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Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

Apparently the 'misinformation' trope has extended into art.

Many of you defending censorship in the last few years (and very much so on HN) on political grounds are going to be changing your minds in the coming years due to stuff like this.

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I don’t expect many minds to change. I predict the “‘private’ [misnomer] companies can do what they want [broadly false]” crowd to dig in and rationalize why art is not a special case. My own hypothesis is they personally identify with the corporations, e.g. they are entrepreneurs or might want to become entrepreneurs someday.

Honestly I don't think it's that they identify as entrepreneurs or business owners, I think it's just that they identify as progressives, and there is an incredibly prominent pro-censorship current in modern progressive ideology. I say this because I've definitely interacted with many people in real life who are not the "entrepreneur" or "pro corporate" types yet happily cheer on the censorship being practiced by big tech and the like

Progressives are not necessarily for censorship (though some are). But this "private censorship" is a consequence of not regulating new media industries.

So seeing some people complain about censorship after being against regulation has very much "you wanted this, serves you right" vibe.

I agree but would like to posit that that attitude is yet another issue of the current political landscape. The "your previous idea has turned out poorly, both this is your fault and I can now justify slightly this bad thing because it's happening to you" I probably phrased that poorly but I see lots of people who are against things, no longer being so strongly against that thing when it starts to hurt their 'enemies'. It's like a rule change in sport, I'm against it until it starts to give me a competitive advantage.

Which really just goes back to the two party, my enemy or my friend trope. Tribalism etc.

> My own hypothesis is they personally identify with the corporations,

I used to be like that and I remember defending YT censorship as I thought I would probably wanted to be able to do the same had my project took off. It took me a long time to realise I was wrong.

What do you think the people who now shout "censorship" would say if few years ago, someone sugested "the tech giants should be regulated with regards to what content they host and follow due process when removing content"?

The tech giants are unregulated. They can do what they want. They want this for some reason, so they do it.

What is the alternative?

Doing what random HNer's want, apparently. Disrupting industries by straight up breaking the law: totally ok. Choosing what content your website will and will not host: absolutely monstrous. That's tech culture in a nutshell.

I mean, "the tech giants have enormous control over society, monopolistic positions and levels of vertical integration and trilions of cash at hand that make it impossible to fight them in market, can we do something about it?" is definitely a good discussion to have.

Not sure if "they should be hosting dangerous antivaxx content during global pandemic" (that some people claim doest actually exist because of previous content) is a good way to kick that discussion off.

(I realize this particular video possibly isnt that dangerous.)

We're in the baby years of social media. I have some hope that humanity will figure some it out.

I also have a great deal of dread that we will not. We are not guaranteed to have nice things, and a few bad actors can do quite a lot of harm.

Censorship, to me, would be the government forcing these platforms to host content that isn't in their business interests, because it would be compelling speech. That's a much worse problem, in my mind, than private organizations removing content from their platforms.

I would rather live in this world than the alternative.

> Many of you defending censorship in the last few years

It's beyond parody. If this was twitter, I'd be bringing out the clown emoji.

This better not get to hosting providers or it all goes to shit.

Sure, big platforms censoring stuff is bad, but people still have the choice of renting a server and hosting whatever they want.

If your website, hosted on a dedicated machine that you rent from OVH or whatever (and probably Amazon, but I wouldn't trust them) or co-locate in a datacenter, can be taken down on claims of misinformation, that's it, RIP free Internet. It was nice knowing you.

Isn't that exactly what Amazon did to Parler already?

Yeah, like I said, wouldn't trust them.

Why Parler didn't use a "normal" hosting provider, I don't know.

What about GoDaddy?

https://gizmodo.com/godaddy-is-giving-texas-abortion-snitchi...

You got me with this one. Actually threatening someone directly is worse than being an antivaxxer... Guess that's my cutoff point? Just shoot me in the head, I'm sick of this world.

People can't have too much freedom and these big corporations do the bidding for ruling political class. They are deep in tax avoidance and they don't want government to order IRS to start looking.

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