When radio was king, many outlets chose to stop broadcasting Father Coughlin

The concept you're looking for is "good faith". And faith is what it is, you can't have evidence for what went on in the inspector's mind.

Good faith is basically the goodwill be give each other that we're deciding things according to what we say we're deciding things by. If you're judging a figureskating contest, you are supposed to do it based on the desire to promote good technique and artistry. If you do it based on who you think looks good, nobody will ever know, they can only suspect it after you've given full marks to a few good looking people with bad technique.

Once that is undermined in a society, we end up with a mess, because just about every decision can be questioned as a political move, which is what is happening in the US.

Take that appointment of Merrick Garland. How many people now think that it was a good faith decision to not hold a hearing for him? Is it believable that people opposed the hearing for non-partisan reasons? I think it's hard.

Not that we need more reminders of this fact, but here's another recent one that everyone should read: Alex Morse committed the mortal sin of trying to unseat an incumbent Democrat in Massachusetts. The Democratic party used false accusations of inappropriate sexual behavior to successfully smear him and destroy his campaign. Even after their "investigation" turned up nothing they still continued to attack him: https://theintercept.com/2021/01/18/alex-morse-umass-amherst...

the city general loses in court

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017%E2%80%9318_Bergen_County_...

just because the law defines something, we are also equal in the eyes of the law and if a law is not equally enforced and is viewed as being used by the government as a bludgeon against the practice of protected rights, then the government has a difficult case to defend.

So no, this is not an example of out of control censorship or a witch hunt or even a "mere accusation" ruining someone's life, nor was it simply that he was an opponent of Roosevelt (who, like every US president, had many political opponents). This is an example of someone who was fomenting religious and ethnic divisions by spreading the propaganda of one of America's adversaries -- while also being indirectly funded by that adversary.

"In the wake of [blaming "Jews for their own persecution and [claiming...] that the Nazis had actually been lenient. Only a few synagogues were burned, he lied, adding: “German citizen Jews were not molested officially in the conduct of their business.”], a New York radio station decided to break with Coughlin. “Your broadcast last Sunday was calculated to incite religious and racial strife in America,” said a letter from WMCA radio. “When this was called to your attention in advance of your broadcast, you agreed to delete those misrepresentations which undeniably had this effect. You did not do so.”"

Coughlin broke an agreement not to "incite religious and racial strife". Emphasis on "broke an agreement".

You either don't care and make damn sure that the communication channel has a lot of competition over the public mindshare, or you make it completely formal with democratically created rules with last appeals in the government judiciary.

Both of those are fine. Not perfect, but fine. None is dangerous. The first option is the default, for obvious reasons.

I don't know how it was at the time, but our current situation with social media is neither of those options, and not fine at all. Anyway, any comparison or decision based only on the ruleset is misleading.

> Coughlin saw things differently. He blamed Jews for their own persecution and claimed in the sermon that the Nazis had actually been lenient. Only a few synagogues were burned, he lied, adding: “German citizen Jews were not molested officially in the conduct of their business.” And communists, not Jews, were the real targets of the Nazi mobs, according to Coughlin.

Can you clarify, do you suspect this information is not accurate? Or you think it's not sufficient to judge the effect of Coughlin's broadcast and the matter needs to be "pursued further"? (How, what sort of pursuit, what would we be looking to find?) Or something else?

Coughlin wasn't secretive about what he believed, and he was banned from certain stations for exactly what he said on the radio, I think? I'm confused what sort of additional vetting you are suggesting should have happened, by whom. I could respect better an argument that it's worrisome when large corporations can ban people for their political views... but you are arguing that Coughlin's political views were misunderstood? Really? How so?

Or wait, from the first paragraph, that Coughlin wasn't really banned for what he said on the radio, but for... critisizing the local government? With what sort of critisism? You realize it wasn't actually the government that banned him, it was a choice of individual broadcasters not to broadcast him?

Ensuring a diversity of platforms with no one/two/three platforms controlling the vast majority of interaction would probably help.

amazon publishes way more than that, NSFW, google "chuck tingle". The famous author of "space raptor butt invasion", and who can forget the literary masterpiece "pounded in the butt by my own butt"

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=chuck+tin...

This is ultimately one of those things where computer scientists (specifically) freak out because the real world isn't zeroes and ones like they're used to, it's all shades of grey, but if you act in good taste it's probably not going to be a problem. Ban the cartel murderporn, show the aftermath of the bombing (or not, at your discretion), ban the nudists, but allow breastfeeding (or not, at your discretion), all of that sounds fine to me and we don't need to code an exact line into law.

This is really a common thread in HN threads discussing anything touching on laws or regulation, because computer touchers just can't wrap their head around the idea that the law isn't absolutely precisely defined in a state machine and the judge and jury are going to apply human reasoning. But that's how the legal system works.

I'm going to note that there is of course a degree of self-servingness in insisting that there be an exact line drawn. It's a way for Facebook to punt on actually having to moderate their platform and push that responsibility onto the courts, because they don't want to pay humans to deal with what is ultimately a human problem that needs to be solved in human ways. The nature of the world is that there are grey areas and some stuff in the grey area is fine and some stuff shouldn't be there, and it will take human intervention to decide which is which.

If you don't want to pay to do that, and you want to be 100% on the green side of the line, then you will have to default to very aggressive censorship that will probably annoy users, but that's the price of being on a free platform that doesn't want to pay for adequate moderation.

You can't predict the future, so you have to find the one thing(s) to protect in all cases. And like you say, it can not be subjective. In Gov't Tech Acquisitions regulation the single objective is to protect and enable small and disadvantage businesses.

Perhaps it could be the same with platforms that propagate info, but there is risk in creating a competitive environment without some form of formal trust system. It does seem ambitious / hard to think about.

He would never do that. He needs regular users to stay on the platform. The censorship isn't to appease government regulators, it's to keep from alienating regular people who don't want to be exposed to it. Deflecting blame to the regulators wouldn't stop users from leaving and heading to a platform that did more effective damage control.

No you don't. The platform is private property, they can decide whether or not they want such content, no lawyers needed. When someone gets banned or flagged on HN, does anyone mention lawyers getting involved? Of course not.

In the US, though, there's no such impetus. Interviewers and even whole outfits can get cut off from access for the slightest thing, so then you have the phenomenon of politicians only ever being interviewed in increasingly safe environments, with friendly hosts who suck up to them, following prearranged lines of questioning, etc. Any apparent instances of toughness are basically theatre, with both sides in on the act.

Anyway, I don't have an answer here. Choice in media is absolutely a net good, and competition is critical to a healthy overall dialogue. But I feel that some of the more subtle costs of this approach are not always considered in discussions about it.

How do you do that though? The network effect almost always chooses a single winner in the social media market. YouTube is a perfect example. The content creators go where the market is. How do you make sure YouTube doesn't dominate the channel?

My (imperfect) solution is that once you get to the channel domination point, you should be treated as a utility - e.g. you can't kick people off your service unless they've broken the law.

Government acquisitions regulation for tech itself is also a good example.(for COTs products, contracting dev/integration, consulting, research, etc). Gov't acquisition law has become so complex, yet has one single constraint in mind with every update:

Protect and enable small and disadvantaged businesses.

It's not perfect, in many new ways inefficient, but seems to do its job.

But what is the constraint we need when it comes to propagating information? It's not as objectively clear as the acquisition case.

The only way to prevent that is to keep entities from gaining so much power in the first place.

Why?

Parler was specific community with a specific set of inadequate moderation policies and became a center of thought for a violent community that ended up engaged in political violence. And that site, and only that site, thus became a target for broad suppression by other actors in the market.

For the really custom stuff, our commercial artists were amazingly talented with both brush and penknife. Some of those guys could paint lettering by hand that was incredibly consistent and amazingly fast.

"We did something like X a century ago, history repeats, full stop."

Where did "X is quite okay" come from?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin#Cancellation_...

It appears that FDR's attorney general put pressure on the post office to revoke Coughlin's 2nd-class mailing privileges. In the end, the privileges weren't revoked, but (due in part to FDR putting pressure on the Catholic church itself), the bishopry commanded Coughlin to restrict his activities to local ministry.

And sure that host could be deplatformed over it too, but if that continues to escalate then the ultimate endpoint is a balkanized internet where we don't tolerate traffic from ISPs that provide peer exchange to ISPs that provide data services to datacenters that provide services to hosting services that provide services to Parler. Effectively if Russia is willing to continue to escalate then the only practical solution to "de-platform" Parler would be to cut off Russia from the rest of the internet entirely.

If that were true, neither QAnon nor "Stop the Steal" would have gone anywhere. Instead, they spread like wildfire to the point where their adherents literally attacked the democratic process.

The marketplace of ideas only works that way when its participants are rational actors with good judgement, and it's becoming increasingly clear that is not actually the case.

That is the ideal. The actual marketplace seems to operate in the opposite fashion.

The converse of that is "If the idea persists, it's good". I'm having a hard time seeing the evidence for that as well.

Perhaps it should work that way, but in a US context, I think this is demonstrably false. Many people participating in the marketplace of ideas hold diametrically opposing ideas and posit contradictory facts. There is no winnowing of falsehood from truth.

Doubt. This was certainly the intention but it's very plain that the market of public discourse doesn't work nearly as well as scientific peer review, which is itself somewhat flawed.

It's an old truism that 'a lie can get halfway round the world before the truth has got its shoes on.' It has also been rigorously documented: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 For that matter, phrases like 'the big lie' reflect a wide social awareness that lying has historically been an effective political strategy.

Besides the fact that the marketplace of ideas demonstrably doesn't privilege truth in the short term, why would you expect it to? A marketplace is easily dominated by whoever can invest heavily in promotional tools. Furthermore, many people in the market demand entertainment or validation rather than truth, so there's abundant money to be made out of selling pleasant-sounding bullshit.

Given that, there's clearly an amount of acceptable censorship that is higher than 0.

Why do we assume this is true? Billions of people get scammed in the world yearly. Yes. Billions.

Mass hysteria[1] is a thing, and sure in the long term an idea __may__ die out (again, there's no real evidence of this). The damage done until it does die out can lead to a rise in cult of personality like how Hitler came into power and became so popular in Germany.

There isn't some natural filter of hate and __bad__ ideas in humans. People are sheep and will put their weight behind anyone who resonates with them. Not necessarily "good" ideas.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases

If we can be ban false claims of election fraud, we can ban true claims too.