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Comment by Covzire | Hacker News Reader

Facebook's censoring of #Revolution via their claims of moral superiority should frighten the shit out of every free person on earth. While we still have it reasonably good in America, their willingness to suppress speech in good times doesn't bode well for people who will be oppressed during bad times.

The first amendment made it clear that not even the government had the authority to use their vast moral authority, as they exercise through the legal system, to prevent people from speaking and organizing.

But #BigTech has a nuclear option on the speech on the web's most visible ecosystem, social media, through purely market forces and are doing the bidding of a single political party, exclusively. It's not just horrifying that they amassed so much unchecked power, but since 2016 they're actively using and abusing it to suppress legitimate political speech in every nook and cranny they control.

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Media owners have always used their ownership to push their own version of reality. I guess the difference now is that we have allowed so much concentration of media ownership in so few hands. Antitrust is pretty much dead from what I can tell.

Or is this just the current story? Maybe media has always been as concentrated as it is now, we just didn’t notice.

Public social media is really fundamentally different from traditional media because it functions as the public square in a way that traditional media never did.

As such, it needs to be evaluated and regulated as the novel thing that it is. It's not a newspaper and it's not a telephone company, and it's time to stop trying to apply old regulatory arguments and mindsets to the new situation.

So far, attempts to regulate social media show barely an understanding of the problem at hand, but I hope we can recognize that there needs to be defined a novel regulatory framework to prevent tragedy of the commons or heavy handed ideological censorship on public social media networks

In the meantime, the value of privately owned and operated, and invite-only social networks (like setting up your own Mattermost or IRC servers) will continue to go up in relation to public networks, because only in tight knit private communities can anyone actually speak their mind.

I’m curious as to why this was downvoted.

Is it because they disagreed with some of the opinions? I was under the impression that’s not what down voting was for here.

Personally I think it is worth considering a social media platform, once it reaches a certain scale and depending on how content is distributed, as a “public square” or at least more towards a “public square” on the continuum between a private community and a large scale public one.

Your Undivided Attention has an episode which touches on this: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/27-wont-you-be-my-neighbo.... The rest of their series has some interesting perspectives as well.

Could some one who down voted this elaborate on their reasoning?

I can no longer edit the above post but it looks like the parent post I was referring to is no longer down voted.

Compaining about downvotes or the reasons behind downvotes is a reliable way to attract downvotes. The is expressly mentioned in the site guidlines:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Understood, thanks

Social media also has tremendous potebtial for manipulation. If Fox News or New York Times prints false allegations, they and their brand are on the hook.

But Facebook can just boost someome who holds that opinion, you would have the inpression that millions of independant people are thinking that, and would never know who is pulling the strings.

Social media been doing that since nearly the start, though mostly for advertising purposes via "influencers." Read more about some of the early growth hacks (which have included lots of faked engagement) for most media companies to get a sense of this.

It's clear to people who were online since the early days how much things have been changed both artificially and naturally (Eternal September).

One of the problem of such networks is permanency of something that we still treat as spoken word. If posts were ephemeral, they would present much less of an attack surface for various digital mobs.

Maybe there should be an option for users to limit their comment lifetime to N minutes. With N starting somewhere around 5. Of course, you can do this manually, but a semiautomatic mechanism would work better.

Self-destructing messages only really work if you trust every person who reads them AND their devices. They can somewhat limit exposure (especially in obscurity) but also introduce the risk of establishing unwarranted perceptions of security.

People were always able to reproduce things you said—by repeating the words.

They can even claim you said something you didn't say!

That is true but I think it can be misleading to apply this kind of logic when technology has fundamentally changed the economics of this kind of recording. For example, it’s always been perfectly legal to station a police officer next to the road and have them write down the license plate numbers of cars on public roads. Does this mean we should allow law enforcement the unregulated ability to deploy automated license plate reader systems everywhere to track all of our movements in real time?

Your perspective is a cryptographic one, where most flaws are fatal. My proposal was a softer one: reduction of the "I met someone I hate, let me dig in his ancient comment history to get him fired" risk. Self-destructive messages are far from perfect in this regard, but still useful.

If self-destructing messages become the norm, you will see numerous efforts to log and cache those messages for journalistic, political, historic and economic reasons. This is why I made the second half of my comment. Self-destruction relies on obscurity of the practice to work and can create false feelings of security.

> Antitrust is pretty much dead from what I can tell

It has just been defined to mean 'thing that harms consumer prices'.

The question is: who is the consumer? The idea that Facebook users == consumers might not be right. Perhaps the real consumers are the corporations that pay for ads. In that case, some price fixing might be out there. I doubt that Facebook does its best to keep the ad price on the level of a perfectly competitive market.

The current situation is technically better than it was 50 years ago. However, there is a big scale that goes from perfect totalitarianism to perfect freedom and it is pretty much always a good idea to be applying pressure in the freedom direction because big institutions (like governments) naturally attract people who want totalitarianism.

And the first amendment is a really good idea. It deserves a spirited defence no matter what the historical situation was. Media companies shouldn't be looking to or pressured governments to decide what is and isn't acceptable on their platform. If the ideal is impossible then the question of how close they can get must be asked.

In this case the answer is "much better than this". YouTube is setting up for more long term harm than good with its policies. Maybe even short term. I don't care if they like it or not, academics are exactly the sort of people who we should be allowing to voice "crazy" and "dangerous" ideas.

This has moved a long way on from when the coordinated takedown of Alex Jones was a controversy. Where is the line here?

If it was one site it wouldn’t be an issue, but these companies actually cooperate, work together, or hire the same third parties to coordinate bans that span not just one or two companies, but all of the major companies and sometimes including payment processors, all in the same strike. That is the easiest way for them to avoid blowback, when the person has lost all forms of communication at once.

I know this isn't the simplest solution, but the only solution is to stop giving them your speech. If a child lights something on fire every time they get their hands on a book of matches (dating myself perhaps), you stop giving them matches. You're right if you bring up the fact that we've never had to deal with the entire neighborhood supplying the kid with matches, but I think my point stands. We can only control our own (re)actions.

And don't be mistaken: the "freedom" sites fired up as First Amendment outposts to service nazis who got kicked off of mainstream services by corporate overlords, they're "censoring" too:

https://www.rawstory.com/baked-alaska-trump/

"to service nazis who got kicked off of mainstream services"

People you don't agree with are nazis? You are the lowest form of troll.

There are actual factual nazis. Not everybody on the far right is this way, of course. But it isn’t like people are being branded as such when nobody is displaying swastikas.

>People you don't agree with are nazis?

You apparently need practice in reading comprehension.

But I do find a lot to agree with in reasonable people, so sure, I could defend that accusation for s&g's.

Don't use facebook

Not an argument. Twitter heavily censors, as does Reddit. Even picture sites like Instagram "editorialize" user submissions. There isn't anywhere to go anymore, the internet has become unfree.

Don't use any of those sites then. The internet is more than them

The day I depend on an $800B corporation whose customers are other corporations and for whom my personal data is just an asset, in order to be able to speak and organize, is the day I am no longer free.

No law (Facebook's revenue in 2020 was more than twice the entire US Department of Justice's budget) nor good intention on the part of anyone currently in a leadership role at Facebook can in any meaningful way prevent them from abusing their position, if they want to. Certainly, convincing people in Facebook's leadership to do the right thing right now is not a meaningful solution.

I agree with you that the problem is market forces. If you tell people that they are free to make as much money as they want in any way they want, the natural, profitable result is the conglomeration of power. The invisible hand will scoop up everything into one big corporation. Even conventional antitrust law - the thing that prevents Big Tech from becoming a single overarching entity - is an admission that "market forces" are not actually good for society.

I'm a fan of proposals like this to address not only the serious danger of Big Tech but the ongoing danger that the market will create further monstrosities in the future: https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...

If #revolution getting censored by facebook is enough to stop the movement, then it was slacktivism to begin with. Or as Gil Scott Heron said, the revolution will not be televised. One cannot expect mainstream businesses to support a movement that will fundamentally destabilize their revenue streams.

Libertarians are at a loggerhead here. On one hand, businesses are meant to be free to make money however they please, and the market is supposed to correct whatever human rights abuses occur. But the market doesn't seem interested in actual zero-censorship publishing platforms, so on the other hand, free speech advocates are concerned with perceived overreach by the largest platforms.

It occurs to me that the libertarian dilemma you mention, that the unregulated market rewards businesses that restrict liberty in practice, is fairly similar to the dilemma Peter Thiel mentions in https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio... , that expanding the franchise brought in voters who do not vote for libertarian ideals. He calls "capitalist democracy" is an oxymoron, and implies that the libertarian must choose one or the other.

In that essay Thiel advocates for capitalism over democracy, and suggests literally escaping to the internet, outer space, or the seas to be free from democracy and find a refuge for capitalism. But I think the better argument for the liberty-minded is to remain within our jurisdictions and choose democracy over capitalism. The rights to vote as you will, and to speak as you will without censorship, and to assemble as you will without restriction, are protected in our Constitution and moreover are widely seen as civic virtues too. The right to run a business as large as you will and acquire whichever other market participants you will is not protected, and we should stop seeing it as a virtue. Who can say, honestly, that the existence of Facebook as it is today is a victory for liberty?

> Who can say, honestly, that the existence of Facebook as it is today is a victory for liberty?

Mark Zuckerberg, and the millionaires that achieved that victory for him (at cost to the rest of us). The rift here is between individual liberty and universal liberty. And while I generally agree that democracy is a greater good than capitalism; I also see a big difference between the capitalism proposed by Adam Smith and the "shareholder value is god" version we see today. I'm also not too keen on communism. As far as I can tell, we need a messy blend of the pure systems, to constantly struggle and debate about the boundaries between them.

A possibile solution is changes to section 230. I saw a good approach last year that you can read about here: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/washington-can-put-a-...

The key bit was a recommendation from the Trump DOJ, which said:

> The Justice Department, which last month announced recommended amendments to the statute, has suggested that Congress replace “otherwise objectionable” with “unlawful” and “promotes terrorism.”

Which is in detail here: https://www.justice.gov/archives/ag/department-justice-s-rev...

Make that change, and watch the definition of "terrorism" expand out of all recognition.

Agreed. Terrorism seems like it is unneeded.

Reducing Section 230 protections is a giveaway to Big Tech.

Remember that the thing Section 230 does is not that it permits you to moderate; the thing it does is that it permits you to moderate without taking liability for defamation posted by users (and other similar illegal content, but defamation was the motivating goal). One forum, CompuServe, didn't moderate anything, and wasn't held liable. Another forum, Prodigy, moderated a little bit and was. Lawmakers realized this created a clear incentive not to moderate, which goes backwards from the intended goal of defamation law of preventing defamatory speech. Hence Section 230.

You can still moderate in a world without Section 230, provided that you do so well enough to protect yourself from liability, and you have the resources to fight any cases that arise against you. Who has the ability to do that? Big Tech.

Platforms like Facebook will be able to cope with a weakened Section 230 just fine, while still moderating. They'll end up moderating much more aggressively, in fact, instead of deciding to host unmoderated content - because their paying customers are advertisers, not users, and advertisers don't want to pay to put ads on unmoderated forums. (Compare Facebook's advertising revenue with 4chan's.)

But it's the smaller platforms, like this very site, blogs with comment sections, hobbyist-run Mastodons, etc. that will have trouble. They, also, won't decide to post all content without moderation; even in the world as it already is, so many blogs decided to stop having comment sections because they become swamps full of spam. YC runs HN because it reflects well on them; if they were unable to moderate, it wouldn't be worth their time.

So a founder thinking of taking on Big Tech and making their own, better communication forum will realize that their options are to make an entirely unmoderated forum, something that people demonstrably won't prefer to the options they already have, or to spend a huge amount of time and money on moderating their forums as well as Big Tech does. And their potential investors will realize this too. And those companies just won't get started.

(You might say, if this is all true, why was Big Tech so opposed to the Trump DOJ's proposals to reform Section 230? They weren't, they loved those proposals. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/544707-facebooks-zucke... Remember that Big Tech is the enemy, and they control what you hear.)

I agree that without Section 230 a company is effectively a publisher and takes responsibility for all content on the sites they host. I feel like that section should somehow be tailored to promote the First Amendment to let people say what they can that is legal. If you want protection from liability, you should allow people to post what they want as long as it's not illegal and then remove illegal content in a Good Samaritan or good faith effort.

Then users of the big sites will know if they are under the section 230 bucket or not. Right now, it's very easy to just say that you're doing it under section 230 because of the Catch all wording.

Doing this would allow people that did have their content moderated and the company said they were operating under section 230 to contest things that were removed if it is not illegal.

This likely does open up the internet to a big troll fest, and it makes how algorithms rank things very interesting

How do you envision HN working under such regulations? If I spam my startup on every post (which is clearly not in any of the exceptions to First Amendment protection), are they allowed to remove my comments or ban my account? What liability do they incur from doing so? Must they also remove anonymous posts complaining about employment at Amazon or whatever, because those defame Amazon?

Just say companies are counted as general social media after some % user penetration. Facebook with over 2 billion users is obviously a general social media site and should therefore have similar restrictions on what they can restrict as state governments, they can't be about some special topic with that many users. State governments do have the power to remove harassment and porn from public areas, so it could continue as is minus the political stuff.

HN with almost no users can continue as is.

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