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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

I think your fundamental error is in the fact that you think that a private company (and market competition) can fix these issues. It seems that many people on HN are just waiting for the new Savior company, that will magically have incentives to fight for them instead of making money. It's like hoping for market competition create health regulation in the food industry.

Turns out, not even Apple is that messiah, and perhaps the solution isn't in demanding private companies to be your regulators and defenders of good morals and truth. What happened to having specialized agencies regulate and inspect industries?

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The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like ... and get upset when they don't host the stuff we do like.

Consumers aren't rational. Neither are their demands.

I'm probably no more rational than anyone else, but I'm honest that I sure as hell don't want to give money to a service that is happy to host some violent folks content / garbage...

> The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like

Please, speak for yourself. I think these companies should host absolutely everything[0]. Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open.

Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP.

That's your choice.

Isn't the point of the free market that consumers are free to vote with their dollars?

I don't want to give my money to companies that host things that I find morally abhorrent. That doesn't mean other companies can't host that data, simply that I don't want any of my dollars to go to those companies.

If the vast majority of consumers also don't want to give money to companies that host that content, that's the hosting company's problem. The free market is speaking. Nobody is making it illegal for that data to be hosted, but nobody is obliged to pay for it to be hosted. So it seems to me that things are working as intended.

I think the whole concept of “voting with your dollars” is flawed. Google will always have more votes than you.

What? So because someone or something has more money than us, we should just say screw it and buy products we are morally against? That makes no sense.

The analogy to voting to flawed in that actual voting is much too powerful, because it involves politics and the use of force. When you "vote" with your dollars your choices are to either support something or ignore it and spend your money somewhere else. The amount of support you can provide is limited by the economic surplus you've created, and no matter how much money you amass you can't just shut down something you dislike as long as other people continue to support it. Voting in the political sense lacks these safeguards: a majority (or vocal minority) can subsidize their pet projects with the opposition's resources, or prohibit harmless activities merely because they find them distasteful.

No, because just a handful of companies control the entire ecosystem. There is no alternative, you cannot escape their influence and you cannot function without interacting with them.

If Google and Apple ban you from their products and platforms, and Visa shuts down your payment processing, there is nowhere to go. You're done. This and much more has happened many times.

You're making the "just build your own internet bro" argument.

But I think we need to examine both sides of this.

When the American concept of free speech was coined, it was valuable because you could go stand in a government owned square and communicate your message for free. It was a good balance between not forcing private companies to accept speech but still allowing the speech to happen.

Online we don't have the concept of a government run square, and so your speech can be totally stifled by private companies.

But the difference is that when you're standing in the town square shouting nonsense, your reach is constrained, your ability to reproduce your speech is low (you have to just stand there and keep shouting) and everyone knows who you are. Damaging speech just can't be that damaging. Online is totally different.

I think the argument of "Google can't censor you, only the government can" is not great because there's no gov't equivalent of the town square. But I don't think the answer is just "make Google accept all speech" or "create a gov't equivalent of the town square" is necessarily the answer either. I think we should be starting from first principles and understand what free speech is trying to accomplish and come up with a framework that helps us accomplish it.

The history of printing things for wide scale distribution well predates the first amendment and it is silly to pretend otherwise.

But the history of forcing those publications to host your opinion is unprecedented

Historically there were two modes of distribution, "publishers" and "common carriers".

Publishers (like newspapers) had full control over their content, and also had full responsibility for it (e.g., if they printed something libelous, they could be sued).

Common carriers (like the phone company) had no control over the content, and no responsibility for it, either (you couldn't sue the phone company if someone used the phone to plan a crime, for instance).

Google and their ilk want to have it both ways. They want the full control of publishers, and the zero responsibility of common carriers.

Historically, power without responsibility has invariably been a recipe for abuse.

I think they should have to choose one or the other.

This is the point SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas made in his render opinion, that communication networks like social media should be regulated as common carriers: https://reclaimthenet.org/justice-clarance-thomas-big-tech-p...

That’s the way it was until the passage of the communications decency act. Early social networks found themselves in a bind in that if they tried to moderate for say, spam, or porn, or copyright infringement, they were then liable for everything their users published. The CDA was an attempt to solve that problem.

I don’t have a better answer.

How can an endpoint, no matter how large that endpoint is, be considered to be a common carrier?

Justice Thomas is hardly a reliable source for making it so.

How is Facebook any more an "endpoint" than AT&T?

Facebook is just an endpoint on the internet. Nothing more.

AT&T is an ISP among other carrier things.

How can a server, or a set of servers be anything more than an endpoint?

That you would compare ATT and FB shows a remarkable misunderstanding of the internet and WWW.

Pretending free speech was only about the town square is ahistorical.

Free speech has always been about distribution as well - publishing a book or a newspaper, distributing pamphlets - those had similar reach to a random FB post or YT video today (in terms of percentage of the population).

Of course newspapers had no obligation to carry anyone's message, but, far more importantly, a newspaper couldn't be censored by government for printing stuff the government didn't like.

It's also important to remember that there used to exist many more newspapers - factories would have newspapers, most towns would have one or two, many clubs and similar organizations would have one.

Why can't you do business with cash/money orders and run a website on your own hardware exactly?

Doing the money order thing is so inconvenient these days that 90% of consumers will just skip you. It's simply not practical.

Sounds like they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and work harder.

They could also accept checks via the mail. Or cash via the mail. Or cryptocurrencies. Or gift cards. Or barter. There are multiple options available to them.

Those things are all really inconvenient.. Really, who wants to go out and mail something and wait for it to arrive? And gift cards risk the same kind of banning of credit card companies. This is going to limit any business beyond inviability.

The only thing you mention there that is a serious alternative are cryptocurrencies. And those are constanly fluctuating, needing very complex hedging against sudden value changes. And still something that most consumers will really struggle with. Most will not have a clue how to obtain crypto or how to deal with it (safely).

It might work for a really highly educated niche, but not for 99% of consumers. They just want to put in their paypal or credit card details and click buy now.

I don't do business with either Google or Apple.

I don't need them to do anything at all.

There are competitors to Visa.

I can do anything I want without Apple, Visa, Google and even Amazon and Microsoft.

>> I can do anything I want without Apple, Visa, Google and even Amazon and Microsoft.

Really? How can you even know which services or products depend in some way on GCP, Azure, or AWS (not to mention product and services that are built using other services that depend on those)?

Why do I care if some service uses them? I severely restrict service usage anyway.

> Why do I care if some service uses them [GCP, Azure, AWS]?

Because you said

> I can do anything I want without Apple, Visa, Google and even Amazon and Microsoft.

So if "some service" that you use uses them, then you're not doing anything you want without them.

I rarely use services anyway because it is typically a bad idea to get so intertwined with software that I can't control.

We’re not talking about individual choice but an inherent ir/rationality in censorious behavior.

Vast majority of the consumers probably make pragmatic rather than idealistic consumption choices. Eg when you source a new iPhone, you source certain unethical labor practices. When you make use of the US dollar, you make use of some amount of atrocities that built its international purchasing power (eg any of the petrodollar wars). I bet those rarely bother even the most so-called “idealistic” consumers because a) it is a hard calculus to compute b) it is impossible to live when every “impure” thing is removed from use.

The difference with public content hosting is being able to twist arms to make them take down stuff and conform to an image of virtuousness which we narcissistically and psuedo-religiously identify with. It is not about the real damage the contents pose, it is our intolerance to being seen as a “person who can use such sites”. The threat is to our confirmation bias, in this case the confirmation of an idea that there is a clear right and wrong and we are definitely right.

I'm confused. I don't see the problem. What's the difference between the image of virtue and just virtue?

If the majority of people believe that images of virtuousness are what they want, then that's just what they want. People aren't computing the outcome, their ethics are based on appearances and always have been. The internet doesn't change that fact. Whether it was in the middle ages or the post-industrial period or today, virtue has always been performative. So I don't really see what you think your argument demonstrates.

> What's the difference between the image of virtue and just virtue?

What’s the difference between a real car and a perfect cardboard replica? One has functionality and interiority. The other is just exteriority.

In the King Midas story, he wants everything to be mindlessly golden and thus turns them into unusable shiny crap. He got the golden exterior alright, with none of the real goldenness, goodness they would afford him.

Your example is a bit facile. A cardboard car does not function as a car does. It sounds almost like you are saying something but you never explain exactly what’s wrong with performative virtue.

But you have to define what is virtuous before you can claim that performative virtue is “fake”. The young people of today are no less virtuous than their elders, despite the fact that their elders (like virtually every generation before them) complain that they are immoral.

> A cardboard car does not function as a car does.

That's exactly the point. It is contrasting the appearance of the thing vs the structural & functional organization (logos) of the thing. Without the second, it is not the thing. One cannot establish an identity relationship just based on appearances. That is why you can't equivocate the appearance of a virtue with being virtuous.

> It sounds almost like you are saying something but you never explain exactly what’s wrong with performative virtue.

"Performative" virtue, a more accurate designation would be "demonstrative virtue", is an oxymoron. You cannot be virtuous without conforming to the structural & functional organization of the thing, i.e. without really being virtuous. Real virtue is a participatory endeavor. A display of virtuosity is like the cardboard car, it doesn't function as a virtue. Making people take down content for narcissistic reasons does not make the world a better place, because it is devoid of at least two core properties that is rationality and proportionality.

> But you have to define what is virtuous before you can claim that performative virtue is “fake”.

This topic is systematically discussed since Aristotle, and you would appreciate the absurdity of trying to give an exhaustive definition in this forum. But I've given you two properties of it that narcissistic censoring violates.

But "performative virtue" is--definitionally--fake. If it were real, it would just be "virtue". (And similarly, "political correctness" is something not quite correct--otherwise it would just be "correctness"!)

It's an actor "performing" as a character for a few hours, and then reverting back to their original personality.

> But you have to define what is virtuous before you can claim that performative virtue is “fake”.

No, strictly speaking you don't have to define anything. Whatever virtue is, it's consistently that. "Performative virtue" is inconsistent, often hypocritical, and therefore inauthentic.

> The young people of today are no less virtuous than their elders...

I can't speak to virtue in general, but with regards to duplicity it does seem like there's increasingly more of it:

1) young people still have access to whatever methods of duplicity old generations had, and can additionally virtue signal on social media on an unprecedented scale.

2) it seems like it's simply becoming acceptable to lie. Politicians will directly contradict their own video evidence, multiple times a day, and everyone shrugs and moves on. We've given up on norms of discourse and civility. To be clear, I'm not surprised that lies are being told; I'm surprised that there appears to be zero interest or any repercussions.

3) objective truth itself is under attack. It's becoming normalized that anyone can say whatever they feel at that moment and that they have "their truth" and I have "my truth". This is incredibly dangerous.

What does the “Majority of People” mean?

The enlightenment concept of free speech is likely a minority viewpoint among the people of the world. However I also think it is the correct view and that corporations or governments looking to censor speech are infringing on human rights, and believe in fighting for it the same as I would fight against racism, slavery, religious discrimination, authoritarianism, and so on. Just because a lot of people believe something is ok does not make it right.

You start with a faulty premise: google services are public, so you have no valid point.

Build your own data center and upload anything you want. Don't demand that a private company give you an unfettered soapbox.

Also "source a new iPhone"? Can we dispense with the meaningless buzzwords, please?

There is no free market in big tech.

There's little free market for the consumers in tech in general. The barriers to entry are extreme - between inherent complexity of the products, enormous capital investments required, and scale-related benefits (economies of scale, network effects), few can afford to start a real competitor. You can't just make a new Facebook or a new smartphone or even a new coffee machine - not without making a faustian bargain with investors, a deal which is usually the root problem behind why technology sucks.

Consumers only get to choose out of what's available, and in this market, it's hard for an entrepreneurial consumer to make some things available when the market isn't providing them.

> I don't want to give my money to companies that host things that I find morally abhorrent.

Isn't that a sign of a moral panic? Back in the 90s, my parents didn't want to patronize companies that signed deals with pornographers. Even though I was only 10, that sounded ridiculous. Good luck finding any large company that doesn't.

If people wont do business with people who do business with pornographers what right do the pornographers or porn aficionados have to object. If it would render it more clear it wouldn't matter if the subject were avocados. It's not a moral judgement on the worthiness of porn its about consumer choice in aggregate.

Can you explain this? Are you referring to tech only? Maybe I’m way too oblivious but of the large companies I pay money to I find it hard to imagine that most are signing deals with pornographers.

Did the local utilities (water, electric) refuse them to pornographers, and did you parents boycott those?

Just how many modern companies do you think are actively dealing in pornography?

I don’t see what’s changed. Youtube doesn’t host pornographic content either. The Apple App store doesn’t allow adult content of any kind. If you’re saying maybe Youtube and the Apple store should grow up a little and allow adult content I’m sympathetic but the horse has long left the barn on that one.

> Youtube doesn’t host pornographic content

While they don’t host porn, they do host a host of porn performers.

The impact of that is asymmetrical, though. A company that's making 1% profit (thinking a rural TV station here, not necessarily Google) can't afford to lose 10% of it's viewers, so they dial down their programming to the least objectionable possible. That's how we get in a situation where most people want to watch Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones but what they get are Brady Bunch reruns.

That is the point of the free market. But deplatforming certain kinds of offensive content is regressive.

For instance, in the not-so-distant past many Americans found interracial marriage morally abhorrent. Wikipedia says only 5% of Americans thought interracial marriage should be legal in the 1950s. In today’s environment, that leads to deplatforming those who would’ve supported marriage equality. This is not something we would desire.

People are full of prejudices. I’m sure our grandchildren will look back in horror at ours. Let’s not deplatform them for that.

I always think I can draw the line in the sand as a very rational and relatively well read person.

But then I remember that the best thinkers the world has ever seen (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, ad nauseum) were never able to look beyond their noses to see the human suffering of others.

Aka, they were perfectly happy to have a society run by slaves, to ignore the plight of the poor and sick, etc.

That may be true of Plato, Aristotle, etc. But one thing I have learned from history is that there is almost always a contingent of people that do find terrible things like slavery abhorrent and were even outspoken about it. But if you are an elite, and benefit greatly from something, you are probably much less likely to be outspoken against it.

I've never heard of any ancient philosopher being abhorrent about slavery and the like and I've read that there weren't any.

Could you point to some readings if you're aware of it? I'd love to know

Seneca had a somewhat more humane attitude towards slavery. See e.g. https://figsinwinter.medium.com/seneca-to-lucilius-47-on-sla...

And then from inside your link, there seemed to be even more critical voices:

"Then again, the Stoics were famous for challenging common conceptions, and the founder of the school, Zeno of Citium, had declared slavery an evil in his Republic"

He acknowledged their existence but as far as I know, he, not anyone else, said that slaving people was "wrong" or shouldn't be done.

It's important to note that Ceneca and the famous stoics (Marcus Aurelius for example) were rich and benefitted greatly from the status quo.

So now I think it is a shame, that I barely ever heard of him, despite having heard from all the others great (but slavery endorsing) greek minds. And sure, slavery was very common everywhere at that time. One more reason maybe to celebrate early free thinkers?

Most philosophers likely come from the elite classes in the past. You don't have time to sit around and think and write if you have to worry where your next meal comes from.

Perhaps these are the "best thinkers that the world has ever seen" because they said stuff that was beneficial for (some) powers that be. E.g. Plato-Aristotle-line/myth is directly linked to Alexander the Great.

Worth noting that there were very influential thinkers and entire schools of thought that looked beyond their noses. A good example are cynics/Diogenes the Dog, who may well have been more influential than the Platonic line. E.g. (as per anecdotes we have left) Alexander the Great had great respect to Diogenes, who totally ridiculed Alexander's (and Plato's) position.

Also stoics (e.g. Marcus Aurelius) are quite direct descendants of cynics and not ashamed of this at all.

More I look into classical philosophy, or the "myth" of academia, more it seems that it's mostly a fabrication of perhaps scholastics.

This is a very important point. Maybe there were some great philosophers in their time that argued against it and were ridiculed or didn't reach us through time.

I'm curious what you mean by being a fabrication? Their ideas were real and they've shaped history throughout time one way or another

Fabrication is perhaps too strong a term, but the separation between history and myth has not always been that strong. For example it was common (and accepted) to write stuff in some famous person's name.

I don't think it makes the content itself any worse, but it's difficult to know what was really historical.

I don't formally study this, but such problems become quite apparent when I try to e.g. find out historical sources for some philosophical statements or anecdotes. Probably not that different from how people attribute all sorts of "smart stuff" to Einstein.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudepigrapha

Edit: by "scholastic fabrication" I mean that scholastics spent a lot of time "interpreting" especially Aristotle (and tried to make it compatible with the Bible). I'm guessing a lot of what we think is "greek philosophy" may be from these interpretations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism

Thank you for the clarification. I'll read more on the subject.

History is god damn hard. That's why it's useful to read the source material whenever possible.

I don't know how many times I've seen The Parable Of the Cave being used, but reading The Republic, really makes you understand what Plato meant with that story.

It's hard for most people to read that stuff though. I've only scratches the surface. It's easier to trust others to donor for us and distill the information.

And in each century, the lessons learned from the same material may be different too.

It's usually next to impossible to read the real source material, as it's in literally ancient language and written in context and for purposes that are hard to understand.

For most things it probably doesn't matter that much. For example classical philosophy (or its common translations/interpretations) provides a sort of "shared language" for academia, regardless of how historical it is. That's why I tend to think it more as a myth unless there's something specifically historically intetesting.

Most of the classical stories, e.g. the Cave, have "transcended" the original context anyway, and are in a sense richer nowadays.

You're making the mistake of assuming morality from your current time, place, and culture is universal morality. You find slavery morally objectionable because the current cultural understanding is that slavery is morally objectionable. Future obedm might find it equally abhorrent that you, for example, routinely consumed the flesh of sentient animals or openly released carbon into the atmosphere for personal gain, or probably a million other things that will be completely unimaginable in polite society 500 years from now.

Haha you mirrored the argument I've made many times before. The eating meat part I feel is likely to be the thing that will change.

But that's an obvious one. What else will be seen as "barbaric" that we don't even think of challenging?

Working 8 hours a day? Having kids? Going outside or staying inside?

I remember the Greeks were not big on private property and instead took great pride in their public buildings. The polar opposite of our society now

> I remember the Greeks were not big on private property

Then you first have to make something other than private property the backbone of average peoples' pension funds.

I don't have ideas, you?

Tolerance of wrong viewpoints is different than the active support algorithms give to discovering false content.

It’s not “active” support if the algorithm acts in a content neutral fashion, for example based on engagement metrics. In such a situation, changing the algorithm to artificially not let allegedly-false content be discovered is actively supporting the opposing viewpoints. Leaving the algorithm to act without artificial content-specific modification is not active support. Tolerance would be leaving the algorithms alone.

I disagree. I think the algorithms are fundamentally immoral because they promote content that gets "engagement". Which includes and in many cases prioritizes content that people have engaged with because it causes a negative response. Rather than pushing good* content, it prioritizes lowest common denominator, reality tv, desperate pundit, fast food, self congratulatory, outrage porn garbage.

*By good, I simply mean thoughtful, high quality, factual, educational, or otherwise uplifting content regardless of politics

I don't think "Good" is unambiguous enough to trust the platforms to promote it. How about simply "related"? Show people the content they've explicitly asked for. If people explicitly ask for outrageous content, then fine, but we needn't force feed it to society.

Algorithms don't work like this though: content that feeds outrage disproportionately outranks content which doesn't.

Algorithms don't discriminate "content" by it's actual content: they keyword match and look for clicks, and build a pretty perfect radicalization pathway more easily then they build a discourse [1].

You have probably experienced this: almost everyone has the experience of wanting to see some particular YouTube video, but opened it in an Incognito tab (or just avoided it) explicitly because they know the topic will prime the YouTube homepage to fill with nothing but things you don't want to see.

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/youtube-fa...

Former Googler here (11 1/2 years, including in Ads)

The idea that algorithms are "neutral" is laughable. There is a loosely organized group of activists out there who are aware of how these algorithms work and actively manipulate them.

"Engagement metrics" are nothing more than these people pushing the buttons.

I don't really understand why tech companies, like Google, go so far out of the way to maintain the image of being neutral. I agree they have a right to censor content they choose for whatever reason but what I don't understand is why they try appear to be neutral about their decisions. It feels like everyone is aware of what is going on, even other commenters who support Google censorship admit they approve of the bias.

So why do tech companies cling to this line of being neutral when no one really seems to accept it and they themselves have no intention of being neutral? I feel like there wouldn't be any conflict about policies or complaints they have to deal with if they were more honest. Maybe it has to do with section 230. I don't know but I feel like we would be better off if consumers had more information.

Every MITM-as-a-service starts off by being a neutral conduit to attract users, and then slowly adds restrictions to appease advertisers. But users never appreciate additional restrictions, and so Google (et al) have to keep marketing themselves as general hosts lest they lose even more mindshare.

There is a difference between opposing viewpoints and factually incorrect information that is destructive.

If your view is based on provable falsehoods, your view is worse than valueless.

Tolerating these people is harmful to everyone, but that is not why Google is banning it. It is because it is harmful to Google's bottom line.

At the end of the day, Google owns their servers and can say what is allowed and what is not.

Google is a legal construct. I can’t go have a coffee with Google. I can’t get a high five from Google. Google will do whatever our laws say it has to do in exchange for liability protections for its owners.

If you can find a majority to agree you can change the laws. It seems unlikely though. I’m not even sure what you would change the law to be. Current reading of the US constitution says that Google has the same free speech rights that you do.

>Google owns their servers and can say what is allowed and what is not.

Well that's the problem in a nutshell. It ain't good for our society.

They are not there to improve society, they are there to make money, and if you think different you are a fool.

Republicans fought to make companies people, and to be not regulated. And now are crying when it fired back, because forcing a company to publish or block something is actually stepping on its first amendment right.

You won't really have such platform, unless it is done through a well established non-profit or through government (as long as government is Democratic and checks and balances work correctly).

What do you lose by not being able to post or upload files on a Google-owned server?

People act like being banned is a life threatening event.

The truth of the matter is that the right-wing userbase of HN is deathly scared of being marginalized in wider society. Seeing things like Parler getting kicked off of AWS, Facebook Fact-Checking moderation and now this makes them scared.

That is a problem except that no one gets booted for being conservative, so it is not really a problem.

The top performers on FB are conservative pages for crying out loud!

They are afraid of much, which is the problem. It is irrational fear and based on ignorance and hatred.

Parler earned their ban 1000 times over. When sites get shut down by their hosts because its users were openly inciting violence that is not a problem.

I have yet to see someone get booted for following the platform's rules and merely being conservative. People from all over the political spectrum get banned every day.

Not "like life threatening" - Bad for our society.

In that free public conversation is centrally crucial to the sanity of our society.

And having that public conversation controlled by a profit-seeking entity is definitely detrimental to that conversation. And thus detrimental to the sanity of our society.

And an insane society is obviously all kinds of threatening.

Again, Google is not stopping you from using your speech.

If they ban you, they are telling you that they don't want you on their private property.

They don't take away your internet connection.

When did society need Google, or Twitter, or FB to function? They do not. Those are simply three websites. There are literally millions more.

If this site banned me, I lost literally nothing. If Google Drive banned me(assuming I have an account, which I do not) I lost literally nothing. Same for FB. Same for Twitter.

They are not required for a functional society.

Why is that so hard to understand?

To the degree that Google's service is popular is the degree to which it "stops me from using my speech".

Because the public conversation requires a public. Right?

That is not even close to true.

They stop you from using their services, that is it.

You have no right to access popular private servers.

You have no right to a conversation because everyone else has the right to ignore you if they so choose.

Again, private companies can not be forced to give you server space. That pesky first amendment thing and all.

Oh, but it is true.

If their service is popular, then the public conversation is to that degree affected. Clearly.

Show me where you have a right to access a popular server that is not owned by you.

Show me where you have the right to have a conversation. That means that others can be compelled to talk to you.

At the same time, the Civil Rights Movement aggressively used boycotts, protests, and shaming campaigns to push for racial equality.

you're out if you still think about 'equality', it's all about 'equity' these days, 'equality' is no longer good enough.

Maybe that's your opinion, but you don't speak for everyone.

it's sarcasm, sadly these days the main media and our school districts are all about 'equity', teachers are all re-trained to use equity instead of equality right now.

The subtle difference you’re pointing out is significant. Equality under the law is moral and ethical. Forced equality of outcomes is immoral and unethical, and is just collectivist Marxism rebranded.

There's a difference between disagreeing with a position and finding it "abhorrent".

Your evidence with regards to interracial marriages does not support your point. Whether "something can be discussed" is an entirely different question than than "do you support position X". The very fact that they were able to take a poll is strong evidence that talking about it was not verboten.

This is simply not true, and a strange argument. Child pornography is discussed because people find it abhorrent. US politics has largely revolved around the prevention of interracial relationships for at least a century and a half, so the idea that people didn't (and don't) find them abhorrent is bizarre and ahistorical.

> US politics has largely revolved around the prevention of interracial relationships for at least a century and a half

What

Again you are conflating finding the discussion of a practice as abhorrent with finding the implementation of a practice abhorrent.

> In today’s environment, that leads to deplatforming

In the historical environment it led to people being killed by the neighborhood mob when they decided to lynch the black man[1]

In todays environment it leads to genocide[2].

It is morally laughable to compare deplatforming to the consequences of the free spread of misinformation, propaganda and hate rhetoric.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States#...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

> Isn't the point of the free market that consumers are free to vote with their dollars?

Can you pinpoint the moral difference between "Google should be allowed to refuse to host content that they dislike" and "Restaurants should be allowed to refuse to serve ethnicities that they dislike"?

It is a feature of free markets that consumers choose where to spend their money; but it is also a feature of liberal societies that the law precludes the majority from driving out an unpopular minority by refusing to do business with them.

This is reasonable as an ideal, but could be harmful in practice. A significant percentage of the U.S. population believes inarguably wrong and demonstrably dangerous things at this point. It is possible that the only effective way to fix that is corporate censorship. That wouldn’t make me happy, but I’m not going to agree with letting a crazy person steer the Titanic into an iceberg just because it’s their right to do so.

Until they commit crimes and are formally charged and prosecuted in a court of law, they can believe anything they like.

Well, remove their voting rights then if you think that they are too stupid. Why should I be the one who suffers?

Ah, but how do you know you're not the one believing crazy wrong and dangerous things? All those terms are highly relative and if your answer is argument by authority, well ...

Because there are an awful lot of knowledge domains where there is consensus among experts, and one can verify their own knowledge along those lines.

The consensus of experts has been wrong many times throughout history.

1)depends on the domain 2)not for a lack of trying 3) theories can be challenged, new proofs can be found

Also “history” is a broad term. I would say a true scientific method didn’t mature until roughly the 19th century.

But none of those areas are the ones where people get worked up about misinformation. Unless you have been told there is a "consensus" about things like COVID, vaccines and climate change, where there most certainly isn't?

Not commenting on covid or vaccines, not my field, but climate change for one has pretty much been established to a great deal of accuracy (that climate change is man made)

It even is mentioned on its Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climat...

Even someone like Senate leader Mitch McConnell isn’t denying it anymore. Research is still ongoing to what extend we are going to be impacted.

So, even if someone is denying climate change or reading misinformation, it doesn’t change that man made climate change is here, and what its causes are.

So yeah, there is scientific consensus in that area on the broad perimeters.

Now if you believe something different, that just goes against what we already established!

"Man is changing the climate" is a very weak statement if taken literally, and not really what people mean by the term climate change. Of course man has some sort of impact on the atmosphere, as we do on all aspects of our environment.

Once you get into questions like, by how much is it changing, are those changes a big deal or not that serious, by how much does it really affect the weather, even what the actual history of global temperature is, there is a lot of disagreement even amongst scientists, although of course given the tiny size and cliquey nature of many academic fields, criticism from outside the field must always be considered as well.

Those are pretty much already answered, and by many people. The Wikipedia link goes into that :) Data suggests we are currently looking at 2 degrees temperature change as a global average.

While everyone is free to come up with different answers, there isn’t anything credible at the moment.

A friend of mine programs climate models based on latest mathematical insights and data. For 10 years he would put his hand in a fire that it is happening and it will be bad.

Point by point : How much is changing? 2 degrees hotter on average. How does it affect weather? More outliers such as the recent heat wave in the NW of USA. Is it a big deal? Yes, because it unbalances a lot of eco systems and our ability to cope with it. History of global temperature? Has been measured for hundreds of years now and we can deduce temperatures before that. There is a lot of disagreements between scientists? No there isn’t (97% banks on man made climate change) Clique nature of academic fields? That’s an entirely different topic and doesn’t change the data.

I guess education and honest information would be too radical an approach.

Governments and leaders are concerned that people don't trust them, yet the truth is, they don't deserve to be trusted. When the system is designed to create a placated populace instead of critical thinkers, those in charge are routinely lying and blatantly misleading instead of informing, then it's no surprise people will believe in all kinds of fringe ideas.

Hiding and shunning information can be a temporary band aid, but the inevitable effect is that people will trust official sources even less.

>A significant percentage of the U.S. population believes inarguably wrong and demonstrably dangerous things at this point

Yes. Both sides can agree that they think the other believes in falsehods. Since one person has one vote, there is effectively nothing you can do about it.

> Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open.

Were they really though? I'm pretty sure there were plenty of things, especially things deemed to be "Intellectual Property violating", which were strictly banned on all these platforms far before 2010. One example is that Google has been removing search results for as long as I can remember.

In other words, what was in your perspective "free and open" was very restrictive and politically pro-corporate from my perspective --- hardly an "objective stance" but instead a very political stance on what was permitted and what was forbidden.

I don’t think he was talking about search results. Rather other Google products like Drive. People used to share Hollywood films on Drive, for example.

Huh, I never have tried this, but I'm pretty sure sharing hollywood films on drive has always violated their Terms of Service, although I could see them not being great at enforcement all the time.

If Drive was that permissive, then upload sites that tended to "look the other way", like Rapidshare, MegaUpload, etc, would never have existed.

MegaUpload and friends predated Google Drive as I recall.

It may have always been against their terms of service, but that didn’t stop it from happening in the beginning.

Source: first-hand experience

Edit: I checked dates. Google Drive started 2012. MegaUpload started 2005.

Ok Youtube for example has had a longstanding policy of removing videos using music clips without the rights (I assume proactively, not just in response to DMA notices). This is essentially an automatic mechanism, possibly overly aggressive, to stay within the law- find unlicensed music and silence the video. But like stopping me from infringing on a Metallica song is clearly categorically different from actually censoring a video about Coronavirus that doesn’t comform to some standard or is accused of spreading misinformation.

I brought up copyright as just one example, these platforms have many reasons (not always given) for deleting stuff, ranging from political content or activism to copyright. Most ToS's are quite arbitrary. People have been talking about this for a long time as well -- "Chilling Effects" turns 20 this year! At the risk of being a bit unkind it seems like it's mostly just conservatives who were "living under a rock" until now, and now suddenly have loads of opinions on it.

To you it's a golden age, to others this is a period where the internet was thoroughly weaponized by misinformation agents to undermine democracy and civil societies around the world.

But isn't the flip side of all this censorship a reduced ability for people to tell bullshit from reality?

Why is information intelligence not taught in schools?

Much like an immune system, we need to be exposed to nonsense so that we're constantly vigilant. There will always be a group of nutters who believe in flat earth, that vaccines cause autism, etc... Trying to cut that off at the source just throws these people into underground cults. A more scalable, sustainable solution is to

1) teach people to do their research - properly, as in, don't go on Facebook and join "Flat Earth Society Boston" to find The Truth

2) teach people it's okay to change their minds - part of this spreading cultism is that political opinions are now core identities

3) teach people to tolerate opposing viewpoints, even the silly ones - point and laugh, but don't try to cancel and destroy their lives

Another thing - every time a tweet or document is censored, the replies are generally cut off as well. How can people learn to distinct true and false if they don't get to see examples of people being wrong and corrected.

> Much like an immune system, we need to be exposed to nonsense so that we're constantly vigilant.

No: much like an immune system, we need to be exposed to vaccines (i.e. education on how to spot deception, knowledge of what scams are currently going on). Enough people trying to deceive you, and eventually someone will succeed.

How is the education system today going to help people who went to school in the 1970s?

Conversely, what should we teach children today about the information threats of the 2050s?

A proper fix is better than an instant fix.

Sure, but in the meantime the misinformation voters get to pick the textbooks. This is a bit like educating people in fire prevention when the forest is already ablaze.

>But isn't the flip side of all this censorship a reduced ability for people to tell bullshit from reality?

No. People have limited processing cycles in their heads, and you never notice the bullshit you fall for, so you can't correct for errors you're making. Critical thinking skills are great, but they don't provide you expert-level knowledge in every field, nor can they. Sometimes your educated heuristics are just plain wrong and someone else has better information you don't have access to. I see this all the time here with content in my field - developers just get law wrong all the time.

You might remember an era when email inboxes were FLOODED with a deluge of dick pills, get rich quick schemes, Nigerian prince scams, and other low-effort, low-value content. Sure you might be able to avoid clicking on garbage, but the general health of your inbox declined dramatically.

Does that mean society is going to end because we've trampled upon the rights of the latest Cialis replacement to spam my inboxes? Probably not.

You seem to be making an argument from authority by leaning on experts, and I don’t fully disagree with that approach either. But trusted authorities regularly betray trust, and use their label of expertise to push their own agendas. A recent example is found in the false attribution of the PNW heat wave to climate change (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/flawed-heatwave-repor...). They also can be wrong solely due to making a mistake (COVID had many examples of this with rapidly changing guidance). So you aren’t free from the need for critical thinking skills, because in the most important matters you have to still challenge them. To be able to do so, you need to have trained that muscle beforehand.

>You seem to be making an argument from authority by leaning on experts

I don't think that's the core of what I'm saying. I'm saying people have limited mental time, so devoting an unlimited volume of time to sorting through bullshit is not feasible.

Everyone is going to need to make choices, but if statistically the options presented before them are better, we'd expect better outcomes in general.

'Critical thinking' is one of those things that people keep raising as the catch all solution. This line of reasoning states that it doesn't matter what options are on offer because people will calculate the best ones! Unfortunately, they don't.

Most of our language fluency tests rate people's skills in this area; take the ACTFL scale for instance. The sad reality is that when people are provided with language based reasoning testing, many people perform fairly poorly due to common errors, even in test-based situations. People misread statements, misunderstand their meaning, have trouble moving from specific to general or vice versa, have difficulties tailoring their message to their audience, etc.

In general, the very HIGHEST level of linguistic ability in specifically tested scenarios is what we assume out of everyone as the baseline when having these discussions about social discourse. This is an unreasonable starting point.

I tried reading the article you linked to. I honestly can't get past the intro:

    As noted above, the first bullet of the main findings states that the heatwave was "virtually impossible without human-caused climate change."  Sounds very certain, doesn't it?  Virtually impossible.

    Then read their next bullet:  

    "The observed temperatures were so extreme that they lie outside the range of historically observed temperatures.  This makes it hard to quantify how rare the event was"

    On one hand, they say it is hard to quantify how rare or unusual the event was, but on the other, they claim the event was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change. 

    Both statements can not be true.  You can't be uncertain and certain at the same time.

What? The writer seems intent on purposefully misunderstanding the study. "This makes it hard to quantify how rare the event was" is equivalent to the situation of not being able to speak about a "100 year storm" because there haven't been any storms that strong in recorded history. In other words the data is so different from historical data that there's only one reason why: human-caused climate change.

If you can’t get past the intro, I would say respectfully, you’re not giving it a fair chance. You should read the full post and the underlying study being critiqued before judging it.

> In other words the data is so different from historical data that there's only one reason why: human-caused climate change.

No that’s not the case. This PNW event would have happened with or without climate change. The study being critiqued used a hyperbolic claim that the event was “virtually impossible without climate change” even though their own data shows it was virtually impossible (highly improbable) either way, and that it was more due to a rare coincidence of many factors. The Professor who wrote this post I linked also has prior posts analyzing this event and showing that really climate change contributed a few degrees to the peak temperatures, but that it would have been a record breaking event either way.

As you can see here, the purpose of climate change denialism isn't to convince anyone. It's just to delay serious action for as long as possible using handwaving and appeals to authority. Here, the fact that the author is a Professor [sic] is used to add weight to his arguments, even though a vast majority of "Professors" acknowledge that climate change is real.

Ok fine:

    Their next claim is that the June heatwave was enhanced by 2°C by global warming, which is not out of the realm of possibility.  

    But think about it.  Considering that they state that the heatwave had maximum temperatures 16-20°C warmer than normal, by their OWN ADMISSION only about 10% of the heatwave was the result of global warming.  Thus, a record-breaking, unique heat wave would have occurred without global warming.   

    Imagine if they had stated that.  You would not have seen many headlines: Global warming contributed 10% of the heatwave!

This guy is frankly so wrong and misunderstands what he's talking about so badly that he should be completely ignored and you should not cite him any more.

Imagine that global warming dries out a forested area to the point where it catches fire due to being so dry. This guy is saying the equivalent of "the fire burned at 800°C, and global warming only accounts for 0.25% of that!"

I gave the article a fair chance, and facepalmed repeatedly at his inane arguments. He's a crank and you should ignore him.

You have Johnny, saying you should wear a mask when you go to the store, because it helps you against covid. And Bobby says you shouldn't, because there's no evidence it helps, and it might even be even worse for you, if you wear it wrong.

So you're suggesting we should remove Johnnys fearmongering, conspiracy post, because we should listen to the experts?

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-mas...

Experts clearly say that "There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly,"

Expert knowledge by WHO.

...and a month later, we should delete Bobbys post too? Do we undelete Johnnys post?

This is actually pretty interesting because your post is premised upon a massive misreading of what actually happened. It shows you can spread disinformation while thinking you did your research.

The expert knowledge was that mass usage of masks early on in the pandemic could prevent frontline healthcare workers from accessing needed supplies while logistics spun up to meet demand.

"There also is the issue that we have a massive global shortage," Ryan said about masks and other medical supplies. "Right now the people most at risk from this virus are frontline health workers who are exposed to the virus every second of every day. The thought of them not having masks is horrific."

This is literally the third paragraph.

When community spread began to drive the bulk of new infections and we've had months to spin up production on masks, obviously mass adoption changes in value.

I literally quoted the paragraph, where they said that there's no evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit.

They didn't say "it helps, but we're unable to call wallmart and buy all their stock, so we're asking you not to buy them, so we can", they said that there's no evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit... those are two different things.

I've actually watched the briefing you're referring to. Go to 26:00 - 28:00 https://www.pscp.tv/w/1OyJAYoodRnJb

The very next statement by Dr. Ryan "There also is the issue that there is a massive global shortage, and where should these masks be, and where is the best benefit? Because one can argue there's a benefit in anything, and where does a given tool have it's best benefit? And right now the people who are most at risk are frontline health workers [...]"

The follow up statement is also very emphatic that this is about mask allocation due to constrained supply. I don't get why you're trying to ignore the very clear context of the statement.

There was evidence of the effectiveness of masks. They chose to diminish/ignore that evidence because it was inconvenient to protecting the supply of masks.

There were two studies circulating around that time. One of passengers of a bus and another of a restaurant. The bus one found that the passengers wearing masks did not catch the virus and many of those that did not wear masks did catch it. The restaurant one found that people in the flow of AC air caught it and those not in it did not. That meant that it was airborne and there was some evidence suggesting mask effectiveness.

Why should you listen to the CDC, WHO, etc… when there is a better predictor of reality?

Indeed, and that was also the period where Reddit happily hosted a whole bunch of extremely tasteless and borderline illegal communities centered around things like pictures of overweight people and sexualized children.

A quick googling suggests that the first wave of closures was in 2015 [1] after a crushing wave of negative publicity and advertiser pullouts. The other really high-profile one was r/The_Donald, which wasn't closed until 2020 and even has its own Wikipedia article. [2]

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/06...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald

----

EDIT: Actually, looks like r/jailbait was closed much earlier, in 2011, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...

But certainly prior to June 2015, there was much, much broader tolerance for racist, sexist, transphobic content on the site.

> But certainly prior to June 2015, there was much, much broader tolerance for racist, sexist, transphobic content on the site.

And now it has moved to other, more hidden platforms, where there is noone to write counterarguments, and sometimes (tor, freenet,...) impossible to identify someone who writes actual threats and not just "yo momma so fat..." jokes.

I mean, that's literally what most of the posts are arguing for in this thread— that this needs to be a watershed moment to get serious about distributed, uncensorable alternatives to products like Google Drive.

But in any case, "people will find alternatives" has never been a valid reason not to act (either here or in other popular cases such as guns/suicide). There is real value in having standards of conduct that go above and beyond the bare minimum of "not illegal." Moral and ethical value, of course, but also economic— in the reddit case, ultimately being a place that was viable for ad spends by mainline brands who wouldn't want to be associated with a site whose public image was that of being a safe space for hate speech.

Google is a little different since there's no r/all page for GDrive that can be gamed to show this content, and nor is Google likely as worried about the safety of its reputation as an advertiser.

> to others this is a period where the internet was thoroughly weaponized by misinformation agents to undermine democracy and civil societies around the world.

If you said something like this in the 1940s, you'd get a bunch of people nodding their heads in agreement and using it to justify the McCarthy hearings.

Maybe I'm naive, but I still believe the lesser of the two evils is to err on the side against censorship.

Also, if you've spent any time with crazy conspiracy theorists, you'd know that letting the government/corporations/media act as censors just adds fuel to that fire.

Conspiracy theorists have spent the last few years literally using the term "the good guys" to describe the federal government, and were clamoring for a military coup up until earlier this year.

I’m sorry, who are you referring to?

The conspiracy theorists I know, and most of r/Conspiracy, went from distrusting the government to generally converging on Qanon conspiracy theories, and Qanon adjacent conspiracy theories like #SaveTheChildren.

They use the term "the good guys", literally those words, to describe those in the federal government who are supposedly fighting a secret war against a pedophile cabal that will culminate in a military coup.

Interestingly enough, even those conspiracy theorists who haven't fallen down the far right conspiracy rabbithole are also assuming the federal government and military are on their side. A popular conspiracy theory is that the government is gearing up to disclose that UAP reports are actually evidence of alien contact. In those that hold this view, there's a widespread reverence for military members' testimony, and an almost implicit assumption that they are nearly infallible because of their military training. Instead of distrusting the government, they're eagerly awaiting for it agree with them and confirm their personal feelings towards reports of UAPs.

Well then 00-10 was the platinum age. Few behemoths, lots of smaller companies, less focus on marketing and money, fewer idiots online, a focus on hosting your own stuff from 0.

But I agree, platforms should be neutral. And people should still strive to control as much of their online properties as possible. Not just give it to Amazon and Google.

> Well then 00-10 was the platinum age. Few behemoths, lots of smaller companies, less focus on marketing and money, fewer idiots online, a focus on hosting your own stuff from 0.

Eternal September was 1993. maybe this golden age of the internet where everyone was civil and educated and almost nothing was subject to censorship didn't really exist.

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

Host absolutely everything? Instructions on creating explosives, chemical and biological weapons? Some future doomsday weapon? Would you say everything should be available up to and including methods for any unbalanced individual to single-handedly kill thousands or millions? How about your personal details, ID, address, employer, medical history, surfing, shopping habits? Would you even be ok with hackernews piercing the veil of your "throwaways885" username and publishing it?

Platforms are not publishers. The publisher of these things should face legal action (including the removal of their content). It's not for the platform to pick and choose.

Can you define "platform" in this context? Is this a legal term?

It's interesting to see this dichotomy between platforms and publishers in these types of threads. I assume it stems from a reading of Section 230 somehow, but the word "platform" never appears in that text.

Strictly speaking, "platform" is an umbrella term, and people are actually distinguishing between publisher and non-publisher.

What I'm suggesting is that neither I or large corporations are capable of making that distinction. Nor the government for that matter.

Corporations only make that distinction on their property.

These big tech companies do not have the power to silence anyone.

Just like you can ban people you don't like from yours.

There is always a line and content that is illegal and the question will always be where that line is drawn.

A straightforward reading of the 1st Amendment indicates that there can be no such thing as illegal content under US law, including whatever you are right now considering proposing as an exception. An act involving speech may be illegal; if you make a credible threat of imminent, irreversible harm others are free to take you at your word and defend themselves—the justification here is the harm which is reasonably expected to follow, not the content of your speech. If you lie to someone to obtain their property under false pretenses, knowing that the lie precludes any "meeting of the minds" and thus renders the contract invalid such that the property still belongs to them, then you are committing theft. Your punishment derives from the act of taking property which did not belong to you, not the fact that you lied in the process. And of course what you say may be used as evidence against you without the speech itself being illegal.

There are some more problematic areas where the Constitution itself is inconsistent. Copyright should not exist, for one; the core concept is utterly incompatible with freedom of speech. The Supreme Court even recognized this at one point—it's why we have the concept of "fair use" in the first place—but "fair use" is a poor compromise which does not fully negate the infringement of the freedom of speech. When you have one clause saying that Congress has the power (but not the obligation) to do something which would infringe on the freedom of speech, and another clause later passed as an amendment saying "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech", the obvious reconciliation of these clauses is that Congress is barred from exercising that enumerated power because it would violate the later amendment. The Court tried to strike a balance instead… but it still amounts of Congress passing a law which abridges the freedom of speech, despite the limitations imposed by the Court.

There was one other notable exception to free speech that undermines your point: obscenity is not, or has not been, considered speech under the terms of the free speech amendment. So, at least historically, there is some precedent for considering that some forms of human expression can be censored on their own merits.

I should note that I am anti-censorship and consider such laws absurd, but my point is that we can't rely on readings of the constitution to self-evidently protect us from such things.

obscenity is not, or has not been, considered speech under the terms of the free speech amendment.

What part of "shall make no law" isn't clear? It's true that obscenity is an exception to 1A, but that's something that some people made up after the fact, in direct contravention to the framers' stated intention.

The founders weren't short on ink. If they had wanted to equivocate, they were certainly free to do so. The fun really starts when some people decide that their (least) favorite amendments are subject to less (more) interpretation than others.

Many poor precedents are grounded in strong emotional reactions at odds with basic principles, and in my opinion obscenity cases are a good example of that. Still, the classification as obscenity is more about the form of the speech than its content. In fact the more content there is, in the form of either expression or artistic value, and the more the form contributes to accurately conveying the content of the speech, the more likely it is that the speech is considered protected, even if the form would otherwise be considered obscene. I'd rather the courts didn't get involved in trying to decide whether a controversial turn of phrase has enough merit to warrant protection, but in any case I don't think you can extend the principles underlying prohibition of obscenity to exercising control over which information can be conveyed.

I think this is one of those things that sounds nice on the surface but isn't really tenable in reality.

Should they only host or also surface "everything"? Is deranking something censoring? What about not promoting something? If the idea is every thing is given equal weight, then things pretty quickly becomes a cesspool.

If I host a document for a certified notadoctor telling you that you should treat your children's autism by feeding them bleach which will certainly constitute abusing all of them and perhaps killing some do you think online marketplaces of ideas should ignore the fact that half the population is dumber than dirt and the dead kids and keep serving up poison?

> fact that half the population is dumber than dirt

I think you're going a little far there, and the fact that you're using this to justify censorship is pretty ugly.

The case I gave is not in any way hypothetical there were many popular actual self published ebooks on amazon instructing you to abuse and possibly kill your kids with bleach to cure their autism.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/28/amazon-removes-books-promoti...

I'm not going too far I'm speaking empirically. Almost 1/4 of the population has an IQ less than 90 and is empirically challenged and a substantial portion of the remainder including those with reasonable or even high IQ are completely dysfunctional because regardless of how functional a brain they were born with they have basically ruined it by training it only to consume and create trash.

One has only to talk to a large enough number of your fellow humans to realize half of them are in fact dumber than dirt. If there weren't literature about bleaching your childs insides to cure their autism or other insanity of the same grade would find no takers.

If you find the number of bleach swillers insufficient consider thatnearly 40% of us in America believe that a genie created the earth less than 10k years ago. Overwhelmingly this is because they do not possess the intellectual aptitude to dismiss this theory. If their brains were highly functioning they would do so despite conditioning. Plenty of people will live 70-100 years and pass away in their hospital bed without ever ever having turned their brain into the on position.

On the flip side others aggressively question the reality they are given but because they lack the inherent intelligence or have spent their entire intellectual life consuming the equivalent of junk food they are utterly incapable of discerning the difference between insane fantasy and truth.

The comment provokes a thought however, ugliness aside.

Most of us here are presuming (I presume) that we are immune from misinformation, disinformation etc. Why is that? What quality distinguishes we,the observers,from they,the victims?

It seems obvious that education might be the decider. But I'd like to know. What quality of the HN reader distinguishes him from the victim of misinformation?

I do not believe I'm immune to disinformation. This is why I don't think it makes sense for a majority to control a minority or vice versa.

There is plenty of room to have a nuanced conversation about different viewpoints while also taking down obvious lies and crazy. The choice is not between moderating everything and nothing.

What we really all need is the right degree of epistemological humility. I think I’m better than average at discerning misinformation yes, but know that I have been wrong in the past so never weight my conclusions 100%. Its mostly people who live only in the political/social and never have to bang their heads against the hard truth of physics/nature who have complete certainty in the corectness of their positions.

We are all vulnerable to misinformation that affirms our existing biases or that comes from individuals/organizations that have either previously been reliable sources or we have incorrectly regarded as reliable.

If the Washington Post ran an article that stated that a former NASA scientist believed the rate of climate change was vastly higher than previously anticipated I would probably buy it.

If it later turned out his specialty was Chemistry, he had been fired for using his expertise to make meth, and his research was bunkum I would have to eat crow and watch that publication far more carefully.

On a more realistic note I believed to my chagrin that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and reading of some of the awful crimes of Saddam I thought not going in would be a great act of moral evil as it would mean abandoning the citizens to be victimized by a monster. 21 year old me didn't realize there was no good proof of WMDs, that we would kill half a million of them, and that we might well leave them no better off if our efforts collapsed shortly after we left.

Insofar as what separates the reasonable from the rubes

- A modest amount of accumulated understandings about how history,science, math, stats etc work sufficient to reject obviously untrue statements

- The understanding that everything you understand or think you know ought to be criticized and revised over time in response to new evidence. Valuing truth over authority and conformity.

- An understanding of the common failure modes of logic and reason so that you can recognize bullshit when you see it

- A reasonably strategy to use all of the above to evaluate sources continually to see if they are and remain trustworthy.

>Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP.

Within the law of which country?

Should copyrighted content be blocked in the US? What about in the Netherlands?

Should Holocaust denying content be blocked in Germany? What about in the US?

Should anti-CCP content be allowed in China? What about outside China?

If you want to do the bare minimum according to the law, you are going to need a different implementation for every country. And even then people in countries with more lax laws are going to think you are acting unethically by censoring content in more restrictive countries and vice versa.

EDIT: I have no idea why a comment that amounts to "different countries have different laws" is being downvoted.

If you want to operate within a country you should follow the laws there. If the laws are immoral, you shouldn't operate there, or you should accept them and make money without being moral. That choice is up to the company. It's why google building AIs for china should be controversial.

I'm not sure why this is a revelation.

> Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open.

It was in the early part of the 2010's that Google, Twitter and others started censoring Islamic content in the name of antiterrorism and stopping the spread of extremism on their platforms.

“Within the law” undermines your point. It takes the issue and just shifts it to another location on the map. It resolved nothing.

We need to collectively grow up and acknowledge that not all disagreements can coexist and solve them.

In America it shifts it to the US constitution, which provides a more principled approach to speech than the biases of tech companies. Is it a perfect solution? No. But it is closer to it than the present situation.

The law where? That is part of the problem. Every piece of content would need to have hundreds of flags, one for each jurisdiction in which the content could be viewed. That may not be enough for some countries given how easy it is to fake your origin address. It's solvable but not an easy problem.

You clearly don't have kids that consume content on the internet.

This is what I think people often miss in those discussions. There is an assumption that everything shared/'hosted' online is someone's opinion and thus should be allowed to be shared. This was never a case on the internet, don't trust what you read online. What should be regulated is what can be advertised, because most what you read is indistinguishable from an ad. Smoothies cure cancer - an ad or someone believe some antivax type bullshit? What if it's an ad to vote for a particular party because the other will do unbelievable bad things? Fanatic or serious opinion? Should you allow those kind of post on your platform?

In my opinion you should just because it is the only way to make sure that your platform is not taken seriously and will prompt people to read something a bit more serious. It will stir controversies on twitter but who in IRL seriously considers an opinion of a twitter person?

Edit: I went for a smoke I thought about it a bit more, take a look at voat vs reddit. Voat was created as a response to censorship on reddit and look at the cesspool of a place it is. Companies do not censor content because they have a moral stand or a political agenda, they moderate the content because otherwise it will turn into a shit you wouldn't believe (HN does it to). There is much more trolls on the internet responding to everything they can than legitimate people trying to have a discussion.

New Eternal September started with social media and those not hardened by the internet before have a hard time to just dismiss what they read as 'a troll'

It seems like consumers can't agree on why they are upset with these companies. I don't even think we can agree that a private company shouldn't be making decisions about what information should be allowed or removed.

+1 I have never been “outraged” by something posted on the Internet. Disgusted, disappointed or shocked, sure. But in no case did I think the hosting company was somehow responsible for it.

> Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP.

The thing is, people are never going to agree where the line is drawn. So I’d rather let individual companies decide where they draw the line and if that happens to be not where you’d agree, then you can go support an alternate, if this there are many, who draws the line elsewhere. And for those who don’t want a private entity owning the infrastructure, there is always solutions like IPFS.

> The thing is, people are never going to agree where the line is drawn.

True, but I currently trust the line drawn by the law orders of magnitude more than I trust the one drawn by a bunch of faceless reactionaries at a handful of megacorps.

Also, theoretically, I can participate in changing the law when it's either insufficient or overbearing. I have zero say in the corporate policies of the day.

So user generated fake news is ok, and so is foreign propaganda influencing elections?

The law always lags behind what might defame a company(FB is the most recent example), hence the company ends up being proactive.

Edit: I don't have strong opinions - just sharing a rational argument for being proactive.

No, they're not "ok", but I personally believe that outright censorship is worse. ymmv.

It is a hard problem.

The Govt pontificates about big tech issues without putting in the effort of making laws. Big tech is forced to anticipate what might defame them or be used by the Govt as ammo to garner public sympathy. It is a delicate balancing act between censorship and freedom.

Zuck tried to put the onus on the Govt to define right and wrong, true and false, but to no avail. It is hard to please everybody unfortunately.

I really don’t see the hard part. Just because we consider something to be harmful and negative (like propaganda) doesn’t mean making it illegal is desirable.

Even for the things that are illegal, it can be illegal to publish something but legal to provide connectivity services to the offender.

Net neutrality is not a delicate balance.

Or what’s a tricky edge case you have in mind?

I apologize if I missed your point, but in the case of fake news for instance, iiuc, you're arguing that fake news on FB is legal and that FB isn't responsible for such content on their platform.

Information warfare is fairly real and potent in how it has weakened US democracy and vaccination efforts recently. Ultimately, arguably, this has real consequences for the economy, national security etc.

I am not saying that FB is not responsible. I am saying that FB should not have their services blocked by ISPs or government because of fake news on their platform.

You're correct in your observation but state-sanctioned censorship is not the solution.

In case we're talking around each other; what kind of laws would you like to see put in place?

Agree with the idea.

I don't have strong opinions on solutions here, and don't mind the status quo.

I think the same approach as with spam is best.

If you can determine that a particular piece of information belongs to some unpleasant or dangerous category, mark it as that, like a spam filter does, or vaguely how FB does with posts. Importantly, do not remove it unless the law forces you to.

Then let users switch between the filtered and unfiltered view, or look at the analog of the "Spam" folder.

This allows to study pieces of information that are deemed "controversial" or even "malevolent" and make your own opinion, if you're so inclined.

Even more, it could apply several different cultural filters, like "content likely offensive for X", where X is a major religious or cultural group, much the same way as many providers currently mark content as inappropriate for children.

and then there will be a million "Top 10 things the government doesn't want you to know" videos that amplify whatever it was they were trying to censor

But the point is in not trying to censor.

Twitter does add warnings to tweets that are questionable in their claims (anti vax, fake news etc). Is that what you were thinking?

Better that misguided individuals be free to speak, than misguided self-appointed “fact checkers” silence truth.

A side note: foreign propaganda is not worse than domestic propaganda. Swarms of dedicated activists using rioting and other violence to achieve political goals (the dictionary definition of terrorism), in collusion with a sympathetic tech industry that suppresses any dissenting thought, is propaganda and it does influence elections. When these companies do things like ban Trump, they are illegally making a campaign contribution without abiding by the laws of campaign finance. When they do things like censor discussions of the lab leak theory, they propagandize the entire world by freeing the CCP of the bare minimum for accountability.

I am not a fan of any approach here and largely agree with you.

Media censorship did very well exist in pre-tech journalism as well and was more blatant. Eg. Iraq war WMD claims etc. Big tech censorship mirrors this but in a very limited manner since we know it is happening at any point in time and such information is available outside of the major platforms, which wasn't the case pre mainstream internet.

Ultimately, big tech regulation of content is similar to how a WSJ or NYT would manage what they publish. They've been forced into this position with all the criticism over the last few years - it isn't something they wanted to invest in. It looks more like censorship because of the stepping back from the previously laissez faire approach to content, whereas NYT's baseline was self regulation (so it wasn't as apparent). Big tech media is privately held like a bar or a restaurant and in my opinion have every right to control who is on the platform and what is not ok to say - if one doesn't like it - they can leave.

> So user generated fake news is ok, and so is foreign propaganda influencing elections?

I mean... yes? People are ultimately responsible for their own worldview and vote. They are also perfectly entitled to consume any information from any source they please, aren't they?

Well if you live in the US - not really.

If you live in a more populous state like California, you have much less voting power in the Senate and somewhat less voting power in the house and the executive office.

I can much more easily leave a company that I don’t like than the government. A company does not have the power of the state to impose its will on me.

This is the same government that less than a year ago wanted to come down on Saturday Night Live for being mean and is passing laws on the state level right now to forbid teachers from teaching history that doesn’t conform to it’s world view.

It never ceases to amaze me that people want to give the same entity more power that can and will actually take your freedom away.

> is passing laws on the state level right now to forbid teachers from teaching history that doesn’t conform to it’s world view

That’s one version of the story. The other version is that teachers under direction from their union (NEA) are teaching unfactual revisionist history (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-proje...), mixed with a near-religious activist ideology (https://areomagazine.com/2019/01/25/the-theory-of-white-frag...), and corrupting education by converting schools into political indoctrination centers.

The easiest answer for all these problems is decentralization and choice. Google and other tech companies are effectively governments. They hold power and influence over billions, are insulated from competition by network effects, and also regularly act in monopolistic ways. They need to be broken up and regulated.

Can any of these companies arrest me because I “fit the description” or take away my life and liberty? It’s a fact that because of the way that the US is setup between the electoral college, two senators per state and gerrymandering it’s not “majority rule”. This isn’t political. It’s the Constitution as designed.

Until tech companies can take away property via imminent domain, money via civil forfeiture, or put me in jail, they are not anything like the government.

They are more powerful than governments because they can influence all those things by propagandizing the public to shape their opinion.

Poppycock!

A. Private companies cannot force you to do a single thing! Governments have entire agencies and departments dedicated to keeping people they deem dangerous in line, using a list of powers up to and including the right to take their citizens lives, if they do choose. No private company has this kind of power! Not even close!

B. People are not empty vessels, free to be molded by wiley corporate villains. People possess values and opinions, and (much to the chagrin of both corporations and politicians) it is very difficult to change people's minds.

> A company does not have the power of the state to impose its will on me.

No, but it may have the economic power of a (near or total) monopoly to do that which - depending on the time and the place - may be more powerful than the state.

So tell me in what realistic scenario can any of the tech companies “impose their will on me”?

>A company does not have the power of the state to impose its will on me.

Yet.

So tell me in what scenario can any of the large tech companies put me in jail, take away my money or arrest me?

I don't think it's hard to extrapolate from current conditions. Corporations are currently quite powerful - they control the main lever of politics, which is money. They are already using those levers to bend governments to their will, and utilizing pet governments to produce favorable tax conditions in certain countries to reduce their contribution to others. Eventually, there will be small governments that are almost entirely puppet states of large corporations. Eventually those corporate states will grow and consolidate and you'll live in a world where corporations have as much or more power than some small legitimate countries, then some medium ones, then eventually some large ones, and finally more power than anyone else.

Corporations like amazon and google might not be self-perpetuating due to the entropy concentration inherent in companies that get that large but imagine if you had a organization of that size controlled by an AI officer team. It'll happen, just a matter of how long it takes.

So I listed all the things a powerful government can do - control the media to enhance their worldview and threaten to take away private party, arrest and kill innocent people with immunity, take away freedom over petty crimes, etc.

And I should be more worried about corporations evading taxes?

I can tell you I’m much less worried about walking into any of the Big Tech companies and being treated unfairly than I am driving down the street and being harassed by instruments of the government.

As far as using AI to discriminate. Law enforcement and the government has been discriminating for hundreds of years. They don’t need AI to decide to harass me.

I’m a European so I’m usually one of the first to defend legislation of companies. But when it comes to censorship that should entirely be down to the platform. Some platforms might have a no nudity policy, some have a zero trolling rule. Others call fair game to all of the above. Different people like to engage on different levels: some are into high brow arts, others just want to trade stories about getting smashed on drugs. And there’s a whole plethora of interests in between from mums talking about the different shades of brown their kids have squeezed out this week to teenagers talking about nipple slips. None of them have any less right to talk in a safe space than the other. So why should there be a law disclosing what people can talk about?

Ok, I agree that Q Anon, anti-vax chat and so on and so forth causes more harm than good. But is it really the governments place to dictate that? What if the government was the one setting these narratives (not that hard to imagine given Trump and Johnson are two of the biggest serial liars in western political history)? Remember Trump threatened to shut Twitter down because Twitter fact checked Trumps post about election rigging.

For free speech to work, you absolutely need companies to be responsible for what they consider acceptable content rather than the government to dictate it.

" Some platforms might have a no nudity policy, some have a zero trolling rule. Others call fair game to all of the above. "

If this all came with a duty of interoperability, I would be fine with that. But walled gardens that do their utmost to make leaving them really unpleasant and possibly expensive to the users ... that sounds a lot like coercion. And European law usually recognizes that individuals coerced, even softly, by large businesses, need protection.

That’s a separate problem though and should be handled like so. Dictating in law what content independent platforms can and cannot disallow doesn’t solve the walled garden problem. It just places greater challenges on new entrants / would-be competitors while still allowing walled gardens to exist. Plus you also then lose the diversity of TOS that might attract new users to new platforms. It’s a lose/lose outcome that doesn’t even attempt to solve the problem you’re identifying.

No, they should host everything until legally obligated otherwise. If CP was legal they should host it, and if you have moral qualms with that notion you should write your local representative and let them know what content should be regulated.

They are a business, how can you mandate that a private business has to host "everything".

The same way we regulate any business and mandate they abide by regulation. Or the same way we force phone companies to be regulated as common carriers. The same way your power utility cannot cut you off based on your political opinion. All it takes is political will.

Title II Common Carrier regulations.

I'm not entirely sure that's the best model for today, but that's the historic model for a private business that's compelled to allow all legal speech. That's why UPS and FedEx still have to deliver to the New Order (the current incarnation of the American Nazi party).

People join specific social groups because of conversational bias. It might be a mums group where the content is mainly baby related. Or a theatre group with talks about fine arts. Or a retro gaming group that talks about old computer games. They will have policies in place to ensure the content of their group stays focused. Some groups will be aimed at families or being safe for work so might have a no nudity rule. Some might have a no trolling rule because they want a friendly atmosphere. Some might have a no sales rule because they don’t want their group to turn into yet another market place. These are all TOS, censorship rules if you will, that are placed in specialist groups.

Your reasoning would say I could join a kids cartoon group and post extreme pornography because it’s legal and if any parents object then they should have the law changed to ban porn for everyone.

Quite obviously that’s a dumb way of managing online content. Let the platforms manage what content they deem appropriate for their specific audiences and if you really want a zero-censorship community then you personally should join one rather than forcing every man, woman and child into wading through the same content you personally enjoy.

I partly agree with you. But who gets to make those decisions at Google and what happens to your data when they do? These massive corporations have found that they don't need to value customer support and that includes immediately blocking you from everything you have at their discretion.

> But who gets to make those decisions at Google

Does it really matter who? The point is it is a corporate term of service and if anyone doesn’t like it then they’re free to use another platform (of which there are many).

> what happens to your data when they do?

That’s a more interesting question. In an ideal world everyone would have offline backups of anything posted online but clearly that’s an unrealistic expectation. I’d hope the platform would offer its users a path to migrate off, even if their account has been publicly banned. Sadly history has demonstrated that’s almost never the case.

Maybe that is where the government legislation needs to be? Stating that banned accounts have a grace period to back up their content?

> These massive corporations have found that they don't need to value customer support and that includes immediately blocking you from everything you have at their discretion.

I agree but that’s a tangential point and legislating that Google et al host any content and all legal content wouldn’t fix the customer service problem.

The problem is that these companies are open and free until the point where they gain a significant network effect. Once they are in a position to aggressively eliminate competition they start appointing themselves as the arbiters of truth.

I agree that they should be able to change their policies but if they are going to edit content then they should be treated like any other publication that has editors and be held legally responsible for the content that they publish.

A better approach would be to give the user an option to select between filtered and unfiltered content on install with the default being unfiltered and the filtering being provided by the users preferred third party entity.

The great thing about the internet is if you don’t agree with Facebook, Twitter or Google’s TOS you can use another platform or even publish your own platform.

People might talk about FAANG as having “monopolies” but the web was built on independent Joes hosting personal websites and if the content is good then people will eventually find their way there. And we’ve seen the rise of other social platforms precisely because people have felt they wanted to communicate under differed TOS, so this isn’t even a theoretical point.

> Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP.

Self harm, terrorism, revenge porn, fabricated news. Just to name a few.

Internet is very different from what we experienced in the 90s. The ingress barrier guaranteed good content (or at least entertaining content). Now the barrier to content submission has been lowered so much that really anything makes on the Web and this is not good. There are reasons, after all, for having locks on entrance doors, right?

I am quite happy that Google "got the message" from regulators that misinformation is a real danger and we should apply zero tolerance to web polluters.

I say allow even CP. Take the whole system of control right out of the equation. Make the service 100% free, like sunshine, warming saint and sinner alike.

Then, after we have that working, and we want to remove the CP, find another way. Do it on the client side or whatever.

Yeah. I think there is very little I see that should be censored beyond holocaust denial. Maybe CP.

Oh... it's only you that gets a "...but for the stuff I believe is harmful" in there?

>Within the law

Within the law from which jurisdiction? :-)

In 2006/07 they bought YouTube and Doubleclick. That is the inflection point on the evil meter.

Very little beyond CP seriously. Why do you think the sufferinf of an abused child is somehow the only horror we should censor.

Religious domination, violent intimidation, subtle suggestive manipulation, outright marketing lies, even government propaganda should all be censored to some extent to just be within the law

These plarforms must be editors and yes it means less trash / second being published.

> To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP.

And, just to make the point of how hard it is to get consensus here, I'll disagree with you about the CP under some conditions.

I think others will too.

For example some would say that voluntarily made CP (e.g. 17 year old's nude pics) should be uncensored, others might just include an exception for simulated images, still others would say allow everything as long as there's a very low likelihood of victim or victim's connections stumbling across it and no money is changing hands.

Do you support the right of others to host content you consider violent or garbage?

Generally yes, but that depends on what we're talking about exactly.

Specifically I noted my willingness to use their services / indirectly support that company if I have the choice.

In a free society sites like liveleaks and wikileaks absolutely have a right to exist. As well as all the fringe conspiracy sites.

The problem with censorship by Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Google is different. Here the government is putting pressure on the tech companies to censor content they don't like. Censor the bad people or risk antitrust action.

It's so gross and so clearly in violation of the first amendment. Even elected officials and professors are not exempted. It doesn't matter if you're elected by the people or if you're an expert in your field, if you say something that is considered 'misinformation' by the Ministry of Truth you get censored. It's outrageous, and if big tech doesn't change course we need to start building alternative platforms. But it might already be too late.

It doesn’t matter if competing platforms are built. Normal people don’t care one way or another, especially outside of how those other platforms are popularly characterized, so those other platforms will never take off. Only a minority of people are conscious of their liberties and subsequently any potential infringement to them.

> Normal people don’t care one way or another...

As far as I can tell, no shift of the overton window begins with 'normal people', rather it always ends with 'normal people'. Any campaign of this nature is a long and sustained effort over months and years. One requiring that normal people precede them on the wave of change is a guarantee that one will never begin to move in the first place.

All of the major platforms of today will surely be replaced eventually. Snapchat and TikTok came seemingly out of nowhere in roughly the same FAANG environment as today.

This is the problem, isn't it? You seem to be posting an easy question to answer. But it's not, is it? Who is Google to judge what anyone would "consider violent or garbage?"

I don't remember electing them to control this aspect of life. And where does it stop? What is the line? Who is actually defining these things?

When a small group of people control the definition of "wrong think" then we're gonna have a problem regardless of which side of the argument those people are on.

While your question is innocent enough, I get the feeling you already knew the answer.

> This is the problem, isn't it? You seem to be posting an easy question to answer. But it's not, is it? Who is Google to judge what anyone would "consider violent or garbage?"

You aren't even touching on the complexities. The original article was about "misleading content". Google is asserting that they will take action on "content that deceives, misleads, or confuses users".

Good grief.

Speech is violence nowadays. Silence is also violence.

One of these days, I'm going to go live in the woods and no internet. People clearly do not want a free society anymore so I may as well just check out.

If only we could leave our respective countries and self organize voluntarily into new ones.

Until then, those of us with kids, can't afford to checkout. We have to secure a future for our children.

Or just migrate to a country that aligns more with your views, like many immigrants have done and do today. John Locke never said anything about needing form new ones.

The, "Won't somebody please think of my children" excuse is a little selfish considering there are people with differing opinions (who may or may not have children too).

> Speech is violence nowadays. Silence is also violence.

Also: their violence is speech.

would be great if fbk and twitter did the same thing!

any group like 'occupy democrats' 'vets against trump' - would be gone.

If they would do these to the search results, most of the news sites would not longer have top positions! I'm liking this now.

"content that deceives, misleads, or confuses users"

- funny that I used to ask people on fbook some years ago when they posted some things, 'do you believe the thing you are re-posting is true or fake? Is it funny or serious? Do you think your 'followers' think it's true when they see you post it?

Trying to determine the understanding of the re-poster - but also the 'intent' of them re-sharing - sadly I think most of the time it was to 'deceive' aka virtue signal tribe thing - even when they admitted things may not be true, they still wanted the thing posted and shared - and knowing others may not look at it and not know it's not true.

need to think on this longer. Wait, when g/f/t thought the hunter laptop was fake they affected our national elections and discourse, when they did not care if golden shower oppo research was true or fake it affected real world stuff.

Not so sure these folks can be trusted with deciding what should be shared as true/false actually. The reach and effects of these decisions are large and serious.

>Who is Google to judge what anyone would "consider violent or garbage?"

They own and operate a service called Google Drive. They offer that service under whatever terms they decide. And the decisions they make are relevant to their own service. They likely also don't allow you to use their service to distribute illegal material.

>I don't remember electing them to control this aspect of life. And where does it stop? What is the line? Who is actually defining these things?

Google has the right to make this decision on their own platform. They don't have the right to make this decision outside of their platform, and are not attempting to do so. They're not a government. They cannot control what other sites do. They don't have an army. They're not burning textbooks or jailing teachers. They're not controlling the definition of "wrong think."

If you don't like what they're doing, you're welcome not to use their service. Google Drive isn't the only cloud-based document backup service by a long shot.

> The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like ... and get upset when they don't host the stuff we do like.

Yet it is rational to oppose distribution of what you think is wrong and promote distribution of what you think is right. You must have a hidden premise in there somewhere.

That is rational, yes. I think pretty much everyone thinks this way, with differing definitions of both "promote" and "oppose", and "wrong" and "right".

Though I may be misunderstanding what you are getting to here.

I think most religion is wrong, yet I'm not opposing that. I also think genocide is wrong, and yes, I'll oppose that. Same with anti-vax rhetoric.

While religion can be a real negative, it isn't generally the goal and often, there are good intentions. Genocide hurts people, though, through its nature. Anti-vaccine propaganda hurts folks as well. You simply cannot have these movements without hurting folks.

Some religions have hurting people codified in their main directives - so some should be stopped from being shared.

Ponzi schemes? Crypto investments? Drugs? Gambling? Alcohol recipes? Sugar?

i-robot protect us all with truth! (except hunter laptop, and lab leak theory - hide those haha)

Actually - I am kind of okay with this new kindergarten gloves way of treating the people - let's give them the sharing a ability they deserve. California knows best what's good for everyone - just don't talk bad about beef. Well you may have to censor that in some other parts of the world.

Different kindergarten for different countries? different states?

Think how much better and safer this internet world is going to be without all these bad things!

Is it rational, though? Maybe for a certain type of politically active person. But I believe in free expression (the principle kind, in addition to the 1st amendment kind), so it seems to me it is not rational for me to oppose the distribution of anything legal. Or is it irrational of me to have principles, rather than being maximally self-interested or social-utopia-utilitarian?

The thing is you are "promoting distribution of what you think is right" literally right now. Like, with this very comment right here, you are being politically active!

So, assuming you are acting rationally, you are right now promoting what you think is "right" ("anything legal", "1st amendment" eg the United States's Constitution), while countering what you think is "wrong".

If you didn't believe in the promotion of what you think is right, then you wouldn't be posting to argue against what you think is wrong! You would never upvote (bias) or downvote (censorship) and so on. Sure, you could argue that your style of promotion (comments on HN), or that promoting your worldview in general is better for certain outcomes, but ultimately your still just arguing for "freedom" in your particular definition of "freedom" (still promoting or opposing distribution of right/wrong)

I think you are equivocating. I don’t oppose the distribution of any other opinion. I don’t like those opinions, but I’m not trying to make it harder for anyone to say them. And trying to change someone’s mind about it is not at all the same as “opposing distribution” regardless of whether it has the same intent or potential effect.

I'm not trying to equivocate here (or be combative, I hope this is an interesting discussion for both of us!). I'm being serious: I consider downvoting to be "opposing distribution" of a statement by definition, since it limits the distribution, although perhaps not very effective if done by yourself.

> regardless of whether it has the same intent or potential effect.

I disagree, and I think I'm in the majority to have more outcomes-based ethics [1]

What I'm trying to get across is that you are "politically active", whether you think you are or not. "Activism" can literally involve just a bunch of friends on an online platform upvoting and downvoting. Even just a small group of people doing this can even be effective censorship in certain contexts, such as local elections. Sure, Google may have more cost-effective means of censorship --- larger political campaigns have to pay firms LOADS to bury stories or control online discourse without access to the power Google has --- but it's still the same result, just a matter of who calls the shots and cost-efficacy.

You might argue that controlling discourse like this is not censorship or unethical based on your definition, but as you said it can have the same intent and has the same potential effect, so to another perspective, perhaps one that places less value on the USA constitution, it most certainly is.

[1] About 90%, in the case of a survey question about the trolley problem - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem#Survey_data

How would my being mildly politically active on HN contradict my belief that it is rational for me to encourage the distribution of legal speech, without regard for agreement with the content? I feel like you’re trying to chide me by reminding me that I’m engaging in politics. Yes, I’m engaging in politics. I just don’t see what that has to do with the thrust of my objection.

Your point about downvotes being censorship is troubling and gives me pause. I think it’s only censorship because of how HN fades the comment towards illegibility. But I have always thought that is a user-hostile design choice. I’d much rather you could see the score, but still be able to read them easily. I have spent enormous amounts of time carefully reading people I disagree with.

(FWIW, I did not downvote you, and I do so rarely.)

> I’d much rather you could see the score, but still be able to read them easily.

I agree. Actually I'd almost forgotten they did that since I use the StyleBot extension and have ".commtext { color: black; }" in the CSS for this site, which overrides the fading. I also enabled the setting to show "dead" comments; they aren't always worth reading, but it happens more often than you might think.

Actually that's another aspect in its own right—HN doesn't just fade downvoted comments but removes them altogether if they're downvoted enough. And sometimes comments are actually deleted by the administrators and not just marked as "dead" and hidden from the page by default. It's their site, and I would uphold their right to not be forced to host comments they object to against their will, but there is some actual censorship going on and not just convenient "curation" of what shows up clearly in the default view.

I don't see downvotes as censorship when the downvoted comment is still available for those who care to read it, and not actually deleted. To me it's more of an indication that, in the reader's opinion, the comment was perceived as not contributing to the discussion. In general I prefer to upvote the good comments and save the downvotes for trolling, flamebait, etc. which would be likely to derail the thread. To put it in words, an upvote is like saying "check this out" while a downvote is either "don't waste your time" or "this thread belongs somewhere else". But you can still see the downvoted comments if you want.

> How would my being mildly politically active on HN contradict my belief that it is rational for me to encourage the distribution of legal speech, without regard for agreement with the content? [...] I just don’t see what that has to do with the thrust of my objection.

Yeah I'm not really making my point clear here, sorry.

My point is that a "values-neutral" platform doesn't exist, and every attempt to build such a thing is usually only "values-neutral" from the perspective of it's creator. For example, I'd argue there's a contradiction even in the way you phrased it here: "Legal speech" implies you are indeed giving "regard for agreement with the content", since this would imply suppressing content that is not in agreement with some legal framework you have in mind.

> I think it’s only censorship because of how HN fades the comment towards illegibility.

It's not just that. Upvotes promotes one position over the other, so when one considers statistical properties of how far people scroll down, or how likely people are to expand low-voted comments or go to another page (for platforms like Reddit, HN, etc), the effect can be the same.

It's interesting to see that as online platforms gradually replace "traditional" journalism for how people get information, we're rehashing a some of the same old arguments about what is "objective" journalism. Publishing ANYTHING, whether physical documents (eg newspapers) or HTML documents (eg HN, Facebook), will always promote some worldview and censor another based on what is included in the publication, and the ordering of the topics.

Sometimes this censorship is explicit (eg nixing a story, Google taking down a search result), other times it's done statistically (eg putting stuff "below the fold", a search result being on page 10), but our informational world is perpetually being shaped like this. Pretending that's it's even logically possible have unbiased platforms "without regard for agreement with the content" --- as an example, not you, but elsewhere here it was claimed 2010-2016 was mostly censorship-free --- is starting off on a wrong premise. If we start on a wrong premise, any further discussion is meaningless at best, and actively manipulative at worse (Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan comes to mind)

> (FWIW, I did not downvote you, and I do so rarely.)

Thanks, I avoid this also!

It's obviously rational otherwise you wouldn't have brought up legality. We already do this and agree that it is rational.

It's rational only if you don't think those powers will ever be turned against you. Once you realize what you're creating is a mechanism to censor rather than a particular instance of censorship, self interest should force you to realize that the censorship mechanism that you're supporting can be turned against you.

> The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like ... and get upset when they don't host the stuff we do like.

Is this actually true? I only think certain fringe Twitter groups are mad that companies host controversial things.

Man I'd love to find test that theory scientifically.

Complacence might be a better descriptor than mad/outraged. For example nobody really gets up in arms over companies choosing not to host (what they deem to be) pornography for example, and various bans of risqué content and the people who produce them from major platforms tend to get a lukewarm response from people who are otherwise vocal about free speech (see: the USA's FOSTA/SESTA)

There is a long history of people in the USA and elsewhere being mad that companies host certain things - pornography was illegal to distribute for decades because of such beliefs, and is still segregated from non-pornographic content, and shunned by all regular advertisers (you won't see Coca-Cola ads or Beats headphones on pornographic sites) for precisely this reason.

I am absolutely happy if a company is ready to host everything legal.

host some violent folks' content

Consider the Irish Troubles. Consider the US Civil Rights movement.

Isn't US Civil Rights movement notable for its nonviolence overall? MLK emphasized asserting basic human rights, so that the violence of the state should be seen more clearly by contrast.

The US revolutionary movement might be a more clear example where violent action was decisive.

> we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like

I'd argue that there is already a (fairly) tried and tested process in place to deal with this, it's the legal system.

There are plenty of media outlets that publish stuff I don't particularly like, but almost none of it is illegal, so - to be blunt - I just have to suck it up.

Some of my friends have opinions that I - at times - violently disagree with, but I file that under one of the side effects of life, and I deal with it.

I'm rarely "outraged" by companies hosting stuff. If it's illegal, knock yourself out and get it taken down.

However if it's just really, really annoying or you find it against your own worldview, perhaps take a deep breath / drink a cup of tea* / go to the gym / hug your OH, and move on to something more important?

* or gin :)

I think rather than "violently" you meant to say "vehemently." If not then ignore this comment. If so then you should probably edit as the two have important differences in meaning.

I believe "violently" can have two different meanings, the first involving the use of physical force, the second meaning "strong" or "vigorous".

All my violent disagreements are the latter not the former! :)

There are two more ways to deal with content we don't like. We've largely abandoned these to our great harm:

1) Get to know people in your community who hold differing opinions. We all need to be doing this more - fostering friendship over the things we have in common. This isn't easy, but the Western world used to be far better at it.

2) Engage in healthy debate, which means advocating a specific opinion in a public way -- either speech, column in your local newspaper, etc. -- with carefully researched references/sources, no ad-hominem attacks, assuming good faith and intent on the part of those who disagree, and respect for the differing opinions of others.

Imagine if every local community did (1) and (2) -- people would be a lot happier and would be less likely to hold unsupportable opinions, since even cursory research (i.e. prior to publicly arguing in favor of them) would show those opinions have no basis in reality.

There seems to be an immense body of research that shows that good ideas do not win out over bad ideas.

What's worse than a bad idea? A forced idea (or ideology) and the lack of freedom to express a contrary opinion.

The real problem isn't those who disagree with you or hold "bad ideas", it's those who would take away everyone's freedom to disagree in peace.

The idea anyone's freedom of speech is silenced because they can't say what they want through their preferred megaphone is ridiculous.

The idea that these megaphone institutions can and must act as arbiters of what's "ok" speech and what's not is socially untenable.

The best marker of sweeping political radicalism is when no one is allowed to be neutral anymore--not even news outlets or public forums. When everything is political and everyone is forced out of political neutrality, we're in big trouble as a society.

"If you're not for us, you're against us" is an ominous statement in any context, and when that becomes a mainstream political cry, it signals that freedom itself is coming to an end (not to mention freedom of speech).

It's 100% social tenable.

You could never walk into a private bar and demand the right to hand out Nazi propaganda, solely on the merits that "well, that's where all the people are!!"

As for neutrality, there are plenty of actively neutral companies, in action, today. They're just not very popular. Because they're filled with horrible people who demand the right to say horrible things. And no one wants to hang out with those people.

Now that the market has decided horrible beings aren't entitled to anyone else's space, the horrible human beings are insisting that the big mean bullies be forced, through threat of violence, to tolerate them.

It's nonsense all the way down.

That doesn't seem to square with the progress civilization has made over the last several centuries. We no longer torture animals, treat humans as property, believe in the 'evil eye', etc.

While it might be fun to debate the specifics of those claims, let's pretend I inserted the word "always" in my statement.

The legal system isn't great for this as it tends to listen to the one with the most expensive lawyers, especially in the US. And companies like Google have a lot of expensive lawyers.

> The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like

If by "we" you mean US politicians and mass media, then sure. But I'm not sure that's true for the general populace in the US, nor for other countries.

On another note - I don't like that they host things, at all. That is, I don't like that the entity which runs a search engine is also the one which hosts a large part of the videos available for free on the Internet. Or that a company making popular computing hardware like Apple is also the host and gatekeeper for mobile apps, podcasts etc.

I think another error is assuming that having all content within a few hyper-scale hyper-global ad-supported commercial repositories of everything is a natural or healthy state of affairs. Many small websites dedicated to particular things is IMO generally better both from a free speech and a moderation standpoint than these giants that have to thread an impossible needle. In other words, web 1.0 was better.

Can't agree more.

>Turns out, not even Apple is that messiah

They were, just no longer the same under Tim Cook.

I dont want to derail the discussion into another political debate but my thesis, is that some ideology spread like plague in Silicon Valley. The Good vs Evil. As the OP said Google stated off being good, but somewhere along the line the definition of Good got twisted a little bit. They keep thinking they were so righteous they literally started a crusade or witch-hunt ( so to speak ).

And it is in some way interesting because it rhymes with many historical events.

Quite relevant quote:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

- John Dalberg-Acton

>> Turns out, not even Apple is that messiah

> They were, just no longer the same under Tim Cook.

Steve "we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone" Jobs liked making devices for everyone but definitely not for everything they might want to do on them.

What makes you think the government is that Messiah? Is it likely, in your view, that the government will go out of their way to "encourage the spread of misinformation"? I'm not seeing that happening.

>What makes you think the government is that Messiah?

I didn't get that impression from that post...

I don't think izacus suggested it was. My read: there is no messiah, and a system of checks and balances is how we protect the public interest.

In the EU, governments and actually trying very hard to discourage the spread of misinformation, as well as passing legislation that the tech sector has always claimed was not needed. So yes, it's very likely, as it's already happening.

I mean, I don’t really think this holds up. I have personally dropped all Google products I use in favor of privacy-focused alternatives. For example, GA>Fathom, Gmail>Protonmail, etc. So I’m sure privacy-focused competitors will pop up soon, or perhaps they already exist and I simply don’t know of them because I’m not a big user of the OP’s listed Goog products.

The market has most certainly spoken: we prefer privacy, and we no longer want to be a product. Competition will come to fill those needs. No need for more government regulation. The free market works.

> The market has most certainly spoken

This laughable arrogance. The market has most certainly spoken but not in the way you and your microcosm think it has. The market doesn't give a fuck about privacy. They want convenience and want to pay as little as they for it. Privacy might seem to be on people's tongues at this moment and it will continue to be still, but only a core few will actually make decisions that inconvenience them in order to achieve it. Only a few million people are leaving services like WhatApp en-masse. 99% of their customers do not give a fuck. They aren't doing drug deals (well some are), they aren't dissidents, they aren't terrorists, they're just every day people going about their business with likely zero real repercussions other than finding it a bit creepy and continuing to scroll. There's probably more people leaving because things have gotten a bit boring and uncool than people taking a principled stand for privacy.

We are, at least currently, outliers. Do not forget that.

I’m referring to the segment of the market I’m in. I didn’t mean ‘the market’ as in 100% market share. I should have said “the market is speaking.” No need to come off as rude.

That, and Google has ~ 20 years of history where they were perfectly fine and they've really only started to act up recently in ways that are, at worst, objectionable and inconvenient without being particularly harmful.

The risks of letting market competition sort it out are much smaller than the risks of making it a political football. As a political topic it is basically going to be two parties fighting over which set of lies get to be true. That won't be better.

I'm really sorry for the off-topic, but I've been waiting for a chance to ask because I see it here very, very often. What are people intending to denote with the "private" in "private company", especially where the company is so obviously and well-known to be public[ally traded]? What are you trying to distinguish it from by calling it private? Are you just pointing out it's not the government or quasi-governmental? Are you emphasizing that it has its own prerogatives?

Sorry, this has just been becoming a peeve for me on this site. I just want to know what you're trying to express by calling a company that is not privately owned, "private". Thanks.

I feel the exact same way. I suspect "Private Company" is being used in relation to Public/Private Sector and not in relation to whether or not the company is publicly traded.

I feel like your sense of it might be right. But even then, you can count the number of public sector "companies" (like Fannie and Freddie) on one hand, so it just strikes me as such a bizarre distinction.

It's not a bizarre distinction. The discussion is about free speech, and a common talking point has to do with comparing the actions of companies to the protections laid out for free speech in the American first amendment.

However, the first amendment is a restriction on government, not a restriction on private individuals or corporations.

Private equity groups are private. My uncle’s construction company is private. Google isn’t private in any sense that isn’t confusing. Why not just say that the 1st amendment doesn’t apply to corporations? That seems clear to me.

And as an aside, how many of us really need to be reminded, several times per day, of the scope of the 1st amendment? Really? Isn’t it more likely it’s a tired debate stopper?

>"And as an aside, how many of us really need to be reminded, several times per day, of the scope of the 1st amendment? Really? Isn’t it more likely it’s a tired debate stopper? "

My feelings exactly. It doesn't accomplish anything and literally adds nothing to the debate. Does the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on excessive fines imposed and cruel and unusual punishment only apply to the government too? Clearly, we can talk about the spirit of the Bill of Rights and apply that to things that aren't literally the government.

> It doesn't accomplish anything and literally adds nothing to the debate.

It's important because to many people (myself included) the spirit of the freedom of speech referred to in the 1st Amendment is that force (i.e. the exercise of government power) is not an appropriate or legitimate response to speech. Censorship in the broad sense involving hosting decisions by these organizations owned and run by private individuals is not a violation of the freedom of speech, because it does not involve the use of force.

> Does the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on excessive fines imposed and cruel and unusual punishment only apply to the government too?

Essentially, yes. The general principle applies to any organization which would take it upon itself to impose fines or punishment… which basically means the government, because the government doesn't let anyone else do that in its territory. For any organization other than the government this rule would go without saying, but since the government claims to be able to impose fines and punishment according to its own rules, unfettered by the rules of proportional response and natural law, this limitation must be made explicit.

>And as an aside, how many of us really need to be reminded, several times per day, of the scope of the 1st amendment? Really?

Yes, that's why people are pre-emptively raising the status of the corporations in question as private - to head off the discussion you're tired of hearing.

Despite that, instead of discussing what the proper ambit of content review should exist, 80% of the thread is still debating whether or not editorial control should exist in the first place; the exact same type of boring, rehashed discussion that adds nothing of value.

Now we're here having a meta discussion about the discussion that ALSO adds nothing of value, so it looks like no matter where we go there's no shortage of ink that leads nowhere :(.

"Man, I really wish people would focus on discussing something more impactful than the same old procedural arguments".

Hah! By saying that you're also not focusing on the real issue. Got You! Hypocrite much? /s

That's why I've got a frowny face there :).

In America you can count the number of public sector 'companies' on one hand but in others you cannot.

And every once in a while, government does take over a company, like GM for a long time was a public company.

You got it, he is emphasizing the fact that google is not a part of the government. I agree that this distinction is kind of annoying for some reason.

The key is in your last paragraph: the companies in question are privately owned in the sense of "private property". In the context of (American) public policy, due to factors such as the First Amendment, the distinction of a company being governmental/public vs non-governmental/private is much more likely to be relevant than it being publicly/privately traded.

My point is 0.0000006% of companies are governmental. In the context of the discussion, nobody is even thinking of those. So, “private” as a qualifier is hot air. It sounds ignorant to me.

Ignorant of what? Publicly (as in government) owned base infrastructure companies (like telecoms, to which Google et. al. are pretty similar in these ethics cases) are not rare in the world at all.

Uhh, this might be a language difference - here the term "public" company usually means a company that's majorly owned by a government.

Companies owned by private individuals (whether they're publicly traded on a stock market or not) are usually referred to as "private".

So that's what I meant - a company not controlled by a government and has no accountability beyond its private owners.

The reason a distinction is drawn is because government has more rules it must follow when interacting with the public than google. Non-governmental entities in the united states are less regulated than the government.

The term "private company" has no relation to whether or not it is traded publicly. It simply means the company is not owned by or controlled by (in some sense) the government, but by "private" individuals

I guessed. I still don't understand why it is necessary to differentiate a category with 1.7 million members from a category with 17 members. Nobody here is ever, ever, ever (almost) discussing government corporations. I don't understand why people don't just say the 1st amendment doesn't apply to corporations. Everyone would know what they mean. Adding "private" suggests they are distinguishing it from something else. And maybe they are, but it always sounds like they're either misspeaking, confused, or repeating a meme.

Aren't most universities public companies even in USA? I know some of them are private, but there must be way more than 17 public ones. Add all the public schools, police departments etc, and you get quite a lot of them.

Doesn't need to be a private company.

For instance, LibreOffice is looking at WASM:

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/WASM

In fact, there is already Collabora, which is production ready, FOSS and based on LibreOffice.

I would much rather live with censorship that can be removed by withholding dollars vs one that requires votes.

Just look at the puritanical rules concerning language and sexuality forced on broadcasters. Those rules are decades old and outdated and will likely remain forever.

When companies fuck up on censorship, the results seem to last only a few years. When governments fuck up, the consequences echo for multiple lifetimes.

Private my ass. I understand the terminology, but they are part of the defacto public domain, and are a publicly owned company. They built their company utilizing the resources and technological prowess of the United States, then piss in its face to cater to woke leftist silicon valley politics (which doesn't represent 90%+ of America).

If that MIT study about the end of the world turns out to be true, THIS type of woke bullshit will be the cause. And when society falls, I have a feeling who's gonna be gunned after first.

What do you suggest? the government takes over Google? Prevents them from controlling what they store on their servers?

If society fails (which is little more than a prepper wet dream) everyone's going to go gunning for whoever has food and fuel. No one will care about Google or political parties.

I'd suggest we protect freedom of speech similar to how we protect civil rights.

Before civil rights, "private businesses" used the same exact excuse as big tech while refusing customers based on race.

In the current setup, big tech thrives risk-free via governmental protections separating them from their customers (or what their customers post on the platform). The underlying concept of social media has become a public utility, and should be protected as such. Once big tech began altering visibility of posts based on politics (in any way/shape/form), they crossed the Rubicon.

> What happened to having specialized agencies regulate and inspect industries?

Government agencies tend get packed with appointees whose political interests undermine the agency's original charter.

I agree with everything except "I think your fundamental error is in the fact that you think" - I don't think this, and I don't think my post implied that I think that either.

To clarify my statement: "We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information." - I don't think that the structure provided by a company is sufficient to do this properly. Rather than companies/governments, we need protocols and standards. For instance, what if we had a decentralized app (dapp) built on something like cardano, that allowed one to edit docs that lived on an IPFS? We might have to sacrifice some micro-conveniences (e.g. google docs saves automatically for you as often as every few keystrokes) to make it tenable on something like a blockchain, but it seems feasible.

Honestly a lot of folks should assess the value that big tech provides. We survived the 90’s running MSDOS backing stuff up to disks. And storage is cheap. Cloud this-and-that is great in theory but in practice it makes things too complicated. For instance, whenever I use a cloud-centric application I’m thinking okay… so where’s my files? And the answer is who knows!

More specifically I used to use OneNote when it used the local file system and I could get to my data. Then MSFT puts everything behind a cryptic ten-layer hashed URI…

The tech industry is like an insurance company now selling people on fear of losing files or productivity—but I’d wager more often than not technology gets in the way of folks productivity. By technology I mean fluffy clouds because obviously tech CAN help.

We need a better balance and a lot of that starts by keeping it simple.

> What happened to having specialized agencies regulate and inspect industries?

A lot of censorship has traditionally been governments threatening to regulate industries if they don't self regulate, and that's pretty much what's been going on.

we could get a lot closer if markets were well-regulated for fairness and competitiveness. instead, we get all sorts of distortions, some well-meaning but most not. one sign of a good market dynamic is a lot of medium-sized companies, rather than very large or very small, because that means the companies have taken advantage of economies of scale but no one firm has outsized advantage, so all must still compete.

to that end, google, facebook, et al. should each probably be split up into dozens of companies to start, with stong privacy, portability and interoperability standards/mandates at minimum.

I wonder how long it takes until your imho very true observations will be heard.

Splitting up of these internet behemoths is so much overdue!

Heard? By whom? Monopoly-capitalism directly benefits rulers, complaining to the very people who have incentives to keep the system as it is will not change anything. You and your fellow citizens have to actually do something.

Government regulation is no substitute for competition. The ability for consumers to walk away to a suitable alternative maintains a continual accountability that a single agency is unlikely to deliver.

I’ve walked away from Facebook, but I’m still negatively impacted by their algorithm which promotes anger, division, and conspiracy theories.

This actually highlights the point well I think. The cost of walking away from Facebook is too high for most people even though they know its' bad for them.

Take myself for example. I only ever get angry when I browse my facebook feed and for some reason I've actually taken steps to ensure I get angry when I browse my own feed (chalk it up to silicon magic). I would like to leave facebook, but if I do I'd lose messenger which is the easiest and most consistent way for me to keep in contact with dozens of people (who mostly don't make me angry).

If facebook protocols were open source, then by now I would likely have dozens of different options to take my friend's list to a messenger only app that does not include a feed for me to angrily browse.

Lowering the cost to leave is a benefit to everyone since it reduces the reach of that anger inducing feed.

And how old are you? I don't think it's too much to expect for you to be able to manage your own emotions by now. FB has nothing to do with that.

Isn't the Messenger app a "messenger only app that does not include a feed for me to angrily browse."? They also seem to have standalone web and desktop versions at messenger.com

We still need there to be suitable alternatives, so there needs to be some regulation at least, to encourage competition and/or to prevent companies from reaching a point where there are no longer alternatives.

There is a category of companies that doesn't try to be a content arbiter. Common carriers, utilities, other services that have an obligation to contract.

Of course the "contract" with SNPs is that you "pay" with your eyeballs falling on adverts, and the ads in turn don't want to be anything like common carriers. So turning any web service into something like a common carrier would have interesting knock-on effects.

I think your fundamental error is the fact that you think that a regulatory agency can fix these issues. It seems that many people on HN are just waiting for the new Savior government body, that will magically do something ethical and correct for all of the citizens, and not just some politicians like every other government body in history.

Did it occur to you that maybe the GP wasn’t suggesting a company solve the problem and was hinting at open source + open protocol?

1. The GP said nothing about any savior company. They said "We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority".

2. You seem to be saying here that you want a specialized agency to do censorship right, as one centralized decision maker. Am I misunderstanding? A Ministry of Truth?

I'd say that this decision by Google stems from regulators and public opnion bashing against misinformation.

Private companies follow the wind of the policies that are there to coerce them. In this case, the policy that is being put in place is that misinformation is dangerous and should be countered.

In 5 years, misinformation could be relegated to Tor networks, where it belongs.

> It's like hoping for market competition create health regulation in the food industry.

Why is it like that and not like gas stations not allowing smoking so their property doesn't go up in flames? It's really strange to think market forces must always be against consumer, there can be mutual benefit if the right incentives are put in place.

There are absolutely lots of regulations around fire near gas stations, why did you think that gas station owners made those rules? They have to follow them or they will lose their permit and get shut down.

The fundamental issue is companies dealing with out data when they should just be making hardware or software.

In the old days, computer companies made the hardware and government institutions used that to run the internet. This is how it should be. Companies should not be touching our data directly. They simply cannot handle the responsibility.

I would much rather have a even just a handful of private companies be the regulators rather than a single entity.

If our founding fathers had one guiding principle, it was to distribute power as much as possible as power has a strong tendency to concentrate and corrupt.

I often wonder whether the solution is setting the expectation with companies that if they act in bad faith, their leadership will be om nom nommed? Apologies for the metaphor, it's the best I could come up with on short notice.

As people remind us all the time, it’s not a violation of the right to freedom of expression if a private company stops letting you use their services. It is a violation of that right if the government does so.

> What happened to having specialized agencies regulate and inspect industries?

The whole point of free speech was not to have a government agency regulating and inspecting what you are allowed to say.

competition definitely can make things better. But we aren’t seeing enough competition and these companies are engaging in anti-competetive behavior without much consequences.

> What happened to having specialized agencies regulate and inspect industries?

My guess is a combination of regulatory capture and apathy on the part of citizens for various reasons.

executive agencies should inspect and enforce, but not regulate. That is the legislature's job and they cannot felegate it beyond "implementation details". We have been too lenient with this so we get the FCC, FDA, EPA, ATF etc flipflpping on what amount to laws instead of details with every change of administration. That isn't how its supposed to work. Congress decides laws, no one else.

In the other hand, government agencies are not saviors either.

The problem is the government is pushing the same agenda

I personally think nobody should have this kind of power.

What happens is the government makes things worse.

What happened to regulation of private companies?

Easy answer. The modern GOP happened.

Well by all means regulate, but realistically, for example, if we had a Google Drive run by the 'other side' of the political aisle (kind of like Gab v Twitter), then if Google banned certain content, it's unlikely the other would, and vice versa.

Unfortunately, the issue here is companies responding to something other than the market.

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