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Comment by excelthrow | Hacker News Reader

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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

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>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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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