Hacker News Reader

Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

I'm not even in the US, but all of this banning makes me really curious about what's being banned and why.

Something that some of you may have missed: This banning thing already moved into the infrastructure/cloud services layer (AWS):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25707959

View on HN

[Note: Trying to present this as factually as possible.]

According to what the companies say:

- The President incited some people last week to engage in violent behavior at and towards Congress.

- There is evidence that further violence is being planned via a variety of platforms.

- The platforms are attempting to limit their exposure to facilitating such actions.

Some people think that the companies have ulterior motives. I will leave it to you to decide what you think the real reasons are.

Here's an important question: would it be a good thing or a bad thing if it was very difficult to make plans involving violence on the internet?

Hmm, well, is it possible that a corrupt fascist could ever take control of our government? If yes, it seems like it would be prudent to make sure we had avenues of free speech protected even from monopolies or duopolies that may provide platforms.

So then a government telling companies how to moderate their platforms would stifle free speech?

I don't think companies would save us from a fascist government; if the government falls, everything falls. So, in the meantime, trust the government more than companies (which gives you a higher stake in seeing it and Constitutional protections don't fall) by tax-funding public platforms/news delivery networks that have to abide by the First Amendment. That seems like the only way to cut this knot.

Besides federated dark web anarchy, which is a nice thing to try in parallel.

Can you picture Congress funding any sort of public platform that would be used for porn and spam, and extreme politics of all kinds? That seems very unlikely to ever happen.

>> The core principle of Tor, "onion routing", was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, with the purpose of protecting U.S. intelligence communications online. Onion routing was further developed by DARPA in 1997.[18][19][20][21][22][23] The alpha version of Tor, developed by Syverson and computer scientists Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson[16] and then called The Onion Routing project (which later simply became "Tor", as an acronym for the former name), launched on 20 September 2002.[1][24] The first public release occurred a year later.[25] In 2004, the Naval Research Laboratory released the code for Tor under a free license, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) began funding Dingledine and Mathewson to continue its development.[16] In 2006, Dingledine, Mathewson, and five others founded The Tor Project, a Massachusetts-based 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization responsible for maintaining Tor.[26] The EFF acted as The Tor Project's fiscal sponsor in its early years, and early financial supporters of The Tor Project included the U.S. International Broadcasting Bureau, Internews, Human Rights Watch, the University of Cambridge, Google, and Netherlands-based Stichting NLnet.[27][28][29][30][31] Prior to 2014, the majority of funding sources came from the U.S. government.[16]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)

In the same way designating certain market actors (whether they are private or not) as utilities would stifle their free speech. The best examples would be the telcos, water, electricity and post offices. Regardless of criminal past or ideological stance, these entities must serve all members of society, with the only caveat being on the condition of nominal payment.

This is the turning point where as a society, we need to decide where the new line for utilities needs to be, and what parts of the internet and financial systems are fundamental to maintaining the fabric of society.

What ever we decide at this crossroads, may end up haunting us for a very long time.

How would any government exist if it were simple to coordinate violent acts against people you don't agree with?

How can we even exist as a society is if don't we force people to use the framework of governance?

> How would any government exist if it were simple to coordinate violent acts against people you don't agree with?

Isn't it already the case that it is simple to coordinate violent acts against people one doesn't agree with?

>How can we even exist as a society is if don't we force people to use the framework of governance?

Why wouldn't we be able to?

> How would any government exist if it were simple to coordinate violent acts against people you don't agree with? How can we even exist as a society is if don't we force people to use the framework of governance?

exactly the same point that China was making when the US politicians were supporting the Hong Kong protestors.

and similar point Fidel Castro was making when he let the Cubans escape into Florida.

Except everything is a trade off and the cost of saying it’s a “good thing” is sacrificing liberty for security. PATRIOT Act 2.0

Depends on the price.

We could prevent humans from using communications technology to plan violence by banning all such technology. That would be an unacceptable price imho.

There is _always_ collateral damage. You can’t ban all the bad content and only the bad content. There’s a wide range of mitigation strategies. If we discussed specifics it might possible to establish some first principles.

If end-to-end encryption were banned and the US government had full access to all private communication they might be able to stop some violence. On the other hand many governments, the US included, would likely use that power to commit violence. I would not support this particular strategy.

Would it be a good thing or a bad thing if pedophiles couldn't use encrypted messengers to exchange child pornography on the internet?

As always the means need to be weighed against the end.

There are plenty of reasons to use encryption that have nothing to do with kiddie porn. What are the good reasons to allow calls for violence? Or to keep carrying content which supports it? What is YouTube, or society, losing by blocking it?

Of course if you can be pinpoint, objectively accurate with your censorship of "calls for violence" then that's great (not being sarcastic). But the world doesn't really work that way.

There is always a line between black and white that some human has to look at and decide "yeah this is ban-worthy" or not. Sometimes it's obvious - sometimes it's not so much.

One example: remember that "documentary" "Loose Change" that came out after 9/11 and questioned if it was an inside job? I watched it out of curiosity at the time. It was later debunked - but if it had been just immediately removed from every site and nearly impossible to watch I think that could have had a reverse effect. Instead I was able to evaluate the details (or "misinformation", in some cases) from both sides.

So, I believe the previous poster is implying there are always going to be subjective, biased, and sometimes morally questionable issues that arise when censoring information across multiple major platforms - similar to the issue of allowing encryption vs banning it. If you could ban encryption only for child pornography distribution purposes then yes that would be great, but unfortunately that comes at a cost (and it's not like people/politicians haven't tried to do just that).

I don't think we have stepped into full great firewall of China level censorship or anything, but this is a step in that direction - for better or for worse.

The problem is of course, who gets to decide what a call for violence is? I have seen people use "Come on down, it will be wild" as an example of a call for violence. On the other hand, you have people on this site arguing that "Defund the Police" does not infact mean remove all funding. Even when there is a NY Times published opinion with the title "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police" ant eh second to last paragraph starts with "People like me who want to abolish prisons and police"

For a long time "Learn to code" was a statement made by journalist to the working class about how they need to better themselves and adapt to the changing work requirements. Now it is considered harassment because it was being thrown back at the same journalists when they started losing their jobs.

Do you think that the people pushing for these laws and restrictions are doing so because they want to help your side or because they want power? And once they get the power they seek, do you think they will allow for the change you wish to enact to come to fruition, especially if it runs the risk of diminishing their power?

> Here's an important question: would it be a good thing or a bad thing if it was very difficult to make plans involving violence on the internet?

These sort of simplistic quips reveal that either: not much thought has gone into what your saying, or what your saying is a propagandizing effort to conceal ulterior motives.

Does it elude you that this heightened concern in quashing all discussions of violence seems to be rather targeted at a certain segment of the population? Are they the only ones that "plan violence"? Or the only ones where violence originates from?

If your goal is saying nobody "should be able to make plans involving violence," then you're saying nobody should be able to make plans of any sort without being surveiled, so that a determination can be made as to whether those plans involve violence. Who's doing the determining? What if the violence is ostensibly to an end the determiner believes is righteous?

The issues at hand are not so simple as your comment suggests, and it creates a feeling that you're trying to pull one over on people.

There are issues here that needs addressing, the events at the capitol yes, but an equally if not more important issue of how do we map old notions of private property and public property/infrastructure onto socio-techno society where these notions are converging? How do we bring the rights and norms of a healthy, functional, non-repressive society from the pre-internet world to the post internet world?

Violence pre-internet did not elicit calls of "ban all telephones," or "ban them from the telephone network," or "confiscate their printer."

We've barely begun to form the language to talk about these things, and to take in the scope and complexity of the issues arising from the way society and technology have evolved. Glib comments of "violence is bad," make it harder to discuss in a productive way.

Violence is bad. The violence at the capitol was bad. And the violence that rocked American cities all summer was bad. Great concern about quashing all discussion of violence was curiously absent this past summer? Well, discussions of it were jeered, quashed and censored unless you were praising it.

Is that a conversation you'd like to have?

I made my comment in good faith. I wasn't "trying to say" anything in favour of censorship, or against censorship. According to the guidelines of this site you're meant to assume good faith (not that I really care that much).

My personal view happens to be that it is a good thing if people can plan violence on the internet. The alternative is to move further in the direction of state monopolisation of violence, which I view to be a move further away from democracy (and I view democracy to be a disarable thing).

Good thing, of course. The internet has the power to amplify a small message into a massive one and can trivially be used for evil. There is an argument that forcing people to use private chats prevents this stuff from getting out in the open, but come on, the NSA has a back door in everything. There is more harm done letting those messages out into the public space where there is a chance of radicalizing more people, or at the very least making that sort of abhorrent speech more normalized.

Can you make it difficult to make an illegitimate, illegal or violent plan on the internet while also not suppressing legitimate activism, or protests or even normal plans?

Remember that the people in charge of deciding what is and is not legitimate may have their own agenda and interests that will not always align with yours, and will change over time, even capriciously

"The platforms are attempting to limit their exposure to facilitating such actions"

By "exposure", perhaps the commenter means possible sedition charges.

To me, this is further evidence that these websites are neither common carrier nor public forum. The telephone company is not going to cut off anyone's service because of seditious communications. Nor is any public place going to ban people from committing seditious acts there. They will just be arrested when they commit the the crime. Will any ISP terminate anyone's service for fear of enabling sedition. These companies like Google are, first and foremost, websites. The website is the company. If there is no website, there is no company.

What is interesting about this is that these websites are protected by Section 230. Are there limits to Section 230 protection. Do they end at sedition.

If Times Square sold advertising that incited violence against the government, I think they would be involved in any charges.

Wrong analogy. If someone got up to speak in Times Square, incited violence, and was charged with sedition, then the owner of Times Square is not going to be named in any charges.

The owner of Times Square relies upon the big advertising signs for their income. The companies that pay big bucks for those signs decline to renew their contracts, because those signs have become best known as the backdrop for sedition rants, tainting their brands. So the owner bans the best known ranters as a way of signalling to the advertisers that the problem is being addressed and they should keep spending,

"The owner of Times Square relies upon the big advertising signs for their income."

Times Square is just the first public place that I thought of. Not every public place is used for advertising. What if it was the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The point is that, generally, necessary permits notwithstanding, people can enter always public places and communicate with the public. That is why they are deemed public places not private ones.

I am not even sure what advertising has to do with this. Maybe I missed something in the story. I was under the impression it was a YouTube "channel" getting banned not some customer's ability to purchase ads from Google to be shown on YouTube.

I don’t think there is a perfect analogy. They are being given a venue (their profile) a distribution (users; eyes of consumers) in the millions. Maybe if Times Square allowed and played seditious content with advertising in it that would be apt?

I believe section 230 only protects you from civil suits, it does not protect you from criminal charges.

Yes, there are limits. See, e.g., 230(e)(1)

It is interesting how strongly people have been blaming facebook for the worlds problems but as soon as tech companies start to clean up their services its suddenly too much use of power.

If it makes you feel any better, I blame Facebook for a lot of issues in the modern world, and I'm glad tech companies are finally doing something about some of them.

I think facebook has made the right call by cleaning up this mess but I do wonder if a corporation is the right one to be making these calls. Tech companies now hold more power than most governments which makes me wonder if we should start having public elections on who gets to run them. Or maybe they should be tied in more with the government. If someone starts inciting violence on facebook maybe it should be the job of the police to deal with this rather than some moderator sweatshop.

Facebook is the problem in a lot of ways (not all). Making hate viral to millions of people in a decentralized network is an innovation that I am not happy about. What to do about it I don't know and haven't heard many convincing arguments. I do think European style bans on hate speech might be a positive change. Europe has a lot of weird cultural things as a result of their imperialist and colonial past, but their recent experience with genocide and war does lend them some credibility in terms of how they have adapted. I think they have mostly open societies with high quality of life and not many compromises in terms of "liberty". I equate liberty with overall quality of life, not the liberty of individuals to abnegate societal obligations. So bans on hate speech, and attendant penalties, I see precedent where little harm has been done but a lot of harm has been mitigated.

I wonder if the right answer to all this is some sort of parallel justice system with the responsibility to moderate things on the internet?

If you are a website which allows users to publicly post some kind of media, and have a user base >N per year, then you have to connect your website to the public moderator API, and pay some amount for the privilege.

Social media companies don't want responsibility for moderating things people publish on them, nor the blame when they get it wrong (or when they get it right but some people disagree, or when it's just plain judgement call).

At the same time, most people probably don't trust social media companies to do that moderation correctly. Also, as individual and companies we want some certainty about the rules and access to timely recourse if we do get moderated.

Not having moderation isn't an option (see child porn etc.).

(The fact that these are international platforms makes this extra difficult.)

> Some people think that the companies have ulterior motives.

It isn't just ulterior motives, there is an argument to be made that they do not have the competence to police their own policies. Twitter's argument for what constituted incitement had nothing to do with the words Trump used and everything to do with the context in which they were typed.

It is impossible to use that standard of evidence for action and get fair results. If it were possible, "oh yeah everyone knows that" would be a normal standard in the court system. It isn't, because we have established through countless moral panics and knee-jerk reactions over history that higher standards are needed to get fair results.

Media companies as powerful as YouTube using substandard evidence to moderate political debate is huge news. With this standard they aren't half as suitable a platform for political news as they used to be.

The AWS banning is what really concerns me. It's a clear escalation. First it's the app level (breached by Apple and Google), then the infrastructure level (breached by AWS - although there are alternatives here. Next up is DNS, I guess? And after that, routing. The ultimate Internet Death Penalty.

> What's left after that?

We're also seeing the refusal of legal representation, which seems nearly unprecedented. At some point, the only thing left will be civil death [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_death

This isn't about people having their civil liberties taken away.

The social network bans are businesses protecting themselves from people whom threaten their business. Like a fast food restaurant refusing to serve customers who smoke crack in the restaurant.

The platform and infrastructure bans are also businesses protecting themselves but not from people, rather from other businesses. This is on level with U-haul banning drug cartels from renting their trucks.

No one's civil liberties are being taken away

Indeed, no business wants to carry unnecessary liability.

Funny, Didn't see all this crying about censorship when MC & Visa cut off pornhub...

edit: just to be clear, I mean when MC & Visa decided pornhub was a potential liability, they cut them off. When companies decide Trump or Parler are a liability - they do the same - they cut them off. Thats just capitalism.

I don't agree that it's 'just capitalism'. Just because I acquire a piece of private property does not necessarily give me the right to do anything I want with it.

I can't clobber you over the head with a product I bought just like how many countries have laws to say I can't kick you out of private property that's also a public square.

>>I don't agree that it's 'just capitalism'. Just because I acquire a piece of private property does not necessarily give me the right to do anything I want with it.

However, you can evict me from the property and charge me with trespassing, which is closer to whats happening here.. edit: Hell, you can even infringe my 2nd amendment rights and ban me from having a gun on your property!

Also, I'm not sure 'private' property can be a 'public' square. At least in New England, the town commons was public land ?

There are instances where such freedoms are granted to individuals while on private property. However, it is limited to specific circumstances and only when a specific jurisdiction's laws require it.

Quickly looking this up brings me to the supreme court ruling, Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins [1], which involved laws that were specific to the state of California.

Notably, the applicability of this ruling was narrowed over time. Despite this, it has been brought up as an argument in situations with circumstances that differed from those of the original ruling, where questions of its applicability can be easily raised.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

Hmm - must have been pretty hard to narrow, since its seems to specifically target shopping centers ?

edit: I seem to remember my son's class not being able to petition in front of a grocery store in California like 20 years ago...Wonder if it had been narrowed by then?

In New England they also practiced banishment and put people in stocks for moral infractions.

Most of the world including New England still locks people up for moral infractions, even if no longer using stocks.

In my circles, there was huge backlash against the Pornhub decision by Visa and MC. It was a terrible action.

I don't recall seeing much about it? Though, I have to admit I don't do social media much.

Certain topics are stigmatized for various reasons so lots of people don't want to be seen to complain about things because they would then be associated with the topic and get the stigma too.

Access to legal counsel is in a special category. Law firms are expected to represent people accused of the very worst crimes in order to promote a just outcome. It's extremely disturbing that political actions which may be distasteful but could never be prosecuted as crimes in normal circumstances have become a justification to harass law firms until they refuse to represent a client. I say "normal circumstances" because I'm not sure how long it will be until we get show trials and mass convictions of political figures.

Do you have reason to believe that it’s harassment that is stopping these people from getting legal counsel? Many of these people, Trump especially, have shown that they refuse to listen to legal council and will lie for no good reason at all, then throw their legal council under the bus if it seems like it will advantage them. There are many good reasons lawyers might not want to touch the current situation with a ten foot pole besides harrasement.

I'll give a few quick links, but a quick search turns up dozens and I think you're competent enough to search for yourself. You have public statements of "Yes, going after Trump’s law firms is fair game" and then you have the expected harassment and law firms pulling out en masse. Maybe the client's toxicity is a factor, but that should be the only factor.

[0] https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/11/1... [1] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/13/law-firm-drops-trum... [2] https://thenewamerican.com/new-low-democrats-approve-harassm...

If we start compelling lawyers to provide legal counsel to clients, what protections do we afford those lawyers? In several cases over the last election, Judges threatened lawyers with sanctions and loss of right to practice for bringing forth clearly baseless lawsuits and wasting the court's time.

If we affirm that the right to legal counsel is a human right and that corporations also receive that right, how do we protect lawyers from clients which ignore legal counsel and file frivolous that can threaten the lawyer's right to practice law?

> Law firms are expected to represent people accused of the very worst crimes in order to promote a just outcome.

We're entitled to an attorney when defending ourselves from criminal prosecution, but where does it say we're entitled to legal counsel at any other time?

At the end of the day Law Firms are businesses, and again these are just businesses protecting their own self interests.

If they end up needing legal counsel for a criminal trial they'll receive it. Otherwise they can just grab a phonebook and start calling ambulance chasers until they find one who will meet their other legal needs.

There is some advocacy to provide public defenders in civil matters. The reasoning is that financial damages can effectively deny liberty, even though the method differs from criminal.

That of course would not mean pressing private firms into public service.

> That of course would not mean pressing private firms into public service.

Even so that wouldn't apply here. Parler lost their private counsel, not their legal counsel.

Legal rights are distinct from ideals and principles. "Freedom of speech", for example, is primarily an ideal. It has some encoding in law because it is such a valuable ideal, but no one should conflate the two and think that the ideal of "freedom of speech" doesn't apply unless the law says so. The law is not an ideal.

Access to legal representation is similarly an ideal that can't be reduced to its partial encoding in a very flawed legal system.

Do you believe that the idea of legal representation as a basic human right applies in the absence of pending litigation?

Does corporate personhood extend to the idea of legal representation?

Does the right to legal representation mandate that any legal firm be compelled to provide counsel to any client who demands it?

If someone assaults me or otherwise violates my rights, but I can't file suit to defend my rights, then in practice I essentially don't actually have those rights. This is elementary.

Read the PRC's constitution some time and see all the rights that it guarantees, yet no one actually enjoys those rights. They exist on paper only.

You continually ask questions that attack positions which no one has suggested. I've had to ignore about 80% of your comments because they are just diversions. No one said a word about "corporate personhood", for example, and no one is even talking about legal representation of corporations. It's not possible to have a meaningful discussion like this.

You responded to a comment about Parler's legal counsel dropping them and equated it to Civil Death.

Parler is a business, not a person.

Sorry. I wasn't aware of anything involving Parler's lawyers. The mass harassment of lawyers (leading to withdrawal) that I'm aware of involved Trump's lawyers. Perhaps they were retained by a corporation (idk), but I would find the question of corporate personhood irrelevant because Trump could just have retained them personally if he needed to.

To be clear, I don't think that the Trump lawsuits had any merit or should have been brought in the first place. But they should absolutely have been allowed to go through the normal legal process so they could be convincingly rebutted. Sending hundreds of threats to law firms should not be a political tactic in a democracy. That does nothing but give ammunition and validity to conspiracy theorists.

> Sorry. I wasn't aware of anything involving Parler's lawyers.

Your first comment was responding to someone talking about AWS, Apple, and Google dropping Parler. The discussion was around the right of lawyers to drop clients, clients being so toxic that no one is willing to represent them, legal counsel as a right, and the ramifications of a client being unable to secure counsel.

No one was talking about mass harassment but you.

> I've had to ignore about 80% of your comments because they are just diversions.

You're trying to argue something completely out of context. That 80% of comments you're ignoring are about the topic at hand.

Who's being denied the right to legal representation? I'm not talking about individual lawyers refusing to represent people, I mean literally give me an example of anyone being denied the right to legal representation.

> Next up is DNS, I guess? And after that, routing.

Alternatively (or additionally) they could move the damage from the server side to the client: think OSes and browsers, not to mention hardware. It won't be long before "secure boot" technologies prevent people from installing "extremist" operating systems.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

I disagree. Five years from now, we’re all going to look back fondly at the time we were warned about AWS/EWS gaining too much power and thank each other that we heeded the warning.

At the very least, I hope this encourages companies to backup their Cloud data frequently and separately.

Easier to just seize the servers at that point, no?

Isn't this essentially what happened with AWS?

That is precisely what IPFS and ETH domains are for:

https://docs.ipfs.io/how-to/websites-on-ipfs/link-a-domain/#...

I don't want this to sound wrong, but I perceive most of the people complaining about censorship to be hypocrites. They'd be the first to censor if they were in charge of these platforms. They are some of the first to ban in moderated communities like reddit.

The reason they're upset is because they are not in control. I think in some ways they are like the people scared of change, and the once change has taken place they are scared of not being in control.

Well said. Thank you.

> I don't want this to sound wrong, but I perceive most of the people complaining about censorship to be hypocrites. They'd be the first to censor if they were in charge of these platforms. They are some of the first to ban in moderated communities like reddit.

Based on what? I and many people I'm close to in real life are constantly concerned about these escalating erosions of expression and all prefer the less-moderated corners of the internet. None of us have ever sought out control and grew up consistently annoyed at one-sided media outlets, even if they represented the perspective we happened to agree with at the time. If we still use reddit (most of us are falling off), it tends to be a small subset of niche communities that don't focus on meta-politics or have auto-banning protocols. These are the people I see complaining about this around me. Is it just because I'm not on twitter?

r/conservative r/conspiracy r/donaldtrump all come to mind as communities that (up until one was recently banned) complained about censorship while constantly banning users for providing debate.

Heck, I signed up for Gab and was almost immediately banned from the entire site after sharing my liberal opinion.

Interesting, I guess we're just talking about different populations of 'people complaining about censorship.' I never spend time on forums whose main stated purpose is political discussion but still hear a lot of discussion about censorship in my daily life, so I don't really jump to gab, r/conspiracy, r/donaldtrump, etc when I hear that phrase. I don't think I'd characterize those places as being the majority of people concerned about corporate censorship, though

> I don't want this to sound wrong, but I perceive most of the people complaining about censorship to be hypocrites. They'd be the first to censor if they were in charge of these platforms.

> The reason they're upset is because they are not in control.

Do you notice how that starts me, as someone who is firmly anti-censorship, off on the defensive as you seem to view me as an insincere or stupid bad guy?

> I think in some ways they are like the people scared of change, and the once change has taken place they are scared of not being in control.

As a general principle I’m for the idea that we aught to allow free expression of ideas, especially online since that is the way to share ideas. Life happens very differently for people even just domestically in the US, and when our viewpoints come into conflict I’d rather understand what they have to say and talk about it. How is that possible to do when there’s a party in the middle that is able to determine what you’re not allowed to read? I'm scared of not being in control of that and thus censorship in general, not about having my version of truth be published.

There was once a thing called net neutrality. As long as you had the means to operate a server, even a shitty old laptop in your mom's basement, you could have a presence online*.

It's so unfortunate we don't have that anymore though. I wonder who's responsible for that...

*Modulo DDOS attacks. Maybe Cloudflare et al should also be required by law to serve everyone regardless of content.

Ironically, if Trump supporter websites start getting banned at the ISP level they'll only have themselves to blame for their crusade against net neutrality.

If you think AWS banning is bad

https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/digitaloceans-position-on-...

Other services include Twilio, Okta Zendesk, Sendgrid, Stipe, etc.

what’s being banned is systematic destruction of people’s willingness to believe facts in order to support a world view that is inconsistent with facts.

why it is being banned is that it has convinced people to attack the government because they believe the government has done things (for example, “stealing elections”) that it has not done.

big tech has apparently decided that they do not want to be blamed when the government has to shoot a bunch of delusional people to stop them from committing violent crimes based on lies

Violent riots have happened many times based on media lies. That part is not novel.

agreed. nothing novel about people lying to convince other people to do something.

what’s novel is the centralized nature of social media (in terms of # of people reached from a single source) and the fact that some incredibly wealthy companies control these sources and face an existential risk if their platforms are used to create enough civil unrest that whoever ends up controlling the government is convinced that these companies are too dangerous to leave unregulated.

Exactly. These companies want to avoid government regulation / oversight. They are taking proactive actions to lessen the blame that would be assigned to them and thus (hopefully) avoid future regulatory action.

The problem I see is that they are walking directly in to oversight through their concerted actions. They are going to end up being labeled public utilities (identity, max comm, public market have already been labeled so).

At this point wouldn't that be better? They're used as such.

I am not saying it is better or worse, but I would say not one of them wants to be regulated as such. So they are setting themselves up for a result they are trying to avoid. Perhaps it is unavoidable, and actually for the better.

The far right not-so-fringe elements led by the president tried to overthrow the government last week. If it had gone slightly differently they could easily have murdered a large chunk of the legislature.

As a result there’s been a wave of deplatforming of the voices that helped encourage that culture.

It is indeed unfortunate that this came to pass but it was a necessary response.

When you test the limits and protections, you ultimately change the nature of them. This is why you really want to avoid doing so in a free society because then you’re faced with the negatives of being forced to restrict freedoms to prevent that test from happening again and facing the threat of the next time someone trying, them having learned the lessons of how to test the limits much more effectively.

What I’m interested in is how many people here are applauding the banning while liberal voices like Glenn Greenwald, and the ALCU are decrying it.

I’m sure some of my conservative friends would laugh if I told them this site makes me look like Regean in comparison to some others.

All good fun of course. I believe that everyone is entitled to their opinion and ones I disagree with shouldn’t be hidden, but that itself is just my opinion.

Even if those opinions call for murdering journalists? Like many countries in Europe, calls for violence should be illegal. It's also pretty easy to not care about these things if your are a white conservative male and not the target of these things.

A stronger element of the power structure is silencing another. It's simple as that. Look at the relentless pro-censorship brigading on most social media. Lots of money, power and influence is being applied here. If this was china or russia, we'd call it a soft "purge". They'd call it promoting "harmony" or "protecting the people". Not sure what we are going to call it.

Seems like whatever battle Trump and his faction was waging behind the scenes the last 4 years failed and he simply failed to win over enough power/influence to his side. We'll never know what really happened, we can just guess.

But feels like history is happening. I don't think any of us have lived to through anything like this. I know I certainly haven't.

Have you considered that it's not brigading, but a broad swathe of unrelated people genuinely feeling a certain way?

A broad swathe of unrelated people systematically manipulated into feeling a certain way. This has been going on since Bush 2.0's 8 years of assault on the truth.

I genuinely can't tell which side you're taking about, one, or the other, or both. I feel like there are crazy people everywhere, ranging from the hyper woke to honest to god nazis. But one group decided to storm congress (which I still haven't wrapped my head around, I'm mentally living in the beforefor times) and by supporting the rule of law I must now be on the side that's not that, even if I have to share the bus with the nutters who believe in "censoring" and thought policing.

> But one group decided to storm congress (which I still haven't wrapped my head around, I'm mentally living in the beforefor times)

Before 2018?

https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1047935416182235136

Protests inside the Capitol building are actually surprisingly frequent. But why did the events of January 6th result in Congress evacuating their chambers, and moved to defensible positions? Something was different this time?

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/01/35-times-capito...

The US Capitol Police handled the situation weirdly and it got out of hand. I'm not sure why they let protestors across barriers and declined assistance from neighboring agencies. Some people read a conspiracy into these events. I just know this wasn't even close to the first time people were upset at congress and demonstrated inside forbidden areas. Nor was it the first time large peaceful demonstrations were marred by a few acts of violence.

These people are upset because they perceive that different standards are being applied to the same actions because of the politics of the actors involved. I don't think this is going to go away as a result of us clutching our pearls at the horrific violation of our sacred legislative building.

I have read many an article with words like "hallowed halls" and "sacred ground". It's just a building, and with enough dollars it can be cleaned up and repaired. What I keep coming back to was the intent to overturn an election with force by disrupting a critical vote on the election that was in progress. That's not clutching at pearls, that's a threat to democracy and the rule of law.

You're never going to undo terrorizing congressmen and killing a federal agent.

This isn't getting walked back.

Congress seems to be taking it somewhat personally, for some reason that I can't possibly fathom.

It's amazing how many people on HN are falling back on ideology to make sense of what happened.

> the intent to overturn an election with force by disrupting a critical vote on the election that was in progress.

what is the evidence of this intent?

It's neither brigading nor a broad new historical trend. A lot of people (myself included) simply see this as an emergency situation requiring extraordinary measures, and are okay with censorship of the Trump campaign even though we're anti-censorship in general. If it were Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, or even 2019 Donald Trump getting deplatformed like this, I'd be strongly opposed.

Huge simplification: After four years someone finally mustered courage to punch the Nazi, and others swiftly followed.

You make a really good point. It’s basically the Streisand Effect. A bunch of people who didn’t even know who Steve Bannon is are going to go and find out now.

And GP's link, which is about Parler, is another example. I hadn't heard of Parler before it was banned.

Yes, there will be a short boost to parler and bannon, and then a long deafening silence. These bans will be effective.

It won't be. These bans and policies have been going on for a really long time. It is just hitting the US now. It has been happening in India for far too long. Big Tech monopoly has gone unchecked all this while. At least I am happy to see my fellow Indians uninstalling WhatsApp and moving to Signal. The more such alternative services the better. This stronghold of Big Tech on what internet should be has to end and it will end.

Research actually backs up that deplatforming does reduce audience sizes for an outlet.

Which makes sense of you believe that some listeners will simply not have the interest in jumping over to a new platform. Repeat several times and with every platform shift the audience reduces.

> Research actually backs up that deplatforming does reduce audience sizes for an outlet.

This research was done at a time when there was little to no backlash against Big Tech. When you factor in a billion+ people moving from one platform to another it is not the platform that is deplatforming users but it is the users abandoning the platform. I have seen it happen multiple times in my life: From Yahoo Messenger to Orkut, from Orkut to Myspace, from Myspace to Facebook. I have witnessed these shifts happen in India and it is crazy how quickly these platforms that had an established presence lose their dominance literally overnight. I bet that research you refer to hasn't included the Indian psyche in the mix. We move in hordes. All it takes is for one trusted and respected family member or relative to suggest jumping ship. Everyone just follows the leader blindly. Those companies that understand this psyche of Indians and cater to this mindset will do extremely well in India. But it is a double-edged sword. We don't have attachments to any platform. If we see that the platform is going against us, repeatedly, we just shift en-masse. I have seen it happen numerous times to know this time is no different (the most recent one that comes to mind is public orchestrated ban on TikTok after the Indo-China clashes. The Government was forced to ban TikTok after a majority of Indians demanded that it be banned). In few months WhatsApp will lose its dominance completely. The shift has only just begun.

If you don't believe me you can save this HN comment and revisit it in a few months from now.

> When you factor in a billion+ people moving from one platform to another it is not the platform that is deplatforming users but it is the users abandoning the platform.

We've seen this happen in the U.S. too with the recent conservative shift from Twitter to Facebook and Parler. If Parler does go down due to AWS pulling the plug, we will again see a shift to a new platform - it's a matter of where and when, not if.

> We've seen this happen in the U.S. too with the recent conservative shift from Twitter to Facebook and Parler. If Parler does go down due to AWS pulling the plug, we will again see a shift to a new platform - it's a matter of where and when, not if.

Exactly right! No platform is permanent. No company is permanent.

No Representative or incarnation of the Government is permanant either, yet there's so much uproar hhere about threats to $current_political_figure

To be honest, I just think this is how political infrastructure restabilizes. Heavy is the head on which sits the Crown [and vulnerable the neck], as they say. Once impedance mismatch hits critical levels, out come the fangs. Fangs coming out either prompts more impedance mismatch (crackdowns and self-preservation plays by established actors), prompting more crazy, or people start getting the message, and stability is trended back toward.

It's the most simultaneously fascinating and horrifying dynamic equilibrium problem I've ever witnessed play out in my life.

I can see the benefit of deplatforming, but I don't see what the benefit of the AWS ban would be. There are plenty of cloud service providers out there, so little more than a temporary inconvenience.

All of them have pretty similar ToS to AWS. They really don't have that many options. And no, going bare metal is not great either - colo / ISPs can deny you service. (which if they're trying to be sneaky they may find out after buying hardware and transporting it)

You would think so, but I believe the owner of Parler has already stated that he can’t find anybody willing to host him.

I haven't seen the CEO of Parler release any such statement.

----

Rate limited so editing my reply for comment below

Thanks for the link. I couldn't find it. If this is the situation then it's extremely bad. The entire situation is fucked up. We literally are in a Censorship era. But the silver lining is that now there will be serious efforts into creating a decentralised internet that isn't controlled by any Big Tech Cartel. In the same way Bitcoin was a response to 2008 economic crises. This crises will create strong alternative platforms. No doubt about it. It's no longer a matter of if but when. Incentives for an alternative internet have never been stronger.

https://deadline.com/2021/01/parler-ceo-says-service-dropped...

> “We’re going to try our best to get back online as quickly as possible. But we’re having a lot of trouble because every vendor we talk to says they won’t work with us. Because if Apple doesn’t approve and Google doesn’t approve, they won’t.”

Yes. Every time one platform gets banned the right wingers get more and more isolated, more and more relationships become severed, they get more and more lonely. Combined with pandemic quarntines this will be mental tortue and completely destroy them. They simply wont be able to ever come back from this.

This isn't independent research and I assure that the "left" has now much more political enemies than, say, 2015. It had an immense backfire effect, you just weren't able to quantify it yet.

lol

i've been spending ten times more time on Gab this year. just saying.

Gab is so overloaded these days it's hard to log in.

Steve Bannon is beyond the Streisand Effect. It only works when something obscure is banned. Everyone who might be influenced by Bannon already knows about him.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com