Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content

taibbi.substack.com

206 pointswalterbell319 comments

My question to everyone supporting restrictions on speech and supporting privacy violations, even for good reasons, is this: are you prepared to have these tools fall into the wrong hands? The same methods used to quickly shut down a dangerous website or to track down a terrorist by their online posts can be used to silence protests and to hunt down political opposition.

I would agree with you in the context of a government or public body. But in the context of private companies, these "tools" were always available. The wrong hands were always able to use them. And did, many times, in fact.

Like, the problems you're describing are real but they aren't new, and aren't particularly a bigger threat now than they were before.

Market concentration might make them a bigger problem today than before, though.

I'm not prepared to have them 'fall into the wrong hands'.

But these platforms are owned by these companies.

What rules do we put in place that they have to host some of this content? Blatant misinformation, vague encouragement of violence... hate?

Is the price of free speech that someone has to host it? Who doesn't want to?

> What rules do we put in place that they have to host some of this content? Blatant misinformation, vague encouragement of violence... hate?

Why do they have to be rules? Why can't we have a culture of tolerance? Robots aren't running these companies. They're people, just like you and me. They can choose to be tolerant.

Tolerance is about tolerating the most horrid things. Not because it's nice or those things have some value. They're horrid, they have no value. It's because the alternative is worse. Because censorship is worse. Because when a person is censored, when they can't speak, they resort to violence and through censorship, you encourage violence. And violence can't be censored. It can only be suppressed with further violence.

"culture of tolerance"

What does that mean exactly? By that you mean you require someone host, intolerance?

Is it a "culture of tolerance" if someone spews hate on me on a social media platform because of my race, because we're tolerating that?

I'm still trying to figure out what folks think this alternate choice looks like... do we require people to host whatever gets posted?

I agree with OP, opinions shouldn’t be censored, no matter how much we disagree with them.

Anything that’s not harassment, a direct threat or direct call to violence should be allowed.

To your example, if someone attacks you personally then that would count as harassment and be moderated out.

>opinions shouldn’t be censored

Let's say I have a platform that let's people comment, so outside of direct harassment I shouldn't be allowed to delete things?

Well it's not really a question of what you should do, it was more a comment on what the ideal solution would be.

Is your platform as large as Twitter, is it one of the main communication platforms in society, does it allow users to wield social and political influence? Is it a proverbial public square?

If so, then in my view a wise and emotionally mature person would elect not to censor opinions, realizing that there are more important things at stake than hurt feelings.

Of course I might be wrong when claiming that censoring opinions and mandating a specific morality will lead to more conflict (see another comment I made in this thread for more on that). Maybe it won't. I guess we'll find out in the next decade or so.

> Why can't we have a culture of tolerance?

The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.[1]

If you haven't read Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies" then I'd suggest you do.

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

Have you read Popper? Here's a relevant quote from him about tolerance:

> If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

I think it's safe to say that the extent of censorship perpetrated by the big tech is not limited to the voices that teach others to "answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols". They of course ban some of that too, but they ban quite a lot more.

I think this part: "as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion" is clearly relevant when the very facts public opinion is based on are attacked.

> ... answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

The real paradox of the paradox of tolerance is how many people use Popper quotes to rationalize their own intolerance for people with differing ideas, without any awareness that Popper was speaking only of intolerance for people who resort to violence.

Yes. It's as if people want to just use name of famous philosopher to justify their urge to censor people and ideas they don't like.

I’m guess you haven’t read it? Because your summary is not accurate.

That summary is a direct copy and paste from the Wikipedia link I posted and references in that quote.

And yeah, I have read Popper as well as Wikipedia. Saying "it's not accurate" isn't accurate.

Ok, but you selectively quoted a part that makes it sound like Popper is fine not tolerating any intolerance. He wasn’t. He basically said you tolerate intolerance as much as you can without risking the collapse of social order.

Big difference.

> you selectively quoted a part that makes it sound like Popper is fine not tolerating any intolerance

I copied and pasted the entirety of the top section of Wikipedia with no editing. That section says "if a society is tolerant without limit" (my emphasis) which goes to your point that there is a threshold here.

> tolerance is about tolerating the most horrid things.

No it isn’t. No society survives if it is tolerant without limit. You are arguing that anything and everything should be allowed. No laws, no justice.

I suppose it is a valid position to have but I don’t think a practical one over the long term if you want to be alive.

>Because when a person is censored, when they can't speak, they resort to violence

But that doesn't actually happen in the vast majority of cases. Most people try other outlets. If there are no other outlets available, then they tend to give up. Deplatforming has been shown to work.

And it's worth remembering that going violent means putting their life at high risk. Their family at risk. Their possessions and personal freedom at risk. And it means hurting other people. There's fortunately not many people willing to take that step and pay that price.

Just think about what would cause more violence: banning all nazis from Twitter? Or allowing nazis free reign to talk about how horrible minorities are, and what they'd like to do to them?

So we should tolerate violent and hateful speech because if we don't, the violent and hateful will only turn more violent and hateful. Got it. Makes sense.

I...beg your pardon?

What everyone's been talking about the past few weeks has absolutely nothing to do with shutting down dangerous websites, and any terrorist who leaves a trail of online posts that can be used to track them doesn't need anything special to be done to make that possible.

People have been talking about the major social media platforms—who are, arguably, already pretty high up there on the list of "the wrong hands"—deplatforming users actively supporting attacks—physical attacks, in some cases—on our government, our democracy, and our Constitution.

I mean, there is stuff to be genuinely concerned about in all of this as regards the future, and there's a real discussion to be had here, but frankly, I don't think this is it.

Yes

>are you prepared to have these tools fall into the wrong hands?

Yes, because society has a plurality of institutions that constrain power. Restrictions (even speech restrictions themselves) are subject to the court of public opinion (we're talking about them right now), there's the judiciary, political opposition and so on.

This argument never had any pull for me for the same reason I'm against abolishing the police or abolishing surveillance or anything else. Power, even in the hands of people I don't like, can't be exercised arbitrarily.

What country do you live in?

Born and lived most of my life in Germany, now UK. I'd be willing to make that claim for much worse governed countries.

My birth place influences my position a lot. After the end of the war we enshrined the principle of 'militant democracy' in our basic law. Giving the state and its institutions the explicit power to deal with threats to the constitutional order, not repeating the mistakes of the weakened government of the Weimar period that gave rise to unchecked extremist forces.

Isn't that a counter argument to your point though? Like you're saying here that the weak weimar republic wasn't strong enough to check the extremist forces and hence that sufficient checks dont always exist.

My point is basically that I'm much more afraid of insufficient checks on radicalism and inability of society to deal with extremism than I am just with this abstract idea of tyranny.

To bring it back to the topic of the US and Facebook. To me the censorship is not a sign of authoritarianism or anything, but lack of strong institutions. In the face of rising extremism and disorder Facebook effectively has to step in and do something to their best ability because in general the US has very few tools to deal with this at a democratic level.

When I see pictures of someone dressed as a shaman on the dais of the senate and lawmakers cowering behind benches it's very weird to me to draw the conclusion that the pressing issue is too much authority and not enough freedom of expression.

“Face of rising extremism” is just your recency bias showing and demonstrates the power of the media to shape our perceptions. There are many periods in the past where the US was experiencing far more extremism and violence than today.

The US had a literal civil war at one point; the bar is low. Things don't have to be the worst ever to still be concerning.

I see your point, but you can just go back to the 20th century. Anarchists bombing Wall Street in the 20's, racial and antiwar riots (and bombings) during the 60's and 70's. Right wing militias blowing up federal buildings in the 90's.

Obviously you don't want to dismiss a growing problem, but things seem much more manageable today than during these past incidents.

Aren’t those institutions sort of circumventable by lying? Can’t I just say “Barrin92 is a bastard, so I’ve banned them from speaking. Look no closer lest I ban you, too.” Feels like we might be better off in the long run by agreeing on ground rules ahead of time and then sticking to them, no?

>Aren’t those institutions sort of circumventable by lying

I find this argument confusing. There is plenty of historical precedent for tyrany overcoming public opinion, judiciary, politics. I don't think the current topic is an example of this, but as a general statment on power i find this contrary to my experience.

You're basically saying, I don't worry about abuse of power because there will always be some check on it, no matter how ineffectual. That just flies in the face of every time someone managed to use their power to overcome whatever checks were in place.

And this is like a constant theme in history. All the checks on Ceaser's power didn't prevent the Roman Republic from falling.

What tools are these actually - the delete button?

When it comes down to it - i like moderated spaces on the internet. I dont want to wade through spam, not to mention violent and abusive content. I don't like seeing shock images.

So yes, i support having moderation. The question to me is not: yes/no moderation, its where you draw the line; what are your policies and how are they enforced.

Fundamentally i think the solution is competitors. This was a much easier position to take when the web did not just have a few social media giants with network effects, but still: if youtube becomes to dranicon, start a new website. The tools to stream video (albeit not at scale) are just an apt-get away.

>Fundamentally i think the solution is competitors. This was a much easier position to take when the web did not just have a few social media giants with network effects, but still: if youtube becomes to dranicon, start a new website. The tools to stream video (albeit not at scale) are just an apt-get away.

I agree. I wouldn't have a problem with YouTube doing anything if YouTube wasn't the video website. We need decentralization.

But at the same time more and more often I also see these same concerns raised with decentralized networks (going beyond standard practices like blocking and preventing federation with instances), and that gets me worried.

Decentralization of hosting responsibilities would certainly help bring down costs which is usually what makes it hard to make a competing hosting site. Then again any popular website _is_ going to need to go beyond standard protocol practices and try to censor certain illegal content.

We could just change our culture to be satisfied with 720p content and use traditional websites that don't use p2p tech. Like, we could all just start using bilibili.com or some other chinese competitors instead of youtube.

Does bilibili.com have less censorship than Youtube?

The market provides though. There are are tons of sites for alternative and niche content, and new sites come up all the time.

Complaining that you don’t have a ready made audience is pretty weak. You need to hustle for this stuff. People used to xerox and give away zines for an audience. As the Pirate Bay founder said recently[0], it’s embarrassing how easily people are giving up.

It’s almost as if they don’t want to actually put the stuff out there, but rather be held up as martyrs. Pirate Bay and SciHub are still up, and have multiple billion dollar corporations actively gunning for them socially, legally, and extra legally. It can be done.

[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an7pn/pirate-bay-founder-th...

This. I believe that the problem has more to do with most users relying on platforms that are fundamentally advertising companies, and content that doesn’t go well next to an ad gets removed because it becomes a direct threat to revenue. Video sites exist which show very graphic violence, among other things not allowed on YouTube. They’ve been around for years. The issue, I guess, is that they tend to run ads for sketchy business, as they’re the only ones willing to put their name next to that content. The problem IMO isn’t so much that free speech is in jeopardy as the financial incentives of the incumbents are not aligned to support some of the things people want to say.

It can be done, people are just being lazy instead of creative.

Well, that’s the thing with being ostracized. Reputable people don’t want anything to do with you, and so you’re left with only the disreputable ones.

It’s like there’s a whole generation of engineers that don’t realize that you can actually buy a computer instead of just rent someone else’s.

There's always talk about decentralizing content platforms but these decentralized non-blockchain social network and messaging protocols have existed for years:

- Scuttlebutt

- GNUnet

- Secureshare

- Fereenet

- ZeroNet

- Retroshare

- Diaspora

- Mastadon

- Matrix

- Cabal

Decentralized platforms put more responsibility on the user (key management, account recovery, content hosting, etc) which is unlikely to get mass adoption from mainstream users unless the decentralized platform is as easy to use as twitter.

They exist, but I'm worried that they can't break out because of network effects and lock in by the big players.

What would be a good way to make these platforms mainstream? Would you support some sort of a mandatory requirement to federate for the big players? Of course, they would still be able to refuse to talk to instances that violate their own policies.

>Of course, they would still be able to refuse to talk to instances that violate their own policies.

But isn't that ability exactly what many people consider a violation of free speech on mainstream social media platforms, only applies to accounts rather than instances?

If mainstream platforms were federated, you could move to a third instance that would communicate both with the big instance and the banned instance. Hell, you could even host your own instance and still be able to talk to people on the big social network. That's the missing piece that would make those "you don't have to use that website" arguments valid since it would greatly lower the cost of moving away from one social media website to another.

For anyone scrolling past this list, I had a lot of fun with Retroshare. It's like the Napster we never had, but with gardening books instead of music.

I wouldn't have a problem with YouTube doing anything if YouTube wasn't the video website

Then you're in luck, YouTube is not the only video website. It's not even the biggest. Some video formats it can't even compete in because competitors are so far and away superior.

I think you really mean that YouTube is a popular site. But it is certainly not the site going by site size. That would be FB. Not the most engaging either with snapchat and tik tok out there. It's certainly better than the other "also rans" like daily motion though.

(Actually, now I think about it, I'm not even sure I would say it is necessarily "better" than DM. Maybe a better phrase would be "seems to be more popular"?)

Whether or not you even see specific content on Facebook, Google or Hacker News depends on sorting algorithms, so that would be one of the tools used to censor content. It's not just "the delete button", it's so much more, like how DMCA processes are handled or AIs created to find naked people (which affects artists).

>What tools are these actually - the delete button?

Reach

I don't have a problem with moderation but I do have a problem when infrastructure providers like AWS decide how their clients should moderate their content.

You can't have competition when some of the competitors can't use the infrastructure. It is not without reason that utility providers can't discriminate and I think it is time to decide what is considered a utility in the internet age.

AWS is by no means the only infrastructure provider.

IMHO the central question is: do you tolerate zones moderated (or not moderated at all) by their owners exactly how they want it, provided that you remain free to avoid any zone and also to create your own zone(s)?

No one likes spam, abusive content, fake news... However many won't qualify a given content the same way.

IMO, for example, history shows that anyone thinking that he is _right_ and has to educate others by coercing them to pay lip service to his ideas and also by censoring contradiction, walks on a path leading to violent and abusive acts.

> IMHO the central question is: do you tolerate zones moderated (or not moderated at all) by their owners exactly how they want it, provided that you remain free to avoid any zone and also to create your own zone(s)?

Is that not what we do currently? (subject to certain legal restrictions, but generally in usa the restrictions other than copyright are pretty light. And if they aren't, well Tor). You have pretty wide discretion if you self-host, especially on bare metal. Not perfect mind you, but pretty wide.

DNS registrars have also removed sites with views they don't like.

That's about where I would draw the line. Domain registration needs to be regulated or run by the gov't so that it can be protected by the first amendment. Pretty much everything else can be solved by enforcing antitrust laws so as to prevent one entity controlling too much of the space.

The other challenge is DDoS protection. Any controversial site is going to attract large DDoS attacks; if the big DDoS mitigation providers drop a sites that site is either effectively dead, or pushed into the arms of a sketchy "semi state sponsored" mitigation provider like DDoS-Guard.

Yes, indeed, by and large (in 'Occidental' nations). However during those last ~25 years there are IMO more and more pushes towards censorship, from memory laws ( from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_laws ) to deplatforming ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deplatforming ). Albeit none of those is really new it seems to me that they are gaining speed.

Competition makes it harder for malicious actors to manipulate everyone's content, but lets not pretend that companies don't know how to create the illusion of competition [1,2]

We already have the problem of people creating too many filter-bubbles in their online lives. A fragmented social media environment will not usher in an age where everyone gets exposed to a more diverse set of ideas, we'll just get FoxNewsBook and MSNBCBook, or ChristianTube and MuslimTube, or whatever other social groups happen to be the most defining.

Moderated communities are basically the HOA neighborhoods of the internet. There is nothing wrong with liking the high property values, but competition alone does not prevent their abuses [3].

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/expresident/all-the-por...

[2] https://www.foodbeast.com/news/pepsi-boycott-kendall/

[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/homeowners-...

Sure, but the goal isn't to prevent people from crafting their own filter bubbles, it's to prevent someone else from controlling bubbles not their own.

Competition makes it harder for malicious actors to manipulate everyone's content, but lets not pretend that companies don't know how to create the illusion of competition [1,2]

In real life, you get to choose the people to be friend with or associate with, and we all have number of circles with interests that doesn't necessary overlap the same circles. That's pretty much the same thing that I have on the internet when using certain social media. It's great since you don't have spammers, and you don't have to deal with racists or people who just turn up the temperature of a room. Maybe that's the way it should be.

It's also much more difficult to spread vitriolic meme since it has to infiltrate the various disparate communities.

Moderated communities are basically the HOA neighborhoods of the internet. There is nothing wrong with liking the high property values, but competition alone does not prevent their abuses [3].

OK. Pretty much any places that aren't garbage have moderation of some sort. If nothing else to keep out spam.

And a community isn't a HOA, which you are basically stuck with if you live in them.

> I dont want to wade through spam, not to mention violent and abusive content.

I mean, ok? Can't you simply not watch that content? What if there were a warning on the content, so that you could choose to not watch it?

Or maybe you could specify on your account, that you don't want to see that content, so it never shows up for you. Problem solved, and everyone wins.

>if youtube becomes to dranicon, start a new website.

You are clearly ignorant of the kinds of shit actual YouTube alternatives have to deal with. Their websites and videos get de-ranked or de-listed from search (Rumble [1]), their apps get removed from app store (LBRY [2]), their infrastructure gets constant attacks (BitChute [3]). Meanwhile, the mainstream media smears them at every opportunity.

This is nothing like the environment that Google and YouTube were started in.

https://rumble.com/vcxrxh-rumbles-anti-trust-lawsuit-against...

https://lbry.tv/@lbry:3f/googlebanslbry:7

https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/censorship-bitchute-depl...

You're telling me that incumbent platforms are behaving in anticompetitive fashions? if only someone would do something

I never heard of these before. I wish there was a plugin that'd signal me if I visited a Google-owned platform and provided me with alternatives.

Good luck hosting such an extension on Chrome.

There's (somehow) a widely held belief that there is no barriers to entry, on any market, ever. Things from anticompetitive behaviour of incumbents to needing enormous upfront capital invesment simply do not exist. This has to implications:

- Nothing should be done, whether regulation or consumer action, because everything can and will be fixed by the entry of a new company.

- We are living in the best of worlds. Otherwise, a new company would have sprung to fill the gap and then we would be living in the best of worlds again.

I am yet to convince people holding this belief that it may not be the case.

And by smear do you mean accurately describing far right conspiracy junk or something else?

sounds like anti-monopoly laws should be enforced then, which is a separate problem.

Yep, that's part of why reddit is so great.

> Fundamentally i think the solution is competitors. This was a much easier position to take when the web did not just have a few social media giants with network effects, but still: if youtube becomes to dranicon, start a new website. The tools to stream video (albeit not at scale) are just an apt-get away.

There's no serious YouTube competition because YouTube is not (just) a video host. Video hosting isn't that big a deal (though hard at scale).

YouTube is a network of videos, creators and viewers powered by recommendations, subscriptions advertisements (paying creators) and massive network effects.

You could build yet another video host and even have niche success with it. But you have no chance of providing the equivalent effect of a video landing on the YouTube frontpage.

>You could build yet another video host and even have niche success with it. But you have no chance of providing the equivalent effect of a video landing on the YouTube frontpage.

Most people on Youtube never even have their videos land on the frontpage, and yet many of them are successful. That network effect and scale isn't necessary for the ability to broadcast and disseminate speech online, so it doesn't really contradict the premise that free speech on the web (as far as video is concerned) requires Youtube as a host, or that competition couldn't be as effective as, say, repealing Section 230 or having the government take over Youtube and force it to act as a public utility.

At the end of the day, all Youtube is, is popular. They're not like J.P. Morgan, holding monopoly power by physically controlling infrastructure and making competition impossible. The reason there isn't "effective" competition isn't because Google controls the web, it's because no one considers anything less than Google-scale to be "competition," so they write off the tons of other media streaming sites and social media platforms as irrelevant because they can't gain dominant market share. But this conflates the free speech argument with arguments about effective business strategy.

There would be no issue if this was plausible in practice, but its not.

The current climate is one of not allowing people to "start a new website". Sure, one can quite technically run their own platform, but the minute it becomes significant there seems to be a risk of shutdown via external pressure. Deplatforming is a very dangerous tool, the likes of which I think should only be reserved for the most heinous crimes. I have zero qualms about deplatforming a child molester, for example. But there was just a story on here about how someone lost their job simply for having accounts on Gab and Parler. Not for any content they posted, but for the mere existence of the accounts.

Even as recently as the 80s and 90s, liberals were much more likely to be anti-censorship. Now people who claim that label are all for shutting down "bad" things, without understanding that "good" and "bad" are largely human constructs, and the things that are considered "good" and "bad" can and will change over time. What about in the far future when bigotry inevitably becomes commonplace and systemic in a much worse way than humanity has already seen? Do we really want to just hand these tools of suppression and control to people like that on a silver platter? The entire point of freedom of speech is supposed to transcend that sort of control.

To go on a slight tangent, it's quite similar to how many traditional Christians in America would wish for their religion to have special privileges in law, when they don't realize that it would open the door for any other religion to do the same, should their population grow to the numbers they'd need to influence policy. The very same people who would wish to make Christianity privileged would bemoan Islam one day becoming the majority religion and instituting Islamic law via those same legal mechanisms. Nobody I've talked to face to face in my area has any kind of answer to that one.

They're already in the wrong hands. The only right hands are our own.

That is why I prefer these tools be used by private organizations to enforce their own private rules rather than being managed by government mandate. That ensures that enough social rules exist to maintain society but not rules which are so ingrained in law as to prevent progress or allow trivial total abuse.

Would you support breaking the near-monopolies that certain organizations have?

Yes although that's a tangential topic I feel related more to power concentration in a society. None of the organizations have close to a monopoly on communication or content. They simply all agree right now which is generally how implicit social rules tend to function. Eventually they'll start to disagree again in one way or another.

They all have American left wing bias. Personally I'd prefer if they had either European left wing bias or European right wing bias, but right now we only have one option and that is the American political bias which is a really shitty situation. I can't wait for Europe to either ban them in some way or reign in their rights to moderate.

What is to stop any European companies from starting their own social networks? They are not monopolies, and are much less of monopolies than other de-facto monopolies which are allowed to exist without being regulated as such, such as ISPs in the US.

When the private companies start getting billion dollar contracts with the government, or are lobbying politicians for laws massively benefitting the companies in the long run, it's safe to say the decisions behind the "private rules" will be impacted accordingly.

Nothing is a perfect system, I support the one I feel has the best chance of ensuring a stable but evolving society. Not restricting things has resulted in the governing body of the US getting attacked by an angry armed mob inside a federal government building. So that's not a viable option for a stable society. The government is both subject to changing political whims and has a history of overusing it's control in various situations. So that's not a viable option for an evolving society. Thus we get to the shitty but potentially best compromise option. Just like democracy itself.

How is it best for a society to evolve by suppressing diversity? In this situation, I'm talking about diversity of ideas relating to politics.

Have you ever considered why Silicon Valley exists in America? It's because as America grew, it welcomed in people from all over the world with extremely different backgrounds with extremely different ideas about how to do things. Over time, that situation resulted in extreme innovation where the best ideas prevailed.

>How is it best for a society to evolve by suppressing diversity?

Because radical change generally leads to very bad things so you want a slow evolution which means you suppress ideas so they spread more slowly and thus society has more time to process them properly.

>Over time, that situation resulted in extreme innovation where the best ideas prevailed.

And the existence of giant corporate beasts, massive wealth concentration, massive income inequality in the bay area, spread of socially destabilizing ideas, foreign influence over elections, privacy failures, etc., etc. And many would argue many of the ideas, especially recently, aren't revolutionary but rather simply better ways to cheaply exploit people and hide externalities (that society but not the company pays for).

> you want a slow evolution which means you suppress ideas so they spread more slowly

So is this your viewpoint on all forms of diversity, such as racial and socioeconomic inclusion? Or are you selectively changing your definition as you go?

> And the existence of giant corporate beasts, massive wealth concentration...

This has nothing to do with what we're discussing here.

> foreign influence over elections

So you recognize foreign influence over elections, but think it's ok to silence people whose underlying animosity is rooted around accusations of foreign influence in the most recent election?

> and hide externalities

Interesting choice of words considering you're in support of literally hiding externalities of the situation as a whole

>So is this your viewpoint on all forms of diversity, such as racial and socioeconomic inclusion?

Yes. Although in the US we've been working on socioeconomic and racial inclusion for the last few centuries so I feel that's moving slowly enough for society to adjust. Communism shows what happens when you move on the socioeconomic side too quickly and it's not pretty.

I do find it funny how some people think racial and socioeconomic inclusion is a new thing that is just now happening. Do you people never pay attention to history, ever?

>This has nothing to do with what we're discussing here.

You talked about the glory of change in terms of SV. I mentioned the dark flip side of change in terms of SV. You can try to cherry pick parts of the story but I'll keep pointing out that you're doing so.

Aren’t there more ways how and more places where you can speak out today than ever before? Aren’t people able to say more radical or extreme things at scale than ever before?

I’m reminded of folks claiming that their voices are silenced but say so on Twitter, at physical events, on the news, etc.?

The irony seems mind boggling to me.

> Aren’t there more ways how and more places where you can speak out today than ever before?

No. There was for a little while, but the number of avenues that one has for publishing unpopular speech are at a major low vs 10 or 15 years ago.

Now, the internet has reached the status quo of broadcast media prior to it: a small handful of gigantic powerful organizations have total veto over what can be published.

I'm pretty confident that, no matter what idea you want to express, you can find a forum on the Internet which allows you to express it. Even the most offensive, socially toxic ideas typically have a handful of forums that welcome them. Am I misunderstanding your argument here?

You can't find one that allows you to publish at scale. Screaming alone or in a tiny venue is very different than being able to publish to millions.

Everyone's words and ideas should be able to live or die on their own merit, and not be bottlenecked by shitty hosting and blanket domain bans in posts/DMs.

There are tons of places where you can post stuff; Facebook will happily censor DMs between consenting adults that contain your domain name when they want to share links to your content to others.

Become too unpopular (or, more accurately, increase in popularity too much with the "wrong" people) and your host will cancel your account. There aren't that many datacenter operators.

Nobody is being hunted, that's pretty hyperbolic. If YouTube were silencing protests I wouldn't like that, but I don't rely on YouTube to understand what's going on in the world and I would encourage anyone concerned about YouTube's content policy to consider visiting other websites on the internet in addition to YouTube.

>Nobody is being hunted, that's pretty hyperbolic.

That's pretty hyperbolic.

> If YouTube were silencing protests I wouldn't like that, but I don't rely on YouTube to understand what's going on in the world

A lot of people do. You can't really find out what's going on in the world from the mainstream media in any real resolution or detail, and "other websites on the internet" don't generally have thousands and thousands of people livestreaming actual live video of what's happening.

Perhaps this could be rectified by our society working to make bandwidth an order of magnitude or two cheaper, so that there can be lots more live video hosts. As it stands, you're pretty much stuck with a few giant megacorps like Google or Twitch.

This. Some media outlets have decent live reporting, but going through the available apps on a PlayStation, which is what we use to watch video on a big screen via a projector (we also have a Shield and a Mac mini connected to it, but those get used less), we ended up watching both large media cos and smaller channels live-streaming the events of Jan 6 on YouTube. If one looks at the available apps and platforms on smart TVs, there aren’t actually that many options. This could change, but there are high barriers to entry e.g. having enough of a platform that it makes sense to build an app for Samsung TVs, another for LG TVs, another for Sony TVs, then get those all certified and keep them available.

You can because the mainstream western media despite it's faults tends to be pretty good

Meanwhile there are tons of crazy extremists streaming. A lot of it doesnt provide an accurate view and might only be useful as a potentially biased first hand account to digged through by journalists and historians after the fact

There are also tons of non-crazy, non-extremists streaming.

Regardless of whether you listen to the streamers, it's an amazing tool for seeing what is actually happening in a specific place. You can ignore the commentary or ideology (not that that is really an issue, most streams are just normies) and see what is happening.

Western mainstream media is a lot of things, but comprehensive and nuanced it is not.

The overwhelming majority of YouTube content is junk, people shouldn't rely on it to stay informed, at best, they should cherry-pick a few quality sources to supplement others. Yes, there are some people who rely exclusively on YouTube just like there are some that rely exclusively on Fox News to stay informed, in both cases it is the responsibility of the media consumer to make better choices.

Yes. The solution to trolling has always been moderation.

If the moderation is too strict then people leave and setup elsewhere. If it is just the trolls leaving then no one cares and it is a win/win.

It is important to acknowledge that this is a conflict between two ethical ideologies: Deontology/Kantian ethics vs Utilitarian ethics. The Deontological argument is that free speech is good, and any effort to curtail it would lead to a domino effect which will be disastrous. The Utilitarian argument is that this curtailing of free speech is acceptable as the alternative is causing more harm than good. Both ideologies have their limitations and criticisms, and there doesn't seem to be any clear winner.

The philosophy that those who hold the power have will be the one winning, since they have the actual means to impose it, regardless of arguments.

In this case it is Utilitarian ethics.

Yes, and I fundamentally reject the premise that inaccurate expression should be censored or moderated without a proximate cause to a specific harm or credible imminent apprehension of harm.

I do not think censorship is justifiable for potential or non-quantifiable, collective psychic harm.

>I do not think censorship is justifiable for potential or non-quantifiable, collective psychic harm.

Can you provide an example?

If someone posts an inaccurate or untruthful comment that a reasonable person would not rely upon for their safety, I think the correct response is to mute, unfollow or retort (and if it's self-evident, hopefully it's easy to explain why it's inaccurate or link to countered evidence).

However, the imminent apprehension of harm (from a direct, credible or specific threat), does comport with the concept of assault and is grounds for moderation. Likewise, demonstrating proximate cause from someones actions to a specific harm/damages, would also be grounds for censorship.

You can make the same argument in the opposite direction: for those who support unbridled electronic speech amplification, are you prepared for it to fall in the hands of people who are bent on changing minds en masse to fill society with falsehoods, uncertainty, and violence?

On a more detailed note, I draw a sharp line between normal speech and selectively amplified speech. Twitter and Facebook are in a bind because their business is to curate speech amplification in order to maximize exposure to ads. So if you ask “why did person X see post Y?” it’s because Twitter/FB decided to show Y to X. So they have automatically become at least partially responsible for the effect of that post.

So to me this Twitter/FB censorship fiasco is not about free speech censorship whatsoever. It’s about these companies being in the business of deciding who sees what, being externally pressured to do a better job.

It wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever to ask Twitter/FB to “stop censoring” while admitting that they should be allowed to curate feeds to maximize ad revenue.

> You can make the same argument in the opposite direction: for those who support unbridled electronic speech amplification, are you prepared for it to fall in the hands of people who are bent on changing minds en masse to fill society with falsehoods, uncertainty, and violence?

This seems to equate the ability to publish with a society that's filled with falsehoods, uncertainty, and violence. Is it possible that society won't have any more or less falsehoods, more or less uncertainty, or more or less violence than a society in which you don't appoint some "knows better than the reader" censor to decide what people are allowed to see and read?

It seems insanely presumptuous to me that some censor at Facebook or Google won't turn into a violent maniac when they see the things you seem to propose that they censor, but the general, unwashed masses will. Give adults some credit.

We've had the church around spreading falsehoods, uncertainty, and violence for centuries, and the world is still here (and still improving). I don't think letting people publish whatever legal content they like is going to suddenly send our world to hell in a handbasket. The danger from uncensored publishing is overblown.

You're just going to ignore the body count from the spread of falsehoods? The lynchings? The wars? The genocides? None of that matters?

Not to mention the world is getting better only in a very narrow sense. Environmentally, we're entering a very dark period. The falsehoods surrounding climate change will cost us a great deal.

> Environmentally, we're entering a very dark period. The falsehoods surrounding climate change will cost us a great deal

Those falsehoods comes mostly from old people watching fox news. Young people who grew up with mostly unfiltered communication on the internet are typically for doing something against climate change. So this only strengthens the point that free flow of information is more desirable than filtered communication.

People who want to manipulate the masses hates this though, so they try to make every argument they can that free flow of information is harmful and we need to stop it. Basically anyone with power have nothing to gain from you and me being able to freely communicate, so they want to reign that in as much as possible. I'm not sure why you want to make the rich and powerful even richer and even more powerful, but that is what you are arguing for.

I think the point is not that "all speech should be suppressed", but that, generally speaking, the suppression of speech should not be disallowed. Users and employees should be allowed to pressure companies to suppress hate speech; a bar owner should be allowed to kick into the street a racist and profane customer; a school should be able to fire a teacher who is getting a lot of complaints for teaching racist ideas or gaslighting students.

It would be a horrible outcome if speech maximalism succeeded and prevented people from acting to protect their customers, property, society, etc., against destructive speech.

Of course, you can say "yeah but if you allow suppression of speech then it'll be used for evil" -- as in, Twitter can kick off whoever they want. But going as far as legally protecting any and all speech, in any situation and on any public or private property, is far more destructive in my opinion.

> in any situation and on any public or private property, is far more destructive in my opinion.

I think this is perhaps a straw man. Nobody is asking to protect unrestricted speech in all private venues.

Would it be so bad to make it illegal for large services that have private DMs to snoop/censor those, such as we do presently for large services that have private telephone calls?

The dichotomy isn't public/private. The phone company is private and they aren't allowed to tap your phone (unless they're doing it for the government), and they're not allowed to shut off your service because you called members of the "wrong" political party too often.

IMO that last point is because we’re still trying to govern the Internet based on telecom laws from decades ago. Tech moves way faster than laws, especially tech that is helping politicians get elected. The financial and political incentives aren’t aligned to make significant changes any time soon.

I completely agree with you, and we should work to limit these companies to our liking, with legislation.

Your stance is super reasonable. But look around, many people in this conversation are effectively arguing in favor of totally, globally unrestricted speech, which I find extreme and untenable.

I'm a big believer in constitutional free speech, but I certainly don't believe that laws or conventions should protect unbridled amplified speech; giving everyone a megaphone connected to everyone else's ear. Plenty of examples in history show how propaganda was intrinsic to installing and sustaining terrible dictatorships and cults. Sure amplified speech is fine in many instances, but naturally people will want to curb it when it goes too far. People and societies should definitely be free to curb it when it goes too far. They should not be forced to endure it.

Do you think we are observing a symptom (unbridled speech amplification) of the disease (monetization of algorithmically targeted content), so to speak?

Do you think that if we somehow broke this monetization model, that companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google would cease to be the behemoths they are, and the amplification mechanism might go away?

I definitely think the current outrage around "Big Tech censoring free speech" is a downstream effect of these companies curating feeds to maximize ad revenue.

If these platforms presented the content without interpreting and curating it for profit, they could at least take the stronger stance of being a platform instead of a speech curation/distribution/amplification system.

For example if Signal was externally pressured to take down speech based on its content, they would be like "We don't have that ability." But in the case of Twitter and FB, that ability and practice is at the very core of their business model.

Yes. Imagine if the telecoms could play ads before, after, and during your conversations on your phone(s)? Why do we accept it from big tech social media?

Strong network effects + capitalism. They found a good way to make lots of money, which allowed them to pay lots of skilled people to spend their time getting more people into the system and looking at ads.

The problem, IMO, is that most users don’t understand how social media works from a business perspective. Advertising companies put a lot of effort into not being known as advertising companies.

Another fun thought experiment: consider who runs political ads, especially local advertisers (highway billboards etc) and what speech they’re willing to accept. Consider Comcast / cable networks and what speech they’re willing to accept. Who are their customers, how are they making money, and how does that affect what speech they are willing to accept on their platforms.

“ Advertising companies put a lot of effort into not being known as advertising companies.”

That says a great deal doesn’t it? They are too ashamed and know it is an immoral business.

> for those who support unbridled electronic speech amplification, are you prepared for it to fall in the hands of people who are bent on changing minds en masse to fill society with falsehoods, uncertainty, and violence?

You mean a society where the most charismatic/popular members get the attention of the masses, mostly by telling them what they want to hear? Yes, I think I'm prepared to live in such a society.

I think, in your attempt at making free speech look undesirable with your mention of "amplification", you forgot that this amplification is for everyone, including you and those who agree with you.

We should clarify that "free speech" is unrelated to what Twitter and Facebook are doing. Free speech is a constitutional concept, protecting people from draconian government laws that suppress their speech, or discriminate them based on their speech.

What Facebook and Twitter are doing is providing a product that amplifies and places speech in front of particular eyeballs and ears. There are many, many issues with what Facebook and Twitter are doing, but they're all unrelated to the legally-protected constitutional free speech.

Some people have argued that "posting on Twitter/FB may as well be considered protected speech, since society depends on it so much" which is an interesting concept for sure, but has no basis in law yet.

Finally, to your last point, the amplification is not for everyone, and that's at the core of why people hate these companies right now. Users are subjectively amplified or suppressed, or kicked off. And this unequal treatment of users is at the very core of their business model: they make money by selectively amplifying content.

Free speech is not a "constitutional concept" whatever you mean by that. Free speech is a philosophical concept that has been embedded in the US Constitution as the 1st Amendment.

The US Founders thought that people must have the ability to speak their mind, to discuss and challenge each others ideas. They thought this ability was so important they enshrined it in law.

And what that means, practically speaking, is that unlike other places in the world, we can speak out against the government and not worry about going to prison for it. That was the intention of it, and we still have that. Whether content critical of the government converts well enough for a company to allow it to stay on their platform is a different question, and hate speech

  public speech that expresses     hate or encourages violence toward a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation

yet another separate question.

“Free speech” is about limiting government retaliation based on speech. So Uncle Sam can’t legally put you in prison because you spoke against Uncle Sam.

Free speech doesn’t mean you’re protected to speak whatever you want in any setting. Speech is subject to private property and common sense. If you are profane on my property I’ll kick you out and ban you. That is NOT a violation of your free speech.

>You can make the same argument in the opposite direction: for those who support unbridled electronic speech amplification, are you prepared for it to fall in the hands of people who are bent on changing minds en masse to fill society with falsehoods, uncertainty, and violence?

Yes, obviously. "But people may say false things on the internet" is not nearly as strong an argument as "you will be prevented from criticizing your government on the internet".

“You can make the same argument in the opposite direction: for those who support unbridled electronic speech amplification, are you prepared for it to fall in the hands of people who are bent on changing minds en masse to fill society with falsehoods, uncertainty, and violence?“

This is truly ironic given that exact abuse has been perpetrated by these tech companies in order to build their empires in the form of advertising and manipulating users on their platforms.

Also, your dismissal of humanism is appalling.

This is a tough issue, and I don't see how it would be more humanist to support something like "all speech, in any situation, must be allowed and protected". Clearly some of that speech will be destructive, and harm people. I don't think you want to advocate that those people who are being harmed should be unable to protect themselves from speech they see as harmful and destructive.

Neither side of this coin is a straight answer; you can easily poke holes in either by imagining the terrible consequences of the alternative. The answer IMO is people, groups, societies, should decide what's constructive and destructive and converge on a balance that works for them.

No. It’s quite clear. People should have the right to pursue dangerous, stupid, crazy, ugly, offensive, illogical activities as well as safe, brilliant, sane, beautiful, flattering, and logical activities.

Your approach results in a star chamber of elites that make value judgments on what people can SAY, which directly impacts what they can DO. Society is limited to their judgment and belief system.

There are countries that exist today with this model, and it is not a pleasant existence to be a regular citizen in those countries especially for creative “weird” people who represent most of the major innovations in the world. Read history and see for yourself how this approach leads to poor outcomes for the majority. In fact, it is at the core of the founding of the United States itself.

One approach leads to a narrow, controlled, and directed society that is controlled by the elite; the other brings breadth and freedom to pursue crazy thoughts that can lead to major innovations.

If you’re loud and profane in a bar and disturbing the tenants, the bouncer will muzzle you. You seem to be arguing that the bouncer should not be allowed to do that.

You seem to be mixing up “free speech” in the constitution and the normal to and fro negotiations and tensions between people. In private life people need to be allowed to act against speech that they find harmful.

>supporting restrictions on speech and privacy violations

That's a confusing phrase. It took me a while to realize you meant "supporting privacy violations" rather than "supporting restrictions on privacy violations". You seem to be lumping speech restrictions and privacy violations into the same bucket, but I see them as very different, often even opposed to each other. The US elevates free speech higher than privacy. Europe elevates privacy higher than free speech. In many European countries the press isn't allowed to report the names or faces of suspects. In many European countries you can't take pictures of people walking on the street.

Doxing is a clear case where free speech is directly opposed to privacy. Same with right to be forgotten.

> You seem to be lumping speech restrictions and privacy violations into the same bucket, but I see them as very different, often even opposed to each other.

And yet today there was an article in the front page claiming that Signal is a problem because its end to end encryption can be used by anyone, even "bad actors", to communicate. That's an attack on both privacy and free speech, and I wouldn't be shocked if GP had that article (and others like it) in mind.

Mind you, most of the comments here rightfully called that article out for the absurd fear-mongering it was, and even the increasingly common censorship apologists were unusually silent. I was pleasantly surprised, even if it did still get a lot of upvotes and reached the front page.

Fixed the wording to make it a bit more clear, thanks. Connecting doxing as a privacy violation to free speech is a very interesting point that I didn't think about - I was thinking about data collection and tracking when talking about privacy violations.

For what you bring up with doxing, I don't think I have a very satisfying answer. I definitely won't advocate for keeping it on social media websites. But I can't advocate for all-powerful tools that would allow even for actually dangerous content like that to be tracked down and removed from everywhere, because there is no way to ensure that tools like that will not be abused.

Remove it from Twitter, block it on your own federation nodes, try to bring the perpetrators to justice, but, as painful as it is, you shouldn't have a magic button that would be able to completely eradicate that from the internet.

It would also be good to reduce data collection and to teach people to be more conscious of what they share to prevent private information from leaking to begin with.

Your television and radio broadcasts have been "censored" and curated since the dawn of time. Newspapers have curated their content and various newspapers are known for having left or right bias.

This isn't just the stations own content. If you paid to put content on television, radio, or in the paper, the publisher has always had the right to publish or not publish content (with some limits, but nothing this article speaks about would be protected by law). You couldn't have a cable community access channel with whatever content you wanted.

YouTube/ Twitter/ Facebook have been and remain far more permissive in publishing outside content than any other media in history.

You are implying that there is some kind of "new" restrictions on speech, but this is literally hundreds of years old.

I think social media is not directly comparable to television and radio broadcasts. The public square analogy makes much more sense here. But even then, in a lot of places there are impartiality requirements on media outlets, as flawed as they may be.

Let me use your analogy, though.

Let's say there are many newspapers in town. Is it fair for me to refuse to publish certain things? Sure.

What if I own the only newspaper in town? It gets more complicated. But hey, perhaps the town has a thriving samizdat culture, so maybe it's fine.

But then what if I start buying out every printing press in town? And on top of that, what if I'm pressured by the mayor to not publish something? This is a big issue now, right?

How can that situation be addressed? People often suggest regulating that sole paper, but to me the answer is taking steps to ensure that we never end up with one newspaper in town. And we definitely don't let that paper control all of the printing presses.

> The public square analogy makes much more sense here. But even then, in a lot of places there are impartiality requirements on media outlets, as flawed as they may be.

The "Public Square" assumes the space is owned by... well the public. Either the town or city. That's not the case here. Even if it were, the reach of a person in the public square is tiny... a few hundred people if they are absolutely lucky.

Besides... your rights in actual public squares haven't changed a bit. Save the fact that COVID has shut down many public spaces.

> But then what if I start buying out every printing press in town?

You mean the way Clear Channel has actually bought up a huge percentage of radio stations?

The way big right wing corporations have bought up the majority of local television stations in the country?

Is it "fair" that the majority of television broadcast stations are owned by a few right-wing media companies?

For what it's worth, all three "competing" local broadcast television stations are owned by the same company now.

I'd love to know why people think it's super important that Facebook and Twitter cease their supposedly "biased" curating while so many broadcast companies which reach 10s of millions of homes get a free pass.

So let's go after TV and radio stations too, then? I'm not opposed to that.

By the way, I don't think forcing broadcasters or social media to not police their content is the way to go - I'd much rather make sure they don't become monopolistic. The situation you describe with TV must not happen with social media too.

I think the point was that we didn't seem to mind that consolidation nor the censorship/biased reporting in those media sources yet want to ask Twittter/Facebook to hold themselves to a new standard.

Is it more because it's conservative views being censored now?

I think that consolidation was a lot less visible, plus people's attitudes are changing. Finally, this ship has not sailed yet, while TV is pretty much doomed.

American conservatives, being as... loud as they are, did make the issue more mainstream, but people have been bringing up these problems for as long as the internet has been around.

> I'd much rather make sure they don't become monopolistic. The situation you describe with TV must not happen with social media too.

I'd love to see more variety in social media. Unfortunately network effects favor big single player. Also, every time a new entrant threatens, they get sucked up by an existing player. Sadly, since we've allowed Facebook to swallow everything which isn't bolted down, the only real competition seems to be Chinese owned[0].

(And I sympathize with foreign governments struggling with Facebook & Instagram being US owned).

[0] I have no qualms about Chinese people or even Chinese companies in general. But the way the Chinese government operates, I am skeptical of platforms based on speech.

Funny thing is, there might be a way out if we changed the incentives. Because let's be clear: FB, Twitter, YouTube, ... (and to a slightly lesser degree, Google) - they are all media distributors and opinion amplifiers. Much like traditional publishers. Only instead of creating or sourcing their own content, they syndicate.

We also have to acknowledge that content moderation at scale is impossible.[ß] The lines are hazy and fluid, context matters, and incentives are outright perverse. The volume of incoming material is overwhelming. On top of that, people with money, fame or lulz on the line will game any rules based system.

But what if these online syndicates had to publish corrections for their worst offenses? News outlets have had to do that for decades, after all. We could as a society take this as an opportunity to move the goal posts for the better. Instead of allowing the correction to be buried in a dark corner nobody ever sees, specify that the correction itself has to be displayed as prominently as the original news itself.

You're doing print? Then that correction will eat up prime eyeball real estate from the publication. (And make it clear you messed up.) You're an online syndicate? The correction needs to go through the same amplification mechanism and get as prominently on top of the users' feeds as the original item did. It eats up prime screen real estate and makes it equally clear that you messed up.

This would have three benefits:

1) Content publishers become accountable for their actions. The US media in particular is obsessed with just throwing whatever they get their hands on out there and have the readers sort it out for themselves. To hell with accuracy.

2) The requirement to surface corrections as widely as the original item(s) provides a second-order incentive. Your publication forfeits revenue and opportunity from whatever other news are currently floating around, costing both money and reputation. Mess up more often, get punished more often.

3) The readers would benefit from increased media literacy education. Get bombarded with garbage and outright lies? Receive more fact-checks after the fact, published and syndicated through the same funnels that fed you the original trash.

Freedom of speech is not freedom from accountability.

ß: Mike Masnick has been saying this for years. For a longer take, see https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191111/23032743367/masni...

How would this even work with something like twitter?

Lets say Biden Tweets a big fat lie to his millions of followers. That lie in turn gets retweeted by millions of people. Next, Biden posts a retraction. Do all of his followers also have to post a retraction? Does Twitter have to implement some kind of retweet retraction mechanic?

What if the original user is obscure and someone famous quote tweets a big fat lie instead of inventing their own big-fat lie? Does it make a difference if the quoter was agreeing with the original?

How do you deal with users who refuse to post a retraction or even leave twitter entirely? Is there an auto-retraction? Who decides if and when something is retracted?

> The requirement to surface corrections as widely as the original item

Imagine for a moment you are running an obscure little website, "The 2nd amendment times", and you post a little story on your blog about how Obama is getting appointed to replace Biden in 2024 and he's coming to take everyone's guns. All 17 of your readers read your story and laugh it off except one passes it on to Rush Limbaugh who Tweets it.

Now 17 million people blow up your blog. You are featured on Fox News and dozens of top right-wing pundits repost your site.

Who is "accountable" here? How would this get retracted? If you post a new article on the front page of your blog saying you dreamt the whole thing after smoking too much weed, does that make it all good even though only your original 17 readers are likely to see this correction?

flatly, yes, that sounds like an good tradeoff.

It seems unlikely to go wrong the other way, since people are mostly sane about this stuff and agree on what should be shut out (calls for violence, conspiratorial nutjob stuff, widespread misinformation). obviously the calculation would change if Putin-style misinformation was being defended by these people, but it's not.

I disagree about people being mostly sane about this stuff, for what it's worth. We may have very different filter bubbles....

Yes. This isn't the government hunting down political opposition, this is a private company saying "hey, neonazis go somewhere else".

If a different private company wants to host the neonazis, they can go for it. It turns out it's /difficult/ for them because most people find them repulsive.

I don't hear anyone making this argument for child abuse images for what it's worth.

That’s because child abuse images are objective while “neonazis” are not.

Regarding the “different private company”. Some of your people are already trying to deplatform Telegram now, because those “neonazis” went there after they were banned everywhere else.

I have been using this platform to connect with my family for years and now all of a sudden my family and I are supporters of the “neonazi” movement somehow, because of how broad the definition of “neonazi” is, for the American left wing activists.

Maybe you are okay with the collateral damage “for the greater good” but I am not willing to make this sacrifice to satisfy the American left-wingers and their witch hunt. I sympathize with the idea, but no, thank you. Please, think of another solution for your problems.

Maybe, just maybe, you need to somehow use the law system of your country to stop them criminals? Or, in case they don’t do anything illegal (I’m not implying that they don’t, I’ve no idea) - maybe you just leave them be until they do something illegal? And then like catch them and stuff? And leave me my Telegram to call my mum every evening?

Or - wow, even crazier idea - you do not ban them at all, but instead of that you follow their threads and actually prevent them from doing anything illegal when they starting to discuss it? My guess it would be much easier to do when you have this kind of transparency.

I understand it’s not that easy as massive bans of everything that moves in a slightly different direction than yours, but this would probably be the right way. Thanks in advance.

Since I primarily see the canned response of "they can build their own youtube if they don't like it", I'll rephrase to help get your actual point across:

Imagine if Hitler were currently alive and rising to power in Germany, and imagine if Silicon Valley were located in Germany. Would you be ok with Silicon Valley de-platforming and doing everything in their power to silence the Nazi-opposition political party? And knowing what's about to come, do you think the stance of "they can build their own communication systems" would be beneficial to humanity as a whole?

I'm aware this is kind of extreme but there are multiple responses that missed the point.

You do know the Weimar Republic had hate speech laws and enforced them against the nazis:

Contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilising anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech.[1]

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/copenhagen-speech-v...

Would I be ok with suppressing speech if I was an omnipotent being who knew the future?

Probably yes.

The US has strong speech protections, somehow when people are wrong in their beliefs about what that means they move the goal post to this mythical “ethical” free speech maxim.

I dont believe in what those people imagine free speech means. I believe in the “first amendment” which includes freedom of association including for the non-government people that create venues and platforms. “We have the right to refuse service to anyone” as seen on any shop any where.

If you would like Congress to create a new regulation on interstate commerce preventing internet platforms from doing some particular thing, then articulate that specific position.

I am absolutely not bothered the current reality, it is the expected reality and I would like the same privileges on my own venues and platforms.

I have to agree with this sentiment strongly. As much as I may lament today's social media landscape, it is only a drop in the bucket when it comes to my ability to participate in our cultural zeitgeist. And as long as we are going to pursue capitalism with gusto, I am in favor of capitalists controlling their own business - modulo protected class issues.

> I am in favor of capitalists controlling their own business - modulo protected class issues

What does this mean?

Can you give an example of a protected class and how the business would be impacted?

I think modulo is a bit misused here but race, religion, sex, age and more are legally protected classes in the US and a business' right to refuse service can not be because of discrimination against these protected classes. The parent wants to make it clear that they do support a capitalist's freedom to control their business in so far as it does not conflict with class protections.

People are upset because at the core of this debate lies a moral conflict between deontologists and utilitarians, where currently utilitarians are in control and wielding power with complete disregard for the fact that the majority are of different ethical persuasions.

So it’s more a question of how to maintain fair platforms, than it is of free speech. The free speech debate will likely be the dominant topic of the coming decade yet no one actually wants unmoderated public spaces. We just can’t agree to the terms. If this debate really was just about the rights of a few fringe groups of extremists, rather than perceived bias in moderation, it wouldn’t be popular.

You can solve this conflict simply by setting clear rules that everyone must abide by. Rules you’d assume any rational person would agree to. Let’s say: On public platforms you’re not allowed to target any individual or group with attacks. But then you’d also have to ban people who say that conservatives are evil. Which we both know is never going to happen - as just the suggestion would lead to political deadlock. The utilitarians believe in catharsis through the expression of justified hate and anger; no, we weed rules that censor not any division, but unjustified division. We need not rules that protect personal dignity, but the dignity of some over others. In Reddit’s term of service they ban abuse of minority groups; specifically because they don’t want to ban abuse of majority groups. The ministeries of truth of our time are staffed by blue haired ideological activists with a social engineering agenda who love science but only as longs as it’s produced by a faculty that’s struggling with a falsifiability crisis.

If you’re running the communications platforms at the heart of our modern societies you must either govern it from the center, or accept that your subtle guidance however well intentioned is driving us towards ever increasing conflict. You have to govern from the center even though your personal ideology tells you that everything is relative, that truths are only meaningful in context, and that ethics is a function of cause and effect. Because to people who rather view ethics as a categorical imperative _you_ are the one who’s is driving division and pushing us towards disaster. And regardless of who’s right or wrong; it’s arrogant and dangerous to allow yourself to become dogmatic.

Except you don't have the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason. It is against the law to refuse service on the basis of protected classes (i.e. race, sex, sexual orientation). These classes are thought to be immutable.

More and more evidence shows that political beliefs are inheritable[1]. Should that be protected? What about height? We know that shorter men earn less than taller men. Should short people be protected from short jokes? Should the government ensure short and tall people have the same salary? What about attractiveness? Again uglier people are less successful and have less sex. Should they be protected? Should the government put their finger on the scale to ensure ugly people have the same amount of sex?

Either, I should be able to discriminate on any basis, or I can't. The problem at the moment is we have it both ways, in ways that asymmetrically attack one particular group of people.

Nobody really things through any of these inconsistencies though because it doesn't impact most people. As the values in Silicon Valley have significantly diverged from large parts of the US, more and more people are being impacted by these policies.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/09/study-on-tw...

Insightful, I was curious if you had a position? Such as would you like additional protected classes? Or any particular outcome, its not necessary I was just making sure I didnt miss something you were advocating for.

I'm afraid I don't.

Ideally, I think the concept of protected classes shouldn't exist. I'm not sure if there is a difference of teasing/insulting someone about their height or their race. However, I understand the historical reason why these protective classes were created and why they were needed at the time.

I'm not sure how we move forward on this

It will be easier to see who were the useful idiots when the usefulness runs out.

> can be used to silence protests and to hunt down political opposition.

Isn't this what is basically happening right now?

I don't have a horse in the game, but I do remember that quote:

"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"

When I see lots of "this group denied" and "this online account disabled" stuff, I think they should weather the storm.

I don't know, is this just a control-grab-during-a-crisis move?

Moderation has already been occuring for a while now

This includes moderation of left wing users and things that probably should not be banned(especially minority voices). It's just the the current crop of far right and conspiracy folks complain a lot more/louder.

That said I do worry that it will be an extra excuse for authoritarian countries but it probably won't change their behavior

Don't conflate omission with prohibition.

Twitter can omit realDonaldTrump, no concerns whatsoever.

But any one prohibiting realDonaldTrump from trolling, by whatever medium, would be alarming.

What's your opinion of Project Censored?

https://www.projectcensored.org/top-25-censored-stories-of-a...

Just to pick any example:

What's the culture war label for the fate of journalist Abby Martin?

https://www.projectcensored.org/24-silenced-in-savannah-jour...

I think there's no such thing as free speech, and there never has been. Any forum worth reading has to be heavily moderated in some way. Things like scamming people and counterfeiting money are rightfully illegal. Any legitimate state is going to need to quell protests and hunt down political opposition, because at any reasonable population size you are guaranteed to have people who disagree enough with those in power to get violent and criminal about it. We saw this play out recently enough earlier this month on Inauguration Day.

Politics is hard, and absolutist ideas like completely unrestricted speech, a completely unrestricted economy, or complete privacy are at best lunacy, at worst downright impossible. I don't think I would want to live in a society where anyone could say anything whenever and wherever, where corporations were completely unregulated, or where law enforcement could never hope to gather evidence because of privacy restrictions. So I think tools and methods for restricting speech and privacy must exist, and they will fall into the wrong hands, but it's ultimately up to the public to collectively decide and enforce what is acceptable and what's not. It's an endless struggle that's been happening not since the birth of the Internet, but since people started living in groups.

The constitution protects our freedom of speech from the government, not from private entities on their own private property. Make no mistake, that's what centralized social media platforms are - private property.

Freedom of speech is not protected by the constitution on social media platforms and, frankly, I don't want 100% free speech on social media.

Take a look at HN. HN mods do a brilliant job of moderating. We don't have 100% free speech here and the platform is better for it. The discussions here tend to be much higher quality than on similar platforms like Reddit. That's probably a big reason why you're here reading this comment thread.

However... I've noticed a difference between HN and the likes of Facebook or Twitter. As far as I can tell, HN mods focus more on how you say something rather than what you say. If you're civil, respectful, and on-topic you're seemingly allowed to present just about any idea.

Meanwhile, most other social media platforms seem content to let other people be complete pricks to eachother as long as they don't present any ideas which the platform have decided are wrong or "dangerous".

I think the HN moderation strategy makes for a much better platform. I'd rather talk with a respectful person who I disagree with than a jerk with whome I agree.

*incoming nitpick

>If you're civil, respectful, and on-topic you're seemingly allowed to present just about any idea.

HN heavily follows the religion of scientism. If you reject science, you will be downvoted nearly immediately. HN forgets that the reason that we don't fog our kids with DDT anymore is because 'settled science' was questioned. Yes I am generalizing by using "HN".

This is still, however, one of my favorite platforms to read.

Yeah. I'm more focused on mods removing content and suspending/banning users, though; not just other users downvoting posts.

That's the site's "algorithm" (ie, the audience) at work and not anything the mods are doing.

Downvotes aren’t the moderation the op is talking about.

>The constitution protects our freedom of speech from the government, not from private entities on their own private property. Make no mistake, that's what centralized social media platforms are - private property.

I'm getting pretty tired of this line. The American first amendment is not the same thing as the freedom of speech. People who value the freedom of speech aren't making arguments against these companies based on the law, they are stating this is a deterioration of liberal values.

Furthermore, the argument is that no corporation should have these powers that they do, thus the need to regulate or break up the large tech companies.

I want companies to be able to restrict speech though. That's what moderation is. I just want people to hold their moderation policies to a higher standard.

> The constitution protects our freedom of speech from the government, not from private entities on their own private property.

Yet, it's somehow still illegal for the phone company to cancel your phone service because you said something they didn't like while making a call on their telephone network ("private property").

You seem to be conflating constitutional rights violations by the government (1A) with the abhorrent (but legal!) practice of censorship by private organizations.

We've passed all sorts of laws to protect our communications systems and secure access thereto. This "but it's private property!" argument is a red herring.

Keeping with the analogy, if you call into a radio show with your phone, they aren't obligated to keep you on the air regardless if what you say. They can drop you at any time. It's their show and their hardware.

I would encourage you to read this article from the EFF. They do an excellent job of explaining material concerns regarding private censorship and chokepoints for the freedom of expression:

"Beyond Platforms: Private Censorship, Parler, and the Stack"

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/beyond-platforms-priva...

Thanks! That was a good read.

While I want spcial media platforms to preserve their right to moderate content, I'm still not sure how I feel about services further down the stack getting involved (like AWS did with Parler).

> not from private entities on their own private property.

Depends in the state. Free speech is protected in certain public parts of private property in California.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

> HN mods focus more on how you say something rather than what you say

Exactly. I think it works because it makes discussion possible even for the most extreme ideas by reducing the emotional response.

People don’t become racists/terrorists/etc simply because someone told them so. Content removal of speech supporting these ideas doesn’t do any good.

However removing things that break the discussion works. Spamming, flooding, being very rude or provocative, all make the discussion impossible.

>HN mods focus more on how you say something rather than what you say.

This is how the news used to be regulated in the US. Before the Fairness Doctrine news was all over the place, during it was sane and rational, after .. well we're all living it.

When it comes to checks and balances, the news can be under regulated which allows for lies and corruption like we're seeing right now, it can be regulated in an unfair or bias way, or it can be regulated in a balanced way that doesn't restrict speech, it enhances it.

The US has already solved this problem for previous platforms. It needs to go back and put checks and balances back in, instead of letting corruption remove those checks and balances and keep it removed.

Sufficiently powerful private corporations should be held to similar standards. It's a loophole in the first amendment, honestly - congress can't make a law punishing certain kinds of speech, but it can make Facebook's CEO show up to testify and threaten ruinous regulation if certain problems on the platform aren't handled.

Where does the article talk about freedom of speech? Especially as defined by the constitution? It's just making the argument that this speech should be allowed because it's relevant to the rest of the country.

The article doesn't talk about freedom of speech as protected by the constitution. I was just establishing background for my opinion on the broad subject of social media censorship, which is article is part of.

There are also private highways and railroads, and yet the laws of the respective country apply there as well.

The laws are full of property restrictions that limit the ability of private individuals or companies to act in favor of the general interest. Our society depends on the state to impose such restrictions where necessary.

> Freedom of speech is not protected by the constitution on social media platforms and, frankly, I don't want 100% free speech on social media.

The issue here is that a few monopolists have managed to capture so much of "the Internet" that competition is nearly impossible.

The current situation seems untenable: tech oligarchs deciding arbitrary rules on their own whims and for their own purposes, with no due process, on platforms that are impossible to actually compete against.

The obvious solution is breaking up the monopolies so meaningful competition is possible, and continue allowing platforms to moderate as they see fit. But tech oligarchs write big checks to politicians, and it's hard to imagine there's much appetite for biting the hand that feeds.

Google is like a virtual version of Walmart, if Walmart had cornered U.S. flea markets and installed trapdoors in each stall to flush vendors down into the sewer at a moments notice.

The best part is that everybody starts quoting the first amendment, and Google is like, "Look, we hear you. Just tell us where our intractable flushing procedure fucked up, and we will promise to never again accidentally flush that vendor into the sewer."

Basically. I get the "its their service, and you agreed to the terms" but these tech corps are so big and powerful its on a scale unimaginable when these laws and ideas were originally created and its probably time to rethink how we let corporations run when they basically control the world.

It seems to me that the first step is to stop letting the tech corps control your world. If the range of opinion on popular platforms is too restricted, make a deliberate effort to step back from popular platforms onto group chats and random blogs and web forums, the same way we used to a decade ago.

Most people who do this, in my experience, realize that it's actually pretty easy to see and talk about what you want these days. Youtube's content policies are still a problem, but they're the same kind of problem as CBS's content policies, not an existential threat to free speech.

These tech companies make it harder and harder to avoid their lock in platforms. They crush and buy all the competitors and end up with userbases so big that if you do not participate you will be missing out.

I never wish to sign up for facebook but they have crippled the alternative buy and sell sites, obsoleted most forums and are now invading the VR space with their spyware.

At some point we need to stop blaming the user and look at what we can do to curb the size and power of these companies.

You'll only be missing out in the same sense that you're missing out if you don't go to church on Sundays or don't watch NCIS on Tuesdays. There may be commercial advantages to having accounts for your business, but there's absolutely no reason you need to personally participate in the discourse or know about the most viral tweets.

I think we've gotta step back and recognize how strange this would sound just a couple decades ago. If you talked to someone in the 70s, they'd tell you that of course mainstream media platforms are sanitized for public sensibilities; that's just what it means to be a mainstream media platform. If you want to show things that might shock and offend people, you have every right to do so, but you've gotta do it in a smaller forum. My argument is that they were right, and the past decade of nation-scale but unsanitized platforms has been an inherently unstable aberration.

This is a very sensible comment, but I think the fear some have is that these companies will eventually be the sole arbiters of what is and is not acceptable to talk about because they will control all means of communication and information dissemination.

I'd like to say face to face communication is outside of their control, but when I think about how many devices in my house have microphones and cameras in them I begin to question even that assumption.

I bring up private communication because Norway recently passed hate speech laws that threaten prison time for private remarks they deem "hate speech".

> It seems to me that the first step is to stop letting the tech corps control your world.

This sounds like the "Read the Manual" style of programming UX, vaguely applied to the entire U.S. population.

I offer the "F" from "RTFM" as evidence that this technique doesn't scale well.

> CBS's content policies

Inside Edition cannot construct a personalized chain of increasingly engaging and outrageous conspiratorial content, on the fly, that exploits Inside Edition's data about my blind spots in order to maximally capture my attention. Personalized rabbit-holes are a problem on Youtube, however. That, the size and scope of data collected, the scope of potential content (and lack of moderation of said content), and the speed with which the blackbox algorithm can prime users are all problems which don't (currently) exist with Inside Edition. So the comparison you make isn't apt.

Edit: clarification

I don't think it needs to scale well. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the idea that you should be able to easily find arbitrary content on mainstream platforms is very new; as recently as a decade or two ago, it was well-understood that if you're interested in niche ideas you've gotta seek out niche platforms that support them. We just have to resurrect that consensus.

Personalized rabbit holes are certainly a big problem, but establishing radically permissive Youtube moderation won't really do anything to fight them. It doesn't seem like a related issue.

I find myself being more sympathetic to YouTube than most commenters here. It seems we want YT to both provide editorial oversight so that e.g. mass murderers are not given a platform to flaunt their crimes, and to provide a platform where anyone can start livestreaming at any time, anywhere.

The way broadcast media handles this is they have an editorial policy that is applied by humans producing a single stream at a time. There are multiple people monitoring everything a news station puts out at all times. It's kind of hard to see that happening with YouTube.

So while I think YT policies can probably be improved, I don't think it's ever going to be a great environment for content that depends on editorial staff to exist. Any moderation policy YT takes has to be applied to what must be billions of videos now. Complaining that they're not doing what broadcast media does feels like going to McDonalds and complaining that the chicken McNuggets aren't made of filet. It's part of the product, not a kink that can be ironed out.

I'm starting to look forward to the downfall of any of the FAANGs that become censorship happy. This shit has to stop and I know the 1st wasn't mean for private business, but now that private business has such a reach, it needs to be forced on them.

I feel like I must be crazy that “speech loophole” is a serious term being thrown around at all.

We can wish them gone all we want, but man I just don’t see it happening.

Where would your law end? I’m curious how you’d write it...

Would it be something like:

“No person may delete content which has been made publically accessible on a server they administer without a court order demanding that content’s removal”?

Would you have a certain size threshold, like the law kicks in when you hit 1 million monthly uniques?

> Where would your law end? I’m curious how you’d write it...

There is an easy answer to this. We could just model this stuff after other similar laws, that apply to other networks.

Those similar laws, are called common carrier laws, and they could be expanded to apply to more things.

The first step in that process is restoring net neutrality.

I support net neutrality, but why do you think that should be the first step?

That ensures that ISPs and backbones cannot be the ones applying content guidelines.

I don’t think they can technically do that even if they wanted to.

Not anymore, the internets have largely upgraded to https.

Common carrier laws are woefully inadequate for this. Social media doesn't function by me going to your webpage and seeing what you've written. Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, Youtube, every single one are primarily driven by algorithmic discovery. You go to youtube, youtube says "Hey! Here's our curated list of what we think our usres want to see". Making youtube a common carrier would be fine- they would be forced to host porn videos, spam and gore. The result of common carrier legislation on facebook is you'd have Alex Jones on facebook and not a single link, not a single trending page, would ever link to him ever. It would be functionallly undiscoverable. Which is basically where Alex Jones is today.

> are primarily driven by algorithmic discovery.

The news feed is certainly driven by algorithmic discovery.

But the standard user page, or user account, for any of these, is usually not.

So, for example, a reasonable compromise would to apply common carrier laws to the places where it is possible. IE, allow people to have the user page.

> It would be functionallly undiscoverable

Disagree. There is still value in having that youtube user page for someone with existing audiences, even if they do not have youtube discovery.

Furthermore, even if youtube refuses to do discovery for these pages, it would still be possible for 3rd parties to do discovery. Imagine if you could subscribe to a different discovery website that just takes information from youtube pages.

That would be interesting to drive competition in discovery algorithms and give people choice over that.

I don't think FAANGs are any more or less likely to take this stuff down than anyone else.

If Pepsi was hosting a social network for 'the next generation'... they would take similar actions.

The thing is that private companies also have 1st amendment rights, and ideas like “we need to force FAANGs to do business with horrible racists like the people who run Parler” is much more of a threat to free speech than “Parler can’t buy a fleet of r4xlarge EC2 instances to broadcast their racist propaganda.”

Ah yes, the classic approach of renaming "rights" to "loopholes" and then eliminating them.

^ this

Yet another example of Google trying to solve all problems algorithmically. It's not useful to say "if firearm then block content."

I had to squint to read the email, but I think it’s specific to live streams. I’m going to guess that the original intention was to block suicide / snuff live streams. Though that’s pure speculation on my part.

https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/world/new-zealand-mosque-s...

Maybe they don't want livestreams like this?

Well too goddamn bad.

That's part of life in a post-Enlightenment world.

You don't get to have the all the great shit without all the worst shit along with it.

The very nature of freedom means at some point, someone is going to do something you don't like. And I don't mean the mosque shooting. That was illegal. I mean part of having a free society means you have put up with people saying crazy nonsensical bullshit that any reasonable person would laugh at and then click on a new video. And you're going to have some group of people who are just dumb, or are easily impressionable, or are easily persuaded, or are whatever.

Maybe the sickness isn't in the platform, either... maybe the sickness is somewhere else... and nobody wants to bother with it because its actually hard, and will actually cost money to deal with it.

And to that, I also say, "Too goddamn bad." Its not a buffet and you don't get to choose, you have to accept the whole dinner, the hákarl along with the strawberry cheesecake.

Allowing mass murderers to stream their crimes live is not going to fly. I think that's pretty clear.

So, Youtube has to do something about it. The way traditional broadcast media handles this is that they know whoever's reporting, and have someone watching who can pull the plug if that reporter goes nuts. This is apparently too expensive for YouTube, so they use blunter tools.

Budd Dwyer blew his brains out on live television. Thousands saw the broadcast live. The broadcast was actually shown unedited later that day.

This kind of stuff isn't new.

I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but I just do not see any way that you can navigate around this. As for all the Moms (and Dads) who clutch their pearls and scream to YouTube, "HOW COULD YOU LET ME SON/DAUGHTER/CAT SEE THIS KIND OF MATERIAL?!" Well why are we even allowing that question to be asked? The real question is, "Why aren't you monitoring your children's Internet usage? The Internet isn't a babysister. It isn't a parent.

People need to start taking responsibility for their own lives. There's entirely too much passing of the buck.

It blows my mind that less than 3000 years ago, 7 years old Spartan boys were already training for war with sticks, and I literally have a friend who gets offended when I tell off-color jokes around his son at dinner. Who is 22. And has graduated college.

That isn't a "hallmark of civilization", that's crippling our children such that they're unable to cope with anything outside of a curated Disneyland. And the Universe is not a curated Disneyland.

I'm not talking about people being offended. I'm talking about people being murdered for publicity, as a propaganda effort, and YouTube having to deal with the fallout.

Right, and I get that. My point is, "Why is that YouTube's problem?"

What does it say about our society, where people will commit murder for publicity, thus totally and utterly destroying their lives, almost certainly for life, just for some validation of their existence?

I just cannot get shake the feeling its our culture that has a serious problem, not our tech platforms.

Because YouTube shows video to billions of users and it has a responsibility to avoid spreading Hateful propoganda

> it has a responsibility to avoid spreading Hateful propoganda

Maybe people have a responsibility to themselves to ascertain the truth themselves, without Big Brother telling them what to think, when to think it, and how to think about it.

How we entered this post-enlightment is how we can get past it. I believe some censoring, with specific rules and fair enforcement is a healthy way to go. The disinformation has gone too far. Some of us have relatives who live in a parallel reality. This can’t go on forever..

However, random censoring is bad and if it does not break the rules it should not be censored.

Put a hundred people in a row. Punch them all in the face.

Most of them will be fine, at least eventually. A couple might develop permanent cognitive issues, or even die. But most of them will be fine. Yet it is not a reason for us to give people the permission (let's face it, you can't take away the freedom, they'll do it if they want to) to punch others in the face.

Maybe some day people will acknowledge that publishing things has consequences. Just like punching people in the face has consequences.

Maybe some day people will acknowledge that the Universe isn't a pleasant place and that sometimes you're going to be exposed to unpleasant shit, and you need to cultivate some fortitude to deal with it.

I think there's quite a difference between being exposed to unpleasantness, and someone deliberately taking the unpleasantness, handing it over to a publisher and telling them to rub it into your face.

This whole discussion seems to revolve around whether a publishing platform should be forced to tolerate any type of content, or not. I think you'll agree there's a line somewhere there. From seemingly easy, to more tricky, where do you draw the line (or maybe you just cultivate some fortitude)?

* Twitter bans Trumpetists

* AWS bans Parlor

* You have a personal blog where people can comment (without you pre-approving the content). You choose ban someone's comments.

* You have a personal blog to which people can post comments but they only show after your preview. You choose to specifically ignore someone's comments.

* Mosquito Liberation Front decides to use your yard's lawn for a signpost advertising rights for mosquitoes. You take the sign down.

* MLF decides to use your house's white painted walls as a medium for their freedom of speech and spraypaints their logos on it.

(bonus: MLF chooses to use the white painted walls of Twitter HQ as a medium for their freedom of speech, next to a screen that shows live tweets, after they've been banned from twitter)

I think Peertube with its decentralized live streaming where the moderator of the instances and moderator of remote instances where their videos are federated to are the way forward.

You dont like some instances' moderation rules, go and set up your own and then federate with only like minded people and servers.

Will it "support" extremism, probably, but will it cause them to get stuck in their own defederated bubble where no outsider can be influenced by those views? Yes most definitely.

That is a good way forward, atleast one option and the good thing about it is, its already here

I see from their blog that they support live stream now. Very interesting solution, but it lacks a community (at least at first glance). I wonder what a good social pairing with it would be to help drive traffic between federations.

instances are federated with similar instances. one video on instance A goes to all instances in its network. everyone from those nstances or from any activitypub account like mastodon or pleroma can interact, comment, like...

The article only mentions Rokfin, but what other live stream alternatives are there? Youtube has the most draw and algo suggestions, along with a huge community. I pay for YT because it offers a lot of great content and a good value, so I understand why creators would want to stick to that platform.

And what about indie streaming? Is there some package that glues some open source components, either to the cloud or bare metal?

I feel like there is a space for another livestream community, like YT, like Twitch, and like a Podcast, but without the main stream market filters. Maybe there is and I'm not aware of it.

When Defcon did their 'live stream' last year, they did a torrent of the pre-recorded content, YT, and Twitch because they were worried something might go wrong. By wrong it could have been anything from knocking over the service to getting banned for ... Defcon ideas. I don't think the Defcon shoot out was on there. They added live Q&A with Discord and YT. But that was it -- the only open source part was Discord (which did fall over).

If anyone can suggest a more accurate and neutral title, preferably using representative language from the article, I'd appreciate it. I think the story is about an interesting new phenomenon and therefore on topic for HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but I don't think "Silicon Valley" is the right subject for that sentence, and it's not clear to me if the article is only about YouTube or just primarily.

We could change it to the article's main title, but it's a lot more obscure.

Not quite sure how to craft this into a headline, but this is the gist of the article:

> Indie journalist live streams taken down due to “lack of moderation” and “non-authoritative content”

Why does all discussion on HN devolve into a "yes; all speech should be free" vs "no; any censorship is reasonable" discussion.

There are sophisticated discussions around the limits of free speech available (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance#Tolerance...) and yet no one attempts to address them. It's pretty frustrating to see another "oh no censorship = bad", which is a complete strawman argument.

Labelling one side of the arguments as "pro-censorship" is hardly a good faith interpretation of said positions that is likely to lead to nuanced discussion now is it?

Discussion of this issue on HN started semi-reasonably and has gotten worse and worse rapidly. There's nothing to be gained on the subject here other than occasionally satisfying my morbid curiosity about whether it has gotten even worse than the last time I looked.

I understand perhaps sole enterprise or small partnership having the right to control who they serve. However, if it is a public corporation, it is no longer an individual entity, a citizen entitled to control over whom you serve.

Once your company is public and traded on markets within the United States, it is now available to any individual to become a partial owner. To claim that you represent an individual opinion about whom you want to serve is only figurative. These companies are owned by thousands maybe even millions of people with all types of beliefs.

What I am seeing right now with big tech are the voices of a dominant billionaire leader and noisy, radical employees steering decisions about who should be served by the company. This minority of people in a public corporation should not have this kind of power. Their decisions should be driven entirely by the legal system and what is legally allowed and who can be legally served.

independent media would probably do well to look at independent infrastructure. owncast[1] is an interesting project (no affiliation), I’d be curious if there are more like it.

1. https://github.com/owncast/owncast

The fact that an "independent infrastructure" project gets referenced by linking to GitHub should tell you everything you need to know about the state of "independent infrastructure" in 2021.

It’s not that it’s so hard to set up Redmine, just again that GitHub has strong network effects and a lot of convenience. I can go star stuff and come back later. Bookmarking a random open source project that self-hosts and hoping it’s still there when I need it is less convenient.

YouTube's content policy is clearly a failure in the case of journalists covering firearms, but if you're doing serious journalism you need to pay for your own hosting and stop relying on corporate ad delivery networks to give you a free platform.

Peaceful gun rights advocates doesn't fit the "Guns are bad, mkay." narrative.

Have watched ad tech exes go out of there way to cut off any form of revenue to any center or right leaning site.

Was shocked out how routine it was for them.

To them shutting down alt view points was just fighting the good fight. Zero effort to comprehend the other side.

The fact that they're called loopholes at all is problematic.

In my opinion, live content is often on target, just as often poorly thought out. The citizenry votes with ballots . . . and dollars. One is often as effective as the other in steering a nation toward ethical behavior. Keep in mind: A representative democracy is a grand historical experiment. If you value it, value the things that keep it going.

>jumped to encyrpted sites like Signal and Telegram.

AFAIK Telegram is usually not E2E encrypted.

To Jordan Chariton exclaiming in all caps:

> How are journalists supposed to chronicle history if YouTube — and others — are outlawing it?

Regardless of what YouTube says, they are an advertiser-friendly entertainment website. Why in God's name would you use it to "chronicle history"?

> Why in God's name would you use it to "chronicle history"?

Because for better or for worse these platforms have become the public square. They are where modern life happens.

Clearly YouTube doesn’t want to be a public square.

In that case, they should forgo their section 230 protections and stand boldly as the *publisher* they want to be.

That's not how the CDA works.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...

What makes you think publishers don’t have section 230 protections? Have you ever been to the opinion or comments sections on Fox News?

You can't forgo them voluntarily, the section makes it a fact that a service and the service's users cannot be treated as the 'publisher' of content if all they do is re-broadcast or propagate said content. The only way this dream scenario happens is if Google's lawyers put out a statement saying "we accept full responsibility for user-generated content and welcome anyone to sue us over such content, and we will not argue that we are protected under section 230 in court" - and even then, the judge of that court case could still rule that they're protected under 230 since it's law.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230

That's why section 230 needs to be re-written. I'm fine with moderation, and I'm fine with sites that publish user-generated content defining their own content rules.

What I'm not fine with - and what the parent article is mainly focused on - are rules that are unevenly enforced in order to play favorites.

I would reform section 230 so say that you must post the site's user-generated content rules, and you must post a moderation log. The moderation log would consist of the list of moderation actions taken and the accounts affected, and the time. Any moderation action that appears to not align with the stated content policy should be reviewable by a third party accredited arbitrator, at the plantiff's expense.

The net effect of this scenario would be to cause the sites to write down detailed rules about content, and enforce them fairly on all sides.

Right now there are simply too many flagrantly biased or inaccurate moderation decisions on these sites, and many of them seem to be motivated by political or economic reasons.

It's one thing to ask that sites be the "public square" because of the huge gift of liability protection that section 230 grants. This argument has not held up in courts. It's a totally different thing to require sites play by their own rules, and hold them accountable for each hypocritical moderation action that genuinely hurts the "little guy"

Paragraph b3 says this: “It is the policy of the United States to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received by individuals, families, and schools who use the Internet”

I think the technologies where a centralized commercial company controls which information is received by users violates at least the spirit of that law.

Centralized spam filters are an interesting test case. We generally agree they are good, and necessary. How are they different than algorithmic ordering that we agree to in the TOS?

> How are they different than algorithmic ordering that we agree to in the TOS?

People [would be] consuming the spam content being filtered agree with the filtering and are generally happy with it.

Failing that, when people are unhappy with their spam filter they can adjust or disable it.

As a last resort, they can migrate to another e-mail provider, there's no monopoly on e-mail. Moreover, e-mail is delivered almost equally between different providers.

Many people watching youtube or reading facebook are unhappy with their content policies. There's no way to control their filters or opt out of them. There's de-facto monopoly on these markets: the network effect is too strong, and antimonopoly laws don't seem to apply to their acquisitions of competitors.

Interesting points. I don’t think I’m fully sold on it - something like Tinder would seem to be an interesting thought experiment, where people are unable to move due to network effects.

I definitely appreciate you taking the rime to respond. I’m just not sure that I agree that a network effect is monopolistic. It feels more akin to losing a feature by switching off gmail.

Definitely valid points about turning off the filter, although on gmail, I believe that is only for your personal filters. Google still filters huge amounts of malicious stuff before it gets to the spam folder, by silently dropping it.

> I’m just not sure that I agree that a network effect is monopolistic.

A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors.

Source there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

A social network is very similar to railroad network, electricity distribution network, or landline phone network. Yet we allow Facebook or Youtube to do whatever they please with the servers they own, while regulating the hell out of the older ones.

You seem to be asserting that the only options are “public square” (eligible for section 230 protection) or “publisher”.

It’s not clear to me that section 230 has anything to do with public squares, can you elaborate on your position? Why can’t they be neither a publisher nor a public square?

I’m by no means an expert on this bit of legislation; Wikipedia just says:

> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

Any argument AGAINST YouTube (and Twitter) being considered common carriers, and legislated accordingly, should be DOA after the past few weeks.

if a tree falls down in a forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?

No. By definition, sound is just the way that some creatures interpret waves propagating through the air that hit their weird inner ear structures that gets translated through neural pathways into meaningful qualia

so if you publish on an alternative platform and nobody reads it... no sound.

Unlike hearing a sound vs. just the pressure waves, data's form doesn't change when someone interacts with it. It's the same before and after. Sure, the pressure waves don't change, but it's the interaction with them that we call sound. Data is data before and after you look at it.

pointing out literal discrepancies to a figurative comparison? I like the cut of your jib.

“But the plans were on display…” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

I am also confused by the implication that if something wasn't posted to YouTube, it didn't happen.

Because people use what they know and have. There are probably way better tools out there for most things, but if people don't know of their existence or how to use them, then they won't use these better tools.

Look at Minecraft. Some people end up building absolutely incredible things in it. Detailed art. Imagine if they had used a 3D modeling program instead! But those are way harder to use and way less inviting. So, Minecraft it is.

But I would not want to turn Minecraft into a 3D modeling program just because some people use it that way. Similarly, I do not want some external institution to force Youtube to become a video storage platform despite some people using it that way.

From a purely journalistic perspective, it is pretty cheap to run your own site. You can use efficient video codecs and there are many cheap VPS and CDN providers. New technology like peertube and IPFS can make this even cheaper. Taking a for-profit platform like Youtube and forcing it to cater to certain needs just makes it an even more entrenched part of peoples lives. Letting Youtube make itself worse for some purposes/topics encourages users to create and use other platforms.

> Regardless of what YouTube says, they are an advertiser-friendly entertainment website. Why in God's name would you use it to "chronicle history"?

I don't understand this argument at all. The entire Fourth Estate in the US has always been primarily paid for by advertisers, and just saying YouTube is an "entertainment website" seems like a poor attempt to say it can only be used for cat videos or something.

YouTube is the largest video distribution network on the planet. Of course I think someone would use it to chronicle video history.

As a de facto monopoly, it’s certainly the only one that matters right now. But if, say, the porn tubes wanted to wall off a non-NSFW side, they could become a serious competitor overnight. Or if Netflix or Amazon started allowing end-user content, for that matter.

If someone uploaded non adult content to one of the adult sites doing totally non-controversial things, like discussing smart phones or say a 20 part series on linear algebra, would they be kicked off the platform? Is there some effort to titillate requirement?

I'm imagining some vlogger doing an epic trolling email thread with the mods about how "actually, many people find e&m physics lectures erotic..."

I have no idea why porn sites wouldn't attempt to compete, their technology is solid, sometimes industry leading. Diversify.

I would also just like to remind everyone that there are many video sites out there that aren’t explicitly porn sites (but do generally allow some level of porn) that are not YouTube. They also tend to have NSFW / scammy ads as those are the only advertisers willing to pay to advertise next to content that wouldn’t be acceptable on YT.

PornHub have lots of non-NSFW contents -- they have no issue with that.

You just don't want NSFW ad popup when you view them.

YouTube is not just a platform to host vidoes on. It's a search engine, content feed, and social network. There is no adequate replacement. You can back up your videos somewhere else, but there isn't anywhere else that offers a comparable package.

good.gif -- drive the violent and bigoted to coalesce in the fringe.

Radicalize them further, and give them nothing to lose... I bet that will work out well.

Biden's DoJ just arrested a guy for posting misleading election memes back in 2016:

> https://nypost.com/2021/01/27/alt-right-twitter-troll-ricky-...

> Written on the photograph was the message, “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home. Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925. Vote for Hillary and be a part of history,” the complaint states.

> More than 4,900 people, encouraged by the misinformation campaign, cast their vote via text, officials said.

> “There is no place in public discourse for lies and misinformation to defraud citizens of their right to vote,” said Acting US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Seth DuCharme.

Anyone dumb enough to think they could vote by sending a text message frankly shouldn't be voting. (I didn't vote in 2016, if it matters.)

And lies and disinfo are traditionally protected speech. Even lying about military service (without any intent to defraud) is protected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Alvarez

The "it's a private company" argument is out the window.

To the downvoters: posting nasty, misleading memes on Twitter shouldn't warrant a prison sentence of upto 10 years. This will be a test case, not just for the First Amendment, but for the leftists who until now have been able to dodge the issue with the "it's a private company" line.

What did you expect? Several years ago Google openly declared that they are turning evil :)

The "And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!"[1] line is still in Google's Code of Conduct. All they did is remove a line from near the start; it's always been there at the end as well.

[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

And if an employee takes this rule seriously and speaks up, they fire them: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/03/timnit-...

Well nobody seems to be speaking up.

...speech loopholes?

Oh that's right... The first amendment only applies to printed materials and live spoken word. The founding fathers couldn't have foreseen social media, and certainly would have worded the amendment differently if they saw how powerful Twitter was.

The First Amendment to the Constitution explicitly forbids "Congress" from "abridging the freedom of speech." It goes no further.

There's certainly a question of public policy here, but that result will be unlikely to turn on the First Amendment.

On whether a private company could prohibit the distribution of written materials in a town that they owned:

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/326/501/

> Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.

That is a fascinating case. Thank you for sharing it!

> The First Amendment to the Constitution explicitly forbids "Congress" from "abridging the freedom of speech." It goes no further.

True but meaningless; the text goes no further than that, as to freedom of speech -- actually, it doesn't even go that far[1] -- but the amendment does go much further than that. For example, it is considered to be binding on the states through "incorporation" under the 14th amendment.

[1] The text prohibits Congress from making laws which abridge the freedom of speech. This is one reason I don't really understand the argument that the first amendment should protect Trump from being impeached over a speech which is unquestionably protected by the first amendment -- the legislative power and the impeachment power are two separate grants of authority.

Just 3 hours ago a group of teens live streamed themselves stabbing a 15 year old girl to death in Louisiana [1]. Like twitch swatting this is not a new phenomenon. Clearly something needs to be done to discourage or eliminate such content.

[1]: https://www.fox13memphis.com/news/trending/4-teen-girls-char...

Do you have any evidence that this contributed to the actual act?

If anything, this just provides good evidence that will put the idiots in prison.

The article is talking about Google's suppression of independent reporting content that regularly appears on the news. It has nothing to do with anyone being killed.

You won't believe how many disturbing murders are not live streamed. Let's try to deal with the "murder" and not the "content" part.

> Clearly something needs to be done to discourage or eliminate such content.

What do you plan to do, Dr. Manhattan? Because you're talking about human nature... and even you can't change that.

You said so yourself.

It's simply irresponsible for so-called "independent journalists" to cover material that neither they nor their audiences are in a position to understand.

We've seen what several decades of totally unregulated broadcasting have done, to the detriment of our society - without well-funded expert guidance, conspiracy theories and extremism run rampant. Platforms must be restricted to those who prove they can use them appropriately.

And you are qualified to express this view how?

Experts are usually vetted by regulators and other experts, not random members of the public. As anyone is presently free to say whatever they please, I see no reason to share my personal information with the world.

Like the experts who said the virus wasn’t a problem and also that masks are useless?

> Like the experts who said the virus wasn’t a problem and also that masks are useless?

This being a wonderful example of the right-wing propaganda so prominent (though I won't say universal) in this mess. Cause a problem, then blame others for it.

We've all had more than enough of correcting it at every turn. Why not do something about that?

Do you remember when Hank Paulson said he had the utmost confidence in the stability and resiliency of our markets?

Right before a literally historic housing market crash occurred, that then became an enormous stock market crash.

How much more of an expert would you want than Hank Paulson, who added billions of value to Goldman Sachs bottom line, who he himself made $1bn working there, and who had been in the financial industry for 30+ years at the time, and who was the Secretary of the Treasury?

What kind of "expertise" should he have had in your perfect utopia?

I should remind you that Paulson was indeed vetted by regulators, other experts, and Congress, and was widely considered a great choice as SecTres.

We see how that worked out.

An autistic medical doctor predicted the housing market crash 3 years before Paulson made that statement, so as far as I can see, so much for your so-called experts. In fact, I think if you'll try less to defer to experts and more to defer to history, you'll find a very long list of people who were held in the highest esteem who continually got shit wrong, and very very few who got it right.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a lot of material on so-called experts vetted by other experts whose accuracy is no better than a chimp throwing darts.

He has a 3 letter username on HN, obviously he is legit

I think you are getting this wrong. The problem is not all the inexpert persons styling themselves as "independent journalists", the problem is all the inexpert persons who think they understand enough about the world's problems to cast a vote on who should legislate solutions for them. The electorate must be restricted to those who prove they can use the franchise wisely. /s

Okay, you probably are not opposed to democracy. But if not, why not? If the people are too stupid to choose to consume good journalism and ignore bad journalism, how can they be considered wise enough to elect good legislators instead of bad ones?

The US system of government is predicated on having a populace that is sufficiently intelligent, prudent, and moral that it will not give in to mob excess. If we the people no longer possess that sort of character, restricting the speech of said people will not be sufficient to solve the problem. A full dictatorship will be the only solution.

Your point about the character of the people is a good one. But if you jettison free speech, you have jettisoned the entirety of democratic government with it.

"We the people" have never possessed that quality, and direct democracy is a terrible idea for precisely that reason.

Our democratic norms are intended to filter that irrationality into something more functional - though the election of a certain someone I don't feel like naming at the moment shows those norms aren't perfect. I expect quite a few people are thinking very hard about how to make sure none of this ever happens again.

Nevertheless, the ideal of representative democracy relies on experts.

I seriously have no idea whether this is serious or sarcasm.

Either way, once it is decided by all who have the practical ability to distribute information to large numbers of people that only "correct" viewpoints approved by "experts" may be published, you're a short step away from living in a single-party state.

Assuming this post is in earnest instead of accidentally omitting <sarc></sarc> tags:

Have you payed attention to mainstream journalism over the past couple decades? The material they cover and the framing with which they do so reflects an understanding not any better than the one you attribute to independent journalists, to say nothing of an expectation that the audience is even less capable of understanding. Have you never seen a mainstream news channel cover an event that you personally witnessed, and imply or outright state that the event happened differently than what you saw with your own eyes? Have you never witnessed someone interviewed, and then later seen the broadcast, edited interview, implying something else than what was originally stated for the editing done?

Who decides who the correct experts are? Who decides a person can responsibly use a platform?

Case in point the mainstream media headlines leading up to these events: "credible threats of violence" ... officials were "on edge" ... "possible secondary attack."

It's plainly apparent they were just salivating, waiting and hoping (some might say inciting) that something violent would happen, and yet the events "turned out to be peaceful and unremarkable." I'm sure there was profound disappointment in the major newsrooms that day.

> Platforms must be restricted to those who prove they can use them appropriately.

Oh, I found it, the satire giveaway was at the end.

This is a good thing. It was only a matter of time before the perceived total unlimited sense of freedom of speech that pervaded the internet turned toxic. There's an expression "free as in speech or free as in beer," but in reality both of those things cost money.

"Free as in pony" is my favorite phrase to convey cost of otherwise "free" things

I am gonna steal that, its neat

Pony theft is a serious crime.

My God this is truly the best phrase. It works on so many levels...

"Free", but there's the associated cost of upkeep... a barn, it has to be washed, dried, groomed, fed, vaccinated, check-ups, exercised, and lastly, you have to deal with the horseshit... and best part of your expression, is it means you have to deal with both the literal and metaphorical horseshit. :)

Bravo sir or madam.

I would suggest “Free as a white elephant.”:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/white_elephant

I for one, welcome our corporate overlords deciding what ideas are good for us and what ideas are bad for us. Thinking is difficult!

Don’t worry. Once all the speech loopholes have been closed, I’m sure they’ll figure out how to fix the remaining thought loopholes too.

Yes, I think Neuralink is working on that problem! I'll just connect mine directly to Google Cloud!

In a free market you can choose who your corporate “overlords” are. So; which are you for?

Should the government prevent monopolies from having free speech? Because telling google or whoever what or what not they allow in their private platforms is anti free speech.

0r should the government simply prevent monopolies so you have the choice to go somewhere else to consume whatever frothing angry garbage you wish to consume?

You don’t get to have it both ways but both are contrarian to ridiculous libertarian ideals- funny how that works.

Just need to make your own social media platform, right? Let the market decide?

or Option C: we continue to complain so public opinion can change thus creating enough demand for alternatives and then we leave google to die. We get the law, no need to bring it up every chance you get. All these BigCorp white knights aren't doing the public any favors with your wet-blanketry.

I am in no way defending google. Fuck google. I don’t use google to the greatest extent of my abilities. I’m defending a private entities right to free speech. I’m a white knight for the constitution and if you’re American, you should be too.

Public opinion should change and we should have alternatives; but as long as google and amazon hold monopolies on internet infrastructure option C can’t happen.

We shouldn’t be mad at google policing their own content- we should be mad that theyre the one of the only games in town.

yes. I want as little govt intervention as possible. But nobody is calling for govt intervention here. we want public sentiments to continue to fester so we can be rid of google the natural way—competition. Your calls for defending company speech seem out of place. The article clearly talks about building alternatives.

We are simply complaining about google and your sarcastic suggestions were for violating their rights. You're the one who brought it up.

I’m sorry but I think if you believe that google can be cancelled by public opinion you are out of touch with the economic and social reality that we are in. I would be happy to be wrong, however.

Also; only one of my suggestions was sarcastic.

> I’m sorry but I think if you believe that google can be cancelled by public opinion you are out of touch

Then what's your solution? you want govt censorship? they have rights! you should read the constitution.

Have you been reading any of my comments? These companies shouldn't be allowed to hold monopolies. Amazon shouldn't be able to remove you from the internet. Google shouldn't be the only advertising platform in the world. The solution isn't to take away these private entities right to free speech and your solution won't work as long as these monopolies exist. I'm not sure how much longer I can repeat myself.

you never named a solution. you're just saying what isn't a solution. a.k.a. wet-blanketry.

> The solution isn't to take away these private entities right to free speech

That was never suggested by anyone.

We just want increased public outrage which will encourage (1) competition and/or (2) anti-trust investigations.

> Have you been reading any of my comments?

no.

Sure. Until public opinion is blocked and censored on the very platforms that need reformed. This is Monopoly 101. C'mon man!

https://bitworking.org/news/2008/01/the-free-market-fairy/

12 years later...and our government has never seemed so trigger shy to take monopolies to task as they do today. Perhaps that's because our politicians are already owned by them? I'm not happy with the current situation and I'm not sure of the solution. It's very difficult to clear Congress of its incumbents.

This article is about someone whose livestream was shut down while attempting to cover rallies where participants were carrying firearms. Why is it a good thing this was shut down?

Ah, and internet mobs and companies should decide for us? This is a very, very troubling perspective.

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