Twitch will ban users for 'severe misconduct' that occurs away from its site

The extent to which corporations should be considered private entities does not seem like a settled question to me. Your corporation has no natural right to exist, and therefore does not have the natural right to do business solely as it pleases.

> and you have about the same level of responsibility for your party as twitch has for their platform.

What responsibility are they exercising? If the behavior on their platform is not disruptive to it, then what precisely are they defending their users _from_?

> You probably also don't care what the justice system thinks about the invitations to your party.

Invite someone on the most wanted list. I can't imagine it playing out that well for you.

If I want to see it like a legal process there is nothing they can say, specially after this, to make me change my outlook in the same way they ban people for violating their way of thinking and give them no appeal not even the time of day.

By all means have your group of close contacts that you shun when they step out of line but doing that society wide causes too many injustices.

What if the decision-makers at twitch represent 'society' less than they think they do?

It's only a very small minority of people are the ones that decide who gets punished and excluded.

It's not society, its the powerful.

This is how you have people getting banned for supporting a national politician who won election with ~49% of popular vote. Those 49% clearly didn't get a say in who gets punished and excluded. Only the powerful get that say.

I guess you can move out from the US and that's probably a very good decision to make, however: first of all, those corporations are not local to the US, but global, world-wide. Furthermore they are willing to work with authoritarian governments, like Google working with the Chinese government to spy on their citizens. Second, corporations and Western governments are actively trying to remake the rest of the world in US image, project their problems on us and force everyone to make the same mistakes they did. You can run from the problem, but it's not going to solve anything and it will eventually get you too. As far as I'm considered, America falling apart would be an acceptable outcome for me personally, if it wasn't for the fact that you're trying to drag the rest of the world down with you.

Long-held traditions of social shunning, ostracization and extrajudicial bullying are widely understood to be terrible and have produced horrific injustices for centuries. What you're calling for is a regression of justice. It's precisely the disgusting consequences of vigilante justice that led us to develop the modern systems of justice that we rely on today.

Accountability quickly turns into a witch hunt when people start tearing down standards of proof and judicial restraints as "loopholes". When did we forget that?

Society changes, get over it. These changes are going to ruin platforms and people will dislike it and move to other platforms, yet they will still be in the same society.

>The justice system is purposely setup in a way to make it difficult to punish people. This is good. We don't want the government throwing people in jail with flimsily excuses.

This is literally what happens all day every day in the justice system which is nothing more than a formalized social shunning process that requires fewer people to ruin your life and profit off of it indirectly.

Liberty is having the right to offend people, that’s what it means.

Also, your CNN citation says in the headline that there was a gun found, but then the body of the article contradicts it

> Some of the weapons that were confiscated had been seen being used inside the US Capitol including a baseball bat, a fire extinguisher, a wooden club, a spear, crutches, a flagpole, bear spray, mace, chemical irritants, stolen police shields, a wooden beam, a hockey stick, a stun gun, and knives.

Where're the guns? CNN knows people only read headlines; they're so brazen with their narrative.

After they claimed over and over that Sicknick was killed with a fire extinguisher based on zero evidence for weeks there's no reason to trust the rest of these details in an article from February are true anyway, especially if CNN can't keep the facts straight between the headline and the article body

We're just lucky they didn't get the Gavel of Power too!

Or.. in the real world, we understand how the US political system works, realize there was no real "insurrection," and we rightly call it a bunch of jackasses trespassing.

Your call.

Storming the capitol with weapons, having leaders with knowledge of the layout, and actually spilling blood. The picture of the right in this country by media is generally a caricature of an inbred, uneducated southern hick, so it's easy to pretend that they planned for a serious coup and we're just completely incompetent. But the lack of weapons in any significant quantity, or their use, or even their brandishing in the capitol, suggests that there were never any serious plans for a coup or even for violence.

The fact that "insurrectionists" came within 5 feet of the entrance to the chamber with the politicians they were allegedly targetting and obliviously walked past it more likely shows that there was no serious preparation, given that the layout is easily searchable online.

This is manufactured hysteria by the media, for political goals. It comes from the same place as this twitch policy - we are in the midst of a dirty culture war.

My definition would be rioting, specifically using escalating violence until success, to attempt to coerce a system into passing laws that it would not otherwise have passed or wanted to pass (up to and including deposing the leader).

I feel like my view loosely fits the Capitol riot, heavily fits the BLM riots, and heavily fits the 1776 insurrection.

Things I've seen video of includes guys handing out guns to (what appear to be) minors, fights breaking out, and people getting assaulted for recording what is happening there.

Source: I lived 2 blocks away

The initial few days of george floyd protests were tense, but almost every large city around the country also was.

Stop pretending the violence came from nothing. I have friends with burns on their legs from getting hit by stun grenades while actually peacefully protesting. You won’t believe that, but you can find video after video of police actively attacking peaceful protestors.

Also I said "significant violence", as in enough to overthrow the government.

Nah, they probably just want to let a few criminals off the hook for funsies.

Do you understand why some of us are viewing this problem through an anti-trust or public utility lens now?

In other words, "I don't understand how much more open and free (as in electricity) it can get without taking away someone else's ability to do what they want with their power plant."

It's really, really unfortunate that this debate was triggered for what are at their base partisan political reasons. Because this is a debate we should have had with cooler heads, about what these services actually represent for human society and how government should interact with this technology. Instead, everyone is drawing a line in the sand based on their politics (not saying you are doing this, but others clearly are).

And look, yeah, I get it. "Electricity" is not "speech". But when you need electricity and you need computers to transmit speech in the modern era ... well I guess I just see it as six of one and a half dozen of the other.

1. Moderators of groups on social networks have no obligation to let you speak in a space they control. If you want to fully exercise your right to free speech, you must make your own group.

2. Social network companies have no obligation to let you speak in a space they control. If you want to fully exercise your right to free speech, you must build your own social network.

3. Datacenter as a service companies have no obligation to let you speak in a space they control. If you want to fully exercise your right to free speech, you must build your own datacenter.

4. ICANN has no obligation to let you speak in a space they control. If you want to fully exercise your right to free speech, you must make your own internet.

5. Payment processors have no obligation to let you speak in a space they control. If you want to fully exercise your right to free speech, you must make your own financial system.

6. A country no obligation to let you speak in a space it controls. If you want to fully exercise your right to free speech, you must make your own country.

I personally think 1 is obviously fine, it starts getting slightly iffy at 2, quite sketchy and worrying at 3, and 4 is where major alarm bells start ringing. Do you agree that it goes from fine at 1 to a major problem at 6, and merely disagree on where exactly on the road between 1 and 6 we should push back, or do you think 6 is perfectly fine?

But this isn't really how it works. Forebearance actually does have value because it changes society as a whole, shifts expectations at a broad scale, and creates moral authority to demand better from others which is persuasive and powerful.

At the end of the day, what kind of society do you want to live in? Will you contribute to making that society, or not?

Where's our freedom of privacy?

If we stop being freedom of speech absolutists, I can already tell you what's going to happen.

edit: I do not for the life of me understand why someone would downvote this. The opposite of freedom of speech is fascism, and it is a tool that can be employed by any ideology to oppress and impose.

I can expand on this if you're really curious. The short version is that I don't think it's realistic to expect reciprocal generosity from a party that clearly has a double standard about what is and isn't censorship. But on the other hand, we can make a choice not to literally hand that party ammunition for their arguments.

We know that laws around censorship are disproportionately targeted at minority/oppressed communities. We have over 100 years of history demonstrating that fact, from the draft protests, to McCarthyism, to the mass-deplatforming and threatening of the LGBTQ+ community, to moral panics about satan worshiping and sex in mainstream media. We also know the arguments that those people use to try and further their agendas.

They will still use those arguments even if we have Free Speech principles. The difference is that neutral observers will be able to tell that they're being hypocritical. The difference is that they'll have fewer laws on the books that they can quickly repurpose to their agenda.

When you know what someone's strategy is to attack you, when you know how Republicans are going to try and disrupt protests and attack critics, you don't play into that strategy. You try to set up an environment that is hostile to their talking points. That's how Free Speech advocacy responds to bigots -- it tries to make a general social environment where, for example, the recent Florida laws trying to shut down protests look unusual and bad and repressive even to casual observers who haven't researched the issues.

We don't expect racists and homophobes to play fair, that's why we're building a set of laws and social standards that make it harder for them to argue that it's OK to pull funding from schools that teach critical race theory. These people are better at censoring than you are; if you let them set all of the rules of engagement, then they will win.

----

The opposite is also true. Free Speech and Free Association are more helpful to progressive organizations than they are to regressive movements, because most of the time regressive movements are trying to shut down conversation and to stop social evolution. You can see this happening with critical race theory, you can see this happening with BLM protests, you can see it pop up with recent efforts to restrict counseling and support structures for LGBTQ+ youth. You can even see it with how much Conservatives have freaked out over company statements on voting rights and business decisions not to work with states that pass regressive laws. Regressive movements talk a big game about Free Speech, but so much of their ideology depends on nobody questioning the status quo of how we think about race, gender, and inequality, and on punishing and ostracizing anyone in their communities that listens to critics or evolves their views over time.

Sure, they'll use Free Speech to try and argue against Freedom of Association or to claim that they're being oppressed because a football player had the "audacity" to talk about race in a public setting, but they're not particularly good at that kind of rhetoric. The arguments are ultimately unpersuasive and it's relatively easy to point out how they're being hypocritical. So by creating an environment that is Free Speech friendly, not only do we make their ideas about oppression less persuasive and harder to implement -- we also play to our strengths. We create an environment where it is easier to educate people about issues like trans liberation and to showcase the radical inequalities that exist in America. I don't think it's an accident that LGBTQ+ rights have progressed faster than other historical pushes for equality in an environment where it's easier than ever before to share information about people's day-to-day struggles and experiences. So much of regressive ideology relies on people being able to block out progressive movements and to filter/mischaracterize what progressive movements say.

----

So long story short, TLDR regressive/bigoted movements do abuse Free Speech to defend themselves, but it's mostly rhetoric. They are more reliant on censorship than on a free flow of information to further their goals. To the extent that they really care about Free Speech, they're mostly just arguing to get rid of Freedom of Association and to force people to stop criticizing them or kicking them out of privately owned spaces.

So when we build societies that are resistant to censorship, we're not saying that those people will play along and respect our rules. And we do accept that on the tail-end of certain movements (esp conspiracy theories), Free Speech does genuinely make our job harder. But what we're trying to do is to create a battlefield for progressivism that (overall) plays to our strengths and exploits their weaknesses.

He can still be tipped through third party services though. (Like streamlabs and streamelements)

He's still allowed to stream, and now without contract, not exclusive anymore so that he also streams on Youtube and Facebook now I think.

I think that is also something they should do with people who just got arrested. Distance yourself from them, but don't ban them. If it's severe enough then they won't be able to go live anymore anyway.

None of the things you mentioned are incompatible with the group Americans call “liberal”. He also describes himself as a social democrat. He could certainly be described as a progressive.

Regarding that quote, here is his side (from https://positions.destiny.gg/docs/ , links omitted):

> In general, I do not support vigilantism. I think Kyle Rittenhouse was clearly misguided in his attempts to cross state borders and should have stayed home. I also think there are steps he could have taken to minimize the risk of him needing to discharge a firearm.

> Of a larger 20+ minute debate with someone, a short 16 second clip was cut to make it sound as though I support violence against Black Lives Matter protesters when this couldn't be further from the truth. I am incredibly heated in this clip, but I am clear when I state that my main frustration is with the few rioters burning down private businesses and the idea that Trump's only path to victory was with continued arson and destruction of privately owned businesses across the US (full conversation in August of 2020 with context part clipped).

> I have always defended the existence of BLM and its purpose, sometimes in front of live audiences as the only liberal member on a panel. (Jesse Lee Peterson panel in October of 2020 | Conversation with call-in defending the existence and effectiveness of BLM's protests | Panel debate in August of 2020 | Support in November of 2018 of Kaepernick kneeling in the NFL | Attacking Dave Rubin's criticisms of Kaepernick's protests in September 2017)

> I've consistently pushed back against "white lives matter" and similar types of irresponsible rhetoric from the right. (Jesse Lee Peterson panel in October of 2020)

> I have continually defended protesting, and even rioting against public institutions while condemning the rioting/looting of private businesses, as I believe the latter feeds into Republican tactics to draw attention away from the overwhelmingly positive protests. (Discussion about Minneapolis protesting/looting in May of 2020 | Debate with conservative/Neo-Nazi(?) Ethan Ralph in June 2020 | Discussion on my stream in September of 2020)

> My specific issue in this debate was that I didn't believe it was morally acceptable to defend rioters destroying private businesses, regardless of their legitimate grievances with the local police. When I think of rioters attacking and destroying private property, I generally support citizens' rights to defend that property. I think back to the Korean-Americans that were defending their property in the '92 LA Riots, the Black Panthers in California defending their communities, or the tragedy of the "Black Wall Street" Tulsa massacre in 1921. I was especially moved by the frustrated, black local business owner who was screaming out in frustration about looters and rioters destroying his business in the '92 LA Riots.

> It's incredibly frustrating that people have intentionally and maliciously misconstrued a 16 second cut from a larger conversation to make it sound as though I don't support the BLM protests or somehow approve of racist white people indiscriminately killing protesters when this is an issue that I have been ruthlessly consistent on throughout the years. I unequivocally support BLM's right to both protest and riot against the public institutions that they view as oppressive. I have not changed or wavered on this stance in years.

Mine too, but it's standard rhetoric among a very, very large part (possibly a near-majority) of the US population. Tech companies are fueling that fire by showing that (from that perspective), yes, they really are the paternalistic coastal elites that the other half of the country suspected they were. Leaving aside the many ways in which this weapon of platform banning can be abused by future shifts in power -- Google, Twitter, AWS, and now Twitch are not helping the causes they claim to be helping with prominent bans, they are just building taller walls around the various echo chambers.

Interesting that you feel that way. It's certainly not something I'm worried about.

Homeless, poor, young and oddities get removed from malls for being themselves. We're seeing the same online.

Governments don't buy malls. Malls are designed to get you to spend. These sites want you to spend and if you do or don't they will send all of the info they collected about you and sell it to someone else.

We need more hobbiest sites. Government should provide free spaces.

Nope. You can have a smaller, simpler substitute if you have comparative advantage in some other niche.

DuckDuckGo is making a decent showing against Google, despite arriving on the scene almost 2 decades later. A handful of righty / unPC social media properties (Gab, Parler, whatever Lindell’s app is called this week, etc) are slowly eating into Facebook/Twitter market share because they promise less moderation.

I would rather suggest something along the lines of this.

At a certain scale (user count), sufficient implicit selection of users and their content revokes section 230 rights. If you start implicitly removing specific viewpoints and topics it's no longer "user-generated content" and is now your content. Of course there have to be provisions for explicit content scope and spam, but that's roughly where I would start.

Somewhere in between, communication is far too critical for private monopolies to have a stranglehold over.

Beyond the hardened strawmen of actual written law, we have a shifting sense of what is publicly acceptable. Given that most people do what everyone else around them is doing, or at least what they believe others are doing, there exists a powerful tool in that to control the public discourse. We've gone from "I disagree with what you say, but I will die to protect your ability to say it," to "I think someone will find this offensive, so I will also find this offensive, despite my not knowing anyone who'd actually be offended by it."

The laws are a harder target, so those who would wish to stifle inconvenient discourse likely would find it easier to convince a mostly pliable, trusting public to not say the things they don't want said. That there still are a small number of companies controlling what a majority of people consume might be convenient to this.

All conjecture, of course. More of the Paul Harvey "If I Were The Devil" kind of thing.

I'm talking about how you cannot effectively stay in touch with your neighbors and local community without using Facebook's platforms. People who you see every day, but who may not share all of your views; keeping up with those people is important if we want to heal our society's deep divides.

I've tried, but very few shared interest/volunteer/neighborhood groups will go out of their way to contact the one or two people who don't join their Facebook groups about scheduling or events.

It has nothing to do with racist or misogynist strawmen, but since you mention them, Facebook has done a lot to inflate those groups' ranks.

That's actually already true now (outside of protected classes). Any restaurant can ask KKK members to leave if they so desire. Same with any supermarket.

Any individual proprietor having freedom of association is a long long way from "specific types of customers should be barred from buying food from anyone and should literally starve to death". That's a strawman position that you invented.

In America there is no right to food or shelter so I don't know why this concern is raised in a discussion of free speech?

[1]https://kotaku.com/twitch-apologizes-over-recent-abuse-of-po... [2]https://boundingintocomics.com/2020/05/20/twitch-ceo-emmett-...

Do you require a detailed solution before you will even admit there is a problem?

I assume you're referring to the 1A rights of the corporation, e.g. Twitter's right to decline to publish content it disagrees with. I agree with you there. It's a complex problem. My complaint is more with the argument that only the government can restrict free speech. It's a lazy argument because the reality is far more nuanced than that. For example, consider the fact that AT&T doesn't have the right to drop your phone calls when you start talking about Verizon to the person on the other end of the line.

It's totally fair to talk about the "spirit" of the constitution -- that's why we have the Supreme Court in the first place, to interpret the constitution when its words are not clear. I would also note that the Declaration of Independence doesn't mention any self-evident truth about corporations, but it does describe the rights of the people, and government's role in preserving them. If corporations appear to interfere with those inalienable rights, it's not unreasonable for the government to step in to preserve them.

Yes this is the reason. They will continue to stifle speech so its more palatable for corporations to run ads on their platform. Censoring art and dissent is working well for the people you agree with right now. 60 years ago the current culture would have been unfathomable. In 60 years it may be unfathomable to you again, but now you've taken the stand that it's right and just that they stifle dissent. Hope that never bites you.

You would be hard pressed to get the Supreme Court to rule that the same standards could be applied to a media company. The fairness doctrine met similar objections, and that was never applied to companies using cable, just public broadcasts. In this particular instance, we're talking about Twitch ending partner relationships. It's a hard sell to say that Net Neutrality or rationing limited airwaves is the same as forcing Twitch to pay a streamer money or to put them in a privileged position above other streamers.

And if your plan is to create the same kind of restrictions that you see around, say, Net Neutrality, then that still isn't going to create the environment that you want, because Net Neutrality also protects stuff like harassment, disturbing/gross content, and pornography -- it isn't narrowly applied to a privileged sub-category of speech. In other words, common carrier laws protect your political speech, but they're not specifically designed to protect your political speech. They also protect a lot of stuff that people don't want to see on their Facebook feed.

Even more broadly though, when we talk about revising the Constitution, we're talking about free speech ideals, not just legislation. And while the legislative conversation is worth having, it's also worth acknowledging that community moderation is a free speech ideal. The entire marketplace of ideas is based on the philosophy that some ideas win and lose, and that some ideas become unpopular over time. The entire point of Freedom of Association is that people can form communities and have productive conversations on diverse topics without getting constantly shouted down or harassed. Community moderation and subgroups and forums with strict rules are part of how we encourage a diversity of opinions online; they're why we can have this conversation on Hackernews without someone jumping in and trying to sell penis enlargement pills or telling us all to kill ourselves.

So on one hand if we're having a conversation about laws, it is going to be very difficult to get the Supreme Court to go along with most of the "neutral platform" proposals I've heard[0]. On the other hand if we're having a conversation about ideals, Freedom of Association is something we should care about in and of itself, and we should want to preserve that as much as possible -- we should only be looking at getting rid of Freedom of Association in places where we literally have no other choice. Compelled speech is extremely dangerous, it shouldn't be the first thing we try.

And luckily, we have a lot of precedent on alternative ways to get speech to flourish online. When people refer back to the "good old days" when the Internet cared about speech, there was plenty of moderation back then. There were just also a bunch of independent IRC rooms, independent websites, more freedom to be pseudononymous, and everyone's entire life wasn't tied to a single Google account that could be shut down at any time. So the first thing we try should be to increase platform diversity, because we already have compelling evidence that platform diversity increases speech.

[0]: Particularly a Conservative Supreme Court with people like Barrett, who are probably not inclined to say that 1st Amendment protections shouldn't apply to companies that directly interact with consumers. With the exception of people like Thomas, I do not see much eagerness from Conservative justices to strip free speech protections from companies.

https://www.boundary2.org/2018/07/mueller/

The labor of digital creatives and innovators, sutured as it is to a technical apparatus fashioned from dead labor and meant for producing commodities for profit, is therefore already socialized. While some of this socialization is apparent in peer production, much of it is mystified through the real abstraction of commodity fetishism, which masks socialization under wage relations and contracts. Rather than further rely on these contracts to better benefit digital artisans, a Marxist politics of digital culture would begin from the fact of socialization, and as Radhika Desai (2011) argues, take seriously Marx’s call for “a general organization of labour in society” via political organizations such as unions and labor parties. Creative workers could align with others in the production chain as a class of laborers rather than as an assortment of individual producers, and form the kinds of organizations, such as unions, that have been the vehicles of class politics, with the aim of controlling society’s means of production, not simply one’s “own” tools or products. These would be bonds of solidarity, not bonds of market transactions. Then the apparatus of digital cultural production might be controlled democratically, rather than by the despotism of markets and private profit.

Edit: I know the issue becomes murkier for things like mom and pop shops and sole proprietorships, but I am willing to make distinctions based on scale.

This isn't crazy or unprecedented. We don't give unlimited contractual rights to landlords. You'd end up with a virtual serfdom otherwise. So we grant tenant rights exclusive of any contractual terms. Past time to do the same for social media participants.

So yeah, it made sense at the time, since government was the big player historically, but we're looking at a different situation now.

...nevermind, I just realized that US is a union of States where a repossession man just casually walk into front yards and tow away a Camry from debtors.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama

I don't have a horse in that race, but it is disgusting how people defend this blatant and obvious bias as perfectly normal thing.

After the 2016 election, the left ginned up enough hatred that some bloke attempted to gun down a Republican representative [1]. It passed with comment but not any particular shock. This is a good example of the routine (happened in 2011 against a Democrat) level of violence in US politics. The US famously resorts to action when passions are high. Trump simply wasn't inciting anything violent, especially against that high baseline.

Twitter's actions are unjustified, and it is highly likely that all the big tech companies are thinking like this, they are known to be left-leaning. This is a wake up call to the right that these companies are threats. Any right wing government anywhere in the world that ignores the tech companies is at risk of them becoming powerful and effective politically opponents - that is a much bigger thing than people have cottoned on to. This move was big.

[0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...

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

He has been effectively silenced. (And at least in the case of Twitter, it was definitely not for glorification of violence given the two tweets they cited in their blogpost)

Your other point is based on your own personal political biases, which just furthers my point about these platforms controlling the release of information (or disinformation) to the general public.

Just imagine if Twitter was a Right-Wing organization, and decided to silence the current President. How would that change this discussion?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...

How about we get rid of these 'white privilege' theories, because people are interpreting it as if every single white person is somehow inherently racist and evil?

And what's the recourse when the same forces collude to shut someone or some group out of the hosting platform for wrongthink? Build your own server farm? Build your own cloudflare? Build your own DNS? How far do we go in allowing tyranny by a loud and powerful minority? If we can regulate corporations to prevent corporate monopolies, perhaps it's appropriate to implement loose regulations against social monopoly. Collusion to silence an entire set of viewpoints by unilaterally associating them with a minority of extremists is quite literally oppression.

Wouldn't Trump himself count?

> Regardless, politics is not a protected class, nor should it be.

I think it should be, because attempting to ban political views gets in the way of finding out which political views are better. I don't know what "fascist" is, but I can definitely imagine political views like "Communism is a good way to run the country" or "Capitalism results in the best outcomes for everyone" being banned and I really don't like it.

You should have protections so the corporations and bankers don't have too much power over politics.

If I invented a machine that could change physical features between the various ethnicities of the world, would banning Indians from your hotel suddenly be ok?

As soon as I know a coworker is running about carrying a swastika flag, I can never feel safe around that coworker again.

I have and will cheerfully work alongside people with whom I have significant political disagreements. I absolutely would not share an office with, say, an actual white supremacist. That's a hostile work environment and I want nothing to do with it.

Edit: There's a wide gulf between "political activity" and the stuff I'm talking about. You're a Republican? Fine, I'll discuss this with you over lunch and we can have fun teasing each other about our various beliefs. Get arrested storming the capitol? Yeah, that's a jobstopper.

She is probably a lovely person and as I said, I fully support her business. I just wish Twitch would stop the double standard.

They either need to make an 18+ category or they need to stop allowing streaming softcore porn.