ACLU Counsel Warns of 'Unchecked Power' of Twitter, Facebook | Hacker News Reader

ACLU Counsel Warns of 'Unchecked Power' of Twitter, Facebook

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100 pointsgiardini189 comments

The man literally has a press office and a press staff. There are any number of outlets who will cling to his every word in order to praise or criticize it.

I don't use twitter and seem to learn what is said.

It is difficult to see what the problem is.

I don't do social media at all (well, HN and imgur) and unfortunately, still hear it all. Crap is all over the news, its here on HN...it's everywhere.

Also, I tend to think a lot of this has to do with avoiding wrongful death suits for not policing their platforms..

edit: formatting, don't post before coffee

That was kind of the point of the article — the precedent once set is hard to limit to those with press offices. There was no argument with the particular action in this case.

I wonder what the precedent is supposed be here?

Twitter and facebook have been banning people all along, for all kinds of reasons.

I thought the precedent set for Trump was the high level of leeway given to a government leader compared to regular people. I think if he weren’t the President he would have had more tweets removed and been suspended earlier and more often.

Were any laws broken by Twitter? Don’t businesses in the US have nearly every right to arbitrarily deny service to people (with a few exceptions when it’s explicitly denying on the basis of race, etc.)?

Twitter literally didn’t exist 15 years ago. How can a lack of access to Twitter be an an infringement on free speech then?

The internet literally didn't exist 50 years ago. How can a lack of access to internet be an infringement on free speech then?

Television literally didn't exist 100 years ago. How can a lack of access to television be an infringement of free speech then?

Written language literally didn't exist ~5000 years ago. How can a lack of access to written language be an infringement of free speech then?

> The internet literally didn't exist 50 years ago. How can a lack of access to internet be an infringement on free speech then?

So the 14% of households with school-aged children in the United States without internet access don't have free speech?

https://www.ntia.doc.gov/blog/2018/digital-divide-among-scho...

> Were any laws broken by Twitter?

Yes, but not the ones you think. The FAANG companies are basically all illegal monopolies.

Yes but do you? When Twitter suspends your speech do you have a press office to get your word out? If they dare to do it to the president you think they have any reservations about censoring anyone else?

yes, because if they censor too much then parler or any other startup can easily rise up and compete. the barrier to entry is very very low here if there are pissed off users ready to flee. parler being a prime example

Sure looks anti-competitive when Parler is deleted from all the app stores now doesn’t it? And we have people vocally calling for Cloudflare and AWS to deny them hosting services.

Then don't download it from the app store.

Not an argument.

No, Apple is trying to ban the alternative product that has been created.

Parler has banned all liberal, communist, and eco friendly speech.

It’s an alternative to Twitter but it got there by being more restrictive.

But that was banned as well from app stores. There aren't any free, open platforms out there to my knowledge; and if there are, they so obscure, so hard to get into, that might as well not count them as existing.

And you don't own your phone. You have 0 access to it, you can only do with it what the vendor allows you to. The market economy argument just doesn't hold in actual practice, despite its theoretical validity.

Why are you compering him to Trump? Why do you need to defend such person. Road to the hell is paved with good intentions.

This ban was long overdue. Are some people more equal than others?

I may be downvoted here for this statement but that is just some site on the internet. I may be banned from Twitter that is also just another site. Actually was banned from r/Conservative, so what?

Facebook/Twitter are problems because many things, but banning someone for roaring the masses is not one of them.

And arguments like: 'But who is deciding what is hate speech?' seems to me just like fallacy here. Because we have concrete example of spreading misinformation and roaring people in order to undermine civic society. This has already led to violence. 'What if' is just taking away attention from what has already been done.

That's literally what is said in the article.

The problem isn't what happens when tech companies censor a very power man. It's that if they can censor a very power man, then there is no bounds on what they can and will do for less powerful people.

For social networks, the root of the problem is their quasi-monopoly status. We wouldn't accept Comcast deplatforming people.

It's a bad idea to set policy based on the worst examples. I can't see any harm in kicking Trump off twitter. He was basically begging for it. But should Trump's extreme actions be used to justify banning BLM protests because they sometimes turn violent? How about Hong Kong demonstrations? Didn't they storm a legislature? How about WSJ? They print people who believe in election fraud.

It's like using 9-11 to set all terrorism policy.

IMO--these actions should be an "emergency only" policy rather than Big Tech deciding it needs to police what we all hear and think. It's really not clear which its going to be.

The way you’re using “censor” doesn’t accurately describe the situation. It evokes images of people being sent to the gulag for sharing samizdat but he’s not exactly silenced when he can have full coverage by the international media any time he chooses, and Trump’s accounts were not disabled for spreading conservative ideas but for inciting deadly violence. A private company exercising its rights under the contract he voluntarily made with them does not seem like something conservatives should be complaining about.

I strongly dispute that censor evokes gulags.

A person of ordinary education would understand the Hollywood Blacklists of the 50's as censorship. It's a quintessential example of censorship.

To extent you want to redefine censorship as only government actions, there is a pretty plausible argument that elements of the US government pushed for this. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/19/angry-democrats-fa...

It might not be a coincidence that Big Tech waited until Trumps defeat looked certain to finally start censoring his posts in Oct 2020. They were probably afraid of what a Democratic DOJ would do. Democrats have blamed Trump's win on big tech for years.

Okay, go with that. Trump isn’t losing his job, house, or anything else because of what Twitter did. The only thing he’s using is free use of their infrastructure to advertise his speech — and he still has all of the news media, his campaign and personal websites and email, etc. so that’s really not much of an impediment.

> It is difficult to see what the problem is.

No one seems to be angry that Rubert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, gets to decide who is a host/anchor and who isn't, who is a guest that is interviewed and who isn't, who goes on air and who doesn't, etc.

If Fox New (and CNN, OANN, etc) get to decide who to broadcast or not, I'm not sure what's so special about Twitter as a platform deciding as well.

Arguing the contra: if Twitter "must" allow Trump, shouldn't Fox News "have to" allow (e.g.) Noam Chomsky to have his own show?

“Start your own Twitter then!”

... they do.

“Google bans Parler, conservative Twitter. Apple gives them 24 hour notice to moderate more speech or be banned.”

That's funny, it seems they were perfectly happy to try starting their own country a couple days ago.

Autonomous zones for me but not for thee.

Listen, I’m center left and oppose all this craziness. But the tech giants banning these accounts is counterproductive. Violence will increase not decrease as extremists are pushed out of the public square and into echo chambers and non-public Signal groups.

“A riot is the language of the unheard” remember?

So in the interest of balance, conservative leaning apps can get away with doing whatever they want now?

If left leaning apps permit the kind of violent talk that Parler does, by all means, ban those too.

So we are banning twitter then as well?

No. Twitter actually tries.

It's no secret that Parler's ethos is largely anti-moderation, that was basically their whole brand and messaging, after all.

But if one reads Parker's terms of service (TOS), they reserve the right to moderate illegal content, as well as claim unlimited global usage of any content uploaded to their platform. Thus while their ethos was largely anti-moderation, their TOS seems to put responsibility for their platform in their hands---at least in my non-lawyer eyes.

Right, they have a bare minimum policy, but the Android and iOS app stores have apparently higher standards for moderation that they require apps to abide by.

Which completely makes sense -- when you get an app from an app store, its content partially reflects on the store itself.

>Violence will increase not decrease as extremists are pushed out of the public square and into echo chambers and non-public Signal groups.

I see this claim a lot, but is it true? On the one hand, some people will move into harder to find echo chambers. On the other, fewer people will be exposed to extremist content in the first place. Both factors are in play. It isn't clear which one "wins".

It's definitely not obvious that appeasement leads to better outcomes.

"an insurrection is the language of the unheard"

Hmm doesn't have quite the same ring.

Try this one:

"We shall fight them on the beaches... we shall never surrender"

Or would you prefer appeasement?

Start your own Google then?

Funny. I've seen talk of making Cloudflare ban thedonald.win (the reddit clone of trump supporters).

What's next? Make your own routers? Lay your own cables?

Better yet, stop platforming fascists!

Sure. That's the market for ya. The invisible hand can still get stuff done.

If you hit a cog that's a government-granted monopoly, then I'd sympathize with that. Otherwise, I have zero sympathy for supposed market proponents who want the government to step in as long as it's in their favor.

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

This. I fail to see how someone can be ok with “we don’t need environmental regulations, the free market will sort it out” but then won’t accept that the same markets may choose to not allow fascist propaganda.

The free market has spoken, these companies don’t want to be associated with a movement to overthrow elections and undermine democracy.

How to start a conservative social media app in 2024:

1. Create a bank for your financial interests

2. Mine aluminum for your phone manufacturing factory

If you can't communicate without violent insurrectionist rhetoric, then you better do it in private. Platforms have valid civil liability concerns with or without Section 230.

Nobody banned "conservative twitter." They banned the people who have been whipping up the gullible and stupid with unfounded conspiracy theories and outright lies. Alternate realities are bad but tolerated until they lead to violence. Meghan McCain is still on twitter. Her husband, a Federalist founder, is still on twitter. There are plenty of conservatives who are still there.

Pretending that they banned a political philosophy is hilariously disingenuous.

> Google bans Parler, conservative Twitter

Shows up for me: https://www.google.com/search?q=parler

If they didn't want to get banned from the app stores, they should've at least tried to follow the TOS. There is a subreddit dedicated to cataloguing all the death threats on the app, many of which are still up today: https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/top/?t=month.

Reddit, Facebook and Twitter have entire content moderation teams for this sorta thing. Why should there be a double standard for conservative social media sites?

The discussion is not about if a 'free speech app' can have a website. The discussion is about if a 'free speech app' can have an app.

Is there a difference between a ‘free speech app’ and a ‘death threat app’?

Well for one, death threats are illegal and not protected speech under the 1A.

It’s also not even that. The discussion is if someone has to distribute a “free speech app”. The issue is a little more complex for Apple if/when they ban Parler, as you can’t (easily) side load apps on iOS. But Google only banned them from the Google Play store, thus limiting their distribution. You can still use the app, and side load to install. (I think this makes Android’s position a little more tenable here...)

They still have their app and website. And you can still get to their website from a phone.

Yea. No one is complaining that the "Parler" website has been banned. The issue is can a competing product have a comparable offering, including a proper native application with notifications, and all of the features only allowed to be used via native API calls.

I'm not following... what is the competing product here?

Twitter?

Are you saying that Google should follow the same rules for Twitter and Parler? I think that the argument here is that they are applying the same rules -- if you don't moderate the content users post, you're out of the store.

This isn't wrong, but it is misleading. Google banned Parler's app, from their own app store. At the very least, Android devices allow different app stores.

But the whole thing is irrelevant anyway, because neither Google nor Apple filter web pages you can view in their respective web browsers, and Parlor, or anyone, can just make a normal website.

Apple's (and Google's, as far as I know) complaint is not "right wing politics is immoral" - although if it was, I'd be OK with that. Their complaint is simply "you're not moderating your users as required by our app store rules", and as a user, I'm fully on Apple's side here.

That's the market at work, yes.

Funny how quickly supposed free market advocates turn against it when it doesn't do what they want.

"No, you were supposed to hurt the other side, not us!!"

There's always IRC and web forums. You can even use a smartphone based IRC client, if you really have to. If you want to use Google/Apple/AWS services, you play by their rules. Plenty of stories about "XX closed our company account and now we can't do business" on HN.

Yes, start your own twitter is a cop out because no one is willing to accept that they are listening to crazy things.

Plus this IS the free market solution that American speech norms are ok with. Businesses can choose who they give their services to.

If google doesn't surface results that's their choice. Drive business to duck duck go and Bing.

VOAT, Parler, are not havens of conservative/ neo-liberal, small government economic discussion. If you want that go to an actual economics forum, or get a economist/WSJ/BB subscription.

They aren't getting removed because they have "conservative" thought. They're getting removed because people sharing death threats, Nazi apologia, holocaust denial and organizing to stop other people from existing is generally handled by anti terror teams.

While saying this is usually unpopular on boards with a largely American user base - in many other countries this wouldn't even be a question.

Additional note - many people who read these debates have never gone to those sites, and will be swayed by people who come up here and say they visit those sites.

Be wary of false reports and equivalencies. I've recently condemned the actions of the_donald, and linked to evidence of their efforts to subvert r/all.

The response I received was that organized attempts to subvert reddit, and brigade the front page are the equivalent of other subs organically having their content rise to the front page.

Isn’t it good that they are spewing death threats to anonymous users on easily trackable apps so the police can lock them up before they do anything worse?

This is your neighbors, the shallow fixes won’t help. You need another culture who... trust doctors and democracy for a start and it needs to be pushed in education. Something is failing in US.

Yup. That said, It’s not just the US.

Authoritarianism is on the rise around the world.

They violated their contracts to be on the app stores. Remember that TOS are so powerful that now you can be forced to go into arbitration instead of courts.

I don’t care what side your politics are. When corporations can so easily control the voice of the elected leader of a country (one who has genuine legitimate support or about half of the country), I become very scared for the future.

Corporations should not have more power than the elected officials.

There is nothing to prevent any politician from doing what was done before Twitter/FB - holding a press conference and inviting the press/TV. Or putting out public statements which are widely disseminated over news/pr wires.

Yes and anyone can make a website. I was referring to using the platform normal people use here.

Then there's not much concern with the Twitter ban, since the vast majority of Americans don't use it. The platform most used by normal people is Youtube, where Trump is not banned.

That's a good point.

I'm a little surprised a blog hasn't already sprung up on whitehouse.gov.

There’s literally no one left in the room with him who’s able or willing to suggest or execute on this idea.

Not sure why you are downvoted. You raised a legit point.

Facebook and Twitter are important communication channels for the public.

It's dangerous that they can ban any elected official without going through any single legal process. No judge. No jury.

What we are doing here is a screaming match. Who can scream at Facebook/Twitter the loudest probably wins. This is going to turn into threats on FB/Twitter execs very quickly. You'll see.

Why can't we have a due process for banning elected officials?

Because Twitter/Facebook is private property and has no obligation to provide a platform for someone to overthrow democracy and incite more violence.

I'm not familiar with the situation.

That's why I ask for a due process like what we have with our justice system.

You and I are free to criticize FB and Twitter. As I mention, now it depends on who screams the loudest.

Let me get this right. You are against having a due process for banning elected leaders from a popular communication channel? You prefer we scream at each other until one wins? Really?

I don’t understand what you’re saying regarding due process or screaming until someone wins? Who’s screaming?

A person was using a privately owned website to encourage people to go commit acts of violence against senators and congress representatives. That website did not want to be complicit in that violence so they removed access to those people.

Eg. If you go into a coffee shop and start smashing windows and beating people up and rallying for people to murder each other the coffee shop doesn’t need “due process” to kick you out and ban you.

There are laws that exist and twitter has a terms of service. There’s no due process needed. If anything Twitter should be criticized for not banning Trump sooner. They let him do so much damage and allowed it to get to this point for ad revenue and engagement. I’m glad they finally did something but frustrated they allowed it to get to this.

> Eg. If you go into a coffee shop and start smashing windows and beating people up and rallying for people to murder each other the coffee shop doesn’t need “due process” to kick you out and ban you.

Then, the leader of that riot should go to jail for 25 years for murder, not simply "banned from coffee shop".

Also, in a real situation, employees would first keep themselves safe and call police to handle the matter.

In your imaginary situation, would you ask your minimum-wage employees to handle violence in the store?

This is my point exactly. Twitter should just follow the law. If Trump breaks the law, then get a court order to remove him or call the police.

Dorsey and Zuck shouldn't play police.

Also, who's screaming? Just search on twitter. Dorsey and Zuck has been called Nazis, white supremacists, racists for not banning Trump.

If a person has a blog and someone comments on a blog post the author’s address and encourages other readers to attack them, is your position that there needs to be due process for the author to remove the comment?

That’s not how freedom of speech works.

> is your position that there needs to be due process for the author to remove the comment? > That’s not how freedom of speech works.

Judge can definitely order you to remove the comment.

Also, an author's blog is not a popular communication channel like Twitter.

Yes, I'm asking for a proper process of removing an elected leader from an important communication channel like Twitter.

It seems like “the platform can suspend anyone”, “the platform can make those suspensions indefinite (making them a ban)”, and “the platform can be sued for reinstatement” is, more or less, what we have now and doesn’t strike me as particularly unreasonable or dangerous.

If the POTUS is banned from NBC, surely they can still get their TV messages out, right?

So, your position is that a business can ban anyone. AT&T can ban you because you like candy. Yes, candy is evil and destroys millions of teeth.

And if someone is not satisfied, we should just scream at Dorsey until he caves.

So your position is that you can walk into any private business that offers free cookies (eg. A car dealership or bank) and then hold a rally to incite violence in that establishment and you believe they’d have to go to court to have you removed from their private property?

Your twitter account is not a product. The product is sold to advertisers. And even the ads they will or won’t show has guidelines they are not legally forced to show ads that would incite violence.

The legal argument being made in multiple threads about freedom of speech like this demonstrates that you all know literally nothing about freedom of speech or what it means

In your imaginary scenario, the shop owner would get to safety and call police to handle the matter.

The shop owner wouldn't be the one who judge and come up with punishment. The justice system would do that.

That's my position. Twitter is an important communication platform. And there should be a due process for banning an elected leader.

Should Twitter have to go to court to ban an account because it happens to belong to some [elected] school committee member in some small town somewhere? If not, where do you draw the line? State governors? Town Mayors? Town School Committee Members?

It doesnt sound hard to figure it out.

Let's go with the president/senates of the most powerful country on the planet first.

Ultimately, we should apply to every official leader of every country. But that can come later.

Yes, we can get the court order (or whatever it is, I'm not familiar with the name) to forbid Trump from using Twitter.

We do this all the time while performing investigation (e.g. forbidding a person to travel after making bail).

The devil is in the details, as usual.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali... (skip to "credit card buckets")

When twitter was launched, would George W Bush have been granted a non-suspendable account on day 1?

Should Biden get a non-suspendable Parler account on Jan 21?

Would the members of the House of Representatives also be non-suspendable or is that for Senators only?

California is larger than many countries by many measures. Should California's elected leaders have the same privileges as Italy's or the Netherlands'?

"It doesn't sound hard to figure it out" hides a lot of complexity which needs to be dealt with. To me, it actually does sound fairly hard (or labor-intensive at a minimum) to figure it out to a level of detail required to pass a law.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

Let's just start with the most powerful person on the planet first, which POTUS, on the most popular social networks, which are FB and Twitter.

We don't need to figure now what to do with, for example, a senate from Namibia.

My position is that, if we are gonna ban an elected leader, let's get a judge to issue a court order.

It's the same thing with search warrant or the arrest, and we can do that in a timely manner.

The problem that I see is that nobody is pushing for having a proper process at all.

Also, our tax law is like 100x more complex than this. So, yeah, it doesn't sound hard.

Because if they used due process a lot of them would have been banned a long time ago.

They let Trump get away with a CONSTANT stream of bullshit and insults over the last four years. Their PR people had to constantly engage the media to tell them that he only kept his account because he was POTUS.

He isn't gonna be POTUS much longer, there are about 40 other platforms he can use, and he's got an entire press apparatus.

I'm tired of this revisionist nonsense. Again: Trump and others would have been banned A LONG TIME AGO if they weren't elected officials who spent money on these platforms according to their TOSes.

Have you actually read what the average twitter user posts?

Almost all of what I see on there is magnitudes worse than anything I've seen Trump post, and yet there's no action against those users...

This is clearly partisan politics. The ban hammer is not applied equally.

I see unbelievable insults, direct calls for violence (from both sides), acrimonious, spiteful and hateful posts - with zero consequences.

But Trump posts "go home peacefully" and he's banned?

I don't know about you, but I've actually spent a lot of time reading Trump's Twitter feed. While I'm personally embarrassed about his lack of executive poise, and I disagree with most of what I've read, I've never seen anything that would come close to a call for violence, or many of the other things he's been accused of.

Happy to read examples if you have some and I've just missed it.

If you interpret the situation in this manner, you really need to take a break from politics and try to engage into some activity that helps you develop some basic common sense.

Stop thinking about political parties, and think about individuals, their role in society, their influence and the consequences of their actions.

Sending a mob of radicalized people with mental issues to kidnap senators is a bad decision and he got rightfully punished for it.

> Sending a mob of radicalized people with mental issues to kidnap senators is a bad decision and he got rightfully punished for it.

Yes!

I'm not familiar with the situation.

Can we have a due process like our justice system to assign blame?

Should I just take your word (and the word of trump opposition)?

Also, isn't it weird that, you claim, he is the leader of the riot into Capitol, and the punishment is being banned from social media??

Should this be like jailed for life or something?

Sure, but if he was allowed to continue, there would be no justice system.

How do we handle a case where a mass shooter keep shooting people?

You get a police to arrest the aggressor first and get them to court.

We can simply get a police to issue an arrest, ban him from social network, get him to court later.

I don't think this problem is particularly hard. Not sure why a lot of people seem to think that this is impossible to resolve through legal system.

Trump is leading the riot/coup. He should be arrested immediately, no? (In some countries, that's a death sentence.)

It's either (1) Trump isn't really leading the riot/coup or (2) leading the riot/coup isn't unlawful.

I'm confused on this contradiction of reality. Somebody is lying here.

> Sending a mob of radicalized people with mental issues to kidnap senators is a bad decision and he got rightfully punished for it.

Can you please show me specifically where he did this?

If not, it may be time for you to take a break from politics as well, and try to view the situation objectively.

I'm very open to having my bias, if any, pointed out. If you can show me anywhere where the president did what you claim, I'd be very interested.

I wont be surprised if all other world leaders, authoritarian or not, are looking for alternative platforms now, just for the sake of their own sovereignty.

What would they suddenly care now?

When the elected leader of a country can so easily try to overthrow that very same democracy with a violent insurrection the least of the consequences they should face is not being able to incite more violence on someone else’s private property. No matter how popular a hangout spot that private property.

No one is worried about a mentally deranged guy running around in a costume taking over the legitimately elected government. No one is actually worried about this; The democrats are not actually worried about this; Republicans are not worried about this; perhaps some mentally unstable people are worried about this?

>No one is worried about a mentally deranged guy running around in a costume taking over the legitimately elected government

No, because that's not something that could actually ever have happened. Nothing that crowd could have done, or was planning to do, would have actually resulted in any of them "taking over" the government, that's not how this works. That asshole in the buffalo costume got his two minutes of internet fame and then got arrested.

That doesn’t seem at all obvious. There were guys with zipties looking for elected representatives, and the electoral college votes could easily have been seized and destroyed. With hostages, a siege could easily have played out. What would Trump have done in that situation?

Worst case a few politicians and a lot of the "rebels" would have gotten killed. Basically nobody wants to die for trump, there is no risk of a huge armed uprising. It would have been a tragedy but on a grander scale it wouldn't matter, it would be like just another school shooting.

“nobody wants to die for trump”

4 people did die for Trump during this ‘boomer chimpout’. What makes you think more would not have been willing to get involved if it looked like it was building traction?

Also, they planted bombs in the DNC and RNC, and look - petrol bombs: https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/alabama-man-charged-posse...

Thousands of then still have their guns and bombs and tactical gear and fan club. Even if they can't "take over the government", they can kill a lot of congresspeople and citizens.

> When corporations can so easily control the voice of the elected leader of a country

They don't control his voice. They just control if their resources are used to magnify his voice.

The alternative is state-directed media where the leader directs what political messages must be relayed and private parties have no choice about whether to relay them. That's not only inconsistent with the First Amendment, it tends to work out badly.

Yes, that's what I just said. When corporations that are used by the general public for public communication are allowed to control the voice of elected officials, we have a serious problem.

A state controlled twitter is an interesting suggestion. I am not sure that's a better situation.

You said the opposite.

This is intellectual dishonesty.

The alternative is that the government protects the liberties of its people and protect against the tyranny of the majority.

PS Facebook Twitter Google Amazon Apple ARE the state media at this point. For now!

> corporations can so easily control the voice of the elected leader of a country

I see this almost in reverse, that why on earth has the US Federal Government put a company like Twitter in this position? The Feds have their own communication apparatus and instead foisted onto Twitter the responsibility of being the primary communication channel of the president. He has other options but he fully embraced Twitter and despite profiting from it, it's also not entirely fair to them.

Same with the Russian disinformation. There is a ton of state sponsored fake Twitter bots that the Twitter staff is fighting constantly. Why is that on them? Shouldn't the Federal government be fighting that as part of protecting the country?

The Feds done nothing of that sort. Donald Trump is tweeting, because he wants to tweet. Feds are simply unable to control him and it is fair to say that they should not be able to control whether president tweets or not.

Fine, I accept that's a more accurate description. But it's the same point. This is a problem of Donald Trump's creation. He foisted himself on Twitter and it's not their job to accept that at all or forever. He had and still has official channels.

That is where I am at as well. People are celebrating this because the guy they banned is on the other team, but it is crazy how twitter/fb can cut the legs out from under the "leader of the free world" when needed (it was kinda justified in this case).

Nobody should be above reproach for their behavior. I would be (and was!) far more worried about our freedoms if the president inspired so much authoritarian fear that companies would not act according to the principles stated in their terms of service, that apply to everyone.

We should be far more worried that Twitter gave the president a free ride for so long, violating their own standards to allow a powerful person to violate them. That's the real threat to freedom.

> We should be far more worried that Twitter gave the president a free ride for so long

Twitter has given and continues to give people just as or even more deranged than Trump free rides. They don't care, because either a) they agree with those people or b) censoring those people could give them bad publicity and could hurt their ad revenue.

Meanwhile, people like Trump get banned all the time because their politics are okay to ban according to the advertisers/investors/media/population Twitter wants to please. Trump himself stood this long because, even if the people twitter wants/needs to please hate him, his tweets made them money—even from the people who hate him, who nonetheless hang onto his every word—by virtue of being the president of the USA and thus having far more reach than the usual "right wing nutjob".

Twitter waited until now to ban him because in their calculations, I presume, losing less than two weeks of money that Trump's insane stream of thoughts might give them is compensated by the good publicity of this making them look righteous in front of everyone else.

Sadly it works, even here in HN everyone forgets the usual narrative of "these corporations are evil, let's break them down and/or regulate them more heavily, and, for the love of God, let's stop their sinister spying on us", and starts defending these monopolies like no tomorrow as soon as they censor/ban someone they don't like. Even if it's a completely meaningless gesture like this one.

Then change the laws...Corporations are not public utilities. They are not obligated to provide service to anyone.

Indeed, they have to police their platforms to avoid wrongful death suits, and keep advertisers happy.

edit: And to be honest, this is no different then all the "Google shutdown my business for no reason" posts we see on HN. The conventional wisdom there, is "don't build your business on third party infrastructure/services. I'd think the same logic holds for politicians. Hell - they have they're own TV network (c-span) - why don't they use it more ?

It is extremely bizarre to me to watch the left cozy up to corporations. What happened to Occupy Wall Street, Chomsky, the real counterculture?

Occupy Wall Street ended because of its own dysfunction.

I don’t mean what literally happened to it, I mean what happened to the values it represented. It’s barely been a decade and now the left has done a 180 on its relationship to corps.

The values it represented were never turned into anything coherent, which is part of why it collapsed.

There are many problems with corporations and capitalism to be address. Being generally ‘anti-corporate’ just isn’t useful.

Big corps started hiring leftist thought leaders and pay them huge salaries, then the left aligned very quickly with those big corporations.

> It is extremely bizarre to me to watch the left cozy up to corporations.

The Left opposing the Right’s efforts to commandeer corporate resources to serve right-wing political agendas and demonize (and incite violence against) those insufficiently subservient to right-wing interests against the will of the corporations involved isn't “cozying up to corporations.”

I remind you that the capitol is also full of elected officials, and the president sent a mob to attack them.

That crossed a line and that's why he was banned.

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

What part of this indicates that the government has authority over who Twitter chooses to allow on its platform?

I don't know how is it in the USA, but in Mexico BY LAW Television Stations must give the presidency certain amount of time to speak. So, if this same situation happened in Mexico the president could easily go for 30 minutes on TV and talk his talk.

Maybe it would help if someone on the internet condescendingly pointed out to them that the first amendment doesn't apply to private platforms. I mean I know that's not what they're talking about at all, but it's what always seems to happen in these discussions.

At what point do these massive corporations effectively become a government? They govern what you can say, think and buy.

I don't want businesses to be forced to do business with people it doesn't want to there are many avenues to address grievances with that already. For instance in this case, the Trump admin can sue and have the concern addressed in court.

No business in the world can currently stand up to a government that wants to curtail it by the way.

This is not just "we don't want to do business with you". This is "we don't you want to have a platform anywhere".

I start caring when several tech monopolies co-ordinate to take down alternative platforms like parler.

Parler can be sideloaded on Android.

What happens when Amazon drops them from AWS?

AWS is not the only host. I’m sure China or Russia would be happy to provide service.

Buy some servers and set it up yourself, switch to digital ocean, find more classic service providers. What you thought AWS was the only way to host shitty websites?

> "I don't want businesses to be forced to do business with people it doesn't want to "

But we are not talking about forcing general businesses doing business with general people. We are taking about allowing publicly elected representatives of the people having a voice on the platform that the majority of the country uses for communication.

You are generalising, then building your argument on the generalisation.

The generalization is a good principle to uphold, wouldn’t you say?

Should newspapers be forced to publish the presidents tweets for those who are not on Twitter?

So? Hold a press conference or something. These platforms aren't even close to the only communication tool they can use why should one tool be forced to suffer them. My life is certainly better without seeing Trump's asinine and sometimes dangerous commentary on Twitter if I want it I'll go check my NewsNation app.

This right here is part of the problem. It's the government they can post commentary on a us.gov twitter clone or blog or whatever. I don't even agree that outside of government funds we should provide special treatment for our elected officials. We certainly have the resources to establish any communication tool they could possibly conceive of outside of private business.

When they start getting serious anti-trust lawsuits brought against them seems a good point.

I feel like that's something that's been forgetten I this situation, we aren't talking about normal companies, we are talking about companies that are so freaking big that the government has to go and actively prune them to prevent them from crippling their own markets.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/government

> the political direction and control exercised over the actions of the members, citizens, or inhabitants of communities, societies, and states; direction of the affairs of a state, community, etc.; political administration

> the form or system of rule by which a state, community, etc., is governed

Social media corporations influence what they'll allow to be said through their platform, and by means of their algorithms and the effects it has on your feeds and advertisements, they influence what you think and buy.

They do not rule your actions. They do not control laws, enforcement, government spending and military command. Certainly at the size and wealth of many corporations, they do heavily influence legislation though, and that certainly is worth examining.

But individuals have a choice whether or not to use social media. I'm just one person: I use Instagram but only follow a few people that post photos I like (I'll unfollow if a lot of posts diverge from photography), I avoid Facebook feeds completely and mostly avoid Twitter although the past few days have been an exception - I only visit one or two tech-related subreddits. This is just right now at a moment in time. Five years ago I would've said I use Facebook daily and Twitter extremely rarely and what is Reddit, and I've posted a few photos on Instagram but it doesn't really interest me. It's always a shifting landscape. (I once had a Google+ profile...)

When other governments recognize you as a government, then whatever else is true about you, you are a government. Usually this is because you have a military with certain capabilities, but I guess in this new century there could be other options, like money or information.

> At what point do these massive corporations effectively become a government?

When they exercise a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within some geographic domain.

> They govern what you can say, think and buy.

No, they don't. They govern what can be published and sold on their platforms, which aren't the exclusive venues for sale or publishing.

I love how this is 100% a liability issue and everyone jumps to the First Amendment like automatons. Twitter and Facebook are each gonna blow hundreds of millions of dollars dealing with litigation from the fallout of the other day. They have zero obligation to host insane seditious rhetoric or the people who have encouraged it.

Is it a liability issue? Section 230?

(2)Civil liability

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—

(A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or

(B)any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).[1]

Section 230 doesn't protect you from everything. It is a band aid.

Specifically, it says that you have to show that you have tried to prevent malevolent content in good faith. You can't just let it sit there and fester on your servers and pretend that you're covered. Section 230 essentially requires moderation of content.

They knew what was going on. They let it happen anyway. They are liable. They don't want to be liable again.

> Specifically, it says that you have to show that you have tried to prevent malevolent content in good faith.

No, it doesn't, for the type of liability for hosted content, rather than its removal/restriction, that it applies to at all.

> You can't just let it sit there and fester on your servers and pretend that you're covered.

Yes, you can. 230 has more than one area of protection. Two of them are:

(1) You (as a service provider or another user) aren't liable as a publisher for user-generated content that you aren't the origin of. 47 USC Sec. 230(c)(1)

(2) As a provider, you also aren't liable for good faith efforts to restrict access to offensive content or enable content providers the ability to restrict access to offensive content. 46 USC Sec 230(c)(2)

But, notably, Section 230 doesn't apply to criminal liability at all, and there is a real risk of criminal liability under the law against material support for terrorism for knowingly providing any service that you know is supporting some of the acts that have occurred or which have been reported to be now being publicly planned on social media platforms.

> Is it a liability issue?

Yes, it's a criminal liability issue.

> Section 230?

Section 230 provides immunity from certain civil liability. It doesn't provide any immunity from criminal liability, such as that for providing “any property, tangible or intangible, or service [...] except medicine or religious materials” while “knowing [...] that they are to be used in preparation for, or in carrying out, a violation of” any of a wide variety of federal criminal statutes, several of which would apply to events like the Capitol attack or the follow-on already being planned on social media, “or in preparation for, or in carrying out, the concealment of an escape from the commission of any such violation, or attempts or conspires to do such an act” under 18 USC Sec 2339A (“Providing material support to terrorists”.)

This creates a positive obligation to act on knowledge of the organization of such acts on your platform, that Section 230 cam’t immunize against.

What criminal act? He hasn't been arrested or impeached. His words were quite vague. If we just start assuming people are guilty then I fear our system has failed. This is really an issue for the courts (in this case impeachment) to decide.

It would possible apply to Facebook events, if those events have any description of violence.

> I love how this is 100% a liability issue and everyone jumps to the First Amendment like automatons.

Liability is government action, and is limited by the First Amendment. That’s why the US has much less defamation liability than many other countries with closely related legal systems; the Constitutional protection free speech and press prevents the government from imposing liability where other governments have.

Every single one of these actions will have the opposite effect. You cannot ban people into submission. Instead, you’ll only get more extremists and more fracturing of culture.

This seems like psychology 101 to me, but apparently the bright minds in Silicon Valley know what’s best for us more than we do. After all, they have been spying on us and collecting data for years. Maybe they do.

When you do something sufficiently idiotic, like sending a mob of radicalized trigger happy lunatics that believe in alternate reality games (namely Q) to attack the capitol, which is full of elected officials (just like Trump) representing every state, then you fucking DESERVE to be deplatformed.

In fact, not only he deserves to be banned, he deserves to be outed by his own cabinet then sent to jail.

There are probably variances among polls, but this sample from 2000 shows 18% of Americans believed the election was stolen[0] (and it heavily leans Democratic).

Before the 2020 election, we see "record low" confidence, particularly among Republicans[1].

After the election, this poll shows 34% believe the win was not legitimate[2], nearly double from 20 years earlier.

There are several differences between 2000 and 2020[3], the biggest being that 2020 was not a close Election. Biden won 306-232 in the Electoral College, and 81,281,502 (51.3%) to 74,222,593 (46.9%) in popular votes. Yet the disbelief is double.

Donald Trump has been claiming election fraud even when he won in 2016, but his own task force found little evidence[4]. What explains such a change in belief?

In my opinion, this is where amplifying voices that espouse opinions further from the mainstream and center of the political spectrum (extremism) causes that to spread, for culture to fracture, or in a word, polarization.

So given the options of making it easy to reach everyone on mainstream social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Reddit vs pushing extremes out of the mainstream megaphone, it seems that the better option is the latter. Extremism (and polarization) will likely happen either way, but it seems like amplifying and accelerating it is actually the worse option.

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/2188/black-americans-feel-cheat...

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/321665/confidence-accuracy-elec...

[2] https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=3685

[3] https://www.npr.org/2020/11/13/934190243/fact-check-whats-ha...

[4] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/06/02/low-rates-o...

There is lower confidence because there have been more issues. 2020 has been a hectic year. Ascribing the lower confidence entirely to the media is not a convincing argument.

Regardless, that’s not really my point. A sizable portion of the population thinks the election was fishy. Saying, “Too bad, you’re dumb and wrong” doesn’t accomplish anything when it comes to reducing polarization.

I genuinely don’t see the problem with a robust investigation that puts the country as ease, and I don’t understand why anyone would be against such a thing.

Not to mention that removing “extremist” voices entirely would have prevented, say, the Civil Rights movement from occurring. At the time it was absolutely not mainstream. A blanket rule against non-mainstream media is clearly a bad idea, but everyone is too short-sighted to understand that.

> Saying, “Too bad, you’re dumb and wrong”

Not sure anyone said that. Judges reviewed court cases, and failing to find legitimate cases, dismissed them. That's not saying "you're dumb and wrong." That's saying - you do not have a case because you don't have evidence.

> a robust investigation

It sounds like each side defines a "robust investigation" differently. Given that judges from both major political parties dismissed nearly every court filing, and there is still no tangible evidence of widespread election fraud, when do we stop "investigating?"

The problem with theories made without evidence is that there is no way to "disprove" them because they are not falsifiable statements[0].

In this case, the request seems to be to have everyone who wants to believe whether or not there was widespread election fraud would need to review 160 million votes with their own eyes, rather than believe the bipartisan election officials as well as the bipartisan judges that reviewed the court filings. That's an unreasonable bar to cross.

[0] http://www.butte.edu/departments/cas/tipsheets/thinking/cons...

Unfalsifiability

> Because it is unfalsifiable, a conspiracy theory is not provable or disprovable.

> Conspiracy theory is untestable because it invariably proposes that the evidence has been tampered with.

CONSPIRACY THEORY & CONSPIRACISM

> WE are a small, dedicated group of freedom fighters and freethinkers. We are soldiers, rebels in the fight for good against evil.

> YOU are clueless. Why can't you see what's going on here?

> THEY have hidden or destroyed all the evidence that would implicate them and have manufactured false evidence that exculpates them.

> YOU are close-minded. In fact, you are probably one of THEM.

Referencing a bunch of random academic sources doesn’t make your argument any stronger.

The attitude of the media and the Democratic Party in general has absolutely been “You’re dumb and wrong.” As my initial comment said, this accomplishes the exact opposite thing. People feeling lost and ripped off aren’t going to suddenly change their mind because talking heads on CNN assured them everything was legit. Especially when these sources spent the last four years becoming highly partisan. It’s difficult to even recognize The NY Times anymore, they’ve fallen so far. Skepticism seems like a rational move to me.

‘Courts dismissing cases’ is not equivalent to an investigation. As I said before, my primary concern is reducing polarization. I really don’t care how much it costs. Any price is worth avoiding serious civil unrest.

Parties come to agreements on the extent of investigations all the time and there is zero reason a similar compromise couldn’t be worked out for the sake of the country. Of course, no one will do this, because it doesn’t benefit them personally.

It took me about ten minutes but I went through one of the claims from here[0].

So I looked up Minnesota voter registration counts[1] and Minnesota 2020 vote results[2]. I put this in a spreadsheet and looked at totals per county, and any examples of turnout exceeding eligibility. The percentage ranged from 76.9% to to as high as 92.6%. In no case did it exceed 100%, let alone 350% as claimed in a YouTube video. Given that on my first attempt to validate a claim of implied voter fraud (if more votes were actually cast than eligible) I was unable to, I feel there's no reason to investigate that particular claim further. Presumably each of these so called "proofs" follow this pattern. If any did not, I would be shocked if no one outside of conservatively-biased journalism was able to go through each such instance and find sufficient proof that justified further investigation. Sure I'm just one person taking the minimum of effort on one instance (the first I could readily disprove on the list without exhaustive efforts), so I did not go through every item and spend all day. This is just an internet comment, and despite my efforts, I assume I will still change exactly zero minds. But it reaffirms that what some are calling proof and justification is not even accurate, let alone validation.

[0] https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/11/election_fr...

[1] https://www.sos.state.mn.us/election-administration-campaign...

[2] https://www.sos.state.mn.us/elections-voting/election-result...

Also, the media was running election security fearmongering stories since the day Trump won in 2016.

Liberals didn't denounce "Hamilton Electors" very strongly in 2016--though, admittedly, Clinton and most democratic leadership didn't support those efforts, and a larger share of congressional republicans supported Trumps attempt at the same thing.

The number of democrats who thought the 2016 election result was fraudulent was pretty high.

Democratic intelligence committee members outright lied about their evidence for years re Russiagate because it hurt trump.

And Democrats were laying groundwork for contested election this time around too. Hillary Clinton essentially suggested Biden never concede if he lost--implying that a loss would equal fraud.

None of this is as nearly as bad as Trump is doing. But it certainly helps Trump destroy any norms prohibiting bad behavior.

A growing number of people think that the election is illegitimate, and your solution is to suppress them? That's a really bad idea in a democracy like ours that lauds our history of overthrowing a tyrannical government, and it is very likely to trigger a violent response.

Voter ID laws, paper ballots, removal of voting machines, and a promise to audit the election would basically eliminate the risk of conflict. Why not do those instead? Our democracy needs to be perceived as legitimate to survive, doesn't it?

First, I don't think the 74 million Trump voters are being suppressed. The vast majority of them still have Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. The removal of extreme messages from these platforms should only be removing those condoning the extreme messages. Are you saying those extremists speak for all Trump voters?

And those extremists already committed and are planning further violence. There is no good reason to maintain support for their violent plans on popular platforms, and enable recruiting efforts.

A growing number of people believing something that Trump claims but has been disproven repeatedly isnot a desirable outcome. Rather let's reverse that trend.

They should figure out how evidence and proof works and start taking it seriously. Go read https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/18/this-migh... and realize things like the Navarro Report are not documents of proof but persuasive essays that fail the minimum standards of basic research. Like a conspiracy, he hand waves over his evidence which he claims is not publicly accessible, but only he has special access to. Then he just uses a lot of speculation about what's possible. This isn't grounds for an exhaustive, wasteful investigation, because we are not starting from a place of evidence and reason, but merely the propaganda of a Trump machine that wants to maintain his power.

Removing the most extreme views can only serve to reverse this troubling trend of citizens listening to Trump over hundreds of reputable news organizations. To think otherwise is conspiracy thinking!

I generally agree private businesses are free to do what they want. However, when private businesses have so much control over how society communicates and operates, like Twitter, limits need to be put in place over what should be allowed. Twitter, Google, Reddit... all of them have become virtue echo chambers, if you don't agree with the main conversation or how the leaders of the company feel, your silenced by being banned, voted down, and hidden.

Something needs to change.

https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/inte...

In what way is anything Twitter doing an act of Congress?

Any law made forcing Twitter to be used by an agent of the government would be a direct violation of the Constitution.

Being allowed to moderate your own platform, and for users to vote on the amplification of your message is their own exercise of free speech.

ACLU Counsel's actual statement was equivocal af. They aren't the standard bearer on this issue. They just aren't.

Yes that's right. There are 5 things they ask Biden for on the ACLU website for speech, privacy and technology. Moderation policy is not on the list. I think this article needs to understood in the scope of the ACLU overall priorities.

Ban the federal use of, and funding for, facial recognition technology

Support the introduction and passage of federal comprehensive consumer privacy legislation

Expand access to broadband internet access services

Restore net neutrality rules

Reinstate broadband privacy rules

https://www.aclu.org/news/topic/our-asks-bidens-civil-libert...

> It is our hope that these companies will apply their rules transparently to everyone.

The trouble is rules need to be interpreted. Not inciting violence means calling for a valid protest might not be legal, or raising issues about a truly rigged election is not allowed.

There’s too many people talking hot air on social media for rules to to be argued over by lawyers and review boards against every grievance.

These companies have near monopoly control on the flow of information. Like it or not, they are the new public square. Just telling someone that's banned from Twitter, Facebook, etc., "but oh don't worry, you're still free to go downtown and hold up a sign and spread your message!", while everyone else is able to reach millions of people instantly, is not a solution, and you all know it isn't. Telling someone they can start their own website and not use Twitter, and then de-platforming the website they start, is not a solution, and you all know it isn't.

Seriously, look at the state of things. The left has decided to censor the President of the United States. They routinely censor and de-platform anyone that has differing political opinion, and they use disgusting tactics to do so, by just calling anyone that disagrees with them racist, evil, inciting violence etc., no matter how remotely those labels actually apply. Not to mention that the words no longer have any meaning and have been constantly redefined to mean whatever they want it to mean.

Anyone with different politics are banned from their platforms. If they try to start their own platforms then DNS providers ban them, payment providers ban them, companies drop them, app stores ban them. Like someone mentioned elsewhere, what's next? Does anyone not a leftist need to create their own mobile networks? Lay their own fiber? When the left puts an end to this too, what's next? It's already gone to an unacceptable level of censorship and destruction.

You really want to see how evil starts? This is it. A group of people so convinced that they're morally just, better than everyone else, just like every evil regime that ever existed, that have justified to themselves that everyone else is evil, that it's fine to do evil things to them, that's it's fine to literally burn books because the knowledge conflicts with their ideology, that it's OK to do evil things to those that they've deemed to be evil, and that, conversely, nothing they do is evil. That everything they do is "fighting for Democracy!", yet everything anyone else does is the literal death of Democracy. The supreme irony being that of course complete censorship and destruction of any opposing ideas is so obviously the death of democracy. Always getting your way is not democracy.

It's evil, pure and simple, from top to bottom. If you ever wondered how an evil regime forms, how people support it and cheer it on and let it happen, you're witnessing it right here and now.

Twitter just does not have anywhere close to monopoly control on the flow of information. Only 20% of the country uses it at all.

So you keep saying, but I have to wonder what’s the total reach? If 20% are reading, are they then immediately retelling each to 2 more people? And what if every single news caster, PR agent, and manager is among the 20%?

Also, how much is too much? Is 51% the red line?

I think most fruitful approach is to borrow from the antitrust law - a business should be large enough to distort the entire market. Not quite certain how to apply the metric in this case, but that’s the idea.

I think that's a reasonable argument - it's just very different from the idea that someone literally cannot communicate their message if they're not allowed to do it on Twitter.

Would you agree that the market place of ideas is crippled by the presence of a “monopoly”?

Not destroyed as a government could do, but crippled.

I don't think it is. There was a time in the 90s when AOL was in a similarly dominant position with much stricter moderation policies, but the marketplace of ideas never felt crippled. Everyone just understood that the AOL sandbox was a sanitized common ground, and if you wanted frank discussions on complex or controversial topics you needed to go elsewhere. (And I don't know of any topic, no matter how controversial or offensive, that doesn't have some active forum where it's regularly discussed.)

The Social Media conglomerate has become an essential utility, they should be regulated as one.

Especially the combined ban on Parler, Apple, Google, and Amazon together just destroyed that company. In that same tune its like twitter being blamed for any crime committed or planned on facebook and the ISP just dropping twitter. It is insane, Google, Twitter, Facebook pretty much control most of the information that is on the www. Furthermore, the have AI designed to get the most reactions out of people. "Reactions" in the case of the last few years has been anger and hatered on both sides.

Its not a question of who they banned, but the power these companies wield is unprecedented. They literally have the power to destroy companies and "win" elections because of who they chose to portray via their mediums.

If they want to see 'unchecked power' just repeal 230.

If section 230 is repealed, American Internet companies would die and the ones in Europe and Asia would take over.

Think again.

I find it strange the statement is a screenshot from a third-party twitter account. Where's the official statement from ACLU?

Where was the ACLU's handwringing when these platforms were used to disseminate lies and sow dissension?

I think you're misunderstanding the ACLU's arguments here. They're fairly consistently pro free-speech, mostly regardless of what that means. There's not much handwringing from them about "bad" speech because they're OK with bad speech being out there. I don't think they're fans of Trump, as their statement makes clear, but they're worried about the precedent that banning him sets.

> they're OK with bad speech being out there

Might be time for a bit more nuanced view:

Facebook admits it was used to 'incite offline violence' in Myanmar https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934

Four dead in Bangladesh riot over offensive Facebook post https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/21/asia/riot-deaths-facebook-pos...

A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/21/world/asia/facebook-sri-l...

No. The ACLU was built on rejecting social harm arguments to free speech.

> The ACLU was built on rejecting social harm arguments to free speech.

So they're OK with yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater? Or having a president incite a riot or a war?

> So they're OK with yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater?

Assuming that the ACLU generally supports the Brandenburg v Ohio standard, which overturned the US v Schenck standard, I'd say the answer to that question is "yes".

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

Sorry for the lazy shorthand; here’s the fuller version:

What Holmes said after it, however, did become a standard for future free speech arguments. “The question in every case,” he said, “is whether the words are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.”

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/627134/is-it-illegal-to-...

Just pulling from your own quote:

> is whether the words are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger

The "clear and present danger" standard is no longer used. It's been overturned in favor of the "imminent lawless action" standard. Falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater does not fall under imminent lawless action.

Even they have limits to that, as we saw from the aftermath of Charlottesville.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/charlottesville-violence...

> Romero told the Journal “If a protest group insists, ‘No, we want to be able to carry loaded firearms,’ well, we don’t have to represent them. They can find someone else,” he added.

> The ACLU still officially condemns the hate speech of white supremacists, Romero told the LA Times, but “at the same time, we believe that even odious hate speech, with which we vehemently disagree, garners the protection of the 1st Amendment when expressed non-violently.”

> “We’ve had people with odious views, all manner of bigots. But not people who want to carry weapons and are intent on committing violence,” [ACLU spokeswoman Stacy Sullivan] said.

That decision wasn't about their speech, per se, but about the violence of their actions. To be specific: the first amendment protects the right to peaceably assemble and that's where the ACLU has drawn the line.

I think it's simplistic to point to Facebook as instrumental in these instances of unrest. Sure, they were used as an instrument of communication but had Facebook not been there people would just use SMS or IRC. The 2002 Gujarat unrest, for instance, predates Facebook. We know what deadly unrest still forms in the absence of Facebook and other social media. I don't think we have evidence to claim that social media exacerbates unrest, versus the simple fact that more people are on social media and it's becoming a more popular communication tool than SMS.

There are some key differences: Facebook/Twitter/YouTube don’t just send messages, they also chooses which ones to promote to a wide audience. SMS only spreads if I know your number and think to add you. IRC only spreads if I choose to connect to a server and join a channel. In contrast, Facebook will promote things to you unprompted and will use your friends’ names and pictures to promote them. YouTube will suggest videos and start playing them automatically (there was a time where almost any gaming related video would get unhinged anti-feminist rants next because the guys who were outraged by Anita Sarkeesian’s existence showed high engagement numbers and the ad maximization algorithm suggested other things they liked).

This is why Trump et al. are so outraged like this. He’s a millionaire and could afford his own copy of WordPress but that won’t come with a free recruitment machine.

The USPS has been used to disseminate hate speech and plan criminal activities.

Should we ban the post service? Clearly they have no ability to regulate the hateful content they disseminate.

> Might be time for a bit more nuanced view

That's a valid view for you to hold. I was just pointing out that the ACLU does not hold the same view. Their arguments in this case feel consistent with their own previous views, even while it's at odds with your views.

What’s the alternative? Force private companies to do business with people they don’t want to regardless of their behavior? Should an ad agency have to work with every client that walks in the door?

Haven't newspaper been cherry picking what to publish for years? How is this different than the top editor/president/ceo biasing writing or television?

It's not. The uproar about this is primarily ideological dissembly.

I really appreciate the ACLU stepping up to bat here. The organization once defended the right of Nazis to march. As progressivism replaces liberalism on the left, it has faced a lot of internal pressure to compromise on its free speech commitment: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-aclu-retreats-from-free-exp.... Glad there are some old school speech absolutists left at the ACLU.

How did antifa continued to get organized in the last 6 months? Did they have a purge of accounts? Any apps got banned from app stores?

> decision to suspend Trump from social media could set a precedent for big tech companies to silence less privileged voices.

They have it backwards: After years of progressively suspending increasingly important voices, they believe there is nothing they can't control, and every escalation means worse outcomes for those lower in the pecking order.

Plus compaines aren't abstract objects so it matters who the individual persons who make these decisions are.

Strange to see ACLU advocating for an authoritarian leader over civil rights of private organizations.

Pretty interesting how the ACLU becomes an enemy when they go after the employers of a sizable chunk of the users on this website.

Jack and Mark, have every right to kick Trump off their platforms, and maybe I would have done the same. I still don't like that its up to them to decide for us all.

They decided nothing for you. You are still free to have conversations with Trump. It's not to you to decide who they do business with.

It's a problem. We're getting too much online censorship.

Muzzling Trump was quite a step. Probably justified, though, because he finally reached the inciting to riot point.

To the people here who are happy about these companies banning Trump, his supporters, and their respective conspiracy theorists: you are nothing but useful idiots.

Beware. When it's your turn to be dissatisfied with their unchecked power, it'll be much too late.

It's not that I'm happy, it's that I just don't give a fuck. Your doom and gloom falls completely flat because being banned from Twitter is the mildest possible consequence these people will ever face.

Among the "protesters" (insurrectionists) there multiple people in military gear carrying zip-tie handcuffs. They made it to the Senate Chamber.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/01/08/zip-...

I think these companies have done the right thing. Enough is enough.

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