EFF, Cory Doctorow warn about the dangers of de-platforming and censorship

In the context of the various US objections to China, de-platforming narrows one distinction between the Chinese authoritarian treatment of speech and the US's. While all nation-states are hypocritical to a degree, it certainly allows the Chinese to underline this hypocrisy, while providing cover and justification for their own lack of internet speech freedoms. Not a happy trend for free speech absolutists anywhere.

Maybe part of the issue is that now is the first time many people in the US actually notice this. When in reality Facebook and similar have been censoring voices for many years. For example Palestinian ones https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/fb-stop-censoring-palestine/

Right now everything seems to travel to the intersection of "Free Speech" and "Dangerous speech", creating a massive pile up of conversations going no where.

Arguably this logjam resolves itself if you assume:

1) Everything is content, True/false, wrong/right being labels we use after consuming it.

2) All our social media, every new type of it, all UI/UX, payment models, subscriptions, memberships - simply Amplify or Suppress the propagation of content.

This makes our tech discussions relatively value agnostic, and moves the question to whether

i) the use of these tools was just ii) The extent of force used was just

So yes, all our major firms have this power. ANY firm can have silencing or amplifying power.

The question is how we define the norms, and the empirical evidence we generate that shows us what choices are better than others.

A step below that is the empirics and informational tools we have to do the science.

I used my masters dissertation as an excuse to explore whether a particular rule change on a forum worked. Honestly while it was fun to reach some conclusion, there are major gaps in our toolkits to explore these issues.

Sentiment analysis corpuses for non-english corpuses are definitely one of the data sets we need more off, and we need ways to constantly update these dictionaries. Dealing with code mixed language is another problem.

I'm sure someone has solved this, one of the issues is precisely that cross talk on experiments is low and every discipline is looking at this space.

But that is something you can invest your time in if creating this evidence matters to you.

Is "censorship" what newspaper editors have done with letters to the op-ed pages for over a century? (Some made it, how many didn't? Most) How many TV News stations air viewer responses? Is that censorship? Those businesses were mostly one-way from choice.

In the same 'over a century' lots of people reacted by starting their own newspapers. Those papers too were 'echo chambers'. How are 'social media' more public? Is 'we guarantee to air everything' part of their TOS? Else, nothing new here.

Let’s note that while a bar has to allow the public entry, if your speech or actions inside the bar starts a fight, they can bounce you. No written terms of service needed. Just threatening the bartender might be enough.

People might be deplatformed, but they can still write, publish anywhere that will accept their writing, call people on the phone... do anything they could do in the year 1999, 207 years after the Constitution was established.

Shunning might be just fine in society, it always has been accepted. Look at the racial history of Chicago in 1919 and early 1950’s. Shunning after norms have been breached AGAINST STATED MORALS has been perfectly fine. We’re not talking races or creeds being deplatformed here. It took a lot of provocation.

Maybe we’re being inconsistent and expedient. Soul-searching is called for. I support the ACLU and admire their consistency, they’ve supported the truly reprehensible. Not sure if they’ve ever been called on to defend the deepest taboos, but they’ve gone deep enough. Yet it would be interesting to work through them defending the speech that, for example, exhorted people to kill ACLU attorneys. I imagine there are limits somewhere.

Trumbo breached someone’s norms and was deplatformed. He forced the world to allow his redemption. Let’s see the deplatformed show themselves worthy of redemption.

And there need to be some well-thought-out movements to address aome of the causes that get folks to go so over the edge. There are many causes, economic, educational, societal. Flat-out bigoted neighborhoods are more likely to crank out flat-out bigoted generations, that’ll be a hard one for a long time. But less “us” v “them” could be accomplished.

Curious how Doctorow justifies the practice of disemvoweling, a passive aggressive form of censorship that boing boing used to silence people they didn't agree with but who weren't violating the terms of service of the site. Also wonder how all of this fits in the depersoning of Violet Blue from boing boing.

I think the answer is decentralized protocols.

"Go make your own Facebook"

Then AWS takes down Parlor. And so many on Hacker News rejoice.

"Go make your own AWS"

Where does that end? Go make your own domain registrar? Go make your own ICANN? Go make your own ISP? Go make your own internet? Go make your own microchips?

If some virtue signaling Silicon Valley execs want to impress their friends, you're done.

Oligarchy. Has nothing to do with capitalism or democracy. It has to do with internet points and social standing for elite tech executives.

Looks far more like McCarthyism or totalitarianism than anything resembling a free democracy.