Big Tech are supposed to be the plumbers, not patricians of internet discourse
bombthrower.com
bombthrower.com
Base reality is, they all make money on selling your attention to advertisers, and they need for you to believe that your encounters with them are "real," serendipitous, and that you aren't just being managed like an animal in an existential zoo. Sure, there are true believers who think abusing trust and technical power to shape narratives is honest and necessary work, and via Twain, there is no argument that will change their mind so long as they are being paid to believe in it. These would not be the first managers to mistake their own credulity for skill.
I'd reject that any of the platforms are seriously combating misinformation, and state it is just another trope in support of the same end, which is the global brandsafing of all public discourse on behalf of their main essential coalition members - the worst, wideley acknowledged, most objectively evil and mendacious organizations in the history of world. If you don't like how a platform puts you on a target list and actively wipes out your social capital and isolates you from your relationships and ability to make a living, people are perfectly free to just go and start up their own purges...
>on behalf of their main essential coalition members - the worst, wideley acknowledged, most objectively evil and mendacious organizations in the history of world.
Very few people seem willing say this out loud. These groups are not your friends, and are often the biggest offenders of many of the things they claim they are trying to prevent. 'the coalition' is social engineering on an industrial scale and it's disgusting regardless of the stated or unstated intentions.
> Sure, there are true believers who think abusing trust and technical power to shape narratives is honest and necessary work
Narrative warfare exists and is not a single agent game. I am not saying this makes narrative shaping defendable, but in the absence of some meaning-making work opportunist opponents will happily fill in the vacuum. This is the slippery slope that escalates to being a true believer of power (ab)use.
In the past, opponent processes of meaning-making was between differing, well-paced journalistic outlets somewhat within consilience distance. Today a) the inter-narrative drift is impossibly larger and b) heavily clustered around partisan dimensions which are themselves pushed away and c) comes out of a 24hr infotainment firehose because finances favor that. We're denial-of-service'd out of thinking for ourselves and the narratives we're given are hopelessly irreconcilable.
> most objectively evil and mendacious organizations in the history of world
There is no such cabal of coordinated evil. In fact, this gnostic belief is part of the narrative that creates ressentiment and nihilism. Emergent foolishness can just be as evil. And it can be countered with emergent, distributed wisdom, not necessarily another billions of dollars worth of a "good" platform.
> Base reality is, they all make money on selling your attention to advertisers,
Selling your attention to advertisers is a relatively minor harm. We are actually pretty good at suppressing noise and get to the signal we want. But the shaping of your attention and emotions that maximize time on site is harmful in a much more durable way. Not only it directly attacks your noise-suppression and relevance-detection heuristics, the more you stay on site the more you're actively trained to be more foolish, reactive and receptive. This bleeds to the rest of your life. It is like an anti-mindfulness training that stupefies you.
The solution is bound to be in the form of a suite of counter-trainings that gives back each individual their agency to realize this is not good for us.
I agree with the solution though, which shouldn't rely on platform moderation whose customers are advertising and PR. The platforms won't have leverage against their own customers here.
This isn't nihilism, nihilism would be ignoring the problem. And on angle to tackle the specific problem of parties wanting to clean up the net in their purpose was the insistence on neutrality and laissez faire moderation.
I think it still is the best course but requires education like you suggested.
I'm sure the platforms manage their ethics, but this idea that we should trust them with moral authority because they deal with evil more than anyone else should be more suspect. I think it is far more likely that they are compromised by interests than resolute defenders of principle. At the end of the day, social media companies are just euphemistic peddlars of nuanced variations of porn, and a we probably shouldn't be relying on them for judgment on the quality of public discourse.
Censorship (to say nothing of the co-ordinated censorship between platforms) is a blunt instrument with a lot of side effects, and people are surely going to start up their own version of something, I'm saying we should think a lot harder about these issues, because we really don't want to be around when people finally get sick of it and start erecting their own platforms.
The fact is we are in the middle of a pandemic and spreading some types of misinformation is directly akin to facilitating the spread of the virus. If you were in a situation where your basic choices were a) use whatever means you have to limit the spread of harmful misinformation or b) do nothing and watch as the thousands of extra dead and suffering pile up, I hope you would have the same basic human decency as these "true believers who abuse technical power" and choose the former.
The actual key issue is somewhere in the middle of that article:
>"When tech companies take it upon themselves to arbitrate what is or isn’t misinformation, or taking action based on events that occur outside of their own platforms what they are doing, at its core, is adjudicating international law"
No, it isn't. It's a private company determining how and who it conducts business with. Being a 'patrician' of your own property is completely fine and in fact a basic right, and if you don't like Mailchimp's content policies, go to a competitor.
Unless someone explains to me, in plain English, why we ought to abolish the very important freedom of deciding for themselves who and how private entities do business with, I don't want to read any essay length pieces any more about the Gulag archipelago, Orwell or how his friend being cancelled by Mailchimp is like being stuck in Soviet Russia.
And to preempt the inevitable "but they're so large!". This is not an indicator of anything. Tech companies are large yes, but competitors are, as Google actually correctly put it at one point, one click away. Size is not an indicator of market power, inability to chose alternatives is.
The explanation for this is the same explanation for why eminent domain exists. If you own a piece of land that will be in the middle of a busy road, in the US you likely can't construct that part of the road yourself and charge people or arbitrarily restrict people from using it - you likely will have to sell it to the US government.
I'm not trying to argue about if this is the ideal way to do things, but the more society views tech companies owning platforms like landowners owning parts of roads, the more government control.
Services and products on the internet however are not landowners. The reason eminent domain exists is because land is not fungible. Mailchimp however does not sit on mail-land. There is nothing that prevents dozens of mailchimp competitors to exist, offering whatever content policies people prefer. Google does not sit on search-land and somehow excludes anyone from building a search engine. Tech companies, in almost all cases, derive their value from the intellectual property that they built, not some sort of analog to land they stumbled upon. If that was the case we would be on MySpace.
I agree. But fungibility isn't a binary thing, it's a spectrum. And how society chooses to regulate goods and services also varies between extremes.
> Google does not sit on search-land and somehow excludes anyone from building a search engine.
Owning a piece of land that will be in the middle of the road doesn't mean the government can't build a different road right? Both google and the landowner just make it harder.
> Tech companies, in almost all cases, derive their value from the intellectual property that they built, not some sort of analog to land they stumbled upon. If that was the case we would be on MySpace.
Couldn't your arguments could be applied just as well against standard eminent domain? I feel like you are saying something analogous to: Most businesses derive their value from the goods and services they developed, not some sort of logo or piece of land they own. That's why the government shouldn't be able to take anyone's land.
The problem is rather __who__ will regulate a __global company__, when infact companies like google arguably hold more political power than many smaller countries do.
It's very important to distinguish between the actual right you have, which is that nobody should be able to compel you to speak, or how to speak, which is a right that in this case Mailchimp has, and the complete reversal of this, namely forcing private entities to host the speech of others, and have the government coerce platforms on behalf of third parties.
The author wants nothing less than a complete reversal on how we treat association and speech on the grounds that in his perception, 'purple haired millenials' run a business in a way that he doesn't approve of.
It is far more obvious to me that there is an inherent right to choose whom you do business with and whom you don't than that there is an inherent right to have a single corporate entity employing unbounded numbers of employees and making unbounded amounts of money. The individual person can buy and sell on their own, without the government; the corporate entity only really works because it is recognized by the government.
To be clear, I'm not claiming that regulations are illegitimate. We do regulate, say, the individual farmer to make sure they're selling actual milk and not melamine. We do regulate the individual storekeeper to obligate them not to discriminate on race. But those regulations are all very measured and designed to solve specific problems (ultimately - protecting those who are even weaker than the individual businessperson).
Mailchimp is not some tech titan. They do not have more political power than any functional government. They are in no sense a monopoly in their industry, and they have exactly one industry, unlike the usual juggernauts that come up here. Calling them "Big Tech" is a clear example of the terrible slippery slope of adding regulations about obligating companies to do business vs. regulating their accrual of power, if that's the real problem.
Any regulation that would apply to Mailchimp would - if it's going to be effective - also have to apply to a startup that wants to be in the same industry. (It may not apply immediately, but it will certainly apply to the startup's medium-term goals, and thus affect its profitability.) If you just want to regulate Google and Facebook, I could almost believe that, but if "Big Tech" includes Mailchimp, who doesn't it include?
What we'll end up with is a system where anyone who wants to do business must have their business plan approved by Big Government, and where a professional specialization in complying with those regulations arises, and where there's a nice revolving door between implementing and enforcing them, and where Google continues to hold more political power than several countries and can engage in regulatory capture. It's hard to imagine that this aligns with the political desires of anyone except the current leadership at Big Tech. (Even the aspirational leadership of the next generation of Big Tech will find themselves shut out by this regulatory regime.)
Government is toothless and unmotivated to reign them in for the same revolving door issues you wrote about already happening today. The only thing that changes any of this will be whistle blowers and exposition from the inside of these companies. Then you have the issue of what media company will run that story? Think about how much the media rely on Twitter for “content” now.
I am skeptical of any positive changes for quite some time.
Not a lawyer, but I wonder if the Commerce Clause and Necessary and Proper clause give regulatory power to the government under the guise of promoting the general welfare. After all, this has been applied to commodities in the past, even when said commodities weren’t even used in trade/commerce.
In plain English, there’s precedent in the constitution and law for the government to regulate business if it promotes the general welfare.
There are a lot of things that "private entities" aren't allowed to do when doing business with the public in the United States.
They can't discriminate based on race, or religion, or national origin, or handicaps, or (in civilized areas) sexual orientation.
It wasn't always that way. At one time all of those things were perfectly legal. But we, as a society, after a great deal of argument (sometimes contentious) decided that they were wrong and changed the laws to prohibit those things.
We're having essentially the same arguments about online speech right now.
Just to set some parameters here, you would be fine with, say, a landlord refusing to rent an apartment to a black person?
Is there no room for nuance here? Can't we support freedom of association without encouraging expanding levels of censorship?
The reason why big tech platforms have been moving towards more censorship isn't just out of natural inclinations, but directly due to people blaming those tech for allowing types of speech.
There are strong arguments, some of which the article puts forward, for the value of free flowing information. This doesn't mean we have to abrogate freedom of association, but it does mean that we should push back against censorship.
We could also limit freedom of association without abolishing it. (There are already laws restricting freedom of association to prevent discrimination against protected classes.)
> Tech companies are large yes, but competitors are, as Google actually correctly put it at one point, one click away.
It often is far more than "one click". If your email provider terminates your account, you'll have huge problems everywhere you signed up with that email. If your twitter account is revoked, you lose all your followers and history. If you have digital "purchases" on an account, you permanently lose access to them if the account is revoked.
There are all kinds of ways that a corporation, exerting their freedom of association, can have huge negative impacts on their users. The power imbalance here is sufficient to warrant concerns about abuse.
I don't think we should revoke freedom of association from tech companies, but I do think we need to create limitations on how they can exercise that right and provide checks and balances in that process. I am not certain what those limitations should be but I think that is the direction the discussion should move.
Except they're wrong. There's no meaningful competitors to choose from. The big tech platforms - and arguably most SaaS software - are not commoditized. There's no competitor you can just switch to. This is mostly achieved through purposeful incompatibility, and all kinds of network effects.
> Size is not an indicator of market power, inability to chose alternatives is.
Exactly. But in winner-take-all markets, the two strongly correlate.
Because the government is supposed to enforce antitrust laws to make sure there is always a handful of private companies competing with each other, and taking different stances at various topics, so that the consumers could find the one that suits them.
Currently, if you want others online to hear your opinion, you need to rely on a very limited set of free-to-use services that have an increasing appetite in deciding what opinions should be heard. You cannot easily outcompete them, unless you can find billions of venture capital to subsidize your service until it grows large enough for the big advertisers (that are part of the same club) to consider it interesting.
I would say, if a private company doesn't directly charge its users for the services it renders, it should be treated as a government service.
Not really given most ISPs ToS, you’ll have to use a provider. Then what if this provider cuts you off, spin your own DC? What if you can’t get peering? How will you connect your DC?
If you effectively create a town square you shouldn’t be able to ban someone because you don’t like the ideas. How will others know these ideas even exist? (which is the point of censorship)
Second is that platforms themselves now have massive political power. Twitter or FB can easily suppress any fact or opinion it does not like(see Twitter and Biden's crackhead of a son), it can also easily trade ability to suppress for political favours.
In a society as divided as US is right now it is inevitable that they take the 51% side to suppress the 49% side. Result will be a bloody a mess.
There is no solution to it either, shit is in full flight towards the proverbial fan.
Some people say allowing certain content is a statement of endorsement. "Silence is violence" and similar argumenents, but I disagree with that line of reasoning.
"Throwing shit at people and hoping it sticks" is something I do associate with accusations of racism to be honest.
Correct. They can do what they want. However, the title of the article is still correct.
However, I think he brings up a very important point: who gets to decide what's misinformation?
* Private organizations are run by fallible humans, chasing money and reduced liability
* Governments lie. If you don't believe me, read any history book
* Scientists are not a spherical mass floating in a vacuum with a unified opinion, nor are they correct by default
Furthermore, only engineers believe most of the important issues in the world actually have an objective answer to them.
So, who gets to decide? Who gets the power of saying what thoughts are bad and what thoughts are good? Is it someone you agree with? What if it changes to someone you don't?
I personally follow the law so I don't go to jail, since historically it has been made by idiots.
People will always be fallible. Processes, however, can layer checks and balances in a way that people often can’t. Processes are also easier to change than people in my experience.
Processes certainly aren’t perfect but considering your examples are past tense, they can tend to arc towards “more perfect.”
> Processes certainly aren’t perfect but considering your examples are past tense, they can tend to arc towards “more perfect.”
Agreed. My use of the past was to illustrate a basic truth: given the big (colossal) failures of the past, is it more likely we have largely found the truth, or that we are still very far away from it? It's impossible to know of course. That said, the amount of people who will claim their truth is ultimate and all of who do not see it their way must be idiots is staggering. It's human nature though, I literally did that one comment above.
If factual veracity faced a similar system that tries to balance the needs and desires of all participants, then censoring misinformation would be a lot more palatable (and would still, like our justice system, often be wrong.) The current system of supressing misinformation has none of the check and balances contained in the legal system and adding those in would do a great deal to facilitate trust in that system.
> So, who gets to decide?
Each individual gets to decide for themselves.
When there are large asymmetries (for example, in information or risk) regulation can be warranted. For example, most people feel regulating fissile material is prudent because the risk of it coming into the wrong hands is too high to just let unchecked freedom ring when it comes to owning it or not.
Legal adults, however, have a fundamental right to hurt themselves.
Yes, I know there are grey areas.
This is not true, any more than it is for vaccinated people.
Viruses will still spread through a fully-vaccinated population, and they will still mutate in a fully-vaccinated population.
The CDC released a report [1] showing proportional numbers of cases coming from fully vaccinated people (74% of cases against 69% of the population fully vaccinated).
Treating people who are not getting the vaccine as enemies is not going to convince us. In fact, this whole thing has made me, in particular, suspicious of other vaccines that I will research and make decisions for myself about.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/pdfs/mm7031e2-H.pdf
One need only look at the overlay of cases and vaccination rates across different US states to show you’re just flat out wrong.
Similar manner to drink driving, sober people can also hurt others when driving.
This is about where we draw the line. When it comes to drink driving and antivaxxers they both endanger others to an unacceptably high level.
The tongue in cheek point I'm trying to make is that too much of the conversation focuses on relative risk. Relative risk obsession has people not taking more risky, but still incredibly safe (at least in the short term) vaccines here in Australia. Absolute risk (or its delta) tends to be a much more salient number to the victim.
It does help the antivaxx crowd in some circuitous arguments however, as the chance of an unvaccinated person killing a vaccinated person is low if vaccines work!
Also, calling people unvaccinated agency COVID anti-vaxxers, when most are not, is likely to lead to some becoming that.
You may have the personal freedom to get drunk—that doesn’t give you the freedom to drive around while under the influence and you endanger everyone else on the road.
The choice to be vaccinated or not is not a choice that affects merely the individual; its consequences affect communities. Regardless of whether it is valid or not to refuse vaccination, it is not solely within the realm of personal freedom and should not be treated that way.
The claim that unvaccinated people are a breeding ground for more effective versions of the virus sounds like a Big Pharma talking point, rather than something with solid science behind it. My understanding is that environmental pressure results in mutated variants becoming widespread. Couldn't vaccines themselves cause this? The virus hardly mutated for a whole year, but then once inoculations became available it seems that more infectious variants are popping up left and right.
1 person has no meaningful effect but collectively their actions are capable of doing great harm to the rest of us even if we all collectively act in our own best interests by getting vaccinated and participating in other public health measures.
If your freedom to act irrationally allows you to cause my untimely death I don't understand how my inability to go on living wouldn't represent a net decrease in freedom vs forcing you to vaccinate.
If you look at the break down of anti vaxxer sentiment only 9% are dead set against vaccination under any circumstances. These people's perception of their freedom isn't worth hurting everyone.
Mutations and variants occur all the time as the virus reproduces. Variants are not a response to any vaccine; they have appeared primarily (entirely? I haven't been following all of them) in regions where the vaccine is not yet widely available because that is where the virus is able to multiply (and thus mutate) the fastest.
Interesting theory though, I don't think it's true right now, but potentially there may be evidence I'm not aware of.
A real life/modern example of this can be found in Marek's disease in chickens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marek%27s_disease#Prevention
The counter claim seems to be that because vaccination reduces the abundance of the virus there is a lower chance of mutations. It's hard to say which effect is stronger and it probably varies greatly by virus and by vaccine!
Disclaimer: I'm not an expert, just an armchair enthusiast.
“Vaccines that let the hosts survive but do not prevent the spread of the pathogen relax this selection, allowing the evolution of hotter pathogens to occur. This type of vaccine is often called a leaky vaccine.”
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
Sometimes I think people confuse what they wish/think the government role should be with what is explicitly defined within the social contract between the government and the governed.
Other way around. Evil would convince you that leaded gasoline is fine, and that "good intentions" of regulating lead out of gas are evil because government power.
The bigger justices, like the U.S. bill of rights - that's for the greater good. Having laws and order. That's for the greater good too. As are judges, police, government, etc. All the greater good that requires people to comply.
No need to give everyone the job to be clever - we can actually blacklist any opinion we dont want to see circulated and vote on it.
I’d hate to live in a place where a joke can get you jailed.
In the U.S. the Bill of Rights outlines specific rights that cannot be infringed, including the freedom of speech. Now, this amendment could technically be repealed but that is a very high bar since it’s considered a fundamental right by which the others are derived.
Edit: downvotes are fine but at least add to the discussion. I would be interested in hearing what parts you think I’m not interpreting correctly
The reason is straightforward - without free speech, nobody would know if/when the government is abusing any of your other rights.
A vote is simply not the same thing as a choice.
How would you feel if 51% of the people voted to force you to become a Druid?
Obviously people looking for an expedient authoritarian mandate to limit speech within the boundaries of what they consider to be acceptable see the existence of free speech as the allowance of that which is outside their boundaries, but they don't actually understand the purpose. The purpose is a hedge against tyranny with a trade-off. People get to say horrible, stupid, counterproductive things, but your political enemies don't get to constrain your ability to express yourself.
I also don't understand why the rest of the world is so eager to see this right stripped in America...I would feel extremely claustrophobic if there was no place on earth in which free communication wasn't enshrined in law. Even if Europeans want to mandate their own speech, they still benefit from the hedge against tyranny by such a place as America existing.
- Advertise pornography
- Plan attacks against the United States government
- Advertise medical cures that the government doesn't approve of
- Sell counterfeit products
- Pump and dump a stock
- Reveal the identities of CIA operatives
All of these are thoughts, just as much as advocating against vaccines or for alternative cures or what-have-you are thoughts.
Who gets to decide any of the above?
Would it be a good idea to set up society such that all of the above thoughts are protected speech?
If you think any of these things in your own mind but don't take any action on it that is perfectly ok and carries no legal risk.
What is the argument that saying "Ivermectin is being suppressed by Big Pharma, anyone who takes it will get cured of covid" is simply a thought whose publication is worthy of both social and legal protection, but saying "Contoso has a groundbreaking product they're going to reveal next week, anyone who buys the stock now is sure to make a profit" is illegal securities fraud? How do you distinguish those cases?
Clearly MailChimp (or any other service) can't knowingly allow their platform to be used to violate the law, or they would be held accountable.
If certain types of bad thoughts are illegal to spread, the argument, I would think, is they should stop being illegal.
(On a more practical note, Mailchimp's legal department is not a court of law. If freedom of speech / of thought-spreading is important enough to your society that you want to place legal obligations on private companies' platforms not to interfere with it, as TFA advocates, I think a natural consequence is that private companies should not decide what crosses the line and what doesn't, and probably that private companies should not be liable for what's said on their platform. In fact, that's more or less what Section 230 gives us! In a world with strong free-speech protections, it seems to me that Mailchimp should say that you can send whatever you want through their service, and should be encouraged by the government to take that approach, and that if you send something illegal, that liability is on you alone, after due process of law.)
There is nothing wrong with advertising the truth that certain medical treatments exist which are not government approved in the US, or, legal in the US, but are defintely viable, and are actively used in other parts of the world, or, could be by physicians for off-label use.
domperidone [1] is a drug that is used for a few indications overseas. There is an active discussion around it on a number of social media sites, but the FDA warns against importing it, for violating an FDA Act. It is possible to get an exception for one indication in the US, potentially...... But, many women want it because it helps with lactation, and for a woman with a hungry infant, this is a big issue. You get a screaming baby that wants 8 oz more of milk a day, and lemme tell you, can't negotiate with a screaming baby! Off Label uses of medications also, is common among Physicians. Viagra is one drug that has a number of utilities in off-label use.
BigTech squelching the conversation around Domperidone is fairly similar to BigTech squelching the standard COVID treatment protocols [2], from Zelenko [3] & McCullough [4], which will likely become standard of care fairly shortly, and are now in evidence on CDC websites too [5], but significantly trailing the most updated protocols. But they don't squelch Domperidone talk, and the reason is simple. Pushing vaxxes are a big priority for the govt, while going after the discussion of secrets for increasing breastmilk outputs would probably be bad optics.
> actual violations of the law, at least in the United States.
Covid protocols have nothing to do with actual violations of Law, and, they will be standard of care shortly, as the CDC website writing [5] is on the wall.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30000430/
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/stop-ignoring-the-evidence-on-co...
[3] https://vladimirzelenkomd.com/zelenko-prophylaxis-protocol/
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAHi3lX3oGM
[5] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-guida...
Whoever wants to. and then people can compare the competing arbiters and decide who would earn their trust. That used to work with mass media until the internet came along. Now we no longer have multiple newspapers, but "The Newspaper" , "The TV" and "The telegraph" (Twitter?), like 2-3 news sources in total which are basically politically aligned. The name of the game changed from "popularity and copy sales" to "the network effect". I m not sure if this can ever change within a centralizing communication medium like the internet, but perhaps at some point people will realize that the network effect is evil and it will get a bad name.
The internet, centralising… what went wrong?
Was this really necessary? How many engineers do you know, and how many of them actually ascribe to this belief?
There is a significant overlap (higher than a random person's picked from the population) between engineers and what I would call "fundamentalist rationalists". That is, people who believe in reason and science to the point they wrap the speedometer back around to religious belief again. Those people become unable to think outside that framework and consider nuanced solutions. Not everything worth solving has measurable or falsifiable solutions. The world can be very uncertain and work against all common sense at times. This doesn't mean one shouldn't attempt to make sense of it obviously, but science does not a god make. It may, hopefully, but pretending it is that way now is no good.
Accepting uncertainty doesn't mean abandoning objectivity. On the contrary - difficulties in objectively measuring things or falsifying hypotheses are best handled with mathematical tools, which absolutely can work with uncertain quantities (that's what probability theory is for). Throwing hands in the air and saying "it's too difficult therefore there's no objectivity", or "it can go whichever way, so it may as well go the way I like", is not the solution.
There is no golden hammer however. To give a concrete example, I believe our understanding of mental issues using a scientific framework is woefully inadequate. In the future, we may posses enough information to be able to apply scientific principles. In the present, we have managed to control some mental illnesses to a degree using pharmaceutics.
Talking with various people who have had the misfortune of being born with troublesome minds and experiencing my own mind has led me to believe that a large amount of mental illnesses, especially depression and anxiety, are misidentified due to our infatuation to treat the mental plane as analog to the physical body, so as to be able to apply our scientific knowledge to it. The body is hardware, hard and physical, the mind is software, it is changeable. Many are born into this world however without the necessary tools or aptitude to actually go through this process of change and heal their mind when it gets into a broken state. Their frustrations pile up, making them ever more ineffective, all while they are blind to the fact that they could wake up the next day and.. feel completely fine.
It is none of their own fault in a way, as these skills are barely ever taught, and not too many people seem even aware that it's something just as possible as moving your arm. They treat it as if the only way they can "get fixed" is external, as if their car broke down.
Humanity did and still has ways of undergoing these processes. Rituals of progression from one stage of life to another, as well as yearly/monthly etc. rituals affirming one's position in life were more important than they are nowadays. As much as "they do nothing", the mental effect was most definitely not nothing. The human brain always seeks meaning, and lack of stimulus is its greatest enemy.
That is not to suggest that the world was an idyllic paradise full of meaning before. Unlikely. But it's hard to deny God did die somehow.
No true engineer believes that. All engineers must make compromises. Anyone that uses black and white thinking simply cannot engineer (unless you are using the term in a strictly legal sense).
-People you believe are saying true things get to speak.
-People you believe are saying false things get to speak.
-People you believe are saying nice things get to speak.
-People you believe are saying mean things get to speak.
Everyone gets to speak. Individuals get to decide.
Its not a cut and dry issue either. If you were to own a site, anyone forcing you to post things to your site you don't believe is also an infringement of your rights. It cuts both ways.
In my eyes the major issue is the consolidation of discourse onto a few private forums, not whether or not those forums should be able to police themselves.
It does not exist. There is no such thing as "misinformation".
There is only misinformation according to some party.
"Google is going to remove misinformation from YouTube." sounds incredible laudable to the modern ear.
"Google is going to remove things that are misinformation according to Google corporate policy." is much less compelling.
A challenge for anyone reading this: From now on, whenever you read the word "misinformation", fill out the "according to ..." yourself. I've been doing it for a while now. It really improves your perspective.
(I do believe in objective truth. However, if we had a mechanism for objectively determining it in a way we all agreed upon, we wouldn't have this problem in the first place. Whatever the objective truth may be, I seriously doubt "according to the corporate policy of X" is it.)
Talk about highschool level sophistry. "Nah bro, there are no facts, everything is meaningless, the truth is a lie and all lies are true, man!"
Please.
> I do believe in objective truth.
Oh good, I'm glad you took the time to contradict yourself.
> However, if we had a mechanism for objectively determining it in a way we all agreed upon
So misinformation exists but we'll never be able to identify it?
I repeat: please.
The world is not flat. The anunaki don't exist. COVID vaccines don't contain microchips.
This isn't even a little bit hard.
Does it get hard in the muddy middle? Sure. But your claim that 'There is no such thing as "misinformation"' is pure bunk.
I'm sorry, but this is complete BS. If someone makes statements that they know are false, then they are a liar and are spreading misinformation. If someone makes statements for which they have incontrovertible proof, this is absolutely not misinformation.
Just because the gradients between those two are complex, doesn't mean that misinformation doesn't exist, just that the definition of "misinformation" is fuzzy (like so many other words.)
(I don't believe in objective truth or meaning. I do believe that communication is impossible without mutually shared subjective truths and meanings.)
Edit: The reality is that there is a significant amount of misinformation put out by all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons. Some of it (e.g. some press releases) is widely recognized but also generally tolerated. Some of it is partisan. Some of it is widely accepted as truth by almost everyone.
My point is that "misinformation" should always come attached with an "according to X". Some Xs are more reliable than others.
However, as I said and will certainly stand by, "according to Google corporate policy" or "according to Facebook corporate policy" is not one of the more reliable of them. Google and Facebook corporate policy is not in a position to be making that determination, and whatever metrics they are using it is certainly not any definition of truth I recognize.
There's also going to be quite a lot of disagreement about which of those Xs are reliable and how much. This disagreement is not suddenly resolved by stripping away the provenance of statements and letting the word "misinformation" float free without worrying about provenance. It is absolutely valid to discuss how much to trust a given source, but the propaganda word "misinformation" is like the passive voice of propaganda... it isn't misinformation according to X or according to Y, it's just... "misinformation", floating free and objectively determinable. It's a pretty serious step back in philosophical sophistication.
I also think there's a lot of people accepting "misinformation according to our global elite" who, if they thought about it a bit more clearly, would wonder why they're accepting that definition so easily and thoroughly.
The value of specifying epistemic sources is as important when putting forward information as it is when labeling misinformation. Yet most people are generally pretty lax at including and verifying epistemic justifications (especially for claims they are inclined to agree with.)
It is true that the act of labeling things as misinformation can itself be a form of misinformation.
The issue, as I see it, is that we have accepted the practice of deliberate misinformation as long as it is "for a good cause". We don't place as much value in people trying accurately convey information and nuance as we place on the function that information is serving.
I see this everywhere: in the statements about masks that were made early in the pandemic to make sure healthcare workers had supplies. You see this is narratives about the last election. You see this is in a lot of the reporting about Russiagate. There are little to no consequences or reprobation from people who agree with the end goals.
The incentives are all wrong and I don't know how they get fixed, but the problem is much bigger than just "Big Tech", "Social Media" or a bunch of stupid people on the otherside of the partisan divide.
Personally, my bar for 'insurrection' involves at least one gunshot. You can differ! But it's not objective.
And I'm assuming you mean one gunshot "from the aggressors" as one of the Capitol Police officers did fire their weapon in defense of the Capitol.
What would you call a group of armed people who forcibly enter a building in order to disrupt the work of a government and install an unelected leader to a position of power?
a violent uprising against an authority or government.
They violently forced their way into our capital with the idea of intimidating the government to prevent them from handling the lawful business succession insofar as counting and acknowledging the lawfully cast electoral votes.
This isn't subjective its the simple literal dictionary definition of the word.
They didn't fight with the cops they beat and murdered cops in order to destroy democracy itself.
Why only a gun? What about the police officers that were beaten?
In a nation with as many guns as America, especially in the right wing demographic, I'd expect some shooting and a lot more organization before I upgrade from 'riot'. Insurrection is just political spin. Look at that picture with the goofball holding the speaker's podium and tell me these people were serious.
Now, I don't care about Hunter Biden's laptop. What I do care about is that this was absolutely not misinformation. And then the same happened again for the lab-leak hypothesis. Given pants-on-fire dismissal and declared "debunked," when it wasn't then, and has been shown to very clearly not be now.
So, yes, the abuse of the authority is obvious in the hypothetical, but the relegation to the abstract isn't even necessary to condemn the legitimacy of these self-proclaimed institutions.
Once, in America, it was universally acceptable that censoring speech is not the power somebody should get. Neither the government, nor anybody else. Of course, as with every ideal, the reality sometimes came short of it - there are many infamous examples of censorship, both governmental and otherwise, that happened in America. But those ultimately were realized as conflicting with the ideal - and ultimately, the ideal won and they have lost.
Today, this ideal is increasingly being abandoned - for the large parts of the Left, have already completely been abandoned - for the ideas of "safety" and narrow partisan political considerations. The nation - and the whole culture we call "Western culture" - will suffer a lot and regret a lot if we don't find a way to stop it.
If you want to make Facebook some kind of common carrier, you're going to have to outlaw all of its engagement-optimizing AI and targeted marketing, the very core of its business model. When you get on a platform to take advantage of exactly those tools, you can't complain when they change the rules on you---you knew the score when you signed up, you can save the crocodile tears.
He also said:
'I've unkilled it so you can respond now. It's not really on topic for HN though. Too much of a provocative opinion piece and not enough significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). That guarantees a flamewar, which we're trying to avoid on HN.'
I thought it was worth posting because it was written back in August 2020, so was quite prescient.
Also, a truly unmoderated social network would quickly become a clearing house for garbage content nobody wants to look at.
Perhaps we should just have dumb pipes, and let people network over them without a MITM running psychology and behavioral economics experiments on people who merely want to connect with friends and family
The closest system that seems to work is for people to downvote whatever it is they dont like and for that to cause posts to have lower priority.
if such a thing were ever made, it would be very difficult to monitor or moderate.
Current social media doesn't respect you because being respectful doesn't drive metrics.
In short, the conclusion I always come to is that no matter what the math and the game theory say, if the legislative, executive, and judicial all agree that it's a big enough problem, it's dead. There's nothing technologists can do about this. At least, this is the conclusion I always run into whenever I've tried to brainstorm technical solutions over the years.
It'll be a social network for people who were banned from all the other social networks, which is not a great town to live in.
The inherent complications or disadvantages of decentralization aren't worth it for most people.
Regarding trump being banned: "Twitter can ban whomever they want".
We are now in a screaming match. Who can scream at the twitter exec louder win.
It seems to me the religion of capitalism has a solve, here, and it's called competition.
If they really believe in freedom, they should support the freedom of Twitter to kick them off the platform, and these folks have the freedom to find another platform elsewhere.
But, of course, freedom isn't what these people are after. They just want to manufacture a different kind of consent.
The obsession with class (in the title, and content) and misunderstood genius reads more like within-class squabble than an argument for a different order.
I did some freelance work helping someone worried about Google censorship move their services to more independent alternatives, including EasyDNS. This post makes a lot more sense to me as signaling, in that respect.
I think you missed the author's point. His point is not that someone needs to start a competing service. his point is that the feel that tech companies are patricians rather than plumbers is widespread and common place.
Not that I support tech giants invasion in private lives. But when thought through the analogy works against the author's favor.
Make of that what you will.
Yes, how strange that somebody would believe they should have a say in how you use their services.
They are the little brothers reporting your 'thinking' to big brother to see if they will ban you or not.
no, when you nitpick an _extremely complicated scientific matter_ to where you are actively going against CDC guidelines for the sake of pushing your own argument, you get shut down. imagine that. it's almost as if Mailchimp would rather you believe scientists than some tech bro with a podcast.
I'd like to be able to export data easily, run my own programs easily, write software that doesn't get taxed or asked to be resubmitted (since when did Microsoft charge for Windows app development?)
Every company purports to be for you, but it's a big toothy grinned lie. Some of them sell you, others sell you out.
It also sucks that these companies surface the worst of humanity to drive engagement. Are people really this terrible?
Tech started to sour in 2005.
> We’ll have to fundamentally rethink entire economies before we could see large companies (if they would be, at all, allowed to exist) acting ethically.
Then I got to the part where he suddenly rants that content moderators are "probably...teams of purple-haired Millennials with nose hoops and personal pronoun mood-rings."
And calls out the AP for marking a medical claim "false" just because no one has been able to produce any evidence for it.
And says that calling anti-vaxxers nasty names is literally just as bad as racism.
I'm looking at the comment I just typed and it sounds like I'm exaggerating to make him look bad. But I'm not. That's what he's actually claiming.
Youtube houses plenty of conspirators, right wing news, gun channels, and they're monetized. Not only that, but youtube comment sections are notorious for being inline with "conservative" views.
Some gun channels have been demonitized. Not because Youtube doesn't want the money, but because Google doesn't control what advertisers do. In one of the demonitization dramas it was revelead that Youtube as a company would stop generating revenue if a big advertiser like Pepsi or Disney stopped doing business with Youtube.
If you want to see "cancelling" how about the crowds of hate that target minority groups with significant harassment? Why is online canceling from Twitter talked about, but not actual real life militia groups and violent groups that gather to kill transgender individuals? One of those actually harms people.
Do you see these "cancellers" showing up to city council meetings, forming actual physical protests? Nope. Everyone is actually quite free to ignore it. The only time things change is when those in positions of power decide to change it. They make those changes not on the outrage on Twitter, but on their own personal beliefs on whom they want to do business with.
Ontop of this, "cancel culture" can be translated to "protest culture". Somehow critisizing and stopping business with people is "cancelling", and not "protest" now?
>No tech company should be enforcing their Terms of Service based on what they think their users have done or might do off of their own platforms. Yet Twitter, Facebook, Patreon and who knows who else do that.
Reworded: No individual should be enforcing their morals based on what they think someone has done or might do when not next to them.
These "I should be able to say anything I want on someone elses platform" is uniquely american privledge talking. If Youtube, or Twitter, or Facebook allowed whatever people want, guess what? They'd be regulated tomorrow to not allow it. Words actually do have harm, and words do not inherently have 1st ammendment protections.
There are already plenty of misinformed people whom want a "repeal of 230". These companies have both a moral and financial responsibility to enforce their terms of service.
>A mailer company like Mailchimp has no business even parsing the content of their paying clients, let alone summarily judging whether it is misinformation or not. Mail providers should care about two things and two things only:
Yes, they do. They have to parse them for illegal content, and then they have to parse for content that might have their services used in ways that harm others. Disinformation can easily be harmful, and a company like Mailchimp does not want to be implicated in it regardless of 230 protections or not.
> “Covidiots”, “Deniers” these are not rational counter-arguments, they’re slurs. Anybody employing them is not engaging in discourse but rather bigotry and prejudice. This is as inexcusable as racism. Over the past few years many have been challenged to examine their own biases and privilege, in certain contexts for perfectly valid reasons. Anybody engaging in this type of othering toward skeptics and contrarians lacks self-awareness and empathy to the same degree as a racist.
I do not believe his question is in good faith, but is an attempt to deflect any criticism by instead forcing his critic to defend and explain in detail any such criticism before he even attempts to defend his half-baked ideas.
It's been a little frustrating (I guess that's the word closest to what I'm feeling) as I've typically viewed HN as a place that went more for technology and science rather than... other things.
I've noticed the same thing. It's unsettling.
I haven't always agreed with the HN consensus on things, but until quite recently that consensus seemed to be honest and well-intentioned.
Does that seem any more reasonable and rational than "as bad as racism"?
I could even get behind the basic idea that ad hominem attacks are always bad, except that he's already launched an ad hominem attack against what he assumes are "purple-haired Millennials with nose hoops and personal pronoun mood-rings" in the same article! I don't see how to read this as anything but "snarky insults are reprehensible when they happen to me and totally justified when I throw them at someone else."
* No Liability For User Content
* Arbitrary Control Over User Content
Pick one!
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/setting-the-record-straigh...
Edit: keep bringing those freethinker(tm) downvotes. It won't change the law one bit, but I guess it gives good feels.
I mean you could also try starting your own social media network that absolutely guarantees first amendment rights, but so far only hilarity has ensued from that premise along the lines of tragedy plus time equals comedy. You could be the first one to prove them all wrong. What's stopping you?
Or if that's too hard, why don't you all apply to work at Facebook and Twitter? Then you can work your way up the ladder until you can depose Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg. And on the first day of your reign of your new empire you can proclaim to all shareholders and employees that your social media site is entirely unregulated. Otherwise WTH should these companies care about you? You won't build anything and you won't do the work to change the path of something already built.
Sauce. Goose.
Edit: Maybe you should start your own tech news site. Or if that's too hard, why don't you apply to work at YC and work your way up to a position where you control the moderation for this site?
Once again: Sauce. Goose.
If anything you should jump with joy at the rights of people who disagree with this article to flag it and at your right to register discontent without any substantive argument as to why you are registering your discontent with but a simple down vote.
That's freedom of speech in action! And while my tone here is sarcastic, I believe sincerely that this moderation system is currently superior to any of the ham fisted bad AI deployed on either of the two leading social media sites.
You were complaining about being modded down, so you quite clearly had a problem with it.
Freedom to comment is not freedom to not be downvoted into oblivion. You can complain but we'll grey that one, as well. There's lesson in the irony.
You're making a lot of assumptions. One of the saddest and most frustrating aspects of big tech's narrowing of permissible discourse is the association of defenders of discourse with red ties, right wing ideas and all of that.
An Intro to Constitutional Law course or book would demonstrate how false that is, that up until only a decade or less ago, conservatives were the ones assaulting free speech. And Progressives were vigorously defending freedom of speech. This includes hate speech. They were preventing 'consequences' as people like yourself like to remind us we have no protection from. I can suggest materials to read, but what has degenerated is this thread, so it's pointless effort unless someone wants it.
The philosophical arguments made by the Progressives in those days in defense of speech resonate timelessly, from the 1600s to the 2020s. The arguments resonate also beyond narrow ideas of what constitutes government restrictions.
Today the question is around whether the FB's and Twitter's and YouTube's should be regulated as utilities and in the public interest, rather than an outmoded ideal around private ownership rights and the 1st Amendment not applying. From misinformation to viewpoint discrimination, it's the real question of our present time.
Back in the day, I remember how Tipper Gore was all about warning us of the dangers of explicit lyrics and videos and she wasn't a conservative or have I lost track of who's on which team?
Disliking what became of one political party because of the embrace of a demagogue does not necessarily make one a strong adherent of the other leading brand or is that too nuanced for you?
I support the rights of social media sites to moderate content as they see fit and I support the rights of their customers to take their business elsewhere if they don't like how it's run. I won't be going into Hobby Lobby anytime soon nor will I be going to Carl's Jr, but I'm also not going to tell them how to run their businesses. I think that's where we really differ here. Facebook and Twitter will ultimately fall to superior successors that catch the zeitgeist just like they did. But not on any of our schedules.
Edit: Ah, I see the founder (who died in 2008) donated and supported anti-gay causes and anti-abortion
Al Gore was long known as a conservative Democrat, and his taking up his wife's singular political issue was in line with that; in fact the WSJ complained about his supposed reinvention as a liberal in 2000 during the campaign. (Weirdly, complaining that he had done so in aligning with Clinton, who also was, even as President, a conservative Democrat; this was a partisan campaign hitpiece more than anything, Gore’s actual reinvention as anything but a conservative Democrat didn't really happen until after he was out of electoral politics, when he became a single-issue campaigner on climate change.)
Tech gets all sorts of tax breaks to innovate. That's okay, but if they proactively kick people off the platform so as to head off government regulation, that's not okay?
Or wait, let me guess, all tax breaks are good! How'd I do?
The extent to which this happens at all can be debated. But the principle of the matter should be clear, if it is shown to be happening, it is certainly morally wrong, it's anti-democracy and (although it's difficult to prove in court) perhaps unconstitutional.
Here's an example of the grey area I'm taking about in my previous post. The executive branch is flagging posts for "COVID misinformation" to Facebook. We don't know who is doing the flagging or what criteria they're employing, and Facebook has an incentive to comply with the take-down requests so as to avoid potential costly regulation. The sum total of this is the government censoring speech (well, there's one layer of indirection, which is a compliant and scared Facebook) in a way that's completely unaccountable and not auditable.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/05/trump-looking-into-antitrust...
For the record, what Trump was doing was clearly authoritarian and had the intention of controlling moderation decisions on these platforms. It was anti-democratic and awful due to its underlying intentions. Ron DeSantis is trying a similar thing to Ben and Jerry's now.
However, I was and remain less concerned by this than I am with the influence of the Democratic Party on tech firms, mainly because the Republicans have so little influence despite the threats. You can see the power asymmetry (and revolving door) on display through a single example, the censorship of the Hunter Biden story on the eve of the election.
We seem to be in a quarterly pandemic wave cycle right now and it's overwhelming our healthcare system and it's killing Americans and ultimately depressing the economy. Given all the changes and adaptations we made as a society post 9/11, attempting to control the flow of covid disinfo seems minimal to me. And it's easy to criticize our leaders. But just like a true first amendment zealot should build their own social media site centered around the first amendment to find out why that's impractical, try leading this country when it's on a course to be an indefinite pandemic purgatory.
But you raise a valid point. I'm very concerned with YouTube's slut shaming through demonetization of Naomi Wu's YouTube channel. It's not a good look for them but then very little is these days.
Regarding your comment about a 1A-friendly platform, I don't advocate for a censorship-less social media platform. It's stupid on its face. But moderation should either be voluntary with no coercive influence of government (whether that influence is achieved by carrot or stick), or it should be defined by the legislative body (hate speech laws) instead of implied threat of regulation or via the executive branch.
Regarding the flagging of COVID misinformation, that's fairly lower on my list of worries, and it's not that I don't favor removing that toxic information, it's that the executive branch is the one coordinating it. The encouragement of political censorship (the Hunter Biden case above) is much higher on my list of concerns and much more directly anti-democratic.
So they chose to eliminate its effect on the election based (I would assume) on the bogus stuff about Hillary's email server four years earlier. And if this is the end of October surprises I can only say good riddance, but it probably won't be.
Try walking a mile in their shoes before holding them accountable to infallible behavior is my only suggestion here.
We're going to have to disagree about a first amendment friendly platform. I'm a huge fan of letting the marketplace of ideas work these things out lawsuits and all. I 100% expect a dumpster fire every single time, but then most tech companies end up dumpster fires anyway so why not? There's probably some epsilon incremental revenue pulling this off and capturing the single digit percentage audience that demands these things, no?
I can only conclude that Schiff et al were being intentionally dishonest about the Russian disinfo line in an attempt to apply the maximum amount of influence at the most critical time before the election. It was a cynical attempt by elected officials to sway an election through censorship. They knew it wasn't Russian disinfo at the time. Joe Biden's own comments revealed that knowledge about a day into the saga.
What you're saying is roughly equivalent to "So what if they can't use the telephone or television? Can't these folks just use Morse code?"
At some point in history, 5% or less of the population understood email. RSS feeds are not inherently more complex than email, in fact they're quite a bit simpler. (And even if you don't grok RSS feeds, you'll probably grok a weblog; RSS is only relevant here because it gives the exact same affordances as something like a Mailchimp newsletter, even though it works differently under the hood.)
Email is not like, say, Facebook where to reach someone on Facebook you need to send via Facebook. How you send email is largely irrelevant as long as you pick a provider that doesn't send so much spam that their outgoing mail gets blocked.
Where is the line drawn, and what responsibility does each level have?
Presumably every user appreciates the anti-spam filtering these sites do, and anti-scam/phishing, but there should be a separate checkbox (ticked by default) for "Remove misinformation about covid/vaccines", and one for "Remove misinformation claiming the election was stolen", etc.
Then the social media companies can say to governments "If you would like all users in your jurisdiction to be unable to opt out from these categories, please pass a law requiring us to hardcode these settings for them, and we'll update our UIs to tell users why they can't opt out."
Better yet, the social media companies should say to governments "Please provide your own list of which posts are misinformation, and we'll make sure that users see a blank page saying 'Your government has deemed this post to be misinformation' instead of the content they want".
It isn't there wasn't a lack of social platforms which didn't try to remove moderation "because of free speech" but they don't last long before they collapse under their own crazyness, and the crazyness of their users.
I imagine such a platform would turn out like Reddit, only better, since people who opt out of the consensus reality would probably have their messages only visible to like-minded users, unlike on Reddit where each user is trusted by default in each subreddit.
HN doesn't allow downvotes so I upvoted literally everything else on the front page to compensate. Thx
I agree a big company shouldn't have _complete_ power to control content on their site for reasons the OP says because at some point this becomes a danger to society. At the same time it is a danger to society to freely let users promote whatever content they want, for the same reasons.
For all the examples or people who have been persecuted (or whatever word would fit better) for saying the "truth", like scientist who said the earth was not at the center of the universe, there are countless others who, for the better, were quieted from issueing harmful information.
The OP says people should be taught a lesson in critical thinking, but I don't think this is a problem. I think most people are pretty logical, they are just dealing with misinformation, no matter what "side" they are on.
So this is a real problem. It is good the OP raises these questions, but I don't think it has the solution.
It’s not the amount to take issue with but the spread of its influence. Anti-vaccine ideology was given a platform by big tech and now we have an endemic disease because folks believe that nonsense and let it hold sway over their medical decisions.
Edit: for folks voting this down I’d be interested in a rebuttal or at least an explanation of how this doesn’t add to the conversation. I try to be a good citizen here and thought I was engaging in good faith.
"Misinformation", someone might say, and we wouldn't have to give you any justification. No freedom from consequences, they say.
The misinformation may be coming out of a organized campaign or it may arising organically, but it definitely exists in droves and is spread by social media. It exists on both sides, but it is not balanced.
* thankfully, she’s pretty discerning and don’t believe any of this, but believes it is important to not le this sort of behavior cause her to “unfriend” people she’s known for decades.
** just to be clear, they weren’t, and the evidence was that pictures of insurrectionists appeared on an antifa web site. That was true, but that’s because they appeared on the part of the website dedicated to documenting people as fascists
*** I found the original source in about a minute, and a public rebuttal from Dave Ramsey in two
That was true until they started promoting and demoting content in order to drive engagement and juice their ad revenues.
Big tech is not plumbing. The minute Facebook invented the news feed they became editors and content promoters.
If they really want to just be plumbing, they can shut down their algorithms any time.
As an aside, I picked on that part of the post because the rest of it quickly pivots away from tech and reads as a self-promoting, semi-unhinged rant about covid that reads like the drunken ramblings of Q adjacent anarcho-libertarian, complete with the big hits: references to the "Davos elite", hydrochloroquine, ivermectin, Evil Dr. Fauci, etc, etc.
Which reminds me, I should probably flag this post given it's relevance to HN is glancing at best...
Ok. If they are editors and publishers then perhaps the law should change so that should be treated like other content editors that exist already.
We could do this by treating them legally equal to things like the New York Times, with all the legal responsibilities, freedoms, and liabilities that such a thing entails.
And these companies that don't want to be treated like editors, then we could create new provisions in the law, that give them protections if they act like how the phone company acts.
If they run a service that you patronise as an end user then they can do what they want because if you don't like their terms of service you can go elsewhere.
Don't like f*c*book's terms or behaviour? Leave. YouTube keeps mistreating you? Leave. AWS repeatedly asks you to stop your users breaking the terms you agreed to? Leave.
I don't care if you can't get the clout or customers you want on Vimeo or Mastodon. I don't care if you don't think there is no viable alternative. You obey the contract you agreed to or you get kicked off. Organisations are not obliged to agree with you or serve you.
Lumping Internet-based organisations into "Big Tech" is a misnomer and I find it is frequently a sign that someone's about to go on a rant about something they either don't understand or are purposefully being obstinate about.
I do miss the days before "big tech" and social media when every asshole with half an opinion wasn't given a bullhorn to shout it from the rooftops as if they had something worthwhile to say.
When you are complaining about the Associated Press, maybe take a step back and consider whether or not you're just wrong.
Because the Associated Press is one of the most milquetoast, boring, middle-of-the-road, non-opinion-giving, dry ass, plain organizations out there. They really don't give a shit. They report on things so other newspapers can run the story.
And it seems like all he wants to do is commit the fallacy fallacy. He thinks by saying something is a fallacy, that makes them wrong. It doesn't.
Not to mention, the authorities people are "appealing" to are experts in this field. Not to mention, we can turn that "appeal to authority" around on Ivermectin as well. He's just pimping it because "a doctor said so". And when you point that out, they'll point out why we should blah blah blah. But that's the rub. It's something they want you to do for them, but won't do for you. No one is listening to these people simply because they're in charge, but because they're proven experts in their field.
And so on, with the rest. When he's not just completely misrepresenting a situation to claim something is fallacious when it's not.
Why the double standard?
Now, you can say whatever you like on the internet, you just are not entitle to force other people and companies to give you a platform to do so. Facebook, Youtube, this site, etc., doesn't owe you sh#t. If you want to publish something that they don't like, host it and promote it yourself, just as if you want to put something in the news that they don't like, or on TV or on the radio or on a book.
The insane and childish authoritarianism of the author of this article that believes that "Mail Chimp" doesn't tell him what to do with their service but instead he is the one that tells them how to run their private for profit company is both comical and sad. If you don't like the terms of service, stop using their service. That's how that works. If you think that they are infringing on your rights, them take them to court, don't click bait about it.