Hacker News Reader

Comment by BobbyJo | Hacker News Reader

I think we need to acknowledge that a lot of what these agreements outline is, to a large degree, subjective. If human language, or expression in general, weren't contextual and up for interpretation, then I think this would be a viable way of looking at things, but that simply isn't the case.

So long as there is room for interpretation, and the consequences (politically, economically, etc.) of those interpretations are potentially far reaching, leaving it up to private companies with no oversight isn't a good option.

View on HN

So you have n companies each applying their own subjective judgement over their own networks, or you have 1 government applying its own subjective judgement over all networks in that country.

It's highly unlikely that the latter is more friendly to fringe or extremist views (setting aside whether or not that's a good thing).

One government is optimistic in this case. This is the EU talking, they'll gladly deliberate for months before any action is taken.

Furthermore, wouldn't this worsen an authoritarian or Trump-like scenario? We are expecting the government to moderate itself? Wouldn't a yes man/crony just sit in that seat ala William Barr and let the tweets go unchecked?

Yeah, in the US, depending on which dystopia you think we're living in, it's very easy to envision either some Trump crony making sure nobody was disrespectful to him on Twitter OR some "deep state" agents starting to censor him way back in 2015 to try to prevent his getting elected in the first place.

I've yet to see a realistic proposal for what should replace Twitter's ability to choose its own TOS that isn't either a worse situation like that, or isn't some "only illegal stuff should be taken down" that probably results in far fewer open places on the internet accepting user-generated content for broadcast in the first place.

The key difference is a government is decided by the people. n companies (let's be real, 2-4) have no accountability.

There is potential for an antitrust issue - two companies having immense control over the most popular way to access the internet, your phone. At least for now, it's really more of a convenience thing when app stores remove apps; limiting the feature set of your product offering to apps only may make sense, but it is an educated risk. If you feel you want the most people to access your content, you make it work on mobile and desktop computers without requiring a specific app store gatekeeper.

If you disagree with Apple removing something from an app store, you buy an Android compatible and enable side-loading, or you buy a Linux compatible phone, or if all else fails, you connect through a web site.

When I used Windows Phone, it was annoying that I couldn't download an app for my bank, inconvenient that I still had to use ATMs to deposit checks. And disappointing that I couldn't hop on the Snapchat bandwagon. But I was still able to communicate with friends and family, read the news, do research, learn things, and make use of the internet.

Allowing just a few companies enough control over the internet to take away your ability to choose how you use it is an antitrust issue.

> It's highly unlikely that the latter is more friendly to fringe or extremist views

This is empirically false though, at least in the the USA.

In the USA there are extremely strong protections for free speech.

If it was required that platforms followed the existing way that the government is allowed to ban certain speech, then platforms would be much less restrictive, because our laws of what speech is allowed is very pro free speech.

Many authors have speculated on how modern society would work if rather than 1 legal system you would have large companies that each have their own laws and enforcement. Usually the world is made into a dystopia.

I think a 1 government is in general more friendly to fringe or extremist people. Not that the laws are better, but government legal system must in its core treat everyone similar where same act done by two people are punished similarly. This aspect of law make people feel safe against arbitrary enforcement and that benefits both people of fringe as well as non-fringe views.

I don't think we can enter science fiction stories into the evidence for this debate. They are fiction.

The events in these books don't even necessarily reflect the beliefs of the authors. An author might simply write what would be entertaining to read, or what has been written in the genre before. Even if these fictional megacorps do reflect the widely held belief of genre authors, that doesn't serve as any kind of factual basis on which to base public policy.

That is true, through we do have historical evidence during the colonial times where large shipping companies were large enough to rival nations and had their own laws and enforcement. Later we also have large mining companies with their own towns, laws and enforcement.

As far as I remember my history, companies that are larger than nation with their own laws and enforcement have not much nice things written about them.

"No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." [0]

-- Winston Churchill

For any kind of platform that allows arbitrary users some level of control over the content that will be hosted, the options for ensuring that content is not harmful are:

* Community Moderation: users control contributing and moderating content. The platform chooses moderators, or enables voting for them. This gives users and all people (i.e. citizens) the most power, but has the most potential for abuse of the system to enable using the platform to host, spread and share harmful content.

* Platform Moderation: wholly moderated by platform chosen moderators. This is probably the most common system. The platform will use its own set of values and policies to decide what to moderate, and will likely target the most popular content deemed harmful. Per platform, this gives platforms the most power, but platforms much compete with each other

* Government Moderation: moderation likely by the platform, but with oversight from government - policy and values may be defined by the government; failure to moderate according to the government legislation could result in penalties or termination of the platform. If the government has sufficient checks and balances and citizen influence, this may be a desirable system, but if the government is not "of and for the people", it could also be used by the government to moderate opponents of the government as decided by that government. Anyone opposing the absolute power of the government may find their content "moderated" away. This is the stuff of nightmares for the founding fathers.

"When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny." [1]

-- Thomas Jefferson

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

[1] https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/whe...

That's a fair statement but as long as a company is not found to be applying bias to their application of their rules, again I see no problem. In the instances we're discussing though, there has been clear violation of terms over a sustained period of time.

this argument seems well & sound to me, if I replace "private companies" with "private monopolies". right now I don't think we know how monopolistic these companies are & i don't think we've tried doing much competing. so yes we are under the seat of a few big entities. it's our fault. athe failure of us, our unwillingness to compete, does not give the nation's of the world preimminent domain. the rights of the private entities to converse as they would is to be respected, including excluding unwanted voices. if you have something to say find your own places to say it.

these garbage fire bonanzas ablaze with calls for violence & insurrection with the flimsiest fakest of fabricated basis underneath are unfortunately really bad tests of how monopolistic big tech is, because they doom themselves, seem rankly incompetent, destined to self immolate. competitor platformsust follow some law, which is in many cases what companies do when they kick people off: protect themselves & the rest of the platform from grave risks. i believe companies should be encouraged to find their own ways to remain safe, that nation's ordering them around to control speech in certain governmentally dictated ways would be horrific. cyberspace doesn't deserve this infringement, people don't, even big tech, sucky g useless as it is, doesn't. this isn't china. we don't do that here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com