Hacker News Reader

Comment by DJPocari | Hacker News Reader

Where do we draw the line on how we censor the internet? Obviously actual terrorist group sites can and should be taken down, but this feels like it's getting more murky than that.

- Should we be okay with Facebook censoring these groups?

- Should we be okay with Google censoring search results?

- Should we be okay with Apple censoring apps?

- Should we be okay with AWS censoring websites?

- Should we be okay with GoDaddy censoring domains?

- Should we be okay with Verizon censoring internet traffic?

Giant corporations aren’t simply following court orders, they are acting on their own now. This is problematic for a multitude of reasons. The precedent has been established.

EDIT: By "actual terrorist groups" I mean those that are classified as such by the US Government (e.g. FBI, CIA, NSA). While I think QAnon and Proud Boys have many of the characteristics of a terrorist group, they are not classified as such (personally I think they should be, but it's the government's job to decide that).

View on HN

Why does it feel more murky than that? There are actual threats being posted against lawmakers, and then we had a violent storming of the capital by those people, many of them armed, asking where those lawmakers are.

I mean...that image alone. "Violence works. Make them afraid", accompanied with text then saying "How about make them hang?", and showing lawmakers hiding in the Capital.

The fact it's a third party forum that these terrorist threats and planning are taking place doesn't really change the fact it's still facilitating terrorism.

But this isn't the same as ISIS recruiting off of Twitter where the FBI/CIA/NSA monitors that discourse and contacts the respective platforms. This is a company deciding what should and shouldn't be censored.

There's a difference between protected speech and yelling "FIRE!" in a movie theater. But with the way things are moving, more and more speech is being classified as "hate speech." The line between offensive speech and violent words is getting more murky. I think there needs to be clear standards and clear enforcement.

'The line between offensive speech and violent words is getting more murky.'

So do you think Amazon is falling on the wrong side of it here? Because even if it's more murky, if they're waiting until it's -very clearly violent-, egregiously so, with real physical criminal acts occurring because of it, I'm pretty sure no matter how murky the line is, they're well on the side of "violent words", not "offensive speech".

Your concern only applies if they're trying to draw the line in an area that is murky. I'd contend this is not.

> This is a company deciding what should and shouldn't be censored.

are you saying that platforms cannot choose what to moderate because of a right to free speech? that's nonsense. you want free speech, go outside with a bullhorn, no one will arrest you - that's all that means.

Even if it is okay for Facebook and Twitter to impose strict moderation policies, is it okay for AWS, Verizon, or GoDaddy?

I just think it's a slippery slope, and we desperately need to cement our feet in the ground and draw a line somewhere.

Also, when an overwhelming majority of public discourse takes place online (thanks 2020), the people choosing who does and does not get access to the centralized systems have a CRAZY amount of power. Yelling in a public square isn't how ideas spread anymore.

Is it Ok to force owners of a private company to host content they find objectionable? Gay porn on the Hobby Lobby forums?

AWS is a private business, they don't have to host anything they don't want to. Forcing them to host parler would be an egregious violation of their right to choose who they associate with.

I think a way more interest question is this - what about modern US conservatism makes violence so attractive to it? You cannot have a conservative forum that will not rapidly devolve into violent threats. Even /r/conservative, the more mainstream and mature conservative subreddit is absolutely full of people threatening revolution, backs against the wall, etc.

The reality is that we as a society are getting numb to this and are actually being far too tolerant.

You see the same unhinged types on left leaning platforms. Online forums attract the fringe loudmouths. Parler is not representative of modern US conservatism. I call myself conservative and I've never in my life visited the site.

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

Edit: to be clear, in context, I am saying that these nutjob posters on Parler are not representative. I understand that mainstream conservatives may also have a presence there.

My problem sometimes with this line of reasoning is that some rights are more important than others, we've already decided that as a fact.

For instance "Forcing them to host parler would be an egregious violation of their right to choose who they associate with." Is true, but we force companies not to discriminate based on Age, Sex, Religion, etc. So your right of who you can associate with isn't iron clad.

We could just as easily add "Freedom of Expression" to the list of things you can not discriminate against, and suddenly the argument holds no water.

I'm not an American, however I sometimes enjoy the irony of America where one side of the political spectrum will be angry that a bakery is forced to bake a cake for a gay couple, but think it's against the customers rights for AWS to not host content they don't agree with.

Whilst the other thinks the baker should be forced to bake a cake against their will, and AWS is free to drop any business they feel like.

> we force companies not to discriminate based on Age, Sex, Religion, etc.

none of these qualities pose a threat to others in our civilized society. however, spoken words have a direct influence on anyone who hears them. so there is in fact a difference which is not simply arbitrary.

So you're saying censorship has no threat to civilized society?

>“Republics and limited monarchies derive their strength and vigor from a popular examination into the action of the magistrates,” Benjamin Franklin declared. By sharing knowledge and sparking debate, a free press invigorates and educates the nation’s citizens. Freedom will be “a short-lived possession” unless the people are informed, Thomas Jefferson once said. To quote John Adams: “The liberty of the press is essential to the security of the state.”

However you want to define these apps, they're basically falling under the first Amendment. Obviously there are limits which are carved out in law. However how would you feel if newspaper printers elected to no longer print specific news papers backing one candidate or another?

In an ideal world, the market would separate the wheat from the chaff, and these platforms would dry up and die on their own.

most things you quote do not apply to a society where you can reach 70 million people, effortlessly and immediately with 0 cost. 200 years ago there was no way to easily impersonate via a fake video, photo, or recording. wax seals were used to prove authenticity of official mail.

> However how would you feel if newspaper printers elected to no longer print specific news papers backing one candidate or another?

like they have been doing since they have existed?

i assume you mean if all newspapers decided to stop printing the same side of the story. if that side of the story was suggesting the vice president needs to be assasinated, then i think that's an okay viewpoint to marginalize before it reaches the entire country.

>like they have been doing since they have existed?

>i assume you mean if all newspapers decided to stop printing the same side of the story. if that side of the story was suggesting the vice president needs to be assasinated, then i think that's an okay viewpoint to marginalize before it reaches the entire country.

No I was saying if the provider of printing to say your local news paper was friends with the Mayor and there was a corruption story, and they opted to decline the business of the local newspaper and refuse to print it.

Not every newspaper owns their own printing.

I hear what you're saying, I'm just saying the laws need to catch up, we can't depend on each company being socially pressured to do this or that. If we regulate the internet like a utility then we need to move to that world.

i think it's reasonable that if you are planning violence, you should not be allowed to do it on a public platform, amplified to millions of people. do it in secret, like the good old days!

Who has lost the ability to speak freely online? The only people who have been banned from speaking are a few high profile people who broke the T&Cs, and were recognized for their toxicity.

This is deplatforming -a platform-, not those people. Every individual on Parler can go create accounts and post on Twitter and Facebook and etc...unless, of course, their toxicity causes them to be banned there.

Nothing legally, or fairly, forces one platform to host another platform.

"If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech."

-Noam Chomsky

i wonder if his views would be the same if tens of thousands of people were chanting "hang chomsky" because they were convinced by "free speech" that he was a pedophile, through cheap and easy dissemination of photoshopped images and ai-generated voice "recordings".

it's difficult to map pre-internet ideals to 2021.

Also, pre-deepfake ideals.

Chomsky is talking about free speech in the context of academic debate.

Death threats and similar do not fit in any shape or form into "free speech".

Downvoted for educating people on free speech - oh the irony!

Regarding the "FIRE!" analogy - there are journalists such as Glenn Greenwald arguing that media and politicians fearmongering the specter of right wing terrorism are the becoming the ones yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded movie theater, and the mass deplatforming of regular conservative groups and proposed Patriot Act 2.0 measures that will ensue is the movie theater suffering disproportionate and unnecessary harm as a result.

Is there actually mass deplatforming of regular conservative groups? Where is this happening?

On Facebook, “WalkAway” a community that was devoted to compiling hundreds of thousands of ex-Democrat video and text testimonials was banned. It was not about Q and didn’t advocate breaking into government buildings.

It was the most wholesome right wing space I’ve ever seen on the internet. People sharing their experiences being alienated by either how they saw media manipulate a story they knew about or by how divisive partisanship and cancel culture personally affected them. Welcoming each other in the comments regardless of their sexual orientation or race. It would have been a useful place to learn from but now it’s gone.

kathy griffen posted a photo of herself with a severed donald trump head. i mean cnn did ask her not to attend a new years Eve party but shouldn't she be deplatformed?

the deplatforming policy is impossible to define and will be enforced arbitrarily. it's going to satisfy no one.

I think "accompanied by actual physical acts of violence related to said speech" is a pretty decently high bar, that this incident clears.

Until you have an incident you actually, rather than hypothetically, object to, why do you assume Amazon is going to aggressively deplatform software platforms? They have a pretty clear financial incentive not to.

>kathy griffen posted a photo of herself with a severed donald trump head

And she was suspended for that.

She has reposted since being suspended and apparently it's okay now.

https://mobile.twitter.com/kathygriffin/status/1323893513226...

Yep still funny too

Exactly ,,, you use a platform to call for murdering people in the name of second civil war .. well you get banned. That is the least a civilized society can do.

When did Trump encourage murder? This is hyperbole.

Who said anything about Trump? Just so you haven't noticed Trump is not that important anymore.

Who said anything about Trump being important?

Lets agree to agree on this.

Agreed, but like it or not, he is the flagship of this wave of censorship. His ban was the first shot over the bow by the social media giants, if you will.

He tweeted that he wouldn't be at Biden's inauguration, a clear sign that it was okay to attack it. /s

Seriously, that was Twitter's argument for why they banned him...

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...

We're talking about parler getting booted off AWS, what are you talking about?

I really don’t understand this mentality. Why wouldn’t you want this publicly available? You really want domestic terrorists functioning underground? Not only does this prevent people from seeing and judging and debating such an idea, but it also creates a precedent for a stronger surveillance state.

So Amazon, Apple and Google should intentionally keep Parler around as a honeypot to snag right wing terrorists and the rest of society should just pretend we don’t know how they keep getting arrested?

I think Amazon, Apple and Google should rely on the authorities to tell them what can and can’t legally be present on their platform. If something is already clearly illegal, then sure, take action immediately, but there has not been any mention of what Parler is allowing to be illegal. If it’s deemed illegal then I fully support deplatforming.

But, per your original post, wouldn't deplatforming then just be pushing it underground again? While letting it get to the point the ideas can spread and radicalize others?

I think once you’re to the point that something is illegal you’re fringe enough to where the threat is very small. There’s a big difference in the size of groups that say “we should do X” and people actually leaving their houses and “doing X”.

But the people saying "we should do X" help create the ones "doing X". When the crazy action you're contemplating also gets social acceptance and support from a group of like-minded people, all calling for it to be done, it stops seeming so crazy.

ISIS was famous for radicalizing people around the world thanks to their publicly shared content on the internet. I say we let them fester in the shadows where these awful ideas will have fewer vectors of minds to infect.

In fact, there's some research about this - https://twitter.com/asbruckman/status/1347987974177357833

It was done back in August last year, so not in response to recent events.

The findings were, essentially, it doesn't reduce the individuals toxicity; it does reduce its spread.

There are tweets from 2016 calling for Trump's assassination. When is Apple going to take down the Twitter app?

Here's just a search I did now: https://twitter.com/hashtag/assassinatetrump

The parent comment was not asking where to draw the line on _what_ to censor. The question was "where do we draw the line on _how_ we censor the internet?"

E.g. If your ISP decides that something you posted on Twitter violates some standard of their own devise, should they be allowed to disconnect you?

ISPs should be common carriers. Unfortunately the current administration disagrees.

At what point should something like AWS be a "common carrier" though?

When it's transporting goods (data) to the general public without discrimination, for the public good and necessity. Since that's the definition of a common carrier.

AWS isn't fundamentally transporting goods but providing a service (the transmission of data happens via a common carrier between you and it). It's not clear that AWS access is a public necessity. And it's never attempted to claim it does so without discrimination.

According to the GOP, yes. -I- personally support net neutrality however. As well as the net being a need to operate in society.

But the ability to run a workload on AWS? They're a business. I'm totally okay with them deciding to stop doing business with me. That also has a GOP precedent, what with that whole "You don't have to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple" thing.

ISPs are businesses too, so that's not really the relevant distinction here. Why would you be okay with AWS deciding not to do business with you based on something you said, but not your ISP? Seems rather arbitrary to me.

"(I support...) As well as the net being a need to operate in society."

That's why. Access to a company's compute resources is not a need. Further, there are options, many different cloud vendors with different T&Cs, different allowed things, different jurisdictions, cultural expectations, etc. If I manage to break the T&Cs to all of them, that's kind of on me, and doesn't preclude me from having access to compute resources (I just have to buy them).

The internet? I've got one ISP option. And without it, I'm cut off from a large part of what it means to function in this day and age.

> many of them armed

I haven't heard of more than 5 firearms. No mention of where those were. Videos I have seen just show flags, signs, cameras, and mobile phones. What were these "many" armed with?

One guy rolled up with a truck off molotov cocktails and firearms. Several IEDs were discovered and detonated by bomb squads.

So one guy is now many?

Nine firearms plus one long gun, one container of molotovs, several pipe bombs, and two IEDs were seized by police. Additionally several released chemical agents at police. One beat a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher. One was photographed with a set of zip tie restraints.

And that's just what was captured obviously. Presumably for everything found there were several more things concealed.

Is the guy in custody? Who is he? What's his background?

Pipe bombs, molotov cocktails, mace, plenty of arms other than firearms. This article has some links to more info: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/one-of-the-trump-sup...

It'll be simplest to watch the AG charge people, since they only file those charges if they're confident in a successful prosecution. Charges will probably be trickling in for months as they identify the insurrectionists.

Right, and BLM chanting kill the police, that should be encouraged by twitter and facebook????

Your logic defies me.

Keep on voting for pelosi so she could continue becoming rich off the backs of hardworking americans and eating 10k dollar ice cream

Creating accounts to break HN's guidelines like this will get your main account banned as well, so please don't do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If real threats are being posted against lawmakers, there should be a legal process to resolve the situation.

It's a good question, but for the record, I'm fine with the line being somewhere before Parler, which is full of people plotting political assassinations.

This happened to Gab.ai, too, but it happened after one of those plotters committed a mass murder, one he advertised on Gab, at the Tree of Life synagogue.

Yep I think its fine that parler is getting booted based on the content that is getting posted. Lets not pretend that all these companies are trying to squash people of a certain political group, they are simply banning users posting borderline illegal and violent content. You can quite easily use mainstream social media as long as you aren't posting about how someone should be beheaded.

>You can quite easily use mainstream social media as long as you aren't posting about how someone should be beheaded.

Is that so? Curious, because I was seeing a lot of guillotine memes from leftists last month.

When the leftists guillotine someone, this will become a more persuasive argument.

Isn't the whole point of this "deplatforming" to stop incitement?

Yes, after concrete evidence that the incitement is sincere, or being materially interpreted as sincere.

(For the record: I think the guillotine imagery is as offensive as the Pinochet helicopter stuff, which is to say, extraordinarily offensive, and I think less of anyone who uses it. That's easy for me to say though, because I'm also not a leftist.).

Ironically

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/08/jeff-bezos-guilloti...

Dispite my disagreeing with you and feeling pretty shafted by the removal of Parler, don't take it personally - you're an open source contributer who has earned my respect.

Did they name people, places, or times? A key factor in free speech legal cases is how credibly threatening something is — someone telling a friend “I’m going to strangle you!” after they get rickrolled is clearly not but someone saying “On <date>, we’re going to <place> to kill <politician>” is enough that the Secret Service might want to talk with you.

Another factor is the climate: nobody is using guillotines anywhere now but mass shootings are sadly common.

> You can quite easily use mainstream social media as long as you aren't posting about how someone should be beheaded.

https://thehill.com/sites/default/files/blogs/kathygriffintw...

Literally no person in the entire world believed this was an appeal for people to behead Donald Trump.

You’re a lot smarter than this, so my reaction to this is wondering why you would say this.

Say more? I'm being sincere.

There is absolutely no way you can be certain of the beliefs of the whole world in response to something. It’s hard enough to even feel confident you truly know the beliefs of a single person.

That alone is true, but this imagery itself is so grotesque that we ought to assume it led to a change in the degree of motive to cause harm. If you don’t believe me, consider a thought exercise where the identity of the person involved is exchanged with someone who did end up assassinated this way. Would it be reasonable to conclude this influenced it?

That doesn't seem at all plausible to me. Further, I don't think you can point to lots of serious "behead Trump" chatter in the opposition; conversely, I can easily point you to "hang Pence from the tree outside the Capitol" postings that were not kidding.

Anyways, we probably understand each other at this point and don't need to belabor this, even if we don't agree with each other.

I'm only responding to your point, I wasn't making any comparisons. Perhaps if taken literally what you said may be correct - the problem with this kind of imagery is not its advocacy of a specific technique, but allowing people to more clearly imagine it and normalizing it in their minds.

In any case, I stand by my claim that to say you can know the full effect on all minds of a certain image is a poor argument to make, since it's literally impossible to know. I hope you'll at least recognize that kind of claim is worth avoiding, if for no other reason that it inadvertently undermines any other point you are trying to make.

Here is a previous case of someone who took action that on the face of it was only egged on in hyperbolic political talk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Congressional_baseball_sh...

Can you cite a source on the connection between Kathy Griffin and the guy who shot Scalise?

As far as I know there isn't any documented. However your claim is "Literally no person in the entire world believed this was an appeal for people to behead Donald Trump." I think you are overstating the wide range of interpretations humans often have.

Like many assassins, the person who fired on a congressional sports practice did appear to be motivated by political animus that on the face of it would not include shooting up the players on a ball field. But that is what the person did. This is similar to the attempted assassination of the Arizona congressperson in response to the Alaskan politician's crosshair advertisements.

As a reasonable person it is difficult to understand that folks might not share your views because as a reasonable person one's views seem logical and well grounded. That is totally understandable.

I agree that Parler should be shut down, but going forward I think we need to rely on court systems with due process (or some new alternative system that specifically addresses digital censorship). I’m afraid of this becoming the norm.

Public discourse increasingly relies on these corporate platforms. I don’t think everyone quite understands the implications of normalizing this behavior, and to me that’s frightening.

For the record: I don't know if "shut down" is the optimal outcome. Credible moderation --- "no appeals to violence" --- would take it from dangerous to mere odiousness. But I don't know that anyone has a right to demand any private business host odious content, either.

But it's Parler's problem that they've hit this point with so little time to build credible moderation, not anybody else's. Me sowing, me reaping, &c &c.

Do you really expect "credible moderation" given that giving the RWNJ's a home is their stated business plan?

(And no - it isn't free speech, they're quite happy to ban non-conservatives)

I don't, but I'm just saying it could be done.

To be clear, it isn't being shut down. A private company has chosen not to host it on its servers. They can invest in servers and host it themselves, if they so choose.

It may seem like splitting hairs, but it is an important distinction to make.

Sure that's possible, but what if their domain registrar disables their domain name? What if Verizon limits web traffic to and from the website? The idea that that could happen used to be far fetched, but now I wouldn't be surprised.

Then perhaps letting people plot insurrection and violence against politicians and pretending you can’t moderate them isn’t a working business model.

AI moderation bots, here we come. And people complain about ContentID on Youtube...

Then they can find a registrar who wants their business.

Domain registars seems a bit more of a sticky wicket. That is quite a bit more complex than simply hosting your own website, and I have no way around it and I'm unsure as to what the solution should be, TBH. I'd say it should be under governmental control, but they move at a snail's pace and I doubt they could handle the volume.

As for monitoring and throttling personal web traffic from our homes, that's long been an issue which is already an issue and not just with Verizon. EFF has brought suit in the courts, but to no avail, as of yet. So as for being far fetched, not only is it not, it's happening now. Comcast regularly throttles traffic to gaming sites/services during peak television hours. What's the difference?

where does it end though? do the critics then attack any org that colocates their servers, anyone that provides peering?

i find it quite shocking how quickly this is all coming, over a drummed up hysteria.

Five people are dead and the heart of our democracy was invaded by a violent mob. There are no hysterics here.

just keep pushing people into corners, surely that will help to calm things down.

Heart of democracy or historic conference center with attached offices?

If democracy does not beat in hearts of all and instead resides in an old building far away then truely its count of future days is not high.

Hilarious how historic government symbols and tradition are suddenly cool again, after a summer of statues, monuments, and buildings being vandalized and toppled.

All the people who died chose to be there. It's not like bystanders died. They knew the risks going in. Plus, one died of stroke and another of a heart attack. Blaming those deaths on Parler is a little hysterical.

Well, personally, I'll never do business with AWS again, and I'll advocate against using them every place I work from now on (I already argue against using proprietary AWS services in order to keep things portable). Does that matter much to them? No, but I can only control what I do.

I fully agree but it's getting increasingly hard to make this argument with a straight face given that the tech companies in question still host numerous other hate groups. Twitter still allows the leaders of the Taliban and the Nation of Islam to post.

It's clear that the "line" we're talking about is arbitrarily set for different groups based on some unknown criteria, and that IMO is part of the problem.

I think the criterion is pretty clear: this stopped being a matter of speech or rhetoric, and started being a matter of real-world violence and unrest.

For the record, I think all extremists should be banned, including the Taliban and Iran.

Because the Taliban doesn't commit acts of real-world violence and unrest...?

I'm guessing it's because they don't advertise^ plans for violence in public... or on Twitter.

Edit: ^specific plans

https://twitter.com/Zabehulah_M33/status/1346373559812300800

This is the official spokesman of the Taliban posting a propaganda video of a militant bragging about waging jihad.

https://twitter.com/Zabehulah_M33/status/1343458261459218432

This is another video (and also see part2 of the tweet, which is posted as a reply to this one) where militants holding guns talk about their plan to kill the government leaders of Afghanistan.

These Silicon Valley-based corporations are no doubt highly ineffective at moderating content outside of a specific American, Anglophone context. Certainly the Rohingya know the fruits of their failure:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16574370

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15296442

Hmm, that sounds a whole lot like the basis for banings of Parler. Inability/unwillingness to moderate such things effectively.

In the end this is all about some virtue signaling towards their own employees (so that they don't start quitting and are not unhappy) and about money.

My apologies, I edited my comment but you responded before my update...

That said, a big difference is that the taliban are not actively inciting Americans to storm the capitol en masse.*

And there’s not much domestic debate that they’re a problem. My belief is Twitter was pushed to this extent by the fact that it’s the president of the US, an inherently credible figure with huge sway among American citizens.

*edit to add: by ‘actively’ I mean ‘successfully, across thousands of Americans.’ They both incite violence in the US, but so far only Trump et al have accomplished a riot in DC that killed police...

Also, I don’t think it’s unreasonable—or even controversial—that we would hold the _president of the United States_ to a higher standard of conduct than the taliban. Especially with respect to the impact he has on the day to day operations of the US and the actions of tens of millions of Americans...

In the current context, we aren't talking about the president of the united states, we're talking about a bunch of random people on Parler.

But if your point is that government officials should be held to a higher standard than random, non-official peoples, I agree... which is why it seems like an arbitrary wrong to me that the official leaders of the Taliban are still able to post videos calling for the death of nonbelievers.

If, rather, your point is that we don't care about the Taliban because the ongoing deaths of thousands of people in Afghanistan is something that our society cares less about than the death of a handful of Americans... well, I suppose you're right, but I'm not sure how I feel about agreeing with that.

You’re very right on two points^:

1. I’m getting mixed up vis a vis Parler vs Trump vs Twitter vs AWS vs the rest...and you’re right that it _is_ wrong for Twitter to give the Taliban a platform to spew vile shit. That said, I think the conduct of American officials is of much greater proximate concern than the Taliban off in Afghanistan...

2. ...but that doesn’t excuse senseless deaths of foreign people. It’s not surprising that Twitter aws et al are more responsive to active threats to American lives than Afghani lives, though it is disappointing—if it’s the case. But I’m not under the impression the Taliban is actively and publicly and widespreadly planning murder and riots on Twitter.

^at least these two, I’m not passing judgement on others.

you may think they should but they haven't. if there's not a huge wave of bans of the next few weeks then the hypocrisy will be impossible to ignore.

The line is very clear. We are not those people and we hold ourselves to a higher bar than them. We don't want to descend to their level. Hate for them shouldn't turn us into them.

I'm not sure who "we" is referring to, but if you're referring to America, the Nation of Islam is an American political/religious group based in Chicago that routinely calls for the death of Jewish people (they also advocate for the death of Asians, teach that all white people are satanic, and are anti-vaxxers). "We" already have descended to their level, and yet Twitter allows them to remain.

Not "we" as in "all of us". Lets keep the psychos out.

The criteria seem pretty clear. The reputational (and other) risks to their business passed a certain, admittedly ill-defined, threshold. If enough of the "right" people raise a public stink about other individuals or groups, those will get dropped too.

Parler is also full of people who aren’t plotting assassinations. And there are plenty of terrorists on Twitter too, but nobody wants to talk about that.

There's state sanctioned violence & there's uncontrolled violence. Authorities don't like competition, especially when they are on the take.

So Signal and Telegram should be banned as well from all IaaS, app stores etc. as well since Islamic terrorists have been shown to use them?

The fundamental question is not whether the line should be drawn before or after parler, but who should draw the line, who should decide what kind of websites are allowed to exist. We don't allow electricity providers to decide what kind of businesses are allowed to exist, similarly we should not allow hosting providers to decide what kind of websites are allowed to exist.

Then Twitter should be banned too because it's full of calls for political assassinations: https://twitter.com/hashtag/assassinatetrump

> Where do we draw the line on how we censor the internet? Obviously actual terrorist group sites can and should be taken down, but this feels more murky than that.

No, it doesnt. Actual terrorist group sites should be banned and kicked of whatever platforms they're operating on. No one, or no company, should be required to provide service to them.

I really struggle to see the issue here. If you allow calls for elected officials, or anyone, to be publically murdered, then it's free game for companys to refuse your service. It's pretty fucking simple imho.

"Obviously actual terrorist group sites can and should be taken down, but this feels more murky than that."

§ 2384. According to the statutory definition of sedition, it is a crime for two or more people within the jurisdiction of the United States: ... To oppose by force the authority of the United States government; to prevent, hinder, or delay by force the execution of any law of the United States; or.

Terrorists.

Okay, but the problem is that we aren't using the same systems that would be used to take down an ISIS website. Instead we are becoming increasingly reliant on corporate leaders defining where the line is drawn. There is no due process or appeals system; they are the prosecutor and the judge.

I think it's fair to say that Facebook/Twitter/AWS/whatever has been more lenient in favor of these "Capitol people" and Trump than ISIS.

Do you think Twitter would deliberate days/months/years to ban an ISIS account?

Those things are for judges to decide, not an Internet mob (or militant employees of Big Tech).

Actually businesses should and must decide these things for themselves. A lot of stores now enforce rules for customers to wear masks, without any legal mandate or ruling by courts that masks are mandatory. It's good business, because your other customers won't want to shop at your store if they don't feel safe in a pandemic.

Likewise, tech companies have the right to decide what is good business for themselves. Hosting a platform where insurrection and violence is being organized, will turn off your other customers and your employees.

Are we saying no to free markets and private enterprise getting to choose good business decisions for themselves now?

So to be clear, you want to force a private company to do business with someone? How is this any different from a store having a “no shirt, no shoes, no service” sign?

It's not ok to create HN accounts for political battle. It's not what this site is for, and doing it will eventually get your main account banned as well. Please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

By that standard a civil rights era sit in or march was sedition. That doesn’t seem just, but I guess there is much more work to do.

Which was indeed said by opponents of civil rights at the time. And people were arrested on that basis:

> December 13th 1954: White civil rights activist Carl Braden was convicted of sedition in Louisville, Kentucky on this day. His crime? He and his wife Anne purchased a home in an all-white neighborhood and then almost immediately sold it to an African-American.

http://todayinclh.com/?event=civil-rights-activist-carl-brad...

Its fascinating how the civil rights movement changed the enforcement of sedition law but did not lead to the repeal.

> Where do we draw the line on how we censor the internet?

Is this censorship? Looks to like someone saying they don’t want to host someone else’s crap.

It would be a form of censorship if private companies were forced to host content they didn’t want to host.

> Giant corporations aren’t simply following court orders, they are acting on their own now. This is problematic for a multitude of reasons. The precedent has been established.

I think this is a completely different problem that stems from anti-competitive behaviour. If we’re unhappy with a few large companies acting as extra-judicial gatekeepers, then we should break them up and increase competition and diversity in the market.

If they hold a natural monopoly, then we should make them utilities, and make it explicitly clear that government is controlling their behaviour, and concepts like the 1st amendment should apply to them.

What we shouldn’t do is try to fix this problem by having governments force private companies to host certain content. For the same reason we don’t want governments forcing private individuals to express certain speech.

Aren't all these things already regularly done in response to copyright violations, spam, child porn, etc? Seems like the precedent was set long ago.

> Obviously actual terrorist group sites can and should be taken down, but this feels more murky than that.

Considering the perpetrators of Wednesday's attack had guns and bombs[1] and declared their intent to kill US political leaders... what exactly distinguishes them from "actual terrorist groups"?

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/08/politics/us-capitol-riots-arr...

The article says somebody parked 2 blocks away and left bombs and guns in their truck. Doesn’t that make you think the perps did not have guns and bombs while they were perpetrating?

Just because he was arrested before he could use any of those items doesn't change the fact that violence was intended. Pipe bombs were also planted at the RNC and DNC headquarters.

A bombastic bipartisan, eh?

It seems like the goal was to distract the police and draw them away from the capitol building.

How do you classify an “actual terrorist grouping site” versus a “collection of fringe political ideological groups who happens to have a lot of content which looks suspiciously like the same content you’d find on actual terrorist groups’ sites” without using a broad brush?

It's called The Benghazi Line: if they've collectively caused more deaths (5) than occurred during the Benghazi Incident (4), then they're a legit threat requiring action to disrupt and deplatform.

With less snark: it's not about how much organization they demonstrate, it's a judgement call about the likelihood of tangible damage and destruction occurring. Yes, it's an imprecise standard. That's the reality in which we live and operate.

If you can’t tell the difference, does it matter?

To me, no.

My question was to the author of the commentary I was replying...though, since I posted they’ve gone back and appended a note to their comment providing their definition.

Private companies are free to ‘censor’ what they believe is either bad for business or exposes them to liability. Maybe the free market has decided extremism is bad for business.

The problem with the whole "free market" argument is that these companies don't abide by the same forces as traditional companies. If all my friends are on Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, then I am forced to use those. Social media companies have quasi-monopolies and using alternatives is both difficult and impractical. Perhaps more decentralized communication networks will come about, but the government might use situations like this to shut them down or limit the legality of their use (as people cheer it on).

Social media companies have quasi-monopolies and using alternatives is both difficult and impractical.

So did the press, and yet they were expressly granted this freedom. Buying a printing press and starting your own paper wasn't easy either, but the 1st amendment never said it was supposed to be.

Big businesses will always have massive influence. Walmart refuses to stock AO rated computer games and NC17 movies. Advertisers don't want their ads running next to pornography. Corporate America supports gay rights (less some holdouts like Exxon). Some medium size cities in America only have have one newspaper left.

I'm not concerned about social media network effects. MySpace and AOL used to be dominant services.

Convince your friends to change platform. If they won't, and it is such a foundational issue to you then perhaps you should either not worry about your social interactions being censored or find different friends. If my friends frequent a bowling alley I find questionable am I "forced" to partake because that is where my friends frequent? Your argument carries little weight to coerce such lax regulation.

Tangentially, not terminating business with Parler could be construed as not operating in their shareholders best interest, a breach of their fiduciary duty, as it could potentially harm future business opportunities if they become associated with the platform. In this case AWS is not a utility that holds a monopoly on some resource. There is market competition, and hosting your own service is an option. If a telcom prevented the latter I'd agree with your argument, as there aren't necessarily alternate options. Even then the law outlines a framework where some content is illegal that any lawyer working for the firm could green flag for client/contract termination.

> If all my friends are on Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, then I am forced to use those.

You are not forced to use those, nor any social media platform. Nor are you entitled to the use of any social media platform, legally anyway.

You WANT to use them, but that's much different from being forced. Being forced would mean everyone who gets a US drivers license also gets a facebook account.

I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing, I’m not smart enough to know yet, but what you describe isn’t new.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(person)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excommunication

Acting/speaking on specific ideas have caused people to be outcast, “social pariahs”, and excommunicated for millennia.

What is new today is the scale that people can reach, and the ability to excommunicate a person’s scale without excommunicating them.

None of that is technically censorship. They are all private companies and they have the prerogative to give the users a TOS, which they can accept or not. That said, I do think that having more options is always good, a decentralized Internet is a richer Internet.

Just a nit-pick, but the suppression of speech by a private institution is still censorship, it's just not government censorship. I think maybe you were conflating it with the First Amendment, which applies only to the government and it's agents and not private companies.

In agreement with everything after your first sentence though.

Yes, it was a poor attempt of trying to explain the common misconception that the First Amendment applies to private business. You are correct, though, the word censorship is broader than that.

are TOS required by law that if they are enforced then they are enforced equally? i doubt it but it seems like a contract violation to selectively enforce the TOS.

If you break the TOS, then the service provider can take any actions they are entitled to in the TOS at their discretion. You can challenge the validity of the TOS, but you can't force the service provider to be good or fast at enforcing their TOS.

It's a free market as well as a land of free speech, so they can just find another hosting provider, or build their own servers. They can enable whatever kind of groups they choose, but that should in no way require other people or organizations to collaborate with them.

At some physical level (e.g. the backbone), I'd like to see laws that apply the 1st amendment to all US-controlled physical connectivity i.e. backbone operators cannot block traffic based on content, ever.

Above that, I'd prefer to see a more diverse business ecosystem so that AWS' business policies were just one of a larger set of possible choices you would have when picking a hosting solution (note: this doesn't just mean more companies, it means greater diversity of the AUPs on offer)

At that point, we could all do what I consider to be the right thing, and leave AWS or whoever to do whatever they want, confident that there were genuine alternatives available.

There’s is no line. AWS is a business. And one that caters to enterprise customers. Large enterprise customers don’t want to be cohosted with sites that are controversial. AWS has a history of kicking off controversial sites.

Another view is about what services on the internet should be considered a commons, particularly as more interaction shifts to online rather than in-person spaces. Physical commons are regulated through local action and laws with some basis in democratic action. Online commons are generally near-absolute dictatorships run by a for-profit company where the only restrictions are minor government regulations that would make them liable for users' actions under certain circumstances. Otherwise, any commons can purge users for essentially any reason with no input from those using the commons.

I won't suggest solutions to this at the moment other than to say there are more options that providing democratic power over existing private commons. There could be public online commons that are guaranteed to meet certain standards, for example, and for private spaces to not compete and subsume them. Though this is speaking vaguely - there are many potential discussions to have about what a public digital commons could look like.

Why is this not a terrorism site to you?

It's been used to conduct a terrorist attack this week. It's being used to plan a terrorist attack in the coming days.

The creators were given a chance to clean house and take measures. They haven't.

So why is this not a terrorist platform in your mind? Is there a belief that Americans cannot be terrorists?

Edit: you added a clarification that these are not official terrorist groups as classified by intelligence agencies. However white supremacists are considered to be significant terrorist threats by many agencies. (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/04/white-supremacists-...). Parler is a haven for unchecked white supremacy. Therefore it is reasonably classifiable as a terrorist site

The obvious line is incitement of violence. Most countries have codified this in law but the US has not I think?

can you define incitement of violence? is there an actual definition or is it a "I know it when I see it" type thing? also, incitement or not isn't the perpetrator of violence the guilty one? ... or has that changed?

It depends on the collective judgment of the attorneys working at the Department of Justice, and the judges hearing the case. Unfortunately, the DoJ is currently under the command of a person who has a vested interest in protecting "his" people, so attention to this issue has been lacking.

If you hire a hitman, both you and the hitman are guilty. I think the same standard could apply here.

> can you define incitement of violence?

No, I'm no lawyer but there is a lot of legal precedent for this, at least in my country.

This and hate speech against groups are the only limitation on free speech where I live.

As we have discovered, the sad answer to all those questions seems be be.

"Yes when it agrees with my political agenda"

> Where do we draw the line on how we censor the internet?

If they are a private company and not a utility with a government granted monopoly then they can do what they want. So not okay for Verizon or the power company, but everyone else should be free to censor. It's their private property.

For spam / malicious traffic / botnets, our answer to all of those is historically "Yes," and it's worked fine for the growth of the internet so far. It's of course much easier to get a lazy cloud host, registrar, or ISP to take someone offline if the FBI is involved and gets a court order, but it's always been the expectation that there's an abuse contact who will respond to reports from the general public. Every domain or netblock entry in WHOIS has an abuse contact, implying there's some consensus standard of "abuse."

Seems like free speech was tolerated until it began threatening the republic to me. There are some interesting questions with the power of companies but those questions existed long before this. Uncharted territory.

Giant corporations bring all sorts of problems.

However, I think the real question is, if you have qualms about them, why use them at all? There are alternatives. Generally, people use them because they want to reach the corps. audience, or want to use the corps. infrastructure because its 'easier' then building there own. If thats the case, you're basically saying you're 'okay' with them having all the rights the TOS grants them.

People get hung up on whether a group is an officially recognized terrorist organization or not, as if a group needs to be labeled terrorists by a three letter government agency before they can terrorize people, throw bricks through windows, burn down churches, ransack capitols, kidnap governors, lynch people, etc. It's a meaningless distinction whether or not they are officially recognized as a terrorists by the government.

I’m drawing two lines. One is property rights. For each of your questions, is the person doing the “censoring” the owner of the product? If yes, then I’m morally fine with it. The second line, does the censoring make the product unusable to me? If yes, then I will stop using it.

Maybe that’s too extreme. I’m not above lobbying them if it’s a decision I don’t agree with. Lobbying could go as far as boycotting. But fundamentally I see my role as to be either a consumer or not.

Where do we draw the line on Infrastructure regulation?

The network, the platform-provider, the platform?

There is precedent for regulating the network. And Parler can run it's own server . I think there is enough competition in the platform space to allow platforms to regulate themselves.

AWS is not infrastructure. It is a service for which there is competition, as well as the option of rolling your own. Telcoms are infrastructure because generally there is not competition and you can't just run your own fiber.

“Slippery slope” is a logical fallacy.

For reasons I can’t quite figure out, HN will crucify you for equating correlation with causation, but seems incredibly fond of this equally invalid mode of reasoning.

The government designating terrorist groups is a bad yardstick, because US law enforcement can only designate foreign terrorist organizations.

There's a legitimate debate to be had on these issues but the speech we're seeing from the Far Right is well over the line of protected speech. It's now advocating civil war. The consequences of allowing it to continue should be obvious to any reasonable person after the assault on the US Capitol on Jan 6. That was just the beginning.

Paid platforms & the open internet is where this is going.

i see social media going back to servers and fiber. peering their physical network like in the old days. who wants to risk their entire enterprise on the whims of a "platform" provider?

I believe in property rights. The service is the property of the shareholders. They should be able to do what they want with their property so long as it isn’t breaking a law.

This is why I can’t understand some conservatives having an issue with this. It is principled to anyone who believes in the private ownership of property that they can ban whoever they want.

I also believe internet companies shouldn’t have special privileges. They should be responsible for anything illegal on their property they could reasonably be believed to know about. Especially so if the content is user generated and made public. Crowdsourcing should be a liability.

A line of "cannot police their userbase and prevent them from violently threatening other people on a regular basis" seems to pass the reasonable-person test to me.

(To be clear: I think Mark Zuckerberg and the actors at Facebook who have not handled their fomented genocides on Facebook and WhatsApp belong in the Hague. I am not precious about them, either.)

It also passes the "shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater" test - IMHO the US government can clearly regulate this sort of dangerous speech

Democrats in charge means dangerous speech is from the right. Republicans in charge means dangerous speech is from the left. they would continually declare opposition as the most dangerous of speech and pass/repeal laws accordingly. The supreme court wouldn't be able to keep up.

Corporations get to choose who they do business with, who’s on their platforms. If they don’t want to do business with a platform for hatred, violence, and fascism, they shouldn’t.

Of course they should have done this 4 years ago...

How about we look into censoring family environment? Why not to take kids away from the family and transfer them to the state so they are not exposed to racist parents? Where's the end to it?

PS I came from Soviet Union and this is not a theoretical idea.

> Why not to take kids away from the family and transfer them to the state so they are not exposed to racist parents?

This isn't about racism. This is about a site that is unable/unwilling to stop itself from being a forum for inciting violence, terrorism, sedition, and treason.

So you think racism is not a threat to our nation? We'll send you to the re-education camp!

A private corporation is not the government, they can stop you from using their platform, not sending you to a "re-education camp".

I am talking about next step. We need to fight extremism.

right, if the people on parler are such a threat surely CPS should be taking their kids into protective custody. does anyone know if that's happening?

I see it more as a bunch of disparate entities all deciding Parler are a bunch of assholes and not doing business with them. Nobody's forcing their hand.

Also, you drew the line at actual terrorist group sites, and I think Parler is one of those. It doesn't matter if you agree or not, enough people at AWS (and other corps) agreed with me and took it down. Sucks to be a minority, huh?

As far as whether giant corps should be censoring content, it's nothing new. The fantasy of everybody running as an independent node of a distributed network is just that. Look how centralized Bitcoin has gotten.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com