Hacker News Reader

Comment by TameAntelope | Hacker News Reader

I think it's an interesting consequence of accountability, that the people being held accountable tend to vocally dislike being held accountable, but don't want to say so for some reason.

It'd honestly be pretty refreshing for a leader to come out and say, "I don't think my actions should be held against me like your actions should be held against you because I'm special/different." Insane, but refreshingly honest.

For what it's worth, I'm increasingly with you re: leaving the US, for what basically amount to the opposite reason. I'm tired of people not being responsible for themselves, their actions, and the outcomes that happen beyond the first order consequences.

View on HN

Held accountable by whom? We didn't elect twitch.

Who decides who needs to be held accountable, and for what? Shouldn't that be the justice system?

Twitch mentioned proactively banning people who are arrested, without using the word 'convicted'. Which demographics is that likely to affect?

You're thinking of it like a legal process. Think of a private party instead - you're happy to invite lots of people, but everyone heard Adam was a real asshole to someone in public, so you don't want to have him at the party anymore (even though he was never bad at your previous parties specifically).

It's a reasonable thing to do and you have about the same level of responsibility for your party as twitch has for their platform. You probably also don't care what the justice system thinks about the invitations to your party.

I don't have the power to ban Adam from all parties. Twitch effectively does, in this case.

There are many services that let you livestream. Twitch is just one of the most popular.

You mean they can ban someone from YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and all other services with live streaming option? That's not really the case.

There are posts elsewhere indicating that twitch is close to the only game in town for live game streaming. People were denied access to tournaments, not intending to stream or commentate themselves, because the tourney organizers wanted to stream on twitch.

Sure, it's just video games, but we have to reckon in general with the consequences of an oligopoly that's 'just exercising control over their private property' when it adds up to most digital communications.

If it’s important enough, the government should run it.

Game live-streaming isn’t important enough.

Sure, it sucks that twitch is the only game in town for professional gamers. For some reason other attempts never worked long term. But what options are there? Either it needs to be worth for someone to compete with the service, or streamers would have to gain some kind of law protection status which would be worse than now. Or even worse, twitch could go the way of pro physical sports where as long as you don't kill someone, nobody cares. (and you may even get positive pr to keep covered up)

> Think of a private party instead

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

From being surrounded by Adams. Either you act in cases like that, or you become known as "that place that likes to invite Adam (and others)". And it's completely up to the host which side they want to be on. Twitch chose to end the invitation.

> Invite someone on the most wanted list.

That's not even close to the case discussed here.

The problem is who judges the Adams and decide that they are assholes. People are worried that the judge will not be fair and it will be biased in favor of some ideology.

Of course at some point it will not be fair. No system is and people make mistakes. The question is - is it going to be less fair / more biased than not applying the same policy.

Honest question: is there an exhaustive list of natural rights?

The only ones I know about are related to the Declaration of Independence and I don’t have any evidence they are comprehensive.

I don’t have any evidence to believe of a conscious higher power, so my list of natural rights is likely to differ from people who do.

No, because "natural rights", like all rights, are a human abstraction and thus open to interpretation, political and religious bias and difference of opinion. They don't actually exist in Nature and so can't actually be objectively quantified. The Declaration of Independence was written by men who believed they had a God-given right to own other men as property after all.

> then what precisely are they defending their users _from_?

You are replying to a poor argument from the parent poster, they don't have to be protecting anyone, it's fine for them to simply say "I don't want that jerk at my party"

> Your corporation has no natural right to exist

Natural right is a weird qualifier, some corps have a legal right or privilege to exist depending on "must grant" or "may grant" in the locality.

> and therefore does not have the natural right to do business solely as it pleases

Well sure, they aren't allowed to ban people for their membership in a protected class, e.g. their race or disability for the same reason that they aren't allowed to sell cocaine or kill people, because the law prohibits all of those things.

> 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.

This is a particularly interesting topic - a lot of the parallels around private vs. public places seem to have eroded over time. Facebook, Twitter and others are now serving the function of a public place. They are means of communication used by governments and elected leaders.

I suspect at some point soon there will be a shift in the balance here, to try and address the extent to which companies are "private entities" sitting outside of the legal frameworks, where they deal with the public. NJ views privately owned shopping malls to be public places from a 1st amendment perspective, even though it is not publicly owned - it isn't a huge leap to consider FB or similar as a public space on that basis.

They are deciding how they view each user and their actions. Shouldn't I also be expected to have the same privilege?

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.

You do have that privilege. Why do you think you don't?

>Held accountable by whom? We didn't elect twitch.

Society. Don't like it, pick a new society like the two commenters you responded to you are considering.

>Who decides who needs to be held accountable, and for what?

Once again, society.

>Shouldn't that be the justice system?

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. However this allows a loophole for people to get away with a wide variety of crime and criminal like behavior which is obviously bad. How would you suggest these people are held accountable if it isn't through "cancel culture" which is basically just the modern equivalent of social shunning that various cultures have been doing for centuries?

Early American culture was designed to prevent this. Early pilgrims were persecuted by other Christian groups in Europe. So they built in ideas like religious freedoms to try to build a society that could accept differences of opinions. I'm not American but have a lot of respect for what they were trying to achieve.

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.

The idea that the Pilgrims came to America for religious freedom is mostly a fairy tale. But either way, there is a world a difference between shunning someone for exercising religious freedom and shunning someone who very likely committed sexual assault.

EDIT: This is being downvoted. I'm not sure if it is the Pilgrims comments, so I will point people to the Wikipedia article and the second sentence which notes that the Pilgrims "fled religious persecution in England for the tolerance of 17th-century Holland in the Netherlands." They spent over a decade in Holland. They didn't come to America due to persecution because they already had religious freedom in Holland.[1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrims_(Plymouth_Colony)

I think we will have to agree to disagree on the history of the Pilgrims.

I don't think there is a world of difference between the two. You are shunning someone because it is very likely the did something wrong. If that is your close friend and you think they did it, then it's probably a good idea to shun them. The hope is that they will see they did something wrong, own up and change. This makes the world a better place.

Some person on the internet that has been accused of doing something wrong could be black listed from online life, but what does that achieve? We don't even know if they did it?

Then what happens when someone changes their ways and becomes a better person? Do we keep them blacklisted? This seems to be the way we are operating.

There are plenty of sources that agree with me on the Pilgrims.[1][2][3]

Almost no one is "cancelled" permanently. Maybe they go away for a few months or years, but they almost always are able to resume some sort of normal life eventually. It is much less severe than a jail sentence. If they truly do reform and become a better person, that usually speeds up the process, but it is rarely an actual requirement.

[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the...

[2] - https://www.history.com/news/why-pilgrims-came-to-america-ma...

[3] - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/americas-true-history...

> Then what happens when someone changes their ways and becomes a better person? Do we keep them blacklisted? This seems to be the way we are operating.

Right. Twitter hands out lifetime bans. I was very encouraged this week by Justice Thomas’ opinions on monopolistic platforms. https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984440891/justice-clarence-th...

Well, they were eventually “persecuted” in Holland the same way they were “persecuted” in England: They weren’t allowed to impose their religious rules on others. That’s the “persecution” they “fled.”

'Society' by how thick a margin? 80%? 50.1%? Less?

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

There is no set percentage, but if the decision makers at Twitch don't represent society, there is nothing stopping a Twitch competitor from sprouting up that is more in line with society's morals.

I'd submit for your consideration that there's quite a lot stopping someone from just starting a twitch competitor.

Even beyond the tech challenges, there are thousands of posts out there describing the network effect and trend towards winner-takes-all in a given social networking market.

I'm honestly curious about the mindset that leads one to just say 'nothing stopping you, make your own twitch, no biggie'. Is it lack of sympathy for those cast out? Idealistic belief in free markets and meritocracy? Genuine belief that it's easy? What's the underlying angle?

Now you're moving the goal posts from "able to broadcast yourself" to "starting a twitch competitor.

Then you're moving the goal posts from "streaming yourself" to "reaching as many people as possible and/or making the most money from it".

You can say what you want on the internet, but people don't have to listen and companies don't have to broadcast you, promote you or pay you.

Alex Jones still does his show, but if you accuse the victims of a mass shooting of being actors in a conspiracy for gun control, you might not get to have people subscribe to you on youtube.

I didn't open up the "just go start your own twitch" line, I was responding to someone.

> You can say what you want on the internet, but people don't have to listen and companies don't have to broadcast you, promote you or pay you.

That sounds good in a vacuum, but what about when it's a handful of companies doing all of the broadcasting? If this were the internet of the 2000s, with a widely distributed network of self-hosted blogs and BBs, I'd be right there with you, but that's not where we're at.

Alex Jones is big enough to bring his noxious show anywhere. What about the little guy? What if it's the historically persecuted who continue to be persecuted when this all shakes out?

> That sounds good in a vacuum, but what about when it's a handful of companies doing all of the broadcasting?

... are there not enough giant companies doing this thing that didn't exist a few years ago?

You realize you can pay for a VPS for $10 a month and broadcast to hundreds of people right?

> If this were the internet of the 2000s, with a widely distributed network of self-hosted blogs and BBs

Pretty sure all that stuff can still be done. Do you not realize you can rent a server and buy your own domain name? You can even rent a VPS with 40 gigabit internet and 10 terabytes of upload for around $20 a month.

> What about the little guy? What if it's the historically persecuted who continue to be persecuted when this all shakes out?

Lol, who are the historically persecuted that aren't able to stream video games because they can't help but violate twitch's TOS. I have a hard time believing this is even a serious conversation.

Remember your hypothetical started with Twitch's morals being out of line with society's morals. That represents a huge demand for a competitor.

I would compare it to when Reddit started cracking down on immoral content. That created demand of competitors. Multiple ones popped up. However they weren't able to sustain themselves or grow demand because society was on Reddit's side and not the side of Voat and the like.

The reason it is currently difficult for Twitch competitor to gain traction is because people are largely fine with Twitch. Even so, there are still plenty of other streaming options including those with sizable userbases even if they are targeting different market segments like Facebook and Youtube.

No, it's not society. That makes it sound like everyone has a say.

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'm willing to bet there are a significant number of people who didn't vote for him who would be opposed to an individual getting banned for supporting him. This pushes the percentage of individuals who are opposed to this punishing/excluding over 50%. "The powerful" that you are referring to would also be a minority if your numbers are correct.

Agreed - it is a minority.

By this study it's about 8%:

https://hiddentribes.us/

> Society. Don't like it, pick a new society like the two commenters you responded to you are considering.

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.

> How would you suggest these people are held accountable if it isn't through "cancel culture" which is basically just the modern equivalent of social shunning that various cultures have been doing for centuries?

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?

For much of the history you are referencing there was no difference between the whims of society and the whims of the judicial system. We now have the separation of the two which opens the loophole I previously mentioned. Do you have any suggestion for how to address that loophole?

For example, imagine a scenario in which a loved one comes to you and says they were sexually assaulted two years ago. It happened long enough ago that there is no hope to recover any corroborating evidence. It will simply be the victim's word against the perpetrator and therefore there is almost zero hope of conviction. Do you tell this person "just trust the judicial system" or would you help them achieve some sort of punishment outside of the judicial system such as getting the perpetrator fired?

> Do you tell this person "just trust the judicial system" or would you help them achieve some sort of punishment outside of the judicial system such as getting the perpetrator fired?

Nope. Neither. I may or may not stop associating with the perpetrator, all things relative to my perception of how bad the thing they’ve been accused of was. I might mention it to mutual acquaintances and let them decide how they want to deal without any judgement on my part.

Trying to get someone fired / hurting their livelihood in general seems quite childish.

I try to mind my own business. I don’t snitch on anybody if I see them doing something wrong. I don’t join online mobs or rage on anybody.

Your child comes to you and says a teacher raped them and your response would be you "might mention it to mutual acquaintances"? You wouldn't want to be a "snitch" and tell the school that employed the teacher?

That’s super extreme. Of course I’d call the cops the same day. It’s your job to protect your children.

If some adult I knew said “so and so made me feel really uncomfortable 2 years ago” or “so and so touched me 2 years ago” I’m not going to say “hey let’s get them fired!!!”

It’s not my place to be a vigilante. I wouldn’t get involved at all. If I had a good relationship with the accused I would probably even help them out, eg hire them, after someone “cancels” them.

We have shifted from relying on the whims of society for justice to relying on the judicial system for justice. There isn't a "separation of the two" even now, there's only one recognized system for determining justice. Vigilante justice is illegal.

No, I absolutely would not help a loved one achieve some sort of extrajudicial punishment, I would instead strongly recommend against it. I would try to comfort and support them, responses that are helpful regardless of how good or badly I personally judge their case and related punishments. I would tell them that perhaps the justice system has failed them and no system is perfect, but vigilante justice is a terrible and unproductive response that breeds more injustice than it resolves.

The way you fix loopholes in the justice system is by fixing loopholes in the justice system. The justice system is governed by laws developed by deliberative bodies held accountable through democracy. It's not pretty and it's not satisfying, but after centuries of gross injustice we should know better than to trust mob justice.

Historical social shunning was the majority of people in society choosing to exclude people. Today's cancel culture is vocal minorities bullying monopolistic companies into excluding people.

>Society. Don't like it, pick a new society like the two commenters you responded to you are considering.

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.

That’s what freedom is, you don’t get a say in what they do if they don’t want you to.

I think people generally mention accountability when it suits them, specifically when it suits their group morals.

Accountability to me is that the government teaches them a lesson, some company doesn't need to jump in line to punish them for me to feel satiated -- that job is done by the government. Moral communities are just that though, tiny groups that would like to exercise their power and worldliness on others in pursuit of their utopian society free from democracy and government oversight. Having come from a repressive religion, I have no argument against why this paradigm is flawed, but maybe it takes the eyes of someone who has lived that to see it.

So you think companies are acting in a moral interest and not in perceived financial interest?

I think the financial interest is connected to moral interest.

The responsibility starts to fuzz when you try to follow that thread.

It's clearly with the company executing the decision to remove someone from their platform, but trying to decipher whether or not what they're doing is a financial or moral decision (despite their claims, that's part of the financial choice) becomes fairly pointless.

If you want to rail against a changing society, that seems like a waste of time. If you want to rail against a specific set of companies who have acted in a specific way, I think that's more productive and addressable.

"We can ban anyone at will for any reason or none" (which is what this kind of policy amounts to) is corrosive to actual accountability. Twitch are appointing themselves as judge, jury and executioner; there's no evidentiary standard, no right of appeal, no procedural safeguards. It's the same kind of "accountability" as the Star Chamber - a way for the strong to impose their will on the weak.

Twitch is a private company. You are free to not use their services (which may be a good idea).

Limited-liability companies are an unnatural, artificial privilege; perhaps we should tolerate them when they serve some social purpose, but they should be held accountable like any other government-backed entity (since that is in fact what they are). More to the point, pragmatically the likes of twitch are harder to avoid than many national governments.

Yeah I get your point. Like those witches in Salem, they really didn't like being held accountable for performing witchcraft.

The "witches" in Salem weren't actually witches. Racist and violent assholes on social media trying to drape themselves in the false flag of liberty are still racist, violent assholes.

I think the parent comment is trying to point out that the people who were deciding who was a "witch" in Salem back then could be the same type of people who are deciding what counts as "racist" or "hate speech" these days when it comes to "canceling" others.

Yes, practically everything every social media platform has done over nearly the last decade which anyone has ever disagreed with has been equated to Nazism, Stalinism, Orwellian dystopia or the Salem Witch trials. The slippery slope fallacy is very popular, especially on Hacker News.

There is no false flag of liberty, that is an oxymoron.

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

And if you exercise your right to offend people in my establishment, I have the right to toss you onto the pavement.

Liberty is a two-edged sword, which is something a lot of people seem to have forgotten.

> if you exercise your right to offend people in my establishment, I have the right to toss you onto the pavement

not anymore (if you are implying physical removal). you can't even apprehend shoplifters anymore without getting sued.

Purely literally, yes, you're correct, you can neither physically remove someone nor physically restrain someone, and this is a good thing, as the state has a monopoly on use of force.

If you only "metaphorically" toss someone onto the pavement, though (tell them to leave the premises), you're fine, and can have the group who has a monopoly on force enforce that request if necessary.

Metaphorically, because we're really talking about whether "liberty" implies a "right to offend people" that precludes Twitch from being able to ban any account for any users' behavior. It does not. Especially not for the kind of egregious reasons they're stating.

> this is a good thing, as the state has a monopoly on use of force

i disagree that its a good thing. The threat of a minor altercation from property owners helps maintain stability (emphasis on minor).

And the state having a monopoly on violence changes the dynamic of property, where the government can take whatever it wants from me (even my children) if they want to dream up a reason.

>And the state having a monopoly on violence changes the dynamic of property, where the government can take whatever it wants from me (even my children) if they want to dream up a reason.

On the other hand, without the state having a monopoly on violence, anyone has the right to take whatever they want from you, given sufficient force.

> There is no false flag of liberty, that is an oxymoron.

Several political philosophers critical of liberalism (and even those sympathetic to liberalism) have argued that several free actions we take do indeed disadvantage people in various ways, whether it comes to democritic citizenship or other social interactions. It is entirely possible to act under the flag of liberty while still (knowingly or not) disadvantaging other people. This 'paradox' (speaking loosely) has given birth to the (currently popular) philosophy of egalitarian liberalism (or, liberal egalitarianism, as opposed to other theories such as Marxian egalitarianism).

You can read more about this at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/#NewLib

Liberty is not concerned with disadvantaging people, or advantaging them for that matter.

Liberty is the action itself, irrespective of the result.

Since when has BLM or antifa been held accountable for anything? BLM alone murdered over 30 policemen and several civilians. They pulled a dead body out of one of the burned out buildings in Minneapolis after the violent left-wing riots there. Antifa murdered 9 in Dayton and injured over 20 others, they stormed multiple government buildings and attacked government officials and police. Who is held accountable for promoting violence against ICE, disclosing the home addresses of the police and shooting at their facilities?

I'll try to be mature about my response to this too.

Blaming BLM for the acts of individuals is tantamount to blaming the right for the acts of people who organized in private groups on a public platform. Both sides will claim that the other has stoked fear, hate, and division to various degrees in a myriad of ways. I tend to agree with both, but I also realize that the people really responsible are likely at the top of a chain that laypeople can't even perceive.

If we're to undo the damage that Russia has done to this country I think it starts in that understanding. Then and only then do we have armor to fight a nation hell bent on destroying things like ethos.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com