings of private industry is reprehensible. Yet look at what some of those voices are calling for now. Crying about "de-platforming"--no it's a private company making a choice. As expected, most people have no actual principles and really only claim to believe in something for as long as it's serving their own interest. If you suggested we have some mandates around communications companies and government access to them right now a bunch of "republicans" would be on board even though it stinks of state controlled media.

Also, it's quite interesting how much of the seriousness of these blows for this administration stem from their painting the "mainstream media" as an enemy. The POTUS has a significant communications apparatus available to it outside of social/new media/, but this administration has alienated those other sources so significantly they cannot even use them effectively.

Many liberals, like myself, are appalled by deplatforming as well and are rethinking our support for the modern left. It is an peculiar era indeed where championing freedom of speech, a core part of the Enlightenment philosophy that gave birth to liberalism, is condemned as being right wing.

Your post history has a lot of defenses of conservative views but you call out that you are a liberal to try to bolster your conservative points. What liberal views do you believe in?

Here's a convenient primer for my beliefs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

Thanks for the specifics. Your post history and that generic wikipedia article help show your actual views

A flippant response is all that a bad faith question merits. It may surprise you but I would encourage people to read my post history as well, all of it. Anybody not hopelessly mired in today's hyperpartisanship will see that I am criticizing the left from a liberal perspective.

Liberalism and left wing aren’t the same thing, it’s not conservatism either.

Take Milton Friedman for example. Right wing right? No, liberal. He believed in free markets and the power of free enterprise, but he also believed unions were important as an expression of individual freedom of association. He even advocated a negative income tax for low earners so he was a redistributionist.

I still think that would be far better than a basic income, but I digress.

A big chunk of the Democrat party abandoned liberalism (I.e. against globalism, free speech, etc). So you end up in scenarios where “liberals” aren’t really Liberal and call the Liberal people right-wing or centrist.

Liberals and even traditional leftists seem conservative (or fascist) to modern progressives, who mistakenly think of themselves as liberal.

Sure, I think it's totally fine to be appalled by deplatforming. I do think people should have a voice, I also think it's the right of platform owners to decide what terms of service they set and what discourse they consider ok. The point is not to say deplatforming should be ok in all and any cases, the point is to highlight the hypocrisy, or perhaps abandonment of so-called core/staunchly held beliefs, that emerges once those beliefs are suddenly at odds with maintaining power.

edit: to put it another way, it unveils that one of the identifying principles of the ideology is not a principle but a convention, upheld so long as its convenient.

Yes, corporations can and should be criticized for legal actions that are within their right (and oftentimes should stay within their right). Whether that is pollution, poor employment practices, or applying censorship unevenly.

As a champion of freedom of speech, you must be aware that it does not protect speech that would likely incite something like a riot, which is exactly what happened this week.

Incitement of violence is an incredibly high legal bar.

Hypotheticals, don't count. Hints don't count. Dogwhistles don't count. Impassioned political speech doesn't count.

The fire in a theatre quote that everyone seems to know is even from an overturned case. (Schenk v US)

The Brandenburg case that overturned Schenk held:

If a threat is not immediate

If it's non-specific/ non-literal

Then it's not criminal incitement, because it's protected free speech.

Interpretations of "what Trump meant" don't count, even if you believe with all your heart that he meant something other than the literal words spoken.

As a leftist, I am torn as the President did just incite a coup attempt, but this is a decisive demonstration that mega-corporations can just discipline the speech of the president (really the enemies of the DNC currently, though that will change to Rs in future elections). I think they will exploit these powers to a far greater extent going forward. There is nothing to celebrate here.

Trump's base of support is insane, but somewhat independent of control by Washington (versus the Democratic party electorate which loyally votes for the chosen leader). The establishment is finally asserting its power to lay down the law. Unfortunately, the country is spinning out of control for reasons they can't or won't manage so this will only be a band-aid though it's gonna hurt for us.

Calling that a coup is pretty insensitive towards people who have actually been through coups, especially since it's usually the US establishment govenments funding and protecting the perpetrators.

It wasn't successful or nearly successful, but I saw some potential for creating a drawn out process that could create the space for more support for them (but they failed). I am well aware of the hideous things the US does around the world and organize to try to stop further interventions.

This was not on the same level, but I don't think it's helpful to deny that the objective of these guys was to overturn the election and they had institutional support from the President, legislators, and it appears the Capitol Police. Off duty cops and military were in the crowd. It just wasn't sufficient or well enough planned.

In my opinion, what we witnessed is the farce part of the classic quote: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

Calling that a coup is pretty insensitive towards people who have actually been through coups

With the utmost sympathy for those who have experienced coups and aware of the crap "enlightened" governments pull around the world...

I do want to say that gatekeeping and shaming of the form "using [word X] is insensitive to the people of real [word X]" is one of the trends that is amplifying division in the US. There's probably a better way we can acknowledge worse problems without inadvertently damaging discourse.

That said... an attempted coup can take many forms.

Eh, you're speaking from a position of privilege that I can't comprehend. But I can assure you I'm not being offended theoretically for someone else's sake.

to-may-to to-mah-to. The president incited a mob to attack congress. Pipe bombs were planted, law enforcement agents were injured and killed, the aim was to disrupt a legitimate election.

Was it clumsy? Yes. Doomed to failure? Absolutely. But make no mistake, had the crowd encountered some of the members of congress they dislike it would have ended much more poorly.

I don't think it's much of a stretch to call it an uncoordinated, ham-fisted attempt at a coup.

Trump incited sedition and insurrection, leading to an attempt by the mob to take over the seat of US government, with members of that mob stating publicly that they had every intention to take prisoners and execute the two individuals next in line to the Presidency.

How is that not an attempted coup d'etat?

> (...) but this is a decisive demonstration that mega-corporations can just discipline the speech of the president

It really isn't. Trump unilaterally desired to use a private service as his main medium of mass communication, while he also unilaterally decided to not only shun his standard and traditional media of mass communication.

If he wanted it, he had at his disposal all media in the whole world to address the public.

But somehow he chose to use a free service provided by a single and very specific private company which also has a very public and clear list of service terms and conditions.

To make matters worse, in spite of his individual choice of using the private company's service as his exclusive medium of mass communication, somehow he also threatened the company with judicial and criminal persecution if they didn't abused by his very personal and unorthodox choices and preferences, which rendered his continuous use of the service as a major liability.

Thus it's pretty obvious that no, a corporation like Twitter cannot discipline the speech of a US president. What we have seen is a president that, due to his individual lack of judgement and insistence of exclusively using a private service while ignoring every single alternative there is in the world proceeded to violate the service's terms and conditions, thus resulting in the service being terminated.

It's not just one service, we're seeing Twitter and Facebook and now a mail service too. It's really a large fraction of the services he uses coordinating to shut him out for better or worse.

> It's not just one service, we're seeing Twitter and Facebook and now a mail service too.

I haven't seen any reference regarding any email service, and to me that sounds something between unbelievable and an absurd excuse in light of the criticism of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email service.

And moreover doesn't the white house operate their official email service?

Regarding Facebook, all I've seen is a notice that an official page that wasn't used at all was suspended for a week. Does a temporary suspension of an account that's not used count as manipulating speech?

I understand the need to grasp as straws to find any excuse for outrage, but you have to do far better than that.

> I haven't seen any reference regarding any email service

It was in a former title of this page, and if you'd followed the link and read the tweet you'd see it was about a service called Campaign Monitor:

> Email Marketing | Email Software | Campaign Monitor

That's the strap line for their website. Like many here, I often read the comments, sometimes without reading the linked site, but when commenting it does help to follow the link first.

Twitter has the freedom of speech/association right to ban whomever they want from posting on their privately owned servers. Freedom of speech and association cuts both ways, and your freedom of speech rights do not extend to other people's property without their permission.

Free speech rules are more complicated than that. [0] When a person or company owns a "public square" that is open to the general public under some circumstances they can become defacto state actors and lose their right to discriminate what people are allowed to say on their property.

We have never seen that be applied to the internet but in principle twitter is very much the modern day town square of discourse.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama

And what's interesting is that Trump's Twitter account specifically was declared a "public square" when he was forced to unblock users in 2018. Since that's the case (as ruled), blocking EVERYONE from accessing that account seems like a larger violation.

The suit argued that Trump blocked the plaintiffs after they criticized the president, which constituted "viewpoint discrimination.” Being that the President’s Twitter, @RealDonaldTrump, is a public forum, that would be in violation of their First Amendment rights to free speech. U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan agreed with the plaintiffs.

Ref: https://mashable.com/article/trump-unblocks-twitter-accounts...

The argument that @realDonaldTrump was viewpoint discrimination is because that twitter account was being used as a defacto mouthpiece of the US government. As such, people engaging with it are entitled to 1A protection.

That doesn't mean that Donald Trump is entitled, either as an individual, or as POTUS, to have a Twitter account.

These platforms are really just websites. If you don't like them, you are free to make your own website. If you create a website would you really want the government to interfere with it?

Those right wing positions are just bread and circus for the masses.

The right does not actually work for “less government.” Look at Trump’s agenda: more regulation of immigration, tariffs on China, regulations on media, etc. You are stuck in the past.

Right, I'm aware of that, but many Americans' aversion to the left stems precisely from drummed up rhetoric about the left being "big government" "socialists" and "communists" that want to rob them of their freedoms.

The choice these days is really between big government, isolationist, police state with hyper-capitalism (right), and big government, globalism, with milquetoast socialism.

There is, in fact, no recognised principle by which the propriety or impropriety of government interference is customarily tested. People decide according to their personal preferences. Some, whenever they see any good to be done, or evil to be remedied, would willingly instigate the government to undertake the business; while others prefer to bear almost any amount of social evil, rather than add one to the departments of human interests amenable to governmental control. And men range themselves on one or the other side in any particular case, according to this general direction of their sentiments; or according to the degree of interest which they feel in the particular thing which it is proposed that the government should do, or according to the belief they entertain that the government would, or would not, do it in the manner they prefer; but very rarely on account of any opinion to which they consistently adhere, as to what things are fit to be done by a government.

~ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

>Yet look

You had me going until that point.

I was expecting you to say something more like 'look at what happens when private industry intervenes in government'

I’ve always seen this as a primary function of the postal service. The government should defend and maintain it as the essential medium of communication that it is. It’s not as fast as most forms of modern communication, but it handles a lot of essential tasks efficiently.

On a somewhat related note, never underestimate the bandwidth of a sneakernet.

Absolutely, and this is my go-to argument any time someone says that the USPS is obsolete/unprofitable/archaic/redundant/etc.

The point of the USPS is that the government can always correspond with any of its citizens, with an organizational service guarantee.

But even postal longhaul trucking is private contracted, even if it's not to one giant entity.

Same for rural route carriers.

They can’t stop the service though. At most they can delay it while the government changes contractors.

Isn't this basically true for all the cases listed above?

It's semantics at some point. But I don't know where.

Ie, even if USPS operated the routes, they're relying on trucks built by private companies.

No, it’s not the same because the users can still get the same service eventually. Trump will never be able to access his Twitter followers again.

Government contracts don't change the requirements of the Government to deliver the mandated services.

I mean, they have their own websites and the postal service.

But the real answer is, too large of a population of the USA believes the free market is more efficient than government.

I don’t know if that is right or wrong, but it definitely leads to an outsized reliance of the government on private companies.

> too large of a population of the USA believes the free market is more efficient than government.

People believe this because it is actually true.

But its mechanism of operation is competition. It doesn't apply to monopolies or highly consolidated markets, which can be as inefficient as any government.

This has obvious implications for the subject at hand.

More "efficient" at what? Business is supposed to be efficient at making money and does so by excluding non-customers.

Government is supposed to be "efficient" at serving all the people -is very hard economically. Post to rural MO, MT or AK wouldn't make it w/o guaranteed service by USPS. Among other services B couldn't do because the "margins arent there"

> Business is supposed to be efficient at making money and does so by...

maximizing value and minimizing costs so that customers choose their offering over a competitor's. Which makes them more money.

> Government is supposed to be "efficient" at serving all the people -is very hard economically.

This is almost never even useful.

Having mail service to rural areas isn't uneconomical because nobody would offer the service for the right price, it's because nobody would pay the price it actually costs.

But if it costs the government $100 to deliver a package, and the recipient would rather have the $100 than have the package delivered to their home (as compared to e.g. a post office box in the nearest town), why are we even doing that? Just let them keep the $100 in tax money they would have paid to fund the delivery but wouldn't have paid given the choice not to.

I like the way this comment put it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25697249

IMO when you decide to start disconnecting parts of your country because they are inconvenient, you're one step from disconnecting the disagreeable, undesirable, or just different. The disconnected form their own beliefs and eventually take actions that are destructive to the whole because they haven't been connected to the whole.

> IMO when you decide to start disconnecting parts of your country because they are inconvenient, you're one step from disconnecting the disagreeable, undesirable, or just different. The disconnected form their own beliefs and eventually take actions that are destructive to the whole because they haven't been connected to the whole.

I had to read this twice to realize that you were disagreeing with me, because of how well what you said maps to the ongoing forced segregation of the political parties onto separate social media sites.

Where I would disagree with you with respect to the Post Office is the assumption that not having universal direct home delivery is actually disconnecting people. Even historically, having mail delivered to your nearest town rather than directly to your house adds a few days of latency to a form of communication that already has about a week of latency in it. You're still participating in the same network, with the same people. You receive the same information.

Which is the thing that doesn't happen if we purposely segregate people with differing political views from communicating with one another.

> Having mail service to rural areas isn't uneconomical because nobody would offer the service for the right price, it's because nobody would pay the price it actually costs

Or perhaps they would pay the cost but it's uneconomical to do so and having an uneconomical situation results in worse outcomes for a significant amount of the population?

I can't believe you're saying this when a enormous group of Americans have shown at the last election that they are clearly uneducated in the richest country in the world yet instead of attempting to fix that issue capitalism is exploiting them for profit.

> This is almost never even useful.

There are a lot of issues America could fix if you had more faith in your government.

Free market solves that problem with higher prices to deliver to further/more rural places. We just don't like that because we're spoiled with the government hiding that additional cost at the expense of those who should ideally get it cheaper.

This is nothing new. It has always been that way. The only thing is there hasn’t ever been a person/president that is so bad at being human that companies wanted to distance themselves from him. That is also because these companies are not media companies. Even now I am sure if he speaks the traditional media companies will carry his message.

I'm not actually sure of that the news media are willing to carry every message.

From where I'm sitting (In Australia) the US news media seems to be quite free and happy to limit their coverage of output from the White House. Now the news media are commercial companies and I'm guessing their thinking is that they don't want to broadcast material that their audience finds distasteful or unappealing so they limit what they broadcast.

My first reaction to the banning of the President was to wonder how I get an unedited account of what (however bizarre) he is saying and it's proving to be somewhat difficult. Maybe he's given up and gone back to playing golf so nothing is being said.

I think the media companies are in a very difficult position. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been placed in a position of a primary outlet for any number of public personalties and as such have a degree of moral responsibility to clearly and without alteration transmit the words of those personalities. The problems start when the personalities use the platforms and the comment systems associated with them not as a conduit for information but as a soapbox to persuade people to believe dangerous falsehoods and organise illegal activity.

The question is, where is the line drawn.

Can I post fiction on Twitter? Of course, and there are many authors who do just that, posting stories in small chunks. Can I post satire? Yep, the Onion does this regularly, with their audience fully understanding that what they read is not factual. Can I post blatant damaging falsehoods about identified people? Well yes, but I'm guessing that I could be facing deformation charges, and I'd probably be reported to twitter and banned.

So the line is drawn, post what you like, but don't cause damage with false information. This again raises the question, should the news media broadcast the words of public officials if those words are false and potentially damaging?

In an ideal world we would have a well educated public with finely tuned bullshit detectors who would be able to safely consume unedited false content, being able to determine for themselves what is and isn't true. Unfortunately in most countries we have a significant proportion of the population who are unable to determine attractive falsehood from fact which leaves the news media in the position of editing/censoring words to try to limit damage.

The problem with bullshit is that bullshit artists will switch around any arguments against them and use them back. For large segments of the population their inability to think logically hampers them from differentiating bullshit from facts so they just go with whatever their tribe is doing.

so it comes down to education. Without an properly educated population who have been taught and encouraged to think for themselves we are at the mercy of those who peddle falsehoods for their own benefit.

It's not enough to have a commentator say that something should or should not be believed, the public themselves needs to have the tools to be able to weigh and verify and come to their own conclusions.

There will of course be some who regardless of education will be lead, but we can do a lot better than we currently are.

The POTUS has an official website, whitehouse.gov. He has an entire media and communications team to promulgate his views.

The newspaper/TV/radio industry has operated as a curated medium, with editors and journalists operating, mostly, according to professional standards.

The internet/web has enabled people, organizations, and governments to bypass those media, but public education, particularly for those who finished their K-12 education prior to the web (basically anyone over the age of 45), didn't educate people on how to evaluate unfiltered, uncurated information.

Expropriation and war-production act type solutions were always sufficient incentives/threats.

Once again, case law/legal theory just hasn't caught up yet.

It'd be interesting to see if today, a TV station says "We're disabling the emergency broadcast system to pre-empt our (either rational or irrational) fear of misuse."

How long till fcc/govt mechanisms have the broadcast antenna turned off? Or the station seized, or whatever the solution is.

Is the answer the same if, hypothetically, a foreign "influenced" station does the same thing as a war breaks out?

Or, what if a station "ghosts" the system. Just turns it off without announcement?

Apply the same questions to everything else you listed above.

I presume (and hope) the pentagon knows these answers.

If there's a place for RSS, surely it's here.

We're very much dependent on private companies who of course have their own rights too... but that raises all sorts of questions.

I support these folks right to manage their own service as they see fit, but it's also hard to ignore that if enough decided they would act in bad ways, there would be serious consequences.

The President can send a Presidential Alert to all cell phones. This cannot be turned off by the user.

https://www.wired.com/story/presidential-text-alert-fema-eme...

Trump's campaign emails are not government comms. The campaign is a business that raises funds to pay for Trump's political campaigning, although lately it seems some of that money has been going on paying off debts from his previous campaigns (https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyl...).

As for all the other Trump social media, there are official government accounts for everything that platforms probably couldn't ban quite so freely. The only reason they've been able to remove Trump is that he chose to use his own personal accounts instead.

They've deleted Trump's tweets on the official channels. He is now banned from posting anywhere on Twitter.

...because he keeps breaking the rules and spreading baseless claims and allegations, as well as dogwhistle calls to action.

There is no right to incite, even under free speech.

Not specific to Trump, but:

Honestly, the campaign de-platforming (especially the last-minute ad-pulls) might concern me more than the head-of-state censorship.

Trump can put out whatever bullshit he likes on whitehouse.gov. The public servants/administration staff that do that have to understand that if they disagree with what he wants to put out, they can object through official channels, and if that is not enough, quit.

I'm reminded that for quite a while, the Library of Congress archived all published tweets.

One thing that is a little tangent to what you said:

Maybe the government should create a video hosting service. It should host any legal content. There would be keyword search, and ability to iterate though all videos but that would be the extent of content discovery.

Then other people could use that service as the back end and build content discovery on top of it.

It would reduce the big barrier to making your own video streaming service with your desired content discovery algorithms since the government service would handle storage and streaming.

All our phones have an emergency alert systems enforced by the telecoms and phone manufacturers that you can't turn off.

Most, at least. Settings -> Wireless & networks -> Emergency broadcasts under LineageOS. It's a great feeling when everyone else's phone sounds off for some bullshit.

AMBER alert! A heavy set man with a 10 year old in a white car 400 miles away should be watched out for.

No. Do you forget that the White House has its own website? Trump is 'dependent' on Twitter only because he won't take the effort to write a memo.

Does anybody read the White House website?

If Trump starting posting 240-word notices on there starting today, people would read it.

I sincerely wonder if the reach would be anywhere near as great.

If you use a 3rd party to get "reach" you have to play by their rules.

Do you forget that the American president used to make all important announcements via official means? Has the Obama administration been lost to history?

My recollection was that the announcements of the Obama administration had really low engagement. When Obama took the campaign hat off and put the presidential hat on, he occupied a proportionally smaller part of the public mind. Trump did not want to take the campaign hat off because he didn't want to let the amount people were thinking about him go down.

"Low engagement"? What is that supposed to mean? Obama actually wrote full paragraphs to introduce his policy and react to world events. Obama actually gave regular press conferences where he would take questions. They were not "low engagement" because they weren't on Twitter.

And Obama was on Twitter for frivolous campaign updates. So you can get whatever benefit Twitter offers while still relying primarily on official administration platforms.

Average people were really not that interested in paragraph-long policy updates, or frivolous campaign updates. Large public engagement in the past four years came from the combination of frivolity and policy consequences. It's not good statesmanship, but it's good showmanship.

Every major news organization has a reporter working in the White House press room, that is in the building where Trump lives and works. At any time Trump could stand in front of them and talk or answer questions. Trump could put 100 cameras on him and address the nation on prime time television. And you really believe that Trump is censored?!

Not only that, but the White House has a Press Secretary that can summon the entirety of the American Press at the drop of a pin. That same American Press would love to have Trump present at briefings and ask him questions as well. There is far from a lack of avenues for Trump to get his message out while President. The idea that Trump is being silenced because he can't spout untruths and foment the masses on Twitter is just ridiculous.

For official communications, the government maintains rights to take over broadcast and cellular bandwidth as well as other channels to communicate directly. This isn't a deplatforming of the government, it's of Trump's political campaigning, which is supposed to be done as a private citizen.

Their power comes from their ability to make or enforce laws on anyone, including people working at those private companies. They don't need to control the actual means of communication.

All the services banning Trump only after he is well and truly done with the presidency tell me that government power still works just fine.

Trump’s private political organisation has nothing to do with the government though. This is a relationship between a private citizen (and associates) and a private service provider. Beyond ensuring both adhere to the law, government has no role here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com