An Illustrated Guide to Post-Orwellian Censorship | Hacker News Reader

An Illustrated Guide to Post-Orwellian Censorship

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223 pointsanarbadalov154 comments

"Modern authoritarian regimes". Authoritarian regimes are pretty obvious and easy to deal with. Hey I grew up in soviet union, everyone knew media/authorities lie, nobody took it serious and all information was taken with a grain of salt.

What is much more dangerous is countries where people they live under a democracy but once some information about people in power pop up it could be silenced, flooded with disinformation, you may disappear, you may hide for rest of your life in some embassy like Assange. Anything can happen. And people with money and power have total control. They just often use indirect, hidden measures to achieve that. We don't even know who are those people, they don't have to be public figures like dictators etc. This is much more scary.

And KGB, stasi, etc never ever dreamed of such control on people and survivlence modern social networks and technologies provide. And western 3-letter agencies have much more power those could even dream of.

And you know what is more scary? That nobody give a f*. Even if information about some really scary stuff appear in media everyone would just forgot about that next day. Or media would even make a show out of it. Like that episode in a black mirror. Everyone knows their phones are spying on them but keep using them. It's not just convinient, I can't order a taxi anymore without a smartphone. Few years ago I could just catch a car not anymore. You can't take a subway or a bus without being seen on 100 CCTV cams with facial recognition. And if you question if that's normal you would be asked "what you have something to hide or what?". Maybe I'm just not an exhibicionist.

As others have said, privacy is not about having nothing to hide, it's about having nothing you want to share.

Yes. Thank you. "free" in the land of "unfree" in the west where we equate free to surfing the net, shopping for infinite products compartmentalizing paradoxes as we go - working ourselves to death even though we don't believe in any future.

I fear that people only care if they're told they should care, vis-à-vis the news media telling them to. Not the people are 'sheep' or anything condescending like that, but rather, people take cues from the atmosphere around them on what to be worried about and how much they need to worry about something. If the news isn't making a big stink out of something, society at large just doesn't react.

For me the creepiest thing about 1984 wasn't the degradation of language or the censorship. What I found most concerning was Winston risking his life for a resistance movement that turned out to be fake. There are two well-known groups of violent protestors that the opposing side believe keeps getting away with reprehensible behavior that the authorities seemingly could stop at any time but choose not to. It didn't click with me until the doc "Social Dilemma" alluded to it with the "extreme center" protests. I think many would-be freedom fighters are falling for that trap.

Are you referring to QAnon perchance? I've always found the "advertised risk" of QAnon to be inconsistent with the apparent lack of investigation (and lack of curiousity about a lack of investigation) a bit curious, as compared to say the Unabomber scenario.

It could be nothing of course, but then it could also be something.

Lack of investigation into what?

Plenty of investigation has been done conducted into QAnon, their beliefs and their claims. Everything has turned out to be spurious.

> Plenty of investigation has been done conducted into QAnon, their beliefs and their claims. Everything has turned out to be spurious.

Oh, it sounds like you are referring to QAnon's ideas - I am referring to QAnon the organization, including its leadership, if any.

We regularly hear (perhaps not so much lately now that the election is over) about how dangerous QAnon is, my thinking is that if this organization is so dangerous, why does no one do anything about it, and why do journalists not wonder why no one does anything about it.

Probably because calling things dangerous is a way to rile up hate which is what journalists do.

QAnon was dangerous (I don't know how dangerous they still are) because of the support given to them the President of the United States and their shared conspiratorial beliefs potentially gaining the power of a mainstream political movement. When the leader of your country believes in a secret conspiracy of leftists undermining him at every turn and a millions-strong cult believes his political enemies are literal baby-raping demons that he's been sent by God to cleanse the country of, that has the potential to create political instability to put it lightly. In other countries, a group like QAnon would become the leader's personal secret police.

But QAnon members have been investigated by the FBI and have been arrested and charged with various politically motivated crimes and attempted crimes including murder, assassination, kidnapping, bombings, disruption of ballot counting in various states and of course the White House insurrection.

I don't know what else you would expect to happen.

I would expect an investigation into what QAnon is from an organization and leadership perspective, at least. Your description is a very popular narrative, but my intuition is that it is fairly manufactured.

it's a honeypot. my father was involved with a left wing party in the 80's in Brazil - not guerrila, just regular election-oriented stuff. He used to tell me that whenever someone showed up in gatherings with very extremist views people would be suspicious because that person was probably an agent trying to identify people with subversive behavior (by seeing who would agree with him).

On the book it's much more than a honeypot, the regime depended on such extremists to exist, so it created them.

Of course, the regime on the 60's to 80's in Brazil didn't have that problem, because they had no shame from practicing the violence themselves and claiming it was from the other side when extremists failed to appear. It looks much more reliable to me.

We still create extremist personas, that don’t exist in real life. I know in France this tactic is used very often to trigger a demonstration of “the good guys”. When you interview the opponents, they’re 1 for 10.000 (=insignificant).

For example with feminism, when asked precise questions, you notice they are afraid of people that don’t exist (meanwhile the actual rapists are still free to roam).

The social changes we're seeing in the West, apart from aligning with the unfolding decadent logic of liberalism, are also supported by powerful groups, some of them government backed.

> For example with feminism, when asked precise questions, you notice they are afraid of people that don’t exist

Well, you will always find a couple freaks of every stripe somewhere. The job of any government looking to create fear is to give them disproportionate attention. Some may even fund the promotion of said freakishness because it either generates more panic, because it functions as a wedge for producing desired social changes that also grant more power to the government, etc. Pick your favorite subversive ideology today or mass phenomenon weakening moral norms and rights and you will find powerful backers. Control over information flow permits the impression that everyone is behind this ideology which causes people to conform for fear of sticking out. This normalizes the ideology, at least in the performative sense.

Well, to put it in perspective, I'm talking about trying to explode a bomb in a full stadium just to claim communists planted it.

But sure, characterizing your enemy as something other than humane is a common thing in propaganda.

Like Italy in the '70s? (Piazza Fontana, Piazza della Loggia, Bologna Station bombing, Italicus train...)

He's probably talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riocentro_attack the bomb exploded on the lap of one of perpetrators before the attack could take place

In eastern germany, there were many anti-government meetings and plans, and sometimes, literally all of people there were different stasi members reporting on other stasi members.

At some point in the late 1950s, the FBI had so thoroughly infiltrated the Communist Party of the USA that it could have taken it over. J. Edgar Hoover considered doing so, but apparently thought it would be more trouble than it was worth.

That’s interesting! Although maybe not surprising. I’d like to know more… do you have a source?

that's a great plot for a comedy sketch

See "The Man Who Was Thursday" by G. K. Chesterton.

One of my favorite books. I like the Fr. Brown stories but TMWWT has stuck with me. The vivid richness of the descriptions could only have come from an artist. In a way he reminds me of Leon Garfield (The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris especially).

So like that Spideman meme where there’s a dozen copies pointing at each other? Except in real life?

Do you have a source for that?

In The Netherlands, the Communist Party was infiltrated by the security service up to the point they were writing the monthly magazine.

The party visited CCP and had a group photo opportunity with the leader du jour. A picture which includes one or more of the spooks.

The "Social Dilemma" is pure propaganda and manipulation, there's very little facts or stats stated in that film that aren't heavily misleading.

What about it is propaganda? From who and for what purpose? Certainly not any large corporation or government, all of whom benefit from a populace that is always online.

Can you provide examples?

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200928/11452045401/socia...

It may have been a hackneyed attempt to point out real issues, but to call it propaganda... by who? Who is running the big 'maybe all these social networks are kinda bad, or at least we should be aware of what they are doing' scheme?

> Friction is about making it harder and less convenient to access unapproved material.

And of course Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, et al would never do anything like that, would they?

Big Tech was censoring people last year who were saying things Congress is saying this year. But don't worry, I'm sure they learned from their mistakes with censoring people.

> As Antonio Gramsci understood, rules achieve hegemonic domination when they are able to cloak their coercion with the consent of the ruled.

If something has the consent of the ruled, can it be coercive? If it can, what even is consent?

The "coercion" is cloaked with the "consent of the ruled". It's not actually the consent of the ruled, it is coercion wearing a disguise.

If a 10,000-strong anti-skub march happens in my town, but the nightly news doesn't mention it at all and instead airs man-on-the-street interviews with smiling middle-class people who all quite like skub, what just happened? Are the populace for or against skub? It doesn't really matter if any anti-skub organizations can be made to appear to be ineffectual or aberrant or insane or invisible.

Your example is straightforward cocercion, it's not what Gramsci was talking about. He argued that culture and religion instill bourgeois values.

It's very tricky to tell people that their desires, beliefs, culture, and religion are merely ruses to further domination. It blurs the line between coercion and consent. It seems to suggest, paradoxically, that people can only consent to things that they ought to consent to, according to the beliefs of the person making the judgement (in this case a Marxist intellectual).

So every *ism is coercion. Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, Buddhism, etc., except it’s not coercion if you’re looking inwardly, I guess.

>Your example is straightforward cocercion

Why do you think that? Keep reading the article. The West doesn't really need Fear (except against whistleblowers etc), but uses Friction and Flooding extremely effectively. The "mysterious" coordination of the increasingly-consolidated media helps provide Friction against organizing effectively against skub, and a steady insistent Flood of pro-skub messaging ensures those without much investment in skub either way suffer the mere-exposure effect and think skub is normal (those man-on-the-street interviews, skub showing up in movies and TV, ads for skub, weirdly patriotic messaging about skub).

>It seems to suggest, paradoxically, that people can only consent to things that they ought to consent to, according to the beliefs of the person making the judgement (in this case a Marxist intellectual).

I think it suggests that people should make decisions based on unadulterated information, rather than that which is spoon-fed to them by authoritarians. Did you read the rest of the article? "Marxist" is an analytical lens, not indicative of someone who wants to give your toothbrush to the revolution.

There's no such thing as unadulterated information.

You're making the same mistake as Gramsci. You decide what the correct beliefs are and the fact that other people don't have those beliefs is evidence of their coercion.

>You decide what the correct beliefs are and the fact that other people don't have those beliefs is evidence of their coercion.

No, the subjects of the article decide that. I'm just some asshole commenting on it.

Relatedly, it's weird that you're directly asserting that I'm doing something that I'm not doing -- you've decided it, thus it is so. You'd think that you could quote the bit where I'm deciding what the correct beliefs are. I suspect you're inferring it from my suggestion that an increasingly-consolidated mass media decides what's normal and presents it to us. If so, I have a short educational video [0] on the topic.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE

I don't care whether the argument is yours or the article's, I'm addressing the argument.

> I don't care whether the argument is yours or the article's, I'm addressing the argument

Sure, by baselessly asserting that I, or Gramsci,

>>decide what the correct beliefs are and the fact that other people don't have those beliefs is evidence of their coercion.

Have I missed something? You wrote that "[i]t's very tricky to tell people that their desires, beliefs, culture, and religion are merely ruses to further domination", which suggests that I, or Gramsci, make that argument. I don't think I did; he doesn't seem to be. Should I infer that the three Fs outlined again and again in the article are in fact the desires, beliefs, culture, and religion of the people being oppressed?

You're missing something all right

I imagine you're still addressing the argument?

Hey, this reminds me of all the anti-war marches I did in the 2000's and 2010's!

There have been times and places where slavery had majority consent, even considering the opinions of the slaves. In all of those cases, I would say that the slavery was still coercive. So yes, you can have the consent of at least the majority of the ruled and still be coercive. Almost nothing wins the consent of everyone, so almost any rule is coercive to someone.

The real thing to gauge is human suffering, which isn’t easy to measure so it often isn’t measured.

The real thing to look at is moral principle rooted in the natural law. This is why tradition is important. It is a dialogue occurring through history done in humble acknowledgment that we cannot "start from scratch" and do better just like that.

Our consent is cloaked because even when we democratically elect a ruler, they then say see we have the consent of the people to do xyz, even though they were elected saying they would do abc.

Most people just say well next time I’ll elect my other side and they’ll do abc that I would consent to. And the process repeats.

Still in some sense if there is true consent by an individual then it isn’t necessarily coercive though it could be manipulative.

Also the consent of two saying I don’t mind if you take/abuse from the one can be totalitarian.

If we think Trump was bad, I think people might be horrified at how hard the pendulum swings back the other way. Many people hate much of the policies going on under Biden (even if just out of partisan reasons and not principles), and one party acting like they can do whatever they want because they have the presidency and a tie in a senate doesn’t change there are like 50 million people who feel like they’re being “oppressed”.

Just as dubya seemed less bad once we had Trump, the next guy might make Trump look the same in comparison.

All done with “consent of the ruled”

> Our consent is cloaked because even when we democratically elect a ruler, they then say see we have the consent of the people to do xyz, even though they were elected saying they would do abc. > Most people just say well next time I’ll elect my other side and they’ll do abc that I would consent to. And the process repeats.

An interesting aspect of this is: full blown direct democracy is one thing, but simple finer grained continuous high quality polling of public sentiment (however imperfect) is rarely discussed, and isn't particularly technically challenging.

That would probably be an improvement over how things go now. The issue is even if public sentiment across a nation is a strong majority like 60%, 40% is still a huge number of people, and different people have somewhat different values depending on where they are.

I feel like local communities this would work well, since a majority overriding a minority might not be as egregious as say a majority of rural folk having their will done over city folk and vice versa.

What I wish we could do is let’s say the federal government says in accordance with majority sentiment, masks are required for children in school. The state of Texas though has the ability to override it or leave it in place, but then the city of Austin could then override what Texas overruled and so on. I don’t know something where the will of more people is being followed.

> That would probably be an improvement over how things go now. The issue is even if public sentiment across a nation is a strong majority like 60%, 40% is still a huge number of people, and different people have somewhat different values depending on where they are.

Oh I agree...but I'm not even making a claim that this will affect change, I am simply suggesting that broad increased awareness of ~true public sentiment (as opposed to largely baseless *claim of public sentiment that we are fed on TV) would be interesting, and maybe even useful. I believe it would decrease the level of delusion in society.

> What I wish we could do is let’s say the federal government says in accordance with majority sentiment, masks are required for children in school. The state of Texas though has the ability to override it or leave it in place, but then the city of Austin could then override what Texas overruled and so on. I don’t know something where the will of more people is being followed.

I'm not opposed to this in principle, but I am leery of claims of "in accordance with majority sentiment" under the current mode of measurement, and information distribution that precedes polling. I believe the whole system is rotten.

Yeah that’s a great point.

That's really the whole reason federalism was implemented as it was in the United States. They didn't believe laws could be created that would logically apply to the entire nation, so the Federal government was very very restricted and almost all normal "government" was delegated to the states. This almost immediately began being eroded and now feels almost pointless.

"Continuous democracy" was something attempted by Tony Blair in the UK (apparently originating in the US) - the terms meaning there is somewhat different to your description. In this scenario continuous democracy was achieved using focus groups of members of the public. This is different from what you describe - as it is using a 'proxy' for actually asking the public.

That an underlying idea here was that all the government needs to do is act upon the feedback of these groups. The government didn't have to lead.

That didn't work out very well in practice though. I don't believe the issue was around the statistical methods, or some kind of bias, although they could add extra issues.

More that the problem is just asking a random collection of members of the public what to do is not in general what the public wants, or not when it comes to be enacted. As the general public does not have the time or the inclination to dig deep on issues and possible results. It's in effect government by 'hot take'.

I bring this up - because whilst not the same, the continuous democracy you describe may also have some of these issues.

This is touched on in an Adam Curtis documentary - probly All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-lov...

It can still be unethnical to have policies and laws that have 50.001% approval. I agree though that I think the word "coercive" here is a bit confusing.

This is the perpetual pull between "right" being the will of the people, "right" being the laws we set for ourselves that are placed outside the people's direct control by appeal to some higher ideal (such as a Constitutional government that provides authority to reject laws because they do not align to that Constitution), and "right" being a pure, objective correctness, justice, etc. (that may or may not actually exist).

Every society eventually wrestles with these things.

A possible analogue: a Ponzi-scheme. The actors do consent (by lack of understanding of how the scheme works), but the outcome is against their expectations. Of course, the guys running the scheme have ways to explain their shortfall (the governments/banks don't want you to get rich) and people do fall for/believe that.

a Ponzi-scheme. The actors do consent

Yes. SEC staff have had to face angry haters after shutting down Ponzi schemes. Not from the people running them. From the suckers, who were hoping that if it went on a little longer, they'd come out ahead.

If it is consent, then it is manufactured consent.

Yes, because an action against a minority by a majority can be coercive. I think American history demonstrates this pretty clearly.

Considering how fast Reddit is growing I think people should keep an eye on the moderators of r/worldnews and r/news. The viewership of these subreddits is several times bigger than their subscriber count because both subreddits are regularly featured on r/all and r/popular. It's also no secret that many journalists use these subreddits to gauge which topics interests people.

It's possible that in a few years all an authoritarian regime has to do to shut down bad publicity is to get a moderator on r/worldnews.

In the future?

Mods of the major subreddits have been on payrolls for years. Its a topic that used to come up with regularity ~6 years ago. I would be absolutely shell-shocked if it wasn't commonplace now.

My thoughts as well, /r/worldnews is for a long while already an echo chamber dominated by one political perspective that, to use a courtroom analogy, act exclusively as prosecutors against populists, centrists and conservatives or they act as defense attorney's for those they already vote for, depending on the hot issues of the day.

The inability for users to police mods on reddit is becoming a serious problem in my opinion.

An additional problem is that most mods enable the rapid development of echo chambers through often well intentioned rules that become draconian when enforced by the right mod(s).

As long as people keep using reddit, nothing is a problem (for reddit).

How would users police mods? It's very easy to write a karma-farming bot, you would end up with bots controlling mods, not users.

    r/worldnews

The sub has gone to hell a good few years ago. If your opinions are anywhere right of woke, you get banned straight up. It is often considered a badge of honor to get banned from r/worldnews. A sign that you haven't fully given in to the hive mind. Funnily enough, the best world news subreddit right now is reddit.com/r/anime_titties (SFW). It started as a joke subreddit satirizing r/neutralpolitics being taken over by porn, but has somehow managed to be the best world news subreddit despite the tongue-in-cheek name.

A lot of innocuous subreddits implement sweeping bans for participation in any black-listed subreddit. r/offmychest is famous for a huge ban hammer (I'm a victim). Honestly, every subreddit that has a r/trueSubreddit version has run into this exact problem at some point.

Honestly, most of the default subs are pretty much hard-censored already. The election year has to led to the complete deterioration of wat used to be well-moderated subs like r/science and r/ask_historians.

Then there are the geographical subs. The default country subs are almost all hard-censored. r/India is so bad, that there's conspiracies about it being run by an ISI operative. Sadly, the reaction to r/India's polarization was the formation of another heavily polarized subreddit in r/india_speaks. So now we have 2 uniquely bad subreddits. In the US, I have noticed a similar thing happen to r/seattle and r/seattleWA around views on homelessness, but to a lesser degree of mutual deterioration.

Any time I step into the real world, I squarely fall into the urban atheist liberal mould. Yet for some reason, the exact same views warrant complete ostracization on a lot of these internet front pages. The insularity of the echo-chamber is mind-boggling.

I've completely quit reddit after 15 years and my life is better for it.

I've been very aggressively filtering out problematic subreddits from r/all, and it's helped tremendously.

>It started as a joke subreddit satirizing r/neutralpolitics being taken over by porn, but has somehow managed to be the best world news subreddit despite the tongue-in-cheek name.

I routinely find that the best content is on the subs that are parodying the subs you'd think would have that content.

/r/neoliberal is a surprisingly informed and nuanced take on a lot of issues

could you give some examples of these opinions? My experience is that posts like this are usually hiding some pretty ugly opinions that get dressed up as "right wing opinions", and I'd love to see a counter example where a very reasonable and respectful position is being banned/excluded. Links instead of descriptions if you don't mind.

I really don't like the assumption of guilt being thrust upon me, but I'll play along. I assume a lack of anonymity in general, so I'll share my profile. You can always dig through my HN profile too. But in the interest of good faith, please don't go around doxxing/stalking me.

The comments that got me banned on r/worldnews are here (That's the day I got banned, hadn't posted for a while before that):

https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/#{%22author%22:%22scre...

They have all been deleted from the subreddit (hard censorship), but the internet is forever.

I mean... it just looks like that whole branch of the conversation was nuked, including everyone disagreeing with you and the whole discussion about whether Modi should be called a Nazi.

I am indian (part of the society that benefits the most from Modi's economics and politics) but I just made this account (also another exhibit of how far-right my government is) to say that I read the conversation and I really think you gotta dig deeper into the social fabric of the indian culture to realise how far-right the organization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashtriya_Swayamsevak_Sangh) behind the government (from which Modi comes) is.

They have an entirely different image of the Indian subcontinent (based on this guy's vision of "Hindutva" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinayak_Damodar_Savarkar). This image roughly includes three parts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindutva:_Who_is_a_Hindu%3F): 1. Religion 2. Culture (Caste etc) 3. National Identity Now the problem is that the government might actually not be really into building the one nation, one religion Indian subcontinent presented in the vision (yes that includes Myanmar, Pakistan, Afghanistan) but the millions of kids being trained by the RSS since forever in thousands of schools kinda do want that. The problem with Modi is not that he's a nazi or not. The problem is with a sizeable population in India who support him because they think he's their guy and will do to Muslims and other lower caste people what the Nazis did to others. Hitler is considered a strong military leader amongst that population. The last part is of course anecdotal (the sample size was around 50 people through out my life spread over different socio-economic-geographic factors. TL;DR This is going to be a problem in the long term for the world

It's funny you say this.

The people who criticize Modi are currently at the top of every english-speaking institution I know off. If anything, criticizing Modi is the easiest way to make you way up the ranks of any English-speaking institution in India. Also, please refrain from using Wikipedia on politically fraught matters. It is the biggest echo chamber of them all, in such areas.

I actually had the inverse journey. I grew up in housing the exact same "RSS are Nazis", "Savarkar wanted Aryan supremacy" opinions that get thrown around in my circles. It actually took a LOT of digging before I even started to wrap my head around the level of institutional propaganda against these persona non gratas of the Indian establishment.

I still dislike RSS, but my opinion of everyone in the Gandhi/Nehru families has plummeted. (Indira was surprisingly candid, but went completely batshit during her emergency). It requires painful digging through of first sources though.

Vikram Sampath's 2 books paint the most detailed image of Savarkar yet, warts and all. (https://smile.amazon.com/s?k=savarkar-vikram-sampath). Also, you should listen to speeches given by the RSS head himself (first sources), especially their annual year review speech. It is surprisingly inclusive. It is quite tame for India's Nazis. Urban folks like us do not realize just how much work the RSS does in rural areas on India. It took going to university in a smaller town and meeting people from poorer communities to hear about how favorably RSS was viewed as a social-welfare NGO.

> National Identity Now the problem is that the government might actually not be really into building the one nation, one religion Indian subcontinent presented in the vision (yes that includes Myanmar, Pakistan, Afghanistan) but the millions of kids being trained by the RSS since forever in thousands of schools kinda do want that

Source ? If anything, Indian Convents and Madras

> other lower caste people

The BJP has been far more inclusive of the lower castes in their power structure than the Congress ever has. Modi himself is lower caste. A substantial portion of the lower castes are voting for Modi too. Your claims are not backed up by data.

At the same time, the recent Pew research survey shows that Indians highly value diversity of religions and preservation of the diversity and freedoms to do so. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/06/29/key-finding....

Hell, more Muslims want India to be 1 mega-subcontinent-nation-state than Hindus. https://www.pewforum.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2021/06/...

Both your links pew research links have this actual content in it: 1. More muslims believe that the partition shouldn't have happened. That is completely different from what I said about Hindus. If anything, it proves Hindus wanting a hindu nation and Muslims feeling that the partition that divided the nations along religious lines shouldn't have happened. 2. The second pew link is full of multiple results showing: a. Hindus believe being "hindu" is an essential part of being Indian. b. Mulsims and other minorities feel insecure about being their own religious selves.

Honestly, either your perception is fundamentally different from what the literal words in the links said that you're willing to misinterpret them to any length OR this was a very cleverly disguised attempt at formulating your argument using the anti-thesis of your argument as the links themselves. Secondly, I agree with you on the Nehru/Gandhi thing. (Another interesting moment is Indira Gandhi talking about population control as a cover in this british documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCI_KhfED2k)

Last please read sarvakar's treatise "Hindutva (Who is Hindu?)" in which he equates being hindu has being indian in addition to the three parts I mentioned earlier.

Now I am going to stop replying to you for my sanity.

BTW, try not misquoting the links you give. It will lead people astray.

Thank you! I've grown used to claims like yours that I was responding to, specifically "If your opinions are anywhere right of woke, you get banned straight up" to be a smoke-screen and usually casual inspection would reveal that the person making the claim wasn't guilt-free to put it lightly. I couldn't see anything ban-worthy in there, so I am glad to be wrong, in the sense that the pattern I was seeing was almost too glib to be true.

Can you tell me why you think you were banned in there though? Like, what attitude or opinion crossed the line? I don't really understand the politics under discussion, but your comments seemed substantive enough that some one could come and meaningfully disagree with you, which I would have anticipated to be a good thing (even if many people disagreed with you).

Anyway, thanks again.

Man, I'm glad I assumed good faith here.

> smoke-screen

Once burned twice shy eh. I agree, it can be hard to distinguish genuine issues and dog whistles from each other.

> If your opinions are anywhere right of woke, you get banned straight up

This was my bad. I did exaggerate a bit. The issue does bring out the worst in me. I still stand by the spirit of my point though.

> what attitude or opinion crossed the line?

My understanding is that reddit mods are not genius propagandists. So, their concerns revolve around banning anyone who steps on a set of predefined land mines.

Past the shallow left good - right bad, there is an impression of India, Philippines, Brazil being run by 'strong-men ethno nationalists' who are all right-wing and bad. Any time that status quo is genuinely questioned, you step on a land mine. They particularly don't like the semantic lines between right & left being blurred.

A couple of other land mines are : ( I single out left triggers, because that's what this community cares about. The right is often guilty of similar or worse things, but they do it with a kind of brazen selfishness that it doesn't seem as hypocritical)

* how various far-left faces are pursuing the same 'american dream' they so heavily criticize.

* If you point out that research on medical transition during puberty is lacking and a lot of gender-affirming models of treatment based in shaky science.

* That a statistical majority of black people support increase in policing. A lot counter-intuitive statistical results among 'captive demographics' are triggers in general.

* Criticisms of Islam in general. I won't extend this to Hindus = evil, but I feel like there is a general dislike towards Hinduism as a result as well. However, it is possible I am just more tuned into it.

> substantive enough that someone could come and meaningfully disagree with you

That is exactly why I got banned. The polite and well-spoken ingroup contrarian (IGW) is a rather dangerous breed. (see another one of my comments in the same thread about IGWs)

> Anyway, thanks again.

Hey, I'm glad this went in such a productive direction. I'm glad HN exists and the coercive civility of the platform is truly wonderful.

Every sub reddit has its golden calf. If you're somewhat left leaning, you're going to end up in places that have leftist golden calfs.

If you're not brain-washed, you'll likely have some amount of critique of every single thing in the world including their golden calf.

So when people say: this is perfect and we're the good guys and they're the bad guys and look how stupid they are, you might say something nuanced or somewhat understanding and now you're a trump supporting, racist, misogynist, nazi incel.

Or, more likely, you'll get downvoted to oblivion and the only people who will comment will have some shit like that to say.

Personally, I've had plenty of reddit users actively tell me I'm a piece of shit for trying to understand what sort of psychological trauma it is that leads to people shooting up schools, or raping, or joining hate groups. Which "humanizes" them too much for most peoples tastes.

Basically: trying to understand "the enemy" or raise awareness about issues in "the plan" are totally off limit topics in most places.

I see a lot of examples of "I got banned over nothing!" that after examination it becomes clear they got banned over.. everything. If something fits that mold I get suspicious. Which is why I ask for counter-examples. Cause its never really nothing, right?

But I think I'm picking up what you're putting down. It just hasn't been my experience that moderation teams are that polarized, it has been my experience that people blame a polarized environment for their own poor behavior though.

Doesn’t this just mean you have the same ideological inflexibility these moderation teams do? I’m trying to understand what actual counterpoint you have made here.

I think we're just sharing perspectives, if you're looking for a hard line to draw between us you're gonna be confused.

> it has been my experience that people blame a polarized environment for their own poor behavior though

I've seen a lot of both, and I think you should be very, very worried about your perspective on this.

There is an overwhelming amount of uncomfortable truths which people are hostile towards. Especially when those people have a narrative; narratives almost always being ideologically over-simplified and therefor in conflict with reality.

If you want a really easy one, I recommend looking into the statistical "math" behind the 75/100 wage-gap. It still blows my mind that one is not allowed to point out super faulty math, and that many people still hold that number to be truth.

So, in this topic I have requested (and received) examples that were contrary to my expectations. I don't think theres anything wrong with my perspective.

> If your opinions are anywhere right of woke, you get banned straight up.

I hear this from people on the right, but there are plenty of right-wingers in there every time I visit.

Go into a thread about Afghanistan, and there will be people blaming biden arguing with people blaming trump.[1]

Go into a thread about Isreal and Palestine. People are arguing about which one is the true evil.[2]

Go into a thread about climate change. People are openly downplaying climate change.[3]

The subs I most often see suppressing speech are generally on the right, so it sounds a lot like projection when I hear people making these accusations.

[1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/pbzuye/large_exp...

[2] - https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/nimqkg/tens_of_t...

[3] - https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/pbkpqt/atmospher...

I clicked on each of these and while there seem to be a few "right of woke" comments they are massively buried. It could be that most non-woke commenters have either already been banned or now avoid it. This doesn't disprove the original comment.

There are plenty of "right of woke" comments in there, but as far as proof, what would you like to see?

There are plenty of folks who haven't been banned, so clearly it's not everyone. Do you have records of all of the people who have been banned so we can directly test the assertion I'm responding to?

You make my case for me right here

Every example you give here is of intra-left debate within a tiny overton window. Opinions around palestine haven't yet crystallized, because WW2 wounds of the holocaust are still fresh. Similarly, Biden was the most hated of the democratic choices on the left. The far-left is still trying to squareoff between their opinion of biden vs hatred of trump vs hawkish liberal empire building vs mistreatment of afghans by Taliban. The opinions around these topics have still not concretized in the culture war. That being said, I certainly see the direction in which the winds are blowing.

__________

On the surface social propaganda dynamics function in a way that is wonderfully elaborated on this post : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20183001 (I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup)

However, under the surface, real propaganda emphasizes the an insidious ostracization of another community member : the in-group-contrarian. (IGC) (read more here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23596617)

Propaganda mods will often allow the stupidest of opinions on climate change and racism to stay on. In part, because the community does their job for them by heavily downvoting these opinions.

But, the IGC is far more dangerous. They start making too much sense (are usually thoughtful & polite), have a proven 'correct' identity (can't easily be dismissed with adhominems) and have some level of credibility (professional stature in the correct circles). Classic examples of IGCs would be black conservatives (Glenn Loury), Anti-woke academics (Jordan Peterson) or atheist ex-muslims (Ayaan Hirsi Ali). Don't read too much into the examples, I don't endorse or even totally agree with most of these people. (The fact that I feel a need to say this, shows the soft fear I have of being called an islamophobic transphobic trump-lover by association, despite aligning with none of those groups)

The IGCs are treated far far worse than any outgroup member. Classic gives are that they get called stupid, opportunist, sell-outs,self-help shills and the like. I have heard some vicious anti-semitic and racist stuff being thrown at IGCs by the left-woke establishment, to shut them down before they get too big. The fear of these people is palpable. I feel like I got insta-banned due to having the trappings of a prospective IGC.

If a member is too prominent at the time of them expressing an IGC opinion, then they get de-platformed (Bari Weiss, Matt Yglesias). The smartest IGCs know to sandwich their IGC view a ton of qualification, express IGC views as a way to point guns in the direction of common ideological enemy and express it sparsely enough to not aggravate too many people. (Contrapoints, John McWhorter). The most dangerous IGCs are those that cannot be deplatformed by a minority, whose ethical compass and merit cannot be dismissed, and are practically pillars of their community ( Total Biscuit RIP, Noam Chomsky, Scott Alexander, Chapelle, Paul G to a lesser degree). This last group is a total pain in the ass to deal with for propagandists.

> You make my case for me right here

You were specifically talking about bans and "hard-censorship". Now you've shifted to talking about downvotes.

I'm not going to try to hit a moving target.

You asserted that "If your opinions are anywhere right of woke, you get banned straight up."

I dispute this claim. Can you show me evidence supporting the claim?

Once we've covered that idea, then I'd be open to talking about whether a system of downvotes and upvotes suppresses the outgroup.

EDIT: If you're going to keep adding to your comment, you can't reasonably expect me to respond to it...

With regards to being an IGC, I can say you won't always get banned. In fact, usually it's the folks on the extreme end of the homogenous group that end up doing the enforcement and driving people out. Is it censorship, bullying, harassment, or is this the system working as intended? I guess that's what people have to decide.

One anecdotal example I have was from a Slack I was part of years ago. These two men who identified as "allies" went around trying to address what they called "micro-aggressions". At the time they were heavily focused on "gender neutral language". To them, this term was well-defined and solidified because in their group it undoubtedly was. The problem was, the wider community had not decided what "gender neutral language" meant to it. There were outstanding questions like, "Is dude okay?", "am I required to observe this massive list of alternative pronouns?" (at the time, pronouns were much more expansive than they are today). It fell short of low-hanging fruit like not assuming everyone is a man on the internet by default. These folks were pestering and ventured into their own system of micro and macro-aggressions. At one point I remember a Norwegian man was berated and micro-corrected for using the term "ladies". A full on lecture was dumped into a thread where he was trying to tell a story of his own. My chief observation in this specific incident was that not everyone agreed that "ladies" is dated language (including women). This caused people to join camps, the camps fought, and inevitably the primarily tech oriented (and progressive oriented) cultural homogeneity won out, driving out both the people they sought to defeat like actual misogynists but an overwhelming trove of normal people who just didn't agree with specific things. The thing I noted about cultural homogeneity at the time was that it inspires people to think in terms of camps, which makes good people odd bedfellows with bad people (and I mean that on both sides of this particular issue). To this day I do not view "ally" men as trustworthy by default.

In other groups I had been a part of similar things happened, but the folks seeking homogeneity attached themselves to Codes of Conduct or Guidelines that became highly prescriptive, and at times, exclusive. They'd seek to moderate one side of this debate but not the other, and with a quickness that was hard to match. They developed a lot of abstract language about systems and power, and ironically enough, used it to boost themselves into power.

I've since distanced myself from any group that has overly prescriptive COC's or has a history of them. What makes that interesting is that I'm not someone who opposes gender neutral language, but I disliked how they enforced it. They weren't positive change agents, and they made the assumption everyone who spoke up was an apologist or some more serious label. I hadn't seen these problems for a while, because I really only hang out on specific IRC networks or HN as a result, both of which have fairly reasonable guidelines that prevent a wide spectrum of abuse.

So are you saying "If your opinions are anywhere right of woke, you get banned straight up." is an incorrect statement?

The last comment tried to shift the goalposts from being "banned straight up" to being suppressed through voting. Now you're trying to shift to a sometimes ban... there's also talk about not banning the people on the extreme right or not banning the "idiots" so they make the right look bad.

Again, I'm not going to try to hit a moving target.

The rest of your comment looks like it's trying to push the conversation off topic.

I'm neither asking for anecdotes nor looking for a diatribe about your experience on Slack. A specific claim was made about censorship in a particular subreddit. I've heard that claim before, but never seen it substantiated in any way.

Can you substantiate the claim?

I'm asking because it sure looks like conservatives are just angry about being downvoted. That's a valid, but very different concern.

> So are you saying "If your opinions are anywhere right of woke, you get banned straight up." is an incorrect statement?

Yeah, uniform rules are rarely reality. I do think people right of woke get ostracized with fairly regular tempo, sometimes that's bans, sometimes that's through other means.

> The last comment tried to shift the goalposts from being "banned straight up" to being suppressed through voting. Now you're trying to shift to a sometimes ban... there's also talk about not banning the people on the extreme right or not banning the "idiots" so they make the right look bad.

It seems like you're expecting me to have much more concrete thoughts and feelings around this subject. I don't. I have my experiences, if you're willing to value them then great, if you're the kind of person that thinks anecdotes are useless then our discussion is over. I didn't sit around writing down all the details around everything I ever saw that rubbed me the wrong way over years (nearly a decade now) of internet based discourse. That's to say, I can provide you a lens to look through, I can't make you see anything you don't believe exists.

> I'm asking because it sure looks like conservatives are just angry about being downvoted. That's a valid, but very different concern.

I am not a conservative. I also think the two are problems likely in the same domain based on what I've read of other replies.

> I do think people right of woke get ostracized with fairly regular tempo, sometimes that's bans, sometimes that's through other means.

Again. I'm talking about one specific claim. You guys keep trying to move the goalposts.

Can you substantiate the claim?

> You guys keep trying to move the goalposts.

I don't have a "goal post" to even move. I came here to dump some insight into the overall problem the other user was describing.

Substantiate what claim? That right of woke users are always treated with a ban? No. I already said that doesn't happen, I also said I don't think the problem is that binary.

Anyway, you make having a conversation on the internet completely exhausting. Good luck figuring out whatever it is that you're trying to figure out.

> If your opinions are anywhere right of woke, you get banned straight up.

This is what I was disputing. That's the goalpost.

The conversation is exhausting because everyone wants to dance around this claim rather than simply addressing it directly. From my end it feels like pulling teeth.

I don't see evidence of the statement.

I don't see evidence that the the statement is applied inconsistently.

I don't see evidence of moderates being targeted with bans.

I don't even see evidence that bans are politically motivated in the first place.

I've seen this complaint a lot, but it never gets substantiated. It's just thrown out there like we should all automatically agree with it.

Well I don't automatically agree. Please forgive my single-mindedness on this topic, but I'd like to see something substantiating the claim being made.

Once we can agree whether this is happening, then maybe I'd be willing to move to a different conversation (like voting).

I'm sorry about that. My keyboard glitched out, so I posted half my comment at that point. Then continued writing it.

My bad. I appreciate you putting in effort to reply and find good sources to refute my claims.

>r/India

More than a year ago I was banned from both r/worldnews and r/India for a comment about how the US and Pakistan funded and armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

I'm a Danish guy and I have never posted anything in r/India. Someone who mods both r/worldnews and r/India doesn't like criticism of Pakistan.

Pakistani nationalists becoming mods of both r/India and r/worldnews is just the tip of the iceberg of what is wrong with the mods on reddit.

banned from both r/worldnews and r/India for a comment about how the US and Pakistan funded and armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Which is no secret, and is not disputed. There's even a movie, "Charlie Wilson's War", with Tom Hanks. "And then we blew the endgame."

Since trump, most of the subreddits have been taken over, and the rest quarantined or removed.

You can add r/videos to that list. They suppress anything relevant. If 9/11 happened today you would not know going on r/videos. You have to go to r/publicfreakout which wouldn't even be the relevant subreddit but at least they don't censor reality even if there is a lot of astro turfing going on.

>It's possible that in a few years all an authoritarian regime has to do to shut down bad publicity is to get a moderator on r/worldnews.

Too late.

After the Orlando nightclub massacre in 2016, /r/news and /r/worldnews completely shut down postings about it because a Muslim was the killer. /r/askreddit and, yes, /r/the_donald opened up discussion threads because there was no alternative on Reddit.

Unfortunately this article isn't criticism, it's an instruction manual for groups that organize and co-ordinate using projection. Essentially anything groups aligned to authorities accuse outgroups of doing is a way of signalling and establishing consensus on what they plan to do next. They aren't projecting because they are stupid, they are projecting because they're coordinating. It only takes about 6-8 years to go from street riots to camps and gulags, and in Canada and Australia, we're about 60% of the way down that road. The only meaningful political question right now is how much civilization we must give up to isolate and remove a totalitarian movement that has subverted and taken root in our institutions, while they used other more legitimate movements as cover.

Complaining about censorship, or any signal of skepticism or belief in principle at all just gets you on a list of being among the first to stop applauding. Who really thinks someone who uses the cynical realpolitik of deception and censorship is going to be swayed by a principled argument? The only thing nihilists understand is power and conseqeunces.

If you are really concerned about censorship, the most valuable act of defiance now is to build close personal networks of friends and family that do not depend on the platforms, and which are immune to the relentless official propaganda disgorged by tech companies.

This all sounds very dark, but really, if you can't countenance it, you aren't going to be innoculated to it, and you are going to be subject to it.

I've come to the same conclusions with the added step that I believe we should focus our efforts on creating platforms and protocols to protect anonymity, encrypted communication, alternate payment mechanisms, and freedom of speech. As a conservative I've seen all of these things attacked in order to control what is allowed to be said and who is allowed to be compensated.

> "As a conservative..."

you had a good comment going until you tribalized yourself (with a false dichotomy, to boot). the pull of the tribe will always subvert independent thinking.

that's not to say we can exist devoid of identities, but that we should always be cognizant of the bias they introduce, and actively reduce the attack surface of that bias by not adopting identifying ideologies needlessly. you can for example be amenable to many "conservative" ideas without considering yourself a conservative, and especially without joining an ideological party (like the republicans).

the goals you mention are not ideological, so why bring ideology into the conversation?

Because the brunt of this phenomena in the US has been directed at conservatives ever since 2016. It happens literally every day now, someone I follow is disappeared from a platform.

yah, that's exactly the bias talking. 2016 isn't special. the rhetorical heat has been rising for decades because more and more people are realizing that moneyed interests are corrupting our shared prosperity, and getting a fair shake is becoming less and less realizable for more and more people. heated rhetoric ("censorship") in turn tries to squash, or at least shout down, dissent, but that's mostly misdirected at each other rather than toward the moneyed and powerful, who have distracted us and subverted our common rules and norms over the last 70 years. it's not special to the times or a particular ideology (and especially not a particular ex-president and his fans).

Something similar happened with terrorism when the US started bombing. People joined because they were losing friends and seeked both revenge and solidarity.

I still don't think it's a great idea to find too much solidarity within the two party system, no matter how sweet the revenge could be. That's why I don't consider myself a modern liberal.

Look how quickly the comments section turned on you because "as a conservative", where as you say, the brunt of all censorship is focused. Really goes to show how effective it is that even in a threat discussing the topic, the prevailing "othering" affect is demonstrated.

I fully expected it. These people have no idea what it's like from the other side and it's specifically why I mentioned it.

> It only takes about 6-8 years to go from street riots to camps and gulags, and in Canada and Australia, we're about 60% of the way down that road.

Didn't the current premier's father (for Canada) do pretty much the same thing (suspend constitutional rights) in the 70's for... dubious reasons to say the least? He was also the man who paved the way to normalize relations with China and Cuba, two nations known for their respect of human rights.

Not a single line about the state of censorship in Brazil. Odd.

Not really, it's a piece for US readers about the US current views of who's "bad", they're not going to criticize their political and economic partners. There's nothing about Saudis either, see.

Or about the situation regarding censorship in the USA, which makes this a rather blatant political propaganda piece by itself.

For those who feel like censorship in the USA is less problematic, because it's not state controlled (that is, if it actually isn't) .. consider this: If business can introduce arbitrary censorship, regardless of justification, on platforms that are widely used by many, is this not far more dangerous than any state controlled censorship?

While any governments can of course ignore their supposed accountability for their behavior, business have far less of that accountability to begin with. Although, if the USA was true state of law (not a powerful banana republic pretending), it should hold those companies accountable for limiting the freedoms of citizens regarding what should be allowed according and protected by law. But heck, almost all (emerging) fascistic systems have started (and flourished) on a collusion between corrupt business and an equally criminal government, with a shared interests in each expanding their own powers and influence.

Almost funny to see articles like these coming from the USA these day, knowing in which direction the country is currently moving. Somehow "the emperor has no clothes" comes to mind.

Orwell's concern was Us, not Them:

"[Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office."

you can definitely see "Flooding" on all the major social media platforms these days

It’s not just “these days”. Flooding is the bread and circuses spoken of nearly 2000 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

We’re talking about the distraction and daily grind that occupies the otherwise-idle hands for which the ruling class’s devils might make work.

Reading this I had a realization. The "soft fear" is alive and well in the USA.

A huge fear right now is slipping up in life and falling off the capitalist progression. There is no safety net here, so if you screw up and end up homeless because you didn't work hard enough or save enough money, your chances of climbing out are almost nill. So rather than sending someone off to a Gulag or prison camp, the gulags are the ghettos patrolled by the police departments.

Here, we say to ourselves, "We don't have gulags," but in the same breath, "if you are 'lazy' it is not our fault that you ended up in the projects." And then the system works to keep you there, from all sides.

By disguising this oppression as a side-effect of "not working hard enough" or "not picking the right career" we can look away and say it is not our problem; yet we live in fear that if we lose our jobs we might end up in these hopeless places. And many will blame themselves because that is the narrative.

Clever, and insidious: the prisons are all around us, just without walls and barbed wire.

> "We don't have gulags," but in the same breath, "if you are 'lazy' it is not our fault that you ended up in the projects."

But that's like saying "we don't have torture, but if you don't help, you're not getting any cake". Yes, living in social housing isn't great because of your neighbors. But it's much better than being homeless. And it's much, much, much, much better than being in a labor camp.

Nobody is stopping you from walking out of the projects. Guess how that works out in a Gulag when you say "thanks, I'd rather live in the forest".

> By disguising this oppression as a side-effect of "not working hard enough" or "not picking the right career" we can look away and say it is not our problem

Actually, this is the definition of ideology, and you are not identifying it. Ideology starts when they accept victims in pursuit of their goal. When you accept negative side-effect that would be considered offsetting whatever good you are trying to provide in any other ideology.

- Capitalist ideology: We accept human victims as a side effect of meritocracy, whereas we wouldn’t accept human victims under Christian ideology,

- Christianity: Caring for poor people; White supremacist ideology: Accepting that we do not care for migrants while we care about local people.

- Feminist ideology: Accepting male victims, for example suicide or work, while rejecting non-life-threatening difficulties for women. (whereas under any other ideology, the two genders’ issues would be treated equally).

- Communist ideology: Accepting to shoot up a head of state in the pursuit of the greater good for all other citizen.

Meanwhile the spokesperson for the Islamic Emirate has 360K followers on Twitter.

Ideologically it troubles me that political opponents are censored in USA (Trump) even though I vehemently disagree with every thing he has to say and I understand it’s damaging to the society through incitement of violence.

I'm less troubled that the censorship actually happened, as much as I am troubled by the increasing demand for such censorship. social media networks give you all the tools you could possibly want to prevent you from seeing posts you don't want to see, but that's not good enough—people are demanding that people get deplatformed for speech. ubiquitous smartphone and social media access brought about the slow death of the "libertarian free speech haven" aspect of the Web, and there's no reason to think those ideals will come back into vogue anytime soon.

Those "ideals" absolutely exist on the internet... they just don't have a place in mainstream media. For example, I often use Mastodon and other platforms like it. Now while popular Mastodon instances obviously don't want to federate with "free speech" instances, those instances still exist and stand on their own. I still remember a discussion some time ago, about federating with what I think was called Gab.

At the end of the day, free speech doesn't mean that a platform like twitter has to let you on to their platform, but should you want to create or host your own alternative to Twitter? Well you can, so you're not restricted in your free speech.

>At the end of the day, free speech doesn't mean that a platform like twitter has to let you on to their platform

Perhaps in law, but certainly not spirit. I understand the dilemma. Twitter doesn't want the KKK on their site, but they've gone way too far. It's nothing more than a thinly veiled self-serving propaganda machine anymore, as is all the other large social media sites. The original dream of internet freedom is dead.

To me it stems from a basic central problem: verifiable fact has value, but it is not defended by our institutions meaningfully.

You can spread all the harmful lies you like as long as your victims are diffuse and lack the standing for a lawsuit.

We have plenty of forms of censorship available through the courts - people can be punished for perjury, filing a false report, defamation, false advertising, fraud, uttering threats, etc. But in all those cases, you only face punishment if you target somebody with the standing and means to retain a lawyer, or you target the machinery of justice itself.

What happens when you target something like "climate change"? Or vaccines? Or the history of the 2020 election? Nothing. Nobody has standing to sue so the act is not punished.

So why is Hulk Hogan more worthy of protection from harmful speech than Climate Change?

And letting falsehoods go uncorrected plainly hasn't worked. The "Marketplace of Ideas" has done jack squat about Q or climate change denial or antivaxxers or whatever, and now we're facing real catastrophic impact of those problems. Significant thought-leaders in these communities can be caught over and over again in easily-verifiable lies and supporting extremist and hateful content... and face no consequences in terms of losing support through the normal mechanisms of the platform.

You can see what happens to platforms without substantive moderation or censorship - they're gradually consumed by obsessed extremists who simply exhaust all the normal people until they leave.

So, with the total failure of a government policy to tackle the problem, is it any wonder that people are looking to the owners of the platforms to tackle the issue? They have the means, and can be influenced through threats of boycotts.

Until reality itself can sue for defamation, we have to come up with a decent alternative. The stakes are high and the impact is real.

why assume that our institutions have all of the verifiable facts? verifiable by whom? the institutions themselves?

and which institutions? the elected federal government? the appointed federal government? the intelligence agencies?

who is the authority on truth, and what gives them that authority?

The platforms are the authority on truth on their platform.

I question whether they should want to be such an authority, or whether they are competent to be such an authority, but they have the power (both technically and, currently, legally) to be the authority... on their own platform.

Because we already do that when it's a matter of perjury, filing a false report, defamation, fraud, etc. In all those cases, the government becomes the arbiter of truth.

If celebrities can sue the Daily Mail for lying about them and win, why doesn't climate change or covid infectiousness get the same protection, considering the stakes are so much higher?

Yes exactly. You should be allowed to disagree with that person still being able to talk. The whole deplatforming of Trump seemed overly orchestrated.

[EDIT} this is getting downvoted, but him magically being removed from Twitter and Parler being shut down didn't just happen in a vacuum. We are in full censorship mode as a country. It is sad to see.

There was a lot of discussion on HN about Parlor ban. I was supportive of the ban because Jan 6 memories were fresh - over the months I've been re-evaluating my position. Not about Trump, but about civil liberties and the machinery that allows peaceful debate, freedom of expression and right to dissent.

Trump was live for millions of people just last week. I'm not sure how you could say Trump is censored. He can get on TV and talk whenever he wants.

Yes, I understand that Twitter is a private platform and it’s not censorship through government. I still have a problem with this. It doesn’t sit well. Big Tech is a proxy for official communications of Gov and banning a political opponent is just so wrong. The timing of this ban was so blatantly obvious - as soon as Biden took oath, Trump was booted off.

Other part of me thinks “Twitter is so much better without Trump”. I’m with you all.

> The timing of this ban was so blatantly obvious - as soon as Biden took oath, Trump was booted off.

There may have been another event that occurred right about the same time which had more impact on Twitter's decision to boot him from the platform.

Trump was removed from Twitter and Facebook on January 6th, not January 20th.

There are few things that can dampen First Amendment protections (to say nothing of Section 230 protections). Incitement to violence or insurrection is one of them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action), and on January 6th, Twitter and FB made the judgement call that it was too likely that's what the President was doing. Perhaps if one turns one's head and squints, one could consider it government censorship because the CEOs of those companies didn't want any risk at all they'd be hauled into a Congressional oversight (or a court) over the use of their platforms in aiding and abetting an insurrection, but it's a strange type of government censorship that censors the President, isn't it? It's not entirely out of the realm of possibility in the US, given that Congress and the Courts are independent branches; perhaps one could make a claim that Congress can apply indirect pressure to shape what a President may say.

(There is, perhaps, more to be said on the topic in terms of why he's still banned from those sites).

> I'm not sure how you could say Trump is censored.

Did you not read the article? Its whole point is the new authoritarians are a lot more flexible than the old ones. They are about reducing the spread of dissenting thought, rather than eradicating it altogether. As the article says:

"Friction is about making it harder and less convenient to access unapproved material."

Banning Trump from Twitter doesn't make it impossible to access what he says, but it does make it harder. You are less likely to read what he says, unless you specifically go looking for it. Twitter's censorship of Trump means a lot fewer people will know what he says, which is its goal.

>Banning Trump from Twitter doesn't make it impossible to access what he says, but it does make it harder. You are less likely to read what he says, unless you specifically go looking for it.

Oh noes. Anyone who wants to know what Trump is saying has to experience the momentary and minor inconvenience of discovering a URL on the open internet. Once then bookmarking it or something. The horror.

> Twitter's censorship of Trump means a lot fewer people will know what he says, which is its goal.

This is a net positive, insurrectionists should not be given a platform.

What other label would you give to the action of banning his Twitter account?

Is it bad censorship every time when anyone gets banned on a forum?

It’s a smooth spectrum from average joe to a political opponent and ex-President.

The key thing here isn't that trump was a political opponent of Twitter/Facebook, but he was encouraging his supporters to overthrow the Democratically elected government of the US and put him in the office of POTUS.

It makes sense for US companies to ban people trying to overthrow the US.

normally when people try to overthrow governments, they bring weapons

Not in every case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_coup

though in this case I'd argue it was a combination of both, there were folks involved in the insurrection attempt on the 6th that brought weapons: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jul/13/donald-tru...

I'm surprised at the downvotes and lack of engaging with my comment.

> Fear of punishment works on most bosses of news media outlets and internet platforms. If they slip up and allow the wrong content to reach the public, they may not be sent off to do hard labor in a detention camp, but they could be demoted and their day docked

Can't help but note that Twitter declined to deplatform Trump for years - long before he was elected president - because he was good for business. When they finally did kick him off (yes, yes, as is their right to do as a private organization), they defended their actions by insisting that they were afraid that he might do or say something that the government might hold them legally liable for. AWS said effectively the same thing when they kicked the service Parler off of their servers because - a degree of separation away - Trump might do something on Parler that AWS might end up in legal trouble for.

This reasoning doesn't make sense since every person or company using any public platform or any public cloud infrastructure can do bad. Person who does "bad" is liable for it not underlying platform.

For example politicians who don't like Bitcoin say something like "Bitcoin is used for drugs" yea but dollars and euros are used for drugs as well so it makes no sense to say Bitcoin is bad or declare any person using public service as good or bad.

So equating banning a user to the rights of a private organization might be a _little_ disingenuous? Some might say a straw man for the fact Twitter did so out of fear of liability pursuant of a government which deemed that user's opinions offensive? Would Twitter have removed the authors of the US constitution for fear of legal liability from the Crown? Isn't that, like, the reason the first amendment even exists? So does the government have constitutional ground to stand on for deciding what is misinformation or illegal speech, private platforms or not? Evidently so. Because... private company?

>So does the government have constitutional ground to stand on for deciding what is misinformation or illegal speech, private platforms or not? Evidently so.

Courts have constitutional ground and duty to judge and decide upon laws and constitution.

In Machiavellian terms, what better way to help ingratiate your company with the incoming administration? Especially since the outgoing one will no longer be able to retaliate.

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