And it's absolutely maddening to watch people defend this behavior under the guise of "they are a private company" and "you agreed to the ToS".
But here it's not what they choose to remove, not "moderation.. It's what those in power press them to remove, aka "censorship".
You don't have to support.
The government will take your support at gunpoint. This is the crux of the issue.
I'm not on either of those platforms, so they're not shipping me ads. I do what I can to be private, so that their data mining doesn't get me.
I have that choice. Unfortunately if I don't agree with what my government is doing, they'll still take my tax dollars and fight forever wars with them.
Censorship is the moderation of content that may be disturbing or cause painful thoughts or feelings. So a person leaking state secrets on Twitter, and the government asking Twitter to take the tweet down, is not censorship: it's protecting national security, or law enforcement. They're drastically different things being taken down for very different reasons.
You don't need an independent body to handle either type of request because we already have mechanisms for a company to handle both. What people are getting worked up over now is the potential for governments to abuse their legal right to remove illegal content, in order to censor. Since it's the govt doing it, the govt is not going to create an agency just to wave a big flag when it is doing something bad. That would be like creating a "National Agency Of We Don't Trust The Government".
There are both attempts of censorship and surveillance/espionage.
Moderators are literally censors, by definition. Look up the definition of "censor" if you don't believe me.
People need to stop playing word games to avoid the label of "censorship". Just accept that you're ok with some types of censorship and try to justify the types you support rigourously. That's the only way to avoid a slippery slope. Trying to tap dance around calling it censorship serves no one.
But as soon as the government requests takedowns and shadowbans, that's majorly crossing the line into infringement of free speech.
The whole reason we constitutionally limit the governmental repression of free speech is because we're all made to support it. If I could chose to pay my taxes to an alternative, then fine, but we're made to pay taxes to a government that now can take down speech critical of it.
Government is (in theory) elected by people, counter balanced by court.
Facebook is accountable to nobody, it don't even have any competitor in social network business.
Yes, exactly.
> Facebook is accountable to nobody
Except when I hop off their platform.
> it don't even have any competitor in social network business.
True-ish I like https://peakd.com/ and https://flote.app/.
They're not as popular just yet, but they're excellent distributed alternatives.
Further, and most importantly, I can withdraw my support from Facebook. I cannot withdraw my support from the US government.
Facebook is accountable to its users. It may not have much serious competition now, but there are myriad potential alternatives which could fulfill the same function, just as Facebook replaced its predecessors (most notably MySpace). Network effects are strong while they last, but notoriously fickle.
Either we can keep that corrupt view, or we can agree that huge corporations are inseparable from governments and reign in their freedoms in a similar manner.
The issue is when at gunpoint people take my money from me, then use that money to fund more guns to point at the Twitters et al. of the world.
If I don't like moderation on a forum, I just leave the forum. I don't _have_ to give my support to it.
I can't just not support the US government.
with that said, neither moderation nor censorship should be tolerated for (political) speech by any (large) organization or bureaucracy, because they are using outsized power to influence opinions unduly, and thereby stripping us of our independence (literally coercing conformation). we can otherwise quibble about drawing a small line at the very far end of the slope where child porn lives.
Using the word "censorship" for the latter but a milder word like "moderation" for the former seems like a perfectly reasonable way to convey this distinction in this context, even if a dictionary might provide a broader definition of "censor".
At what point are Facebook's "moderation" decisions "censorship"? You're effectively saying that it's only when moderation is driven by some kind of government policy, which completely erases the factors that actually matter in evaluating the danger of any given suppression decision, ie. understanding of harm, considerations of power and oppression, etc.
Strictly speaking, moderation is a subset of censorship. The key aspect of moderation is that it is generally done by community members (usually volunteers) and done to enforce standards agreed with by the community. Other forms of censorship generally come from outside a community to enforce some rules the community does not support.
Thus perspective and community identity are integral to the distinction but there is still a basis by which you can objectively view the powwr dynamics and distinguish moderation from other forms of censorship (such as corporate censorship or government censorship.)
I do think the term "moderation" is a misnomer when applied to Facebook and Google as their moderators are generally not part of the communities they censor.
Think of it this way. If AliBaba does something you know China the government is connected. Same goes true for Zoom.
America is no better. (as the Banana Republic example shows) The head of Apple can call the Speaker of the House directly on the phone whenever he wants and that person will answer. I can guarantee you that the same is true of Google. I am also sure if Jack Dorsey wanted to talk to someone with decision making power in the Whitehouse it could happen within the day. (probably slower than Google or Apple though)
BTW I like how HN allows for moderation that makes certain low-quality comments invisible, but there is a mode when you still can inspect them if you want to. It's like the "spam" folder that allows you to have a clean inbox, but also allows you not to miss something that was deemed spam by mistake.
If that's the case then "censorship" is not inherently wrong, since moderation is often times a good thing.
Is this not an incredibly powerful tool of censorship and propaganda? Imagine this in the hands of a dictator. We are sowing the seeds of our own oppression.
I think that the problem is about concentration of power more than speech rights and the real takeaway is that allowing 3 or 4 companies to control such an overwhelming share of communications infrastructure is a mistake regardless of what rules there are.
The argument that we should lean on Twitter to maintain such nebulous concepts as "freedom" at the expense of their own profits is never going to convince me.
Monopolies have always had different rules. My electric utility is a private company but in my state they have to ask permission before raising prices.
I don't agree with censorship in other countries but I also think it's weird to expect transnational companies to push western laws and values in places where the ruling government doesn't want them.
I do not want any government to attempt to coerce a private company to censor private speech. That said, it's particularly egregious if a nation with a constitution limiting it participates in said coercion.
That said, regarding...
> I also think it's weird to expect transnational companies to push western laws and values in places where the ruling government doesn't want them.
I too find that weird. I don't expect Twitter to act in any particular way. My expectation is that my government doesn't act irresponsibly.
Twitter is going to do what the people in the government want it to do.
The precedent here is that printing presses also held a lot of power in their time to print, which is why the newspapers themselves owned their own printing presses: so they couldn’t silenced by a third party.
I don’t think you can expect to use someone else’s means of transmission freely and expect free reign of usage.
That just means we ought to explore ways to decentralize distribution systems like Twitter.
Their censorship is abhorrent, but shouldn't be illegal.
It's as important to be able to not speak as it is to speak.
Indeed. I don't know why more people don't see this; also note that recommendations are the speech of the person, algorithm, or company doing the recommending.
That's debatable. What twitter decides to promote, in feeds and other things via algorithms, certainly falls under their freedom of expression. But their "editorial control" currently also extends over hosting comments by others as well (which they can choose not to promote), and that is questionable and arguably could be made illegal. We had a recent discussion on an article by a legal scholar that argues for this distinction:
This article is specifically about the government asking Twitter to do so.
I know this is hard to believe, but there are people who actually hold principles instead of just performing them. It's not especially surprising that you don't have exposure to them, but the vast majority of people I personally know who complain about speech restrictions from the left also complained about restrictions from the right when they held more cultural power.
Obviously your counterparts also exist, who cheered rightwing restrictions and complain about leftwing ones. But both of you are the proglem: gleefully proclaiming that you have no actual beliefs is practically a non sequitur in a conversation among people with actual moral centers complaining about the underlying principle violation.
We get it, we know you (and your rightwing counterparts) exist, as much as we wish you didn't. You're exactly what we're complaining about.
And the worst of all is the censorship of hate speech, because hate speech has become a malleable term used simply to eventually become an opinion I don't like.
Remember the whole "punch a Nazi", meme? Who doesn't think a Nazi deserves punching? But eventually, everyone becomes a Nazi, so any violence against them is justified.
This artificially constructed right not to be offended needs to die in a fire.
That being said, we do need to be cautious of extending the (legal) definition of censorship out this far. You run the risk of defining censorship to include any sort of counter-speech, or making it impossible to legally moderate Internet platforms for any purpose. "Anyone who provides an Internet platform must be willing to host any and all speech whatsoever" just means nobody will want to host such forums.
Something like common-carriage for large social media platforms could work - though it won't give the right wing what they want. Most of them absolutely were violating those platforms rules, and common-carriage won't let them back on those platforms. The reason why I say common-carrier rules would be a good thing for large Internet platforms is because in practice companies like Twitter and Facebook adopted a policy of "let world leaders do what they want on our platform", up until January 2021. This is not at all a defensible policy. If you have a rule against doing something on your platform, why let people in power do it anyway?
I'm not sure exactly where the line should be drawn or exactly what the rule should be, but it seems clear that we need to do something here.
In the US, Trump used social media to spread lies about the results of the elections. He tried to pull all the stops to stay in power. This is the same President who attacked journalism, rescinded access to White House press events for news sources that were critical of Jim, and used the Justice department to seize records of journalists. Trump was a bigger threat to journalism while he was in office than any content moderation rules Twitter could ever enforce.
> In the US, Trump used social media to spread lies about the results of the elections. He tried to pull all the stops to stay in power. This is the same President who attacked journalism, rescinded access to White House press events for news sources that were critical of Jim, and used the Justice department to seize records of journalists
A very significant fraction of the anti-censorship crowd are pro-Trump, or at least right-wing, and of course a characteristic of that is ignoring all these things that he actually did.
(edit: the irony of being downvoted into the grey by the angry "anti-censorship" faction)
Anti-government-censorship and anti-private-censorship. Myself and I'm guessing many don't actually care what Twitter does so long as the government isn't coercing it to do so.
Besides idle threats to "open up the libel laws" and temporarily blocking random journos from white house events, I don't see how this could possibly be true.
Two things can be bad at once. In measurable terms I'd say opaque, coordinated social media bans are the greater and more permanent of the evils here. We can't deflect to Trump forever.
I’m not saying social media censorship isn’t bad. Of course having a few tech companies control the information that most people see is problematic. What I’m saying is that allowing those platforms to act as a megaphone for misinformation is also a huge issue. Censorship and propaganda are both tools of abusive governments.
I don't have an answer. But we can't find a workable answer without recognizing both sides of the problem.
Because nobody trusts you or anyone else to classify "misinformation".
> In the US, Trump used social media to spread lies about the results of the elections.
> He tried to pull all the stops to stay in power.
He gave a lot of speeches and told his supporters to make their voices heard. Peacefully.
If you assume that he genuinely believes the election was marred with fraud, then none of what he said are lies.
> This is the same President who attacked journalism,
The same "journalists" that spent years spreading fake news that he was a Russian spy?
The same "journalists" that spent years falsely claiming he was referring to neo-Nazis as "fine people" when in fact he was saying the complete opposite? https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/04/26/joe-biden-...
The same "journalists" that claimed that Trump instructed Georgia Secretary of State to "find the fraud" but then completely retracted that he ever said that: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/16/washingto...
> rescinded access to White House press events for news sources that were critical of Jim,
The only one I'm aware of that was revoked was Jim Acosta who refused to follow the rules of the press room and hand over the mic to the moderator: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/07/cnn-jim-acos...
That's not being a "brave reporter". It's just being a showboating dick to everyone else that's following the rules of the press room.
> and used the Justice department to seize records of journalists.
The only instance of this I could find was this: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/us/trump-administration-p...
Though that does not go into too much specifics as to what or why.
> Trump was a bigger threat to journalism while he was in office than any content moderation rules Twitter could ever enforce.
Trump was the most open and accessible President that we've ever had. He would literally spend hours standing in front of hostile reporters answering any questions that they have.
If you want to see the reverse of that, check out how Biden only calls on a preselected list of reporters that ask prescreened questions. They even include a wallet sized photo in case he can't read the reporters name: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/photos-biden-cheat-sheets-f...
Or how about snapping at reporters that ask questions about current events like the pull out from Afghanistan instead of "happy things" on July 4th? https://nypost.com/2021/07/02/joe-biden-cuts-off-questions-a...
That's what content moderation looks like.