Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
They cannot seek the protections of being "critical infrastructure" of any sort, common carrier, public forum, etc. and then, at the same time, disable user accounts for any reason just like any other private website.
They have to pick one or the other. The arguments I am seeing online are folks who have chosen one or the other and are arguing from their chosen perspective. For example, I am content to see them as just another handful of private websites, no matter how large they have become.
Meanwhile, the companies themselves, like Twitter, are content to bask in this ambiguity instead of clarifying what they are or intend to be.
EDIT:
Once the number of users has grown past a manageable threshhold where violations of rules can be detected by administrators (instead of relying on others to report them), it may cause some to wonder what are the reasons absent any legal or other compusion when a user's account is suspended.
Looking at the Twitter rules, the possible reasons this account may have been suspended, e.g., copyright violations, are not obvious. What is their justifcation for suspension. Some sources, e.g., The Verge, are reporting that this Twitter account was being used to solicit statements of support from academics to be used in some litigation in India that seeks to block access Sci-Hub in that country. Apparently the Indian court denied the initial request from publishers for an immediate decision in order to allow time for the scientific community to weigh in on the issue.
I hope someone is setting up another means for the scientific community to weigh in on the non-monetary value of Sci-Hub.
It's never been proposed that platforms like Twitter become common carriers. That designation was intended for the layer beneath them, ISPs.
I agree that allowing that layer, ISPs, to effectively monopolize content via regional monopolies and ever-growing media conglomerates is problematic. Now they're implementing zero rating in broadband and that means there's a high bar for starting the next Netflix, Twitter etc. If you're not already part of that club you'll have to be super wealthy or take on huge debt from existing tech/wealth dominance just to get your foot in the door.
We really need to encourage competition at the ISP level in order to allow for competition among services like Twitter.
>What is their justifcation for suspension.
I don't see why they should need a justification. Just because something is popular doesn't mean people should be entitled to it. It makes no sense that an arbitrary MAU count suddenly rescinds the property rights of the people who pay money to keep the servers running, as well as to develop and maintain the software. Further, I don't see any benefit to society in policies that might encourage social media use, and speaking economically when these large platforms boot people off it actually increases competition and decreases their dominance because it creates a market opportunity for competitors, exactly like what happened with Parler. Suddenly, nobody seems to care that a conservative competitor to AWS is getting a huge account, shouldn't that be pereceived as a good thing? Why are the people who get banned so insistent on using services they claim are inherently unfair to them? Why not support companies that share your values?
Just spitballing here, but doesn't it seem that with the way things are going, Twitter/Facebook will become a silo for those who hold more left-leaning views and Parler/Gab will become a silo for those with more right-leaning views? I understand that there are some who only want to see their preconceived notions reinforced, but for those who are actually interested in an open dialogue and open discussion, aren't we losing something important if this is the result? It would certainly cause an already polarized populace to become more polarized, would it not?
Most right leaning politicians have no problem at all being active on Twitter and Facebook and the vast majority of people who describe themselves as "more right-leaning" want absolutely nothing to do with the sort of people or ideologies that where prevalent on Parler.
Telcos and cable providers provide access to the medium, i.e. the internet, whereas the web is just one protocol that allows internet users to publish. Having websites with 100s of millions of people posting to them is no substitute for peer-to-peer protocols (private communication) or websites owned by news organisations that employ journalists (publication).
We have generally acknowledged that things that are important to everyone and are monopolized need to be regulated.
Social media is practically the only effective way to participate in the global community. The same is true, although with decreasing necessity, in more localized communities.
Facebook and Twitter have massively altered the way that people engage with other people, businesses, even the government. They took public discourse and monetized it. That's fine, but they now have to deal with the implications of being the keepers of public discourse, and I think a reasonable stipulation for allowing them to monetize that is that they cannot bar someone from participating without a very good justification that isn't "lol our ToS allows us to cut you off whenever we want, and take your first born child".
> speaking economically when these large platforms boot people off it actually increases competition and decreases their dominance because it creates a market opportunity for competitors, exactly like what happened with Parler. Suddenly, nobody seems to care that a conservative competitor to AWS is getting a huge account, shouldn't that be pereceived as a good thing?
Sure, and what happened to them? It's a little ironic to argue that booting people off of their platform increases competition and then mention their new competitor that was immediately wiped off the face of the internet.
I think Parler attracted a lot of extremists. That's partially their own fault with their poor moderation, but it's also a reflection that Twitter has so dominated the marketplace that your only customers as a new social media site are going to be nutjobs. It has strong anti-competitive effects. The community is a huge part of a social media site. Crazy users poison the community, ensuring that the brand is tainted and not a threat to Twitter.
> Why are the people who get banned so insistent on using services they claim are inherently unfair to them? Why not support companies that share your values?
Because you'd be better off writing it on bathroom stalls.
Because there is no meaningful competitor. Even Parler was tiny by social media standards, and it's probably dead now.
Because your friends and family want to use Twitter, and probably won't switch, so you have to use Twitter and Facebook.
Because Facebook and Twitter have spent so long maximizing engagement that people barely bother looking for other sources of news and information.
I'm not a huge fan of Parler or the way it was run. It does seem damning that the only app that threatened to take some of Twitter's market share was immediately scrubbed off the internet. I don't think ISIS material gets completely wiped off the face of the internet that fast.
Social media is not important, it's an entertainment triviality on par with online gaming. Further, big tech does not monopolize online communication by any definition of the word, twitter and facebook are one of many thousands of ways to communicate online, and most internet users use a variety of platforms as using one does not preclude the ability to use another. Additionally, I'm not saying these companies shouldn't be regulated, check my reply in the sibling thread, what I'm opposed to is the violation of property and first amendment rights by forcing these companies to pay for hosting content they disagree with.
>Social media is practically the only effective way to participate in the global community
Totally false. The "global community" such that it exists on the internet is spread across many hundreds of thousands of applications, sites, and communities.
> they now have to deal with the implications of being the keepers of public discourse,
No, your reasoning here is completely backwards. The fraction of people who willingly choose to participate in public discourse on these sites have to deal with the implications of choosing to use such sites. There are many alternative options available.
> It's a little ironic to argue that booting people off of their platform increases competition and then mention their new competitor that was immediately wiped off the face of the internet.
No. Parler moved to a new hosting platform called Epik the same one that hosts Gab and others, this is a business opportunity for Epik created by the fact that AWS did not want to do business with Parler, this reduces AWS's dominance in the market.
> it's also a reflection that Twitter has so dominated the marketplace that your only customers as a new social media site are going to be nutjobs.
Not true. The reason that Parler attracts extremists is because it was designed to attract them. There are many other platforms that don't have this issue
> The community is a huge part of a social media site
Social media sites do not own the community, they can visit as few or as many different social media sites as they want and its trivial for them to do so.
> Because there is no meaningful competitor.
Totally false. Discord, tiktok, mastadon, pinterest, twitch, vimeo, tumblr, irc, medium, soundcloud, wordpress, blogger ete and that's just off the top of my head.
> Because your friends and family want to use Twitter, and probably won't switch, so you have to use Twitter and Facebook.
That doesn't matter. If your friends use a platform that you want to use then follow the rules of the platform and you'll have no problem. A lot of my friends communicate over Steam chat, that doesn't mean Valve owes me anything - it's an entertainment triviality.
> Because Facebook and Twitter have spent so long maximizing engagement that people barely bother looking for other sources of news and information.
This is false, but even if it were true, anyone who gets their information exclusively from social media is to blame for their own media consumption habits.
Net Neutrality ensures that ISP do what the name says, providing Internet service without interfering with it, like restricting which sites you can visit.
A platform like twitter, facebook, parler. Is something that was created from scratch and is owned by these companies. As of now it's not their duty to allow everyone in. And enforcing it is stepping on their freedom.
Someone here or on reddit, suggested that perhaps the government supposed to provide such public platform. That's an interesting thought, because at that point I would agree that if such things would happen there such complaints would be justified.
Instead these enourmous websites are filling what is now an obvious void in public services for communication.
Perhaps I should not have used the term "common carrier" as that term has very specific meaning, and only in certain jurisdictions. What I mean is common carrier-like treatment by the public. People talk about these websites as if they are public services. Messenger apps are treated like they are interchangeable with telephone service.
Practically speaking (i.e., how they are being used in practice), maybe, but beyond that I refuse to see them that way. These are not anywhere close to public services, IMO.
Even the trend of websites that we would otherwise see as "public websites" containing "public information" that urge visitors to create "accounts" or "profiles" and "log in" is a disturbing evolution to me, blurring the line between public and private websites. Traditionally, a website that is protected by a password is not "open to the public". If "accounts" are required then disabling the account can disable "public access". Accounts can be disabled for any reason.
Of course, that trend is probably driven by the commercialisation of the web as an advertiser's wet dream.
Having the government provide the platform would create a huge burden on one entity to moderate content. Any mistake would be magnified 1000x what they are now. It would end free speech as we know it and would be very expensive.
Instead we encourage businesses to moderate their own content and compete for a userbase. That allows platforms to evolve on their own dime with incremental changes that satisfy their respective userbases.
And, we can't just snap our fingers to make that happen. True competition comes from separately owned, competing services.
It's not a conspiracy that a handful of platforms dominate it's simply flawed regulation targeting the wrong incentives.
Nah, inviting the government to moderate these platforms is the last thing we want. It's bad enough there are only a handful of them, we definitely don't want all that power under one person's control.
And, forcing them to use more official accounts like @POTUS might give existing office-holders undue advantage.
I think drawing the line at inciting violence is proper. We do need more competition at the platform level and I think this comes when we establish a competitive environment among ISPs and content conglomerates by reinstating net neutrality and discouraging regional broadband monopolies.
Personal opinion is that the best solution would be to dumb Twitter for any discussions, but especially political ones.
a) Should twitter be allowed to cancel accounts who harm twitter?
If yes: b) Who decides which accounts harm twitter? If the answer is "twitter", then they have effectively the right to terminate any account at their will. I don't know what other answer is possible for b) except maybe "the courts", and I'm not sure I like that one.
If the answer to a) is no, for which companies does this apply? Must every company work with every potential customer? Who decides which companies must?
Going through the options, I only see viable: twitter can ban whomever they like, for whatever reason, except for the usual exceptions (religion, race etc).
I wish they wouldn't though.
For example, in an at-will employment state, an employer can legally fire you for looking at them funny. No one would argue that an employer shouldn't have the right to terminate an employee if they were bad for the company, nor would anyone object to the employer being able to determine what is good or bad for the company. Nevertheless, such an act is a dick move and the employer should be heavily criticized for doing it.
Although some people agree that is the question, it is not the fundamental one here. Most of the respectable arguments are that Twitter's bans are senselessly harming Twitter. They're building a gaping hole in their offering that a competitor can cover.
There's a huge demand for alternatives to Twitter, but other major tech companies, the corporate press, and many politicians are doing everything in their power to crush those alternatives and prevent them from springing up.
As someone else pointed out, their user base tripled before they were nuked.
That's because companies don't want associated with the users on those platforms, many of whom left Twitter because twitter didn't want them either.
So businesses aren't simply in some evil cahoots with Twitter. They're associated with Twitter because that the users they do want to associate with.
If Twitter wants to maintain that monopoly and their walled garden, then no, they should not be able to arbitrarily ban users. I would like to see online public discourse declared to be part of the social infrastructure and be treated like a utility.
Alternately, if Twitter is willing to move to a federated-type model where Twitter users can follow Parler users and vice-versa, I think they should be able to continue to ban people.
That neatly resolves this conundrum to me. Twitter loses its absolutely staggering inertia from the size of their userbase. The data becomes open, and social media companies become focused on providing value via exposing you to this data, rather than just by building a moat with it to keep out competitors.
Regulated public utilities generally speaking can't just drop customers simply because they feel like it or don't like them or view them as a "threat". Thankfully the electricity company can't just disconnect you because they don't like you. So long as you pay the bills, they have to keep you on as customer. (I think they can disconnect you if you violate technical rules about electrical safety, such as trying to draw more power from the network than your connection is authorised – but they can't simply do it because they disagree with your politics, or because you are charged with a crime no matter how heinous, or because some third party is suing you, or so on.)
And there is an argument for regulating Twitter/Facebook/etc as public utilities.
A lot of people in Australia's conservative ruling party are pretty upset at Twitter. They were asking Twitter to take down a faked image of an Australian soldier slitting a child's throat which was posted by the Chinese government. Twitter refused. Then Twitter banned Donald Trump. Twitter will argue that the two situations were very different, but a number of conservative Australian politicians don't agree. They are calling for government regulations to control when Twitter can remove content or ban people [0]. Effectively, turning it into a regulated public utility, at least in Australia. (If the Australian government goes ahead with this, I can't see any way out of it for Twitter except to either comply or block everyone in Australia from accessing their service.)
[0] https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/threat-to-democracy-...
Poland will do the same.
I think we either need to get rid of those exceptions or add more. I'm not sure which.
I find it a rather arbitrary standard I so often encounter.
How would banning for religion be different than banning for any other opinion? So long as an opinion asserts the existence of a higher being it is inviolate? All I need to claim to be unbannable for saying that vaccines cause cancer is simply add “This was told to me by the almighty creator Zefron of Zefronism” and that small differences turns an ordinary falsehood into a religion?
Can I deny the holocaust in Germany by simply making it a tenant of a religion?
It seems awfully arbitrary to me.
Think about the adhoc communal living options that are available to people who want to live in intentional community in SF, consider side by side people like conservative Mennonite churchgoers in rural Illinois.
The idea is not that anyone can or should pull an L Ron, the point is that those identity factors are more or less taken to be extraneous of someone's behavior
They are default bad reasons to ban someone, not an exhaustive list, just good rules of thumb
They’re not violating copyright via Twitter. They should have a voice via Twitter, no matter the accusation.
Do accused murderers [as opposed to convicted] get their Twitter suspended?
This is ridiculous.
On a related note, Facebook policy bans sex offenders from having accounts at all, regardless of what they do with them:
https://www.facebook.com/help/210081519032737:
> Convicted sex offenders aren't allowed to use Facebook. If you've seen an account that may belong to a convicted sex offender, please report it to us.
Not sure about the other social media networks.
Frankly the whole situation in the US is messed up, punishment should be limited to whatever the court decides.
(I do think 14 year olds should be discouraged from taking and sending nude pictures of themselves – it is the sort of thing they could easily come to regret in a few more years – but I don't think criminal prosecution is an ethical way of providing that discouragement.)
Receiver could delete picture ASAP, and discourage behavior. If they keep, spread, or encourage they're complicit. Of course, there's a difference in severity between 1 nude of 1 person, or a myriad, or being an adult with a myriad.
Sender getting prosecuted for spreading their own nude as minor might be weird, but also makes sense. Its not as if they'd be a registered sex offender as a minor.
Put this way: what if it was an illegal firearm? We can't just turn a blind eye to youth breaking law, but we can't treat them like adults either. There's a solid middle ground: hold parents accountable till teenager, then both, and at age 16 the teenager but not with fully implemented adult law. Interestingly, that's approx how countries deal with it, or variants of that at least.
TL;DR if properly nuanced, we can deal with issues like these, though we may disagree on these nuances, I'm quite sure we'll agree on the outliers.
I think the Australian state of Victoria gets it more or less right – section 51M of the Crimes Act 1958 [0] makes it explicitly legal for children to produce, possess or distribute images of themselves. Adults (and in some cases other children) can still be prosecuted if they encourage/entice/assist/etc the child to do it, but the child themselves commits no crime.
> Its not as if they'd be a registered sex offender as a minor.
A number of American states do in fact put minors on the sex offender registry. For example, [1] describes how a woman was registered as a sex offender in Michigan after being convicted of "criminal sexual conduct" as a 10 year old
> Put this way: what if it was an illegal firearm?
A fifteen year old who takes a picture of themselves naked, the primary risk of harm is to themselves, and the harm they are risking is psychosocial rather than physical. By contrast, a fifteen year old with an illegal firearm easily poses a risk of death or serious physical injury, not just to themselves, but also to others. Hence, criminally prosecuting the later is far easier to morally justify than criminally prosecuting the former. The situations aren't really comparable.
> We can't just turn a blind eye to youth breaking law
Well, like Victoria has done, the law can be changed so that they aren't breaking it.
[0] http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/vic/consol_act/ca1958...
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/14/when-kids-are-...
I don't think you realize just how common this is. There are very few people managing high school and college machine shops who haven't helped cover up an NFA violation. Even outside that making oil filter silencers for .22 rifles (or other cheap guns high schoolers have access to) is not at all uncommon. Eventually most grow out of it (i.e. they have a real life and the risk reward calculus changes).
Likewise teenagers routinely get exposed to hard drugs and "the system" is the last thing that helps that.
Damn near every adult has a bunch of "I'd be in prison if the caught me" stories from high school.
So yeah, I think we should handle both with a stern talking too about federal prison and not much else. Most kids will mature out of this behavior and it's not worth risking screwing all of them to try and pre-emptively save the few that won't grow out of it.
It's worth noting that is far from the typical case of "being a sex offender."
That’s gotten out of hand. I understand they want to discourage streakers and guys who flip open their raincoats or whatever, but someone who looks for a dark corner to pee is no where near being a sex offender. That’s a travesty.
Doesn't mean we can't try to talk someone out of doing that or discuss how such behavior makes society slightly worse.
The phones at one time we’re not “utilities”. Social media may become the next regulated utility given its importance.
I don’t think there is a great public interest in a single curated (algorithmically and/or manually) user-generated-content newsfeed system. In fact, insofar as such a category of product is desirable, I think that the public interest is in competition and freedom to differentiate, including in terms of content focus and preferences within the bounds of the law, just as is the case with, say, news outlets that aren’t driven by UGC.
This isn't about speech, it's copyright infringement.
Are they committing copyright infringement on Twitter?
Twitter may not be responsible for user content as per section 230 but it's also not a good idea as a company to step on the toes of intellectual property holders without good reason.
We can recognise things as being wrong even if they're not illegal.
As a platform, it bears no responsibility over what's published on it as long as it complies with any court orders to remove illegal content. But it cannot censor or editorialize content.
If it does, it becomes a media outlet and has responsibility over all content published on Twitter, (which doesn't scale very well).
Jack wants to have the best of both worlds. The power to censor whatever he doesn't like, with 0 responsibility over the content he doesn't care about.
For instance, their (and all other social network) S230 liability protection could be tied to specific conduct, such as no arbitrary bans.
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/739906562/u-s-appeals-court-r...
@dick said recently in an interview that these are geo-political decisions. That they might've did the calculus of losing advertising money but it's not the predominate reason [1].
[1] - I can't find this source. I find it weird that I can't search my history to find it. It was in an interview with either Bloomberg or WSJ.
P.S. The interview was in relation to Trump being banned but I think his response applies to Sci_Hub because these are intentional decisions, not from an AI/automated system.
Per historic Soviet communism playbook: all research, including natural sciences, was to be founded on the philosophy of dialectical materialism. Humanities and social sciences [research] were additionally tested for strict accordance with historical materialism.[1]
In other recent examples, I don't think anyone would argue they aren't actively doing their part to suppress free-speech (a requirement for communism). The most blatant and concerning to me is their amplification of discussion around topics that would facilitate the piece-by-piece dismantlement of America's democratic republic. Most recently, getting rid of the electoral college.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_th...
This from Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946), a case decided by the United States Supreme Court, in which it ruled that a state trespassing statute could not be used to prevent the distribution of religious materials on a town's sidewalk, even though the sidewalk was part of a privately owned company town. The Court based its ruling on the provisions of the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
We've had threads about it on HN, but it's also (for obvious reasons) come up recently, and here's Ken White citing a recent SCOTUS decision knocking this idea down:
https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1141766582382678016
(The whole thread is good).
But that is that Marsh v. Alabama had the company wanting to use a state law to kick people out (and this was repeated with the California case Pruneyard). "The state doesn't need to actively help you kick people exercising their 1A rights in a place you don't want them to" is very, very different from "The state can prevent you from exercising your own autonomy to prevent someone from re-accessing your property".
If the company town put up a fence and a gate, they wouldn't be forced to let anyone in.
They are playing cute with political speech. They aren't publishing in the traditional sense. But heavy curation of independent content is (at their volume) publishing - without the regulation accorded publishers. They are, by their actions, espousing certain political ideas by only allowing those ideas to exist in their 'public forum'.
For anyone, even a staunch libertarian, to claim that the government should not get in their kitchen on that basis is naive in my opinion.
What I will say is, however you hope to resolve this problem, eliminating the 230 protections is probably not the right way to go about it if you want providers like Twitter to be less intrusive, or for alternative venues to be viable at all. I think the only coherent "free speech" strategy that involves attacking 230 is accelerationism; that maybe by blowing up the US commercial Internet we'll somehow all migrate to a completely free blockchain Internet run out of the Azores or something.
Moderation doesn't scale, so I think this is a case of either do what 230 requires or cease existing as a going concern - either of these would be good outcomes, so this is a powerful lever.
Some ideas in no particular order; a platform owner is only shielded from liability inasmuch as they (choose as many as applicable):
1. Provide a forthright accounting of any negative actions taken against an account (no shadowbans, no silent editing or hiding of content from discovery) at the time the action is taken with a forthright explanation of how the conduct broke the stated rules.
2. Provide an appeals process for bans/negative actions run by a neutral third party, with any ambiguity resolved in favor of the appellant.
3. Do not make or enforce ex-post-facto rule changes
4. Demonstrate no pattern of unfair or unequal application of the stated rules
5. If a ban is issued, a "wind-down" period must be granted to allow the banned user time to move what they can of their social network somewhere else.
6. Upon request, your own account's data must be provided in full.
OR
7. Remain completely hands-off from a content removal standpoint. Content is removed if it is either literally illegal or breaks the service and under no other circumstance.
This last one would still allow for spam filtering and content categorization, which would allow the user experience to change little from today, and puts the most control in the hands of individual users.
As a matter of principle, any regulatory regime that would put HN as Dan moderates it at risk is bad, and what you're proposing would seem to threaten HN. All your bullets here seem like things that will pull providers into litigation.
Having it apply to every forum everywhere would suck and be unworkable, but once you're at Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/etc. levels of exposure, there are a different set of interests and responsibilities to society in play.
I should add a point I should have made earlier, which is that 230 is in no way based on a notion of being "publishers" or "platforms". That's a super common misconception about the law.
That ambiguity is precisely what I try to address. That distinction might not exist now, but it arguably should.
It’s also not clear to me why we’d expect a private company to have to answer to you or me or anybody else about decisions they make. We can choose to not use their services if we don’t agree with them (and many people on this site have done exactly that), but any rule that attempts to say “once you’re popular enough, your business has to follow somebody else’s rulebook for how you decide what content you must host” isn’t going to make sense to me.
Put plainly, I do not believe it is possible for a social network to moderate hard or fast enough at Facebook/Twitter scale to reject section 230 immunity. Even if they took the step of pre-moderating all content before it appears on the site, there is simply too much content coming in for that to be a realistic option (and not lose a ton of users due to the delay putting people off).
To give you an idea of the scale we're talking about, Twitter does about 500,000,000 tweets per day.
>It’s also not clear to me why we’d expect a private company to have to answer to you or me or anybody else about decisions they make.
They answer to society at the end of the day, which can express its desires via the legal system. If society tires of social networks acting as unaccountable gatekeepers to the national conversation, society can act.
That are offered to the customers below cost of running them in order to stifle competition, which is only possible as long as the government antitrust body is looking the other way.
Twitter as best as we can tell is not offering services below cost to customers.
The free users are not the customers. The paying users purchasing ads are using the services to derive value from the population of free users on the platform.
If you want to reform this, target how companies convince people to give up their data in exchange for functionality rather than for money.
Same argument used towards hate speech but this is more serious IMO because big tech is the new Standard Oil or Big Tobacco.
Sure it matters. It matters because a bunch of people want businesses to allow all legal speech on their platform.
And this group of people is growing in support, and they might eventually get enough support to force these business to do so, using legislative changes such as required these major companies to follow common carrier laws.
THEN ... when there is a literal armed insurrection against the capital where TWO police officers died and 5 people total, and they had pipe bombs and hand cuffs to kidnap people, they waited until FRIDAY after the markets closed to ban Trump from the platform.
Twitter's behavior in this entire thing is beyond unacceptable and borders on treasonous.
I really think everyone needs to be calling for @jack to resign.
Its market cap is $36B. That's 2X less than Snap and 20X less than Facebook.
Microsoft isn't though. Not because they don't completely own the Desktop PC market just as they ever did, but because that market is less relevant than it used to be for web devs.
I live in a strange time.
The store? Then your analogy is flawed because there are other big stores that sell basically the same stuff and even some small shops. Not a monopoly. If all of them choose not to sell that product that doesn't mean anything. They don't have any obligation to carry whatever you want.
Man, people are being absurd about this whole thing.
If major cinema chains (Twitter, Facebook..) refuse to show a movie, but you can still rent the back of Moe's bar (and thousands bars like it) and use their second-hand projector (an analogy for the small audience of alternative platforms).
How successful will such movies be? Should we be concerned that the cinema chains can decide what sort of movies can be made or have any sort of impact?
There are significantly more than two companies that allow mass communication over the internet. In fact, there are a significant number of perfectly free and open ways to communicate over the internet.
Why is Twitter special?
> If major cinema chains (Twitter, Facebook..) refuse to show a movie, but you can still rent the back of Moe's bar (and thousands bars like it) and use their second-hand projector (an analogy for the small audience of alternative platforms). How successful will such movies be?
Sorta my point, because that happens all the time. No one goes around saying theater chains are monopolies and need to show every movie anyone deigns to have projected on a screen.
> Should we be concerned that the cinema chains can decide what sort of movies can be made or have any sort of impact?
Maybe, but that isn't legal standing for doing anything. If you don't like it, boycott theaters, tell your friends not to go to them, promote alternatives that deliver what you want.
Oh, but then the market might disagree with you and keep going to the theaters anyway. Well tough. You're not entitled to force people to care.
Alternatively, push for legislation around online communication platforms and how they are allowed to determine who can and cannot speak on them. But then don't be surprised when those rules apply to your mailing list too.
Farmers rely on access to groundwater for the cultivation of their crops. but since Coca-Cola's arrival, they have been confronted with a serious decline in water levels. [...] documents from the government's water ministry show that water levels remained stable from 1995 until 2000, when the Coca-Cola plant became operational. Water levels then dropped by almost 10 metres over the following five years.
https://waronwant.org/news-analysis/coca-cola-drinking-world...
The company was blamed for depleting the local supply of water even in communities where it did not have operations
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/05/31/h...
Sounds like the plot of Idiocracy.
GP's point was that private individuals have the power to arbitrarily deplatform speech they don't like, no court order required. The counter argument is 'go find another speech platform', but it doesn't work, because speech platforms have been monopolised by a single-digit handful of individuals.
it does not take much effort to realize that twitter is not a monopoly in the space of speech platforms. it's not clear to me that twitter is particularly unique as a speech platform: blogs minimally could serve this role, as could mastodon. more controversially perhaps: facebook/instagram.
contrast that with a situation where you literally /cannot/ get utilities delivered to your house because the utility company doesn't like you: seems like a fairly stark difference to me.
Twitter is one of a small handful of platforms where an individual can share an idea and have that idea spread - as long as the owners of Twitter don't disagree with that idea. It's not because twitter is special, it's because it was one of the first to achieve a sufficiently large userbase.
Defending arbitrary censorship on these platforms as 'oh well it's a private entity so they can do what they like' misses the forest for the trees. Technology has shifted the power balance for free expression, and applying pre-technology laws and mindsets to it just empowers that small handful of individuals to manipulate public discourse even more. Twitter doesn't quite have a monopoly on speech, but it's damn close in terms of practical outcomes. The fact that the legal definition of `monopoly` hasn't caught up with that, doesn't change the matter.
No, it's saying you're welcome to practice free speech, you just can't borrow my megaphone to do it.
How hard is this to understand? You are not entitled to use other people's property without their consent.
If twitter was actually the only way to communicate with people on the internet you might have a case, but that is completely, ridiculously, absurdly not true.
Yes, you can make your own blog and post whatever you like on it (actually these days even that is questionable with cloud vendors deplatforming blogs they don't like), but the chances of your speech reaching a wide audience are millions of times smaller than if you just posted on one of those established platforms and your speech was allowed to spread without censorship.
The problem with your analogy is that your megaphone makes it virtually impossible for anyone else to have one. This was not the case in the early days of the internet prior to these hyper centralised platforms emerging. This is where both the law and just general public mindset hasn't yet caught up with the implications of modern social media. In business, we have anti-trust laws specifically for this scenario. In information and social media, we have nothing.
A cafe owner refusing service to an individual is not comparable to a global-scale speech platform selectively suppressing ideas that the owner doesn't like from reaching a wide audience.
Bullshit. They're merely the easiest. People were sharing ideas far and wide long before these companies came into existence. You have a right to free speech, no one is required to help you spread it.
> A cafe owner refusing service to an individual is not comparable to a global-scale speech platform selectively suppressing ideas that the owner doesn't like from reaching a wide audience.
Maybe not, but I've yet to see a good argument for why being a global scale speech platform inherently means that anyone has a right to tell Twitter who they can and cannot ban.
Again, I'm not saying there shouldn't be consequences for Twitter, I'm just saying that those consequences should be social, not legal.
I feel like the people here are arguing that the reason they should face legal consequences isn't that they've done anything illegal or that necessarily should be illegal, only that they don't think social consequences will work and they can't stand the idea that other people might not care as much about it as they do.
I think Sci-Hub is ethical. I'm under no illusions that this somehow makes it legal.
Sci-Hub explicitly bills itself as a "pirate website." Twitter's rules explicitly ban both copyright violation and illegal activities. Therefore Sci-Hub is violation of Twitter's rules.
Twitter may well be very selective in their enforcement, but the fact that Sci-Hub is violating Twitter's rules is not in doubt, is it?
Which countries' laws? It's kind of illegal in civilized countries to decapitate homosexuals. Will twitter ban this account now: https://twitter.com/ksamofaen?lang=en They're kind of for it.
Anyway as Matt Levine points out everything is securities fraud nowadays so when any of these decisions burn the share price even a bit, they'll get a class action to deal with. Not sure that's the right way to deal with this sort of thing at all but here we are.
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub
I should donate more to the Internet Archive. I hate how so much history can just disappear at a whim if it weren't for them.
(I'm surprised Twitter is archivable in the first place, the whole thing being a pile of JS crap.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20201225111818/https://twitter.c...
I use Chromium for this because on Firefox I have the Referer header disabled and that causes the WaybackMachine to return a 498 HTTP status on an internal API call, but otherwise I see no issues.
Images:
> I'm surprised Twitter is archivable in the first place
I'm sure it must have taken some effort by the IA team, but Twitter is a pretty important source to archive, so I'm not as surprised because of that. They simply rock and can be expected of greatness.
The infinite scroll works, but zooming on images doesn't. That's a bit of a shame because Twitter clips them, and they can sometimes contain important content. Loading replies also doesn't work. Still way better than nothing.
Up until a few months ago, you could still get the old UI if you used a suitable UA header, and until more recently, the "plain HTML" mobile.twitter.com version was available.
But with those shutdown, they are definitely trying to make it hard to consume their content in anything other than their "approved" way, which makes one wonder...
A good case is the Swiss referendum on universal basic income a few years ago that was voted out. And the Swiss have the money to pull it off if they wish.
Something is fishy here, and I really really really don't see the motivation for Twitter to have done this by itself. If this were part of a sweeping crackdown on accounts that promote 'piracy' it'd make sense, but it's not.
Feels more like "a board member has a friend who made a phone call" kind of thing.
It’s a slippery slope and they’ve started slipping. Now how do you stop?
The only solution is for Twitter to say "You all are right, our moderation policy isn't fair it leans to the left more than the right, but we think Twitter is a great product that provides a lot of value. If you disagree and want to leave, we understand"
I think perhaps a legislative approach to monopoly should be nationalizing rather than breaking up. Monopolies can be valuable for consumers if their claws are trimmed.
Splitting up a technology company like Amazon or Google would probably just make matters worse over the long haul. Instead of 1 obvious regulatory target you would wind up with several and this creates more shadowy areas for perverse incentives to grow like mold. Just look at how splitting up ATT has played out. It ultimately re-aggregated into more-or-less the same monster but with even more power and influence than in the 80s. If ATT would have been nationalized instead of split up, I'd have a hard time believing we wouldn't have better internet access on average today.
Insurance is another highly networked product that benefits from monopoly
The insurance companies of the 19th and 20th centuries were boons to society because their local buckets of money could be invested in local businesses and spent (practically as a donation) on advertising at the minor league baseball diamond or the church bulletin
The sooner we mitigate the loss of those good effects, the sooner We can benefit from the efficiency of insurance monopolies whose risk pools will be as large as is practicable rather than driven by historical accidents
I agree with you about ISPs, but I don't see the sense in the argument that I keep seeing about designating social media as a utility or public good. What would that even mean?
Twitter continues to shore up ill will from all sides of the political spectrum. Mastodon, Matrix, and other decentralized, federated communication platforms are increasingly in a good position to put themselves forward as the actual solution to this problem.
DNS providers will also take you out if there's social pressure to do so; see the recent GoDaddy action against AR15.com. Not sure how you work around that.
As for Internet connection, there was another recent action by an ISP which blocked access to Twitter. So you're not necessarily safe with your ISP either.
I think the only story I haven't heard yet is a landlord evicting its tenants for hosting objectionable content. But without any of the above services, it doesn't really matter.
All that said, it's still possible to stay accessible even if your content isn't legal. The important point is that legal but broadly unacceptable content is never safe. You can be kicked out by any provider at any layer, and getting kicked out once serves as a signal to all the other providers at that layer that they are expected to do the same.
It's kind of like living in a small town 150 years ago. The "people" of the town are the few giant service providers in the country. It doesn't really matter what the law says, if the town consensus is that you are not welcome, then they can make it very hard or impossible to live there. They don't need law enforcement on their side, they'll run you out all the same.
Social media is layer 7, I think it needs less regulation in that regard. It's like saying "you can't have your business in the phone book" vs. "you can't have a phone".
And yet an entire town ostracizing someone for a non-protected attribute is actually protected speech and behavior under the first amendment. If you can't participate in polite society, there's very few things the government actually guarantees you.
Continuing our analogy, I hope that we use our power to ostracize "netizens" very sparingly. And I do mean our power, not that of the tech giants, who merely do what they believe will be best for their image as decided by us. I also hope that there continues to be a competitive landscape of online countries, each more liberal or authoritarian in its own unique ways, from where differing individuals and organizations can connect with the world.
Also read on here recently that it's super hard to knock facebook offline because they own all the pieces, even their own domain registrar. Now I've been wondering how hard it is to set up my own domain registrar.
This is the inevitable end of any popular centralized incorporated means of communication.
You have metrics. You pulish with the parasites, they're bigger than with some open-source journal nobody has heard of. Your career progression relies on getting published by the "most prestigious" journal.
You want your work read. Everybody in your field read parasite journal A, there isn't a good substitute. You're stuffed.
You don't get to decide. You're one author. the head of school had decided for you.
I can go on. The parasitic publishers are /hated/ by everybody. They provide nothing at all of value. They have been a very successful example of rent-seeking through the puchase of prestige titles then jacking up the subscription prices.
You underestimate the level of hatred accross the political spectrum from socialist to libertarian of these parasitic (insert metaphor here).
The gun they have to the head isn't perfect. They will go but they continue to extract a vast amount of rent on the way down.
BTW, you have to thank Robert Maxwell, father of Ghislaine Maxwell and friend of Jeff Epstein for the state of affairs: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...
Maybe you should reconsider your position on "piracy" if it would lead to a significant slowdown in solving the serious challenges that face us in the 21st century.
1. Shitty science journalism with paywalled citations
2. $300/yr textbooks
3. Crime
Intuitively, it's difficult to imagine something less copyrightable than a scientific discovery. The world is upside-down.
but neither are good news for free speech. I'm glad twitter purges alt-right and Q accounts but then why use it as an opportunity to also silence a platform that is the biggest hit since the first time a human rights lawyer uttered "Open Access".
pretty glad I left twitter in 2017. I still read twitter via other people's list (those I used to follow) and via searches on nitter. If you know a great list you still have doom scrolling. But the good thing: when I get too angry (or even too much in agreement with the OP), there is no way to share it with the world. This is both frustrating (in the moment), but literally has no downsides. It has never been once that I woke up the next morning regretting I hadn't already shared whatever my opinion was on literally any subject earlier.
The same platform shapes news today. Literally any subject there are weekly instances where a journo got their story through some "influencer or thought leader". Elon Musk tweeted about Signal and the number of downloads increase within 1 day five-fold. Story is in the NYT and international news. Twitter is a surreal place that shapes way too much the news-cycle in partisan ways. Everyone complains about news being divisive but forgetting where the division comes from - there is simply no way a leftist journalist will have many followers from the right and vice versa. It's been like this forever but twitter (and all of social media) amplified this a million fold. Blame journalism for sure but in the same sentence also damn these individuals requesting features that "drive engagement". How the actual F should an algorithm drive engagement when there is no way of really telling what that engagement will cause. Twitter judged from history has never done the right thing when it could have been up to them. They always waited until enough damage had been done to justify what should be "ongoing housekeeping".
[1] https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1349577579091566592
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
It’s a summary of how section 230 works and is worded. The tone of the piece is overly hash and critical of its readers (prompting me unnecessarily to write this paragraph), but it raises some good points, and I was surprised by more than one of the clarifications it made.
Basically, as it applies here, I don’t think Twitter moderating its content to remove SciHub goes against Section 230. My understanding is that it’s specifically covered by 230.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techdirt
So, until something is litigated to the point of SCOTUS precedent, I think most things are at the level of "that's just like, your opinion, man."
However, as pointed out elsewhere, much litigation is still needed to really understand the extent of 230 and thus, "this is like my own opinion, man."
This seems like the ban may well have been because of who Sci-Hub is, not what they said. Which is an interesting complication to this story of what content/who companies opt to host.
I just checked and the pirate bay for example has a perfectly fine twitter account with a great handle (@tpb), and their profile even links to the website. Not sure if they have any tweets linking to their website though.
With politicans it is easy to hide behind partisan idealogy to justify that everything is fine.
The more regular, relatively apolitical accounts are getting banned, the more people realize that something is wrong with the way Twitter acts.
E.g., if a user selects some text and chooses "Copy," the text gets deleted and a listener sends a message back to the server to signal that the text has been "pirated."
At that point the server not only deletes the associated data, but sends a message to all extant clients to remove the given text.
Kinda like a realtime borrow-checker, but not so much for memory safety as for the sheer stupidity of it.
Edit: clarification
The purpose of a chair is to enhance the space it resides in by enabling folks to rest/sit in the chair.
The purpose of a paper is to document science, such that others can see that science, replicate it, learn from it, extend it; the purpose of a paper is to present science such that we can all beget yet more science to happen.
Everyone cheered Twitter when they started taking down accounts, sure that it would never affect them. Everyone ignored the warnings that it is a very slippery slope.
Well, after a fun party, the bill is due.
UPD: Access has been restored.
It’s only fair that, in case of breach of any law, regardless of where it comes from, that same measures be applied in each and every case.
I’m sure HN would agree given what has transpired over the last week.
Edit: I missed to include CloudFlare and others as well. They shouldn’t be providing DNS services to anyone who is breaking any laws.
We have police and courts which are paid to do that.
I can understand removing content that would make them liable in front of a court (as publishers) - anything else they remove it's censorship and I don't like it.
They are not playing god. They own a platform, they are determining who can and cannot speak on that platform. That's the same thing every news paper, internet forum, email server, BBS, public bulletin board, or really any publishing of any kind has done since the invention of publishing.
Twitter is not part of the government, and it does not have a monopoly on internet communication. Hell, it doesn't even charge for its services. You are not entitled to use their platform.
If you are disgusted and disappointed in social media for their behavior, that's perfectly reasonable! There are things you can do about it! you can refuse to use their service, refuse to recommend it to friends, promote competitors, etc.
What you cannot do is pretend that just because they are a large wealthy organization you have some kind of right to use their platform to say whatever you want.
There's the obvious case if they should discriminate against users based on a protected class.
Platforms have also been sued for things like tortuous interference and deceptive practices as a consequence of deplatforming users.
If a user engages in activity that is either clearly illegal or contrary to clear and sensible Terms of Service, removing them is obviously a fine and good thing.
Outside of those circumstances though, I would not take it as a given that there is no recourse if a user is deplatformed.
Banning Trump may seem like a good idea in vacuum, but it's a slippery slope. And before you say that the cases are different, my point is that it shouldn't be up to Twitter to decide.
By supporting Trump's ban, we support Twitter to be the arbitrator of free speech.
We either have to treat Twitter as a private company, they can do what even the fuck they want, and hence we shouldn't have any saying, or treat it a public utility in which case only a judge can decided who gets banned and who doesn't
We cannot have it both ways, based on what we thing suits better our believes at the time.
They are a public company that publishes certain opinions by allowing individuals who are willing to espouse those opinions access, while not allowing others.
They are a public company that blocks other opinions from being heard (on other platforms) in association with other technology giants, by removing the ability for other private or public corps any access to meaningful internet services unless they do not stay in the opinion lanes the giants are comfortable with.
They are a public company that is using their position and status to shape public discourse in the United States, and they should absolutely be treated as such. Here's hoping.
Not unlike the Gutenberg Press - and when you read about the impact that had at first on society the parallels are remarkable.
The defense of "they're a private company and can ban who they want" becomes less and less convincing.
I disagree, they are more like an automatically customized newspaper.
> Not unlike the Gutenberg Press
Agreed, not unlike the Gutenberg Press. Books and newspapers also are not “the public square”, and we don’t allow people to commandeer presses to get their message out against the will of the onwers of presses.
We did something loosely like that with the public airwaves, via the Fairness Doctrine, but its worth noting that the same ideological faction who not only objected to that as a totalitarian infringement of the First Amendment at the time, but who used the spector that kind of thing on the Internet (even though the actual rules they were opposing proposed nothing of the kind) as an argument against Open Internet regulations up through, well, the debate over the desirability of Net Neutrality that is still active, are exactly the faction—often the same individuals—complaining that private actors are choosing not to relay their speech today.