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Comment by awillen | Hacker News Reader

They're not deciding what is acceptable speech. They're deciding what is acceptable speech for their platforms and services. And given how absolutely insane and extreme that speech became before they took action, it's just strange to look at these companies like they're a problem. They tolerated increasingly violent and hateful rhetoric until people literally stormed the Capitol, then took action against the worst offender that helped to plan violence against our elected officials. This isn't some theoretical case of billionaires imposing their worldviews by banning people that we should be tremendously fearful of.

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AWS is more interesting in that case, though, since it's usually transparent to end users. AWS not doing business with Parler is a little like a craft store not selling posterboard and markers to a klansman, or a gun store not selling rounds to the guy who keeps talking about insurrection.

>gun store not selling rounds to the guy who keeps talking about insurrection

Yes, imagine a small town, and there's a guy known for always ranting about the coming insurrection, pedophile conspiracies, how "The Great Awakening" is near... then one day he walks into the town gun store and asks to buy a bunch of AR-15s and a ton of ammo, and the owner of the store says: "Hmm... no."

To elaborate on your point here, gun store owners choosing not to sell firearms to particular customers because they suspect those customers are a danger to themselves or others for any reason (including just the owners' hunch) is very commonplace, and not generally controversial.

From the letter AWS sent, a better analogy would be:

Craft store noticed their brand logo was on a poster board with messages calling for rape and execution of named individuals (a clearly illegal act). Craft store said in their sale recipt that the reserve the right to stop serving customers that promote illegal conduct.

First, however, the craft store asked the organizer to stop providing their poster boards to people organizing mass rape and execution event planning. "Please moderate, and you can continue to use our service"

The organizer days "go bleep yourself", to the store, followed by "if my members want to organize a mass execution of people, that's their protected speech!”

Store says "okay, your not welcome here anymore, see our terms of service"

AWS gave them a chance.. but at the end of the day, those messages calling for illegal acts are stored on AWS servers.. and Parler wanted to promote that kind of content to continue and amplify (it's good for business), but every day AWS is probably getting 50 warrants for information tied to having Parler as a customer. AWS service mark up doesn't cover 20 full time lawyers

I'll say if you're making this argument, then aws should be responsible for all content on aws servers. No hosting protections, direct responsibility. After all, the illegal data was on their servers, thus they should be directly responsible.

They are? They cooperate with law enforcement for illegal material takedowns on a regular basis. You might have heard of raids for botnet hosting, or if not those, the ones for child porn or movie piracy. AWS is absolutely committed to having no illegal activity on their servers.

> ...or a gun store not selling rounds to the guy who keeps talking about insurrection.

If he follows that up with "Allahu Akbar," do you expect the gun store to complete the sale, or call the feds? Is that a limit on "freedom of religion"?

Or if you go to buy a ton of fertilizer, and as they're loading it into your truck, you talk about blowing up the white house -- what do you think is gonna happen?

I would liken it to a contract print house deciding they don't want to run the Unabomber Manifesto in their presses anymore.

> This isn't some theoretical case of billionaires imposing their worldviews by banning people that we should be tremendously fearful of.

I think you've missed the point. The concern OP raises is that this is no longer theoretical - these few billionaires actually can impose their worldview by controlling speech. In this case, we can all agree that Parler had to go. But the precedent / principle of the issue can be considered separately.

> They're not deciding what is acceptable speech. They're deciding what is acceptable speech for their platforms and services.

This is a distinction without a difference. If the major platforms all ban you, you are silenced. Its time we recognize the power these platforms have.

> This is a distinction without a difference.

I disagree, there is an extreme difference there. Freedom of speech is specifically in regards to the government giving you the negative right of being able to say whatever you want without government prosecution (aside from some edge cases like direct threats and the like, which are closer to actual violence). What they do not do is guarantee you a platform. You are free to say whatever you like, but you are not owed the right to be listened to. Removing someone from a platform is not silencing them. A private company does not owe you anything, let alone service.

No. The first amendment is about the government. The concept of freedom of speech is broader. If in a pandemic I can only legally communicate via digital tools, and the billionaires running the digital tools all decide to ban me, I am silenced.

It is not true that you can only legally communicate via digital tools. The US still has a post office

You're right, but the reality is that physical mail is no longer an effective form of communication relative to the speed of online platforms in most cases.

>the billionaires running the digital tools all decide to ban me, I am silenced.

How so? Are you incapable of using non-digital media to communicate? Are you incapable of creating your own digital platforms for communication or using alternative, less popular means to do so? Are you prevented from going to city hall, council meetings, political rallies, or voting? Your speech as it relates to your rights granted in the constitution remains completely intact. Your rights are unaffected by your access to certain digital platforms.

If you are on the no fly list of an airline, aren’t you free to buy your own B787, get a pilot license, get the relevant airport slots and authorisations and go fly by yourself anywhere you want? I mean in theory yes.

precisely. A better way to look at it is that you are free to travel by other means. The burden is convenience.

I support banning Parler, but this argument becomes more transparently untrue by the day. The internet is speech now. Visiting city halls and council meetings doesn't affect elections or policies, voting is useless without being part of an organized bloc, which can no longer happen without the internet, and Parler was one of several alt-right attempts to make their own platform--control of the internet is centralized enough that making a platform for non-technical users against the will of the megacorporations is not possible.

If you don't believe free speech absolutism should be allowed, say so, but free speech and this level of corporate dominance are not compatible.

I agree that corporations should be curtailed in both their size and power. This would resolve the paradox of speech being free, but it's platforms being controlled by a few large organizations. However, to say that free speech is absolute is absurd, because absolute free speech in this context would require the limitation of rights of organizations and owners too.

> However, to say that free speech is absolute is absurd, because absolute free speech in this context would require the limitation of rights of organizations and owners too.

I agree, but that's a common position here.

>Visiting city halls and council meetings doesn't affect elections or policies,

Oh how I wish this were actually true sometimes. Try going to any zoning board meeting.

If the first amendment and your concept of freedom of speech don't line up, then one or the other need to change I would think. If a right is not recognized by others/the government, then it effectively doesn't exist. That's not to say it's not right or that you couldn't rationally defend it though.

>If in a pandemic I can only legally communicate via digital tools

I see the conflict you're bringing up, it's in effect illegal to communicate in person a lot of the time due to the pandemic, so digital tools are very useful for you to be able to communicate, but if you are somehow banned from those you have few options, if any. I think the thing that is incorrect here is actually the government making it illegal to communicate via non-digital tools, even if a lot of times it is in an individual's best interest to stay inside. And once again, no one owes you a platform. You are, in your words, silenced, but I don't think that that is an issue that requires government action.

I think it could require government action: I could argue that it was government inaction in allowing a monopoly/oligopoly over the conduits of free speech that is now depriving me of my rights.

For what reason are we considering these platforms "conduits of free speech"? They are simply private services, private property. In the same way you can legally remove people from your home that you don't want in there, they can bar you from their service. They also didn't always exist. At what point in their existence would you argue that being banned from being able to use them was depriving you of some right? Can they have a monopoly over all of the "conduits of free speech" if all the old methods of communication still exist? If those alternatives exist, could they really be called a monopoly? (Although for things like Twitter, they're definitely not a monopoly, but if we're talking about govt backed ISPs, which can be a monopoly, then that is indeed a different story, but I would argue that ISPs should be divorced from any government regulation/subsidies).

"In the same way you can legally remove people from your home that you don't want in there" -> I agree with you in principle, but this is the type of thing where the principle doesn't generalize at every level of scale, and at a big enough scale it becomes problematic.

Let's consider the other extreme with a fictional corporation "MEGA INC", which suppose owns all web hosting, all ISPs. Let's also throw in that they have a monopoly over paper production and publishing. Now, do you think your argument that "this private entity can do whatever it wants" is problematic? I should hope so.

I'm not making the case that it's black/white and that this situation with Big Tech is equivalent to MEGA INC. But, it's not that our free speech rights are binary. My point is simply that we're somewhere along the spectrum spanning "private home" <-> "MEGA INC", and at this point rights are actually being diminished because of the oligopolistic nature of a significant corner where discourse happens.

So, unfortunately, I think it's a nuanced situation that's not easily reduced to a simplistic principle such as what you've stated. We have clear principles to reason about the extremes, but it's hard to make an argument in the hairy middle because both can be made to apply.

There's no shortage of conduits for free speech you have a right to use, on and off the internet.

The oligopoly only concerns distribution to the widest possible audience, whether it's social media or broadcast media. And even a First Amendment constrained government is allowed to pick and choose which speech it distributes

PG&E is a private company, and I’m pretty sure they owe me service as long as I pay my bill. I could be totally wrong. Who even knows anymore.

Utility companies are for all intents and purposes, governmental. Regulating social networks like utilities is one possible course of action our society could choose. But it is not how we do it today.

That is my point.

PG&E is a utility monopoly and regulated differently than a typical private business for that reason.

PG&E is a government-granted monopoly and is close to being part of the government itself (in that the government gets to decide how much profit the company is allowed to make, and insists they service every individual).

I can see the argument that basic Internet access should be similarly regulated, especially as it uses either public frequencies (e.g. 5G) or public land (sidewalks etc) to provide the service.

I agree that nobody's first amendment rights were violated. I maintain that big tech is controlling _acceptable speech_. All the major platforms are working together to decide what kind of speech society gets to hear, which is dangerous.

First amendment rights are orthogonal.

> What they do not do is guarantee you a platform.

I think this is a really important point. How I have framed this to others is: "the 6 o'clock news isn't required to give you airtime."

In the past, you could write articles to the newspaper, or contact the news and hope they picked up your story. There was not a right to be heard.

That said, I'm still not sure how I feel about what has transpired in the last week. Freedom of speech (as a principle, not in the US legal sense) has always felt like a core principle of the Internet.

> Its time we recognize the power these platforms have.

We have. That's why millions of people have pushed these companies to take a stand against hate. None of these companies are doing this because they want to lose money. If they thought it would be profitable long-term, they would keep doing it. It's the invisible hand of the market that you're really upset with here.

don't discount the power of personal ideologies inside of these companies as well.

It's not their job to "take a stand against hate." I don't buy books from Amazon because I like their opinion on the homelessness situation in the world today. I don't ask my cashier at the grocery store his thoughts on gay marriage, and I don't expect corporations to do more than sell me goods I need.

The weird politicization of commerce is baffling to me.

Consumers using their collective economic power to push for change is not a new concept. I would suggest you take advantage of your willingness to buy books on Amazon if this is truly a baffling concept to you. Then read some of them.

Casual reminder that the slippery slope fallacy is ultimately a fallacy.

I think the issue isn't really controlled speech with these platforms but more often a loss of control of the narrative. They are ill-preppared to deal with hate speech and often will act as the very propagators of it. (See FB in 2016). The real issue to be found is the massive control they have in light of their blindness to the context of their product and inability to enact real censorship of things that are truly intolerant. Personally looking from the outside in, I think that makes them a long-term risk to themselves rather than just a risk to society. It's worth noting that this will likely lead to a platform that intentionally 'free' to intolerant behavior that will compete and likely compete well as it will be additive to those looking for hate.

Modeling them as independent businesses that can decide — based on any non-protected principle they choose — to censor speech is too generic to be useful. They are closer to telephone or radio or broadcast TV companies than to private enterprise as an overarching category. Communication business are, of course, regulated around what they can and cannot say on air (the broadcast ones, specifically), and we probably need a similar approach to handling social media.

Yet we do not treat them like regulated broadcast media, which I guess is unsurprising in that regulation lags behind technology. In the context of Parler, it seems they tried to make the best of a bad situation.

But I don't know that we should cheer this as "the right outcome", even if, in this case, it seems justified (my gut is that this was the right thing to do, in this specific case). It's time to ask broader questions around whether these companies should have that power at all, or if we need government to step in.

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