Can we please discuss Big Tech's suppression of oppressed people? | Hacker News Reader

Can we please discuss Big Tech's suppression of oppressed people?

33 pointsexcelthrow18 comments

I have been a long time lurker on Hacker News. I love the community you have built here, and I have learned a lot from the articles, and even more so, the comments shared here. This place has been a reaffirming corner of the internet with many smart, thoughtful and kind people for many years now. In light of this, I'd like to shed light on two oppressive regimes in India and Sri Lanka that have been stifling peaceful protests, and pressuring Big Tech (specifically Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Spotify) to remove content related to them.

What I DO think warrants a long, introspective look at ourselves and our employers is the fact that these governments - often with long, documented histories of oppression, murder, rape, censorship, and torture - are successfully pressuring first-world tech companies into silencing people across the world (not just their own citizens). The people who fled these regimes cannot engage in free speech in their new homes, because Big Tech all too easily puts commerce over conscience.

Some examples from the last week:

- YouTube taking down music videos in support of Punjabi farmers' protests [1] The Indian farmers' protests have been well covered (especially since Rihanna tweeted about it). Is taking down music videos supporting protesters what a company that 'Does no evil' do?

- Sri Lanka's 70 years of oppression against it's Tamil minority is well-documented, but recent protests for accountability less so [2]. Is Instagram's censorship of the #eelam and #tamileelam hashtags - which refer to the traditional homeland [2], fitting for a company that has found itself - for better or for worse - the biggest platform for speech in the world? Does Facebook really need to bend to the will of a government that denies it's murder of over 100,000 minority citizens? Should Spotify be removing their music?

Tim Cook, in a creepy speech[1], had the audacity to cite the following as his moral dictum for us all, and the reason why he must censor you and me: "Do not be indifferent to the bloodshed of your fellow man."

He says this while frequently hobnobbing with the likes of MBS at his HQ and overseas.[2]

I guess that whole "being indifferent to bloodshed" rule doesn't apply to censorious industrialist oligarchs like himself and his friends. Sure seems quite indifferent to bloodshed to me. As expected.

The public couldn't ever cancel Tim Cook, though; that would be blasphemy! Ask MBS what he thinks should happen to blasphemers.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvPBZCitHsA [2]: https://i.insider.com/5c63d7f62628984cf0097cd4?width=700

Continued:

---------------------------------

I understand that automated algorithms make a lot of these decisions, but I hope not everyone working with these companies is complacent enough to shift the blame onto some zeros-and-ones. I don't know if this post will bring about "change" but with so many of us tech workers here, I think this is a great platform to discuss these. The best time to discuss this has passed, but now is the next-best time.

I DO NOT WISH TO MAKE THIS A POLITICAL DEBATE, and I trust the great mods here will remove such content here.

India may well be trying to do right by farmers, as they claim. Sri Lanka may have worries about national security, as they claim. Hacker News has not been the place for these discussions.

[1] https://www.india.com/technology/youtube-pulls-down-punjabi-...

[2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/02/09/thousands-march-justice-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eelam

>I DO NOT WISH TO MAKE THIS A POLITICAL DEBATE

I agree this is an interesting topic and a real issue, but with words like "oppressive regimes", and "Big Tech all too easily puts commerce over conscience.", I don't see how this can be approached from a non-political angle.

edit: Not to throw it on the words that were used, but I think this is an inherently political issue.

"i want to talk about governments but not politics" is a fairly incoherent position.

Perhaps they mean "I don't want to get into the specific politics, I'd prefer to discuss the generic position from big tech that they help governments suppress news of human rights violations".

In other words, "should big tech do things like this"

Rather than "{thing X} is wrong and big tech is suppressing news of that exact thing. Let's talk about whether thing X is really wrong, or whether it's really newsworthy"

>"should big tech do things like this"

If they want more money, the answer is yes.

If they have a moral and ethical code which values freedom of expression as a human right, then the answer is no.

HN has not been welcoming of political discussion and for good reason. US politics over the last 3 months was noticeably absent from the front page.

That being said I do think there is a finer tech ethics issue here:

If a government asks you to censor or remove content, do you do it?

Looking at Google in China and Australia, answer seems to be “yes, in that government’s jurisdiction”.

Examples OP cited are different in that Google and Facebook seem to have censored the content wholesale, across the world.

It's a fine line to toe. I agree the latter statement is perhaps too accusatory, but I don't want to edit the post (for the sake of context in the comments).

As far as the "oppressive regimes" statement, it is political - but also the actions of these governments towards their respective minority group have been well studied, and for a lack of better words, oppressive. There are other words, like genocidal, that have also been used to describe these actions, but I hesitated to use them on this forum.

My post should have been clearer in that I do not wish to break Hacker News tradition in discussing the underlying political issues that don't relate to technology, but only the pressuring-tech-companies-into-censorship issue. It's still political, but I think it invites much fewer flame wars.

Dissenting opinions don't do well here.

Completely reasonable discussion to promote yet you are pretty heavily downvoted.

Any idea why this was flagged?

No clue, but not really surprised

What you have stumbled upon is actually a curse brought on by the toolset of Big Tech being so crippled by an overreliance on centralized capital. Decisions are made by few, and the impact of those decisions is high. This means Big Tech companies have to hedge to maintain access so they will end up bending over backwards to ensure their continued access to markets, and the hyperoptimization they bring to the table makes the formation of many smaller, more difficult to control versions of the same info propagation systems economically inviable. This prevents the formation of resistance to centralized control mechanisms by greater numbers, and the inherent overhead of organizing a distributed control scheme by tinpots or violent regimes. You can only get away with so much violence before large swathes of people hopefully start having second thoughts, in theory.

Morally speaking, I do not believe tech should be doing any censoring. There are many that would disagree with my viewpoint, but it is my firm belief that it is everyone's responsibility to be eyes open to every level of atrocity we as a species are capable of. Yes, it makes the world feel a lot less safe, but paradoxically, I think it may actually decrease the overall level of friction created by artificial information propagation barriers.

Hierarchical adversarial systems can only persist in environments of informational asymmetry. Once everyone is exposed to the same deck of cards, the rest, in my experience, tends to sort itself out.

This post is a product of ill-informed individual who is unreasonably confident. The protests in india were not suppressed. I know because I am from that country and I was in delhi. The protestors, who weren't farmers, attacked and vandalized a monument and put their RELIGIOUS flag while throwing the national flag. They attacked the police with swords and weapons. It's all there. If posts are encouraging violence especially through misinformation (which is driven by foreign interest), the country has the right to ask tech companies to comply.

PS, Google: Rihanna Toolkit.

I mentioned that this post isn’t about debating who the righteous side is. The question is around the issue of Youtube removing songs, not only for Indian users but those around the world.

Completely agree. I'm not up on the specific examples you mention but I think we need to take a big hard look at putting our society at the control of a handful of tech companies.

I think this is a good opportunity to mention new federated platforms that are gaining momentum like mastodon, matrix, and peertube that are inherently resistant to the profit motives of one company.

"When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Please correct me if I’m wrong here but companies must “play by the rules” in some countries. If they don’t, that company gets the ban hammer.

But I guess that’s your point?

This is true but really shows the morality (or lack of) for companies. Profit over all is basically what it comes down to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com