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Comment by 542458 | Hacker News Reader

As somebody from the first world who has had the experience of moderating Internet forums… free speech in the sense of “the government generally shouldn’t control people’s speech, with limited exceptions” is good and necessary. Free speech in the sense of “everybody should be forced to platform every idea” is silly IMO. Left alone user content rapidly devolves into the most low-effort salient content - flame wars, political proselytizing and porn, mostly. If you want your platform to be about anything other than those, you need curation and moderation. This is key for a good user experience.

Note that you’re choosing to spend your time on HN (a relatively strongly moderated forum) instead of a less moderated forum like 8chan’s /b/.

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I generally agree with you, but one thing that's been making me extremely uncomfortable lately (since 2016) is the attacking of alternate platforms/communities that are built. Back in The Day(TM), when people had issues with mod/admin decisions and they couldn't be resolved, they'd just spin off a new commmunity/chatroom/forum/etc. Some people would move, some would stay in both, and we'd wait to see if the disagreeing faction was large enough to sustain itself. If so, you'd just end up with 2/3 places to go to talk about X instead of 1.

Now it's more common to try to get 'bad' platforms dehosted altogether (e.g. Parler/Gab), subreddits try to get their 'alternatives' banned, and any company/group that challenges a big group is going to be bought out or otherwise dealt with. (See: FB's gobbling of companies to try to keep people in their garden instead of letting people chose which gardens they enjoy.)

We used to have the opportunity to walk into the woods and make our own playground. Now people will follow you and attack you for that. THAT'S the problem. Also we're becoming really fond of demanding community loyalty. HN doesn't have this problem (which is one reason I show up), but on other social media sites, it can be, for instance, forbidden to link to/talk about certain other sites. For example, on Reddit, it's common to ban people for posting in the 'wrong' Reddits, and on Twitter finding out somebody participates somewhere 'bad' is practically open season.

I should be able to go on HN and /b/, provided I follow my host's rules. I should also be able to set up my OWN site and explicitly say it's because I disagree with - say - HN's moderation policies without worrying about the site being attacked.

That's really about monopolies on information and other gateways more than anything. We are so used to consolidation to one or few large platforms for us to access information or services. This is in large part due to network effects, but also due to poor regulation as well as us being lazy.

So if we have lot of different options to access information and your views are still unwelcome in all but the most extreme places, then I think it reflects quite poorly on your views. You might not get a platform, but that doesn't mean you're being persecuted.

It is, but I would argue that was one of the reasons for the establishment of free speech. Back when we were conceiving of free speech as a right, it was in direct response to a monopoly on information. In that case, it was the government backing up their monopoly on information with their monopoly on force. Now, it's companies backing up their oligarchy on information with their resources.

I think the problem is the monopoly on information, not its source. I understand some people disagree.

> So if we have lot of different options to access information and your views are still unwelcome in all but the most extreme places, then I think it reflects quite poorly on your views. You might not get a platform, but that doesn't mean you're being persecuted.

I agree with this. It's just important to still let those extreme places exist.

From my understanding of history which is probably incomplete, free speech is freedom from government restriction and prosecution, not about availability of information in the private sector. It boils down to the principle that we can't force other people to repeat your views.

Free speech as a concept has definitely been abused by people distributing mis-information. That's more of a modern problem as network effects and technology made mass distribution and co-ordination of mis-information affordable outside of governmental organisations.

In terms of "extreme places", the Internet is pretty free from restrictions already. You can pretty much set up a website with content that's not acceptable on any of the large media platforms.

Yes, that is how and why free speech was established. My argument is that we actually were reacting to the availability of information, but since the government (and outside of the US in some places the Church for whatever religion the state follows) was the only source of the monopoly, we assumed the problem was government. Like if you have somebody running around committing arson and you exile them but don't bother criminalizing arson; you addressed that particular actor but not the underlying problem.

> Free speech as a concept has definitely been abused by people distributing mis-information. That's more of a modern problem as network effects and technology made mass distribution and co-ordination of mis-information affordable outside of governmental organisations.

This is true, however, I would say it needs to be balanced against the situation before, where institutions acted unchecked and it was often impossible to act at all outside of them. I am sympathetic to the argument that misinformation is a problem and I even agree with it, I just think the ways we discuss solving the problem would be worse. It's not enough to solve a problem: We should try to solve it in a productive way. Otherwise we end up with a Pyrrhic victory.

> In terms of "extreme places", the Internet is pretty free from restrictions already. You can pretty much set up a website with content that's not acceptable on any of the large media platforms.

This is why I focused on things like pressure to buy out, DDOSes, immense legal resources being brought to bear, etc. You can set up a website, but if it becomes big enough, people start going after it with things other than just speech, and THAT'S where I draw the line.

> So if we have lot of different options to access information and your views are still unwelcome in all but the most extreme places, then I think it reflects quite poorly on your views.

And then those "most extreme places" (Parler, Truth Social) invariably fail because of the "worst people problem".

https://twitter.com/hankgreen/status/1348101443404787718

Historically, this perspective has proven to be laughable. Criticism of Putin can hardly be found except for the most extreme places (in some locations)

>Criticism of Putin can hardly be found except for the most extreme places (in some locations)

That's driven by government persecution, so not really what we're talking about.

Meh- power is power. Fine, how about extreme positions like Jesus is god, earth is round, earth is not center of universe, slavery should be outlawed, women should not have to wear hijab, ...

Those were all sanctioned by government, who decides what the law is and who breaks it. We're not talking about that.

>subreddits try to get their 'alternatives' banned

Every once in a while I come across a rumor that AHS and affiliated subreddits employ a strategy of posting illegal content (like child pornography) on subreddits/platforms that they want shut down for wrongthink. At some point it doesn't matter that the government allows for free speech if a small minority is able to control the flow of ideas for the rest of society; the effect is the same and technically an authoritarian government could trivially benefit from such censorship while ostensibly remaining neutral.

And, for the record, /b/ was the birthplace of hundreds of internet-wide memes in its heyday, with next to zero moderation. The fact that the average person can't stand an unmoderated forum doesn't mean that such fora have no place - especially considering the likelihood that there are campaigns (by the same type of people who try to get alternatives dehosted) to keep such places unusable by deliberately posting offensive and off topic content.

Well, that's where the whole business of Internet anonymity comes into play. What if people had to post their state-supplied identifying information at all times, so there was no doubt about who they were? This is more or less how traditional journalism works: the reporter doesn't generally get to hide behind a screen of anonymity. Editorial board op-eds are often unsigned, however.

I think anonymity is OK personally, it falls into the tradition of anti-government pamphleteering in pre-Revolution colonial North America under British Royal rule, and samizdat literature in the USSR.

No, the journalist will just report from an "anonymous source" instead.

> Now it's more common to try to get 'bad' platforms dehosted altogether (e.g. Parler/Gab)

Well, no company can be forced to host antisemitism, holocaust denial and similar content [1] - most companies don't even want to host such content, simply because of how despised (or, in the case of Europe, illegal) it is.

[1] https://fortune.com/2020/11/13/parler-extremism-hate-conspir...

I am also an American who disagrees with those European laws, though I understand them and why they came to pass. It's one of the difficulties of the issue: Free speech used to be more of a national problem, now it's larger, and, as you mentioned, international law and culture add even more variables to consider.

I understand the desire to abide by European standards, because the Holocaust in particular was so horrific, but there are countries that have laws against things like promoting homosexuality, so clearly legality can't be the only moral arbiter here because the laws are a.) contradictory and b.) we recognize authoritarian governments make oppressive laws and we shouldn't comply with them. Which means we need another standard, one that defines Holocaust denial as impermissible but discussions of being gay as fine.

I don't think anybody should HAVE to host holocaust denial, but if somebody does, they shouldn't be attacked for it. (And 'attacked' meaning attempts made to take down the content/sue facetiously/DDOSing, etc. Nothing stopping people from mocking the host or pulling their money).

I'm also wary of things like 'hosting anti-semitism' as a justification, because what is considered anti-semitic varies (like most kinds of bigotry). Is it anti-semitic to criticize the government of Israel? What about the gender issues in Ultra-Orthodox communities? (I'm not Jewish, but I feel the same way about groups that I am a part of: I might not LIKE being called a dyke, seeing somebody say all homosexuals are depraved degenerates, etc. but that's not the same as calling for my murder or trying to get me fired.)

> Which means we need another standard, one that defines Holocaust denial as impermissible but discussions of being gay as fine.

We actually have, and that is the Declaration of Human Rights.

Holocaust denial denies the very thing why this Declaration was formulated and accepted by all civilized nations. Discriminating against gay people violates Articles 1-3 of the Declaration.

The problem is that the US, its constitution being way older than the Declaration, has a far wider understanding of "free speech" and the responsibilities associated with it.

I mean, if we got every internet company to agree and had some kind of public standards and the ability to vote or otherwise talk through borderline issues, I'd be fine with that as a solution, even as somebody who does hold the US view of free speech.

The problem is that there's no way companies are going to leave money on the table or authoritarian governments are going to agree to that, so then you're right back to the two different set of standards where companies proclaim in the EU/US/etc. that they follow content moderation according to the DHR while letting some countries erase gay people and women, and if that happens, their claim to any kind of moral stand or objectivity can't be taken seriously.

Frankly, I think this issue is going to require some VERY large changes to our systems to deal with, but first we have to go through the panic period where the people in power realized they fucked up and try to save the system that serves them well. I'm of the opinion our information expansion over the last 15 or so years is as monumental as the invention of writing or possibly even just the printing press. Social upheaval is going to follow, and until we establish new systems, it's hard to know how to use those systems to combat this problem.

For example, I think the Constitution is outdated and we should rewrite it.

>most companies don't even want to host such content, simply because of how despised ... it is

I don't think that's true because the frequency of bad ideas is evenly distributed. I'm sure there are many company owners that have those bad ideas and want to host them.

These ideas get suppressed because of societal norms. The problem here is when you disagree with the norm. I'm personally fine with making holocaust denial illegal, but it would be dishonest of me to claim that wasn't an authoritarian move, and that violates another, arguably more important norm! So we split the difference, and leave it up to individual choice. But that solution fractured when the internet split our norms into a thousand pieces, and has totally failed with the mainstream adoption of Trump and woke/cancel culture norms (both of which violate other, more important norms).

Frankly its terrible to feel like you're 'losing' people to bad ideas, and allowing communities to form around bad ideas accelerates the loss. We intuitively understand that some bad ideas are bad enough to lead to war, and vast human suffering. And so we come back to a justification for limited authoritarianism, because war is even worse than that.

Dehosting is a problem of capitalism which is why the erosion of the progressive era regulations and the attempts to prevent their reinforcement and update are things that need to be settled now. Today, we live in the second Gilded Age where maybe a dozen people can affect policies that impact millions of people. You want freedom then you have to put limits on what the rich can do or make it unlawful to be that rich (divestment and breakup).

No, dehosting is a problem common across all socio-economic systems. It is even more prevalent in non-capitalist systems.

Much of the driving force behind today's dehosting is a result of increasing government intrusion into how information is shared on the internet. Congress has been openly threatening tech companies about "misinformation" for the past decade or so and this is a very predictable result.

I agree. It's a 'power' problem.

One historical example that comes to mind that has nothing to do with capitalism is the uproar around the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages because it broke the Church's moral information monopoly.

I think you'd find dehosting was more prevalent in the USSR and the eastern block than the west even now.

I protested a war in front of the White House. Can’t do that in Russia right now. I am far more worried about the effects of misinformation than I am about people getting booted off Twitter.

That's whataboutism. Should there be any concentration of productive forces such that a few people can command or influence others policies to adversely (or even positively) affect millions of people simply because they own stock in said companies?

Dehosting is insane when you consider that your domain registrar and DNS providers can deplatform you as well.

I think you need to look at history, "following people into the woods" and much worse than deplatforming has been ongoing for most of the existence of the US (and most/all other countries, just keeping it limited to a US discussion). I mean just look at what happened to people who demonstrated or supported civil rights in the 60s (hint:some were lynched), or gay lesbians in the 80s and 90s (and still). I actually agree that we need to move past these issues, taking a free speech absolutist stance is not the way. This is part of how these groups were and still are discriminated against.

<< taking a free speech absolutist stance is not the way.

I genuinely dislike this label. It is not an absolutist stance at all. If anything, it is simple a stance based on the foundational values of US as a country. And there is a reason for it. If you cannot express your real thoughts, the conversation gets confused with attempts to evade censor or completely incomprehensible since language gets too distorted to mean anything at all.

It is getting tiring. I am saying this as an immigrant from the old country, where censorship was a thing ( with author writing cringy articles in defense of it -- sounds familiar? ). It is sad for me to see US going that route.

> foundational values of US as a country

> old country, where censorship was a thing. It is sad for me to see US going that route.

Why does this keep coming up? Nobody, absolutely nobody, is advocating for government restriction of free speech. That is the foundation of the US as a country.

Twitter didn't exist back then but newspapers certainly did. Town squares certainly did.

If the founding fathers wanted to say "if someone is speaking in a town square you can't throw tomatoes at them or shout them down", they would have.

Twitter moderating its content has zero to do with the foundations of America or censorship in other countries.

Sure. And the moment alternative to Twitter is even suggested, it is curbstomped from hackers, who see it as a 'permissible' target ( and seemingly it is based on the cheering that follows a hack ) and various service providers, who won't let it exist.

It is all fine and dandy to say 'build your own public square', but its point is somewhat lost, when you have a hard time even getting basic materials.

Why is anyone entitled to their own public square.

We Live In A Society. If you come to a public square - physically or on twitter, and scream something that the rest of society doesn't want to hear, you are exercising your free speech, and they are exercising theirs if they say they don't want to hear you.

"Why is anyone entitled to their own public square."

I think there may be a disconnect between what we are trying to convey.

Public square is by definition.. public. It is not a possession of any one person. Anyone can grab a soapbox.

What I see now.. is soapbox oligopoly. That is an issue.

Anyone is free to put up a website as their soapbox.

They don't because they want the tools and reach offered by private platforms, but don't want to follow their rules.

You can't have it both ways.

But companies can? They are Schrodinger's publisher depending on who opens the box.

More to the point, so anyone can have a soapbox, but that soapbox will be kicked from under you in the form of hackers, ddos, and so on unless you use those tools. What is the next advice? Build your own Cloudflare? Your own ISP? It is madness and leaves us exactly where we are now.

You can't tell me everyone can have a soapbox if the soapbox is only theoretical in nature and in production deployment does not survive a day.

Edit: snarky comment removed.

> but that soapbox will be kicked from under you in the form of...

Right. Just like a real-life soapbox.

I don't think you understand what it would mean to go into a public square - at ANY point in history, and start screaming the kinds of things that get you banned by Cloudflare, ISPs, and AWS.

We're not talking about stuff like "I have a different perspective on who should be chief of our tribe". The kind of political rhetoric that will inspire future generations of enlightened intellectuals to say "I disagree with what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it".

We're talking about content that has NEVER been acceptable to be preached in a public sphere. The kind of content that societies have always intolerated. Nothing is different. Nothing has changed about that.

<<We're not talking about stuff like "I have a different perspective on who should be chief of our tribe". The kind of political rhetoric that will inspire future generations of enlightened intellectuals to say "I disagree with what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it".

I think we fundamentally disagree despite sharing the same initial assumptions.

My argument is effectively that EVERYTHING is a matter of perspective and therefore a matter of opinion and as such protected, because people will disagree about everything, but, if they are indeed enlightened, they will defend it as an opinion. Just by saying that some topics are off-limits, you squarely place yourself as the arbiter of truth, which is a tricky position to be in, because some ideas are just too dangerous to impressionable minds.

Here is the fun part. That is true. Ideas can absolutely wreak havoc, but the appropriate, albeit labor intensive, approach is to help people work through them and not try to suppress it or worse, force it into the shadows.

<< We're talking about content that has NEVER been acceptable to be preached in a public sphere.

I don't want to belabor the point, but there were tons of things that were not acceptable and now are acceptable precisely because some decided to challenge status quo of what is 'never acceptable'. If examples are needed, note how quickly question of homosexuality moved from barely whispered to openly celebrated in US society.

Censorship is an indelible part of human relations. You can never truly speak your mind, partly because the other person cant have it, but fundamentally because you cant either.

"You can never truly speak your mind"

And that is a problem. Our communication depends on being able to articulate ourselves. Quality of our thoughts depend on the language. The quality of our discourse suffers, because our thoughts are being trained to offer 'safe' language.

If you do not see it as a problem, we have a problem.

This is a fact of being human, and you will never “fix” it.

I disagree. And I disagree for one reason only. Never is an awful long time to state anything with any kind of certainty.

You will never fix it the same way you will never make a diamond out of ruby. It's constitutive of being human.

I think we've arrived at the point where all the town squares are owned by a private corporation who can - so I am told - do whatever they want on their property. I guess this was always the terminal destination of American society: stuck in a company town with nowhere to go, while the government just looks on saying "they're not doing anything illegal, so I can't help!"

This is effectively where we are. History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. I am personally saddened that it is not seen as a danger that it is.

But the founding principles have always had restrictions build in. Try for example publically calling for the assassination of the president (or any other person) and see how you fare. Or army members not being allowed to talk about their missions. I don't buy that these are fundamentally different, it is simply drawing the line differently of what is permissable free speech.

The comparison is not applicable. When you join the army, you give up certain rights to join that specific group. To make it even more important, the rules are clear and explicit.

Now compare it to Twitter or Facebook. You don't know what you signing up for. Their TOS effectively say they can ban you for things they deem wrong. It is only recently that we know how they evaluate it ( see CNN discussion of FB speech violence tiers ).

Free speech is just that. It is free speech. There is no TOS. It includes all sorts of nasty bits too, because that is what being human is. Trying to pretend otherwise is, at best, counterproductive.

But here we are. Entire nation scared of reality and in dire need to cover it up with soft language.

<< But the founding principles have always had restrictions build in.

Do they? I am reading the constitution and I don't see those restrictions. You may get a visit from some agencies, but that is to make sure you were not joking.

On the other hand, I do see a mention of when slavery is ok in US and yet people seem surprised when it is pointed out.

I am talking about restrictions to free speech and yes when you join the army your free speech is restricted. Which is a clear example of the government restricting free speech, but presumably that is OK?

The argument is a good one, but I think it is missing the nuance of the status of a soldier, who, for a variety of reasons, is not an average citizen ( note, how many restrictions are listed with qualifier 'while in uniform'[1]).

You can say what you want. Just don't make it look like the army is saying this.

It may sound like a contradiction, but it is not. You voluntarily join the army. You join that specific group and accept their 'rules'. It is harder to argue ( not impossible since there are naturalized citizens, who clearly opt in to become citizens ) that citizens by right of birth voluntarily opt into that set of rules. That is the where constitution comes in.

What I am saying is that army argument is flawed.

edit: changed typical to average

[1]https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/...

But restrictions like this don't just apply to soldiers, journalists can be prosecuted for revealing classified information, people can be prosecuted for treason because they revealed specific information to foreign agents, people can be sued for defamation. All these are restrictions to free speech.

My argument is every one believes there are limits to free speech they just place the boundaries at different places. And I stand by my position that the soldier example is on a fundamental level a restriction on free speech.

Ironically, I'm a butch lesbian who came out in the 90s, so I'm well aware.

One of my less popular opinions in the queer community is that I AM a free speech absolutist (or close to it), even if it does result in some discrimination. (Even against me.) Of course we should minimize and work to eliminate discrimination in society, but that isn't the only value we have, and unfortunately social policies are always a case of trade-offs.

I also prefer to let the homophobes be open about it so a.) I know what they're saying and can undermine it and b.) so I know who to avoid. All pushing it underground does is make me nervous that everybody's a closet homophobe and means I can't change anybody's mind. (Which I have done on multiple occasions).

> so I know who to avoid

This is a good point! I think that the concept of "who do I want to associate with" is a different way to view things than "everyone I see in the world needs to treat me with agency"

I have a hard time knowing where that line is. Like you said,

> I AM a free speech absolutist (or close to it), even if it does result in some discrimination. (Even against me.)

People out there, due to their agency, may not agree with where my agency ends and theirs begins. I think if we have the privilege and feel able to "choose to avoid" those that we disagree with, we could have these discussions in the open without fear and actively change people's minds.

I don't know how to though. I've written about it here [1] but I still don't have a good answer for how do we draw that line of where your agency ends and mine/theirs begin.

[1] https://timonapath.com/articles/body-politic

I think it's such a hard question because the line moves in accordance to people's position in their culture and society. Even oppressed/marginalized people can have very different circumstances. For example, the 80s-00s were very homophobic, particularly in certain areas of the country, but one thing I had in my favor was a parent with their own household that supported me. That meant that if, say, my dad pushed the issue and was an ass, I just stopped visiting. And likewise, once he'd come around (took 3-4 years), if his family had been an ass to me, they would have lost us all because my immediate family was behind me.

I also tested well enough (I was the top scorer in the county on all of our standardized tests) that it was worth shutting up about my being a big fat homo.

That's a very different situation from a gay kid in an Evangelical home in rural Alabama in the 90s, or (moving outside of sexuality) an African American family in the US South in the 50s.

Agency is very tied into a person's individual circumstances, and trying to legislate rules and policy around that is a nightmare, particularly given it can change on a dime. (My MS diagnosis knocked out a fair chunk of my agency).

I think most people's instinct is to try to protect the most vulnerable, but that may end up stifling conversation to the point where the group dissolves/can't hold itself together OR opening people to being poached away to other groups OR other groups with different norms outcompeting or attacking that group.

We need to be careful not to monkey's paw ourselves.

I really want to believe in free speech absolutism, but have been really concerned how successful the "flooding the zone with shit" strategy in propaganda has been. This seems to have destabilized many western countries to varying degrees. The best solution I've heard for this is that we need better algorithms for what gets amplified by platforms and what doesn't. Similar to how thirty years ago I could have shouted all day about the moon landing being fake and it would have never made it into the evening news unless there was something more to it.

What's your thoughts on how we can defend against the shit flooding? I find yhis entire problem area really hard.

The flipside is that the old ways enabled institutions to lie to the people more easily. Remember Iraq? I just bring this up to keep us from getting rose-tinted nostalgia glasses about how much better things were before.

Another caveat to what I'm about to say is that I think we're in for a century of legal and political upheaval, so long term solutions will need to fit into whatever we build next.

That said, I think that there some things we could do.

I'd like to see/hear more about looking into the possibility of regulating sentiment, for example. Maybe you can write any POSITION you want on culture war issue X, but you can't write it in such a way it's only meant to inflame anger/cause despair/etc. Or perhaps you can, but you have to have some kind of warning label, or that content is allowed but turned off/blurred by default (like NSFW pics on Reddit), so you have to actively go out of your way to consume things that are 'bad' for you.

Also give people more tools and nudges. Like let people click through a Twitter profile and see that 80% of a person's Tweets are angry or about political topics. Somebody brought up tax policy as an example of something that doesn't get this treatment, and that's because tax policy is BORING and Slate/Newsmax aren't writing hit pieces about tax policy. People care about culture topics because the media whips them into a frenzy.

We could also force the companies to do due diligence in their R+D/feature implementations; maybe Twitter should be forced to prove that each new algorithm change makes people HAPPIER (or at least doesn't have terrible mental health effects).

Also I advocate for digital history and basic internet infrastructure information to be taught at the K-12 level; so much of the problem is that people don't understand how any of this works at a VERY BASIC level.

Thank you for your thoughtful response!

"Bad" platforms aren't bad because "we disagree with them."

They're bad because they're lying to people en masse and inciting rebellion.

And yes, I absolutely think that behavior that reaches that bar should be squelched. The dangers of enabling the spread of misinformation are entirely too visible in today's society.

The slippery slope argument is garbage in this case. No one has been banning political speech from major platforms. Heck, they bent over backwards to allow Trump and company to say the most outrageous things for years before finally stepping in and putting a stop to it.

And Parler being deplatformed for enabling the public organization of rebellion against the United States hardly seems like an "oh no, we're becoming Nazis!" moment.

It's only the most extreme views that result in deplatforming; "your view on taxes is different than mine" will never rise to that level, so there's no slippery slope.

So in what case can we justify enabling platforms to lie to people and incite violence? It simply can't be done.

Is the first or the second the issue?

If it's the first, I can find a TON of lying and misinformation on 'mainstream' sites and institutions. Off the top of my head, I can think of examples in the past year where the NYT and ACLU lied or misrepresented information, for example. There's also a shit ton of information flying around respectable Dem Twitter and Reddit whenever news events happen. Remember how many people thought that the people Kyle Rittenhouse shot were black and tried to stoke racial tensions using that talking point?

So obviously it's not the lying.

So let's talk about 'inciting rebellion.'

Everybody involved in the January 6th riot is a braindead moron. Trump is a braindead moron. And, frankly, if Trump were arrested, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. That doesn't mean we crack down on speech. It'd be like ordering the USPS to open letters and report people if they plotted their stupid Dollar Store peasant rebellion using paper letters, or tapping everybody's phones.

I'm also exceptionally uncomfortable with the idea that inciting rebellion is inherently bad, as somebody who does believe we should resist tyranny and people have the right to rebel.

They should have been able to talk about how much the government sucks all they want, they crossed the line when they showed up to break into Congress.

> It's only the most extreme views that result in deplatforming; "your view on taxes is different than mine" will never rise to that level, so there's no slippery slope.

Taxes, probably not, but it'll be really interesting to see how union discussions, for example, are handled. Also I could definitely come up with some tax policies that would get me deplatformed from the big spaces. We just haven't dragged taxes into the culture war yet.

When the NYT says something that is factually incorrect, they issue a retraction. Everything they do say is fact-checked, even if they make mistakes.

That's not even close to "lying".

"Misrepresentation" can be a grey area that blends into framing and emphasizing certain parts over others. I didn't include misrepresentation on my list, and that was intentional. You can disagree with how an event is reported without the report containing any actual lies--and that falls under "a matter of opinion."

Things bouncing around "Dem Twitter," whatever that means, are hardly the fault of the NYT or ACLU. Whatever was said, it didn't enter my bubble, in that I never saw a claim that Rittenhouse shot any black people.

But I don't find Twitter useful, so I don't follow anything on it. Instead I read the NYT, and while I don't always agree with their editorials, I generally feel the information they publish as news is as accurate as they can figure out how to make it.

> It'd be like ordering the USPS to open letters and report people if they plotted their stupid Dollar Store peasant rebellion using paper letters, or tapping everybody's phones.

No, it really, really isn't like that.

It's more like shutting down stations from using the licensed public airwaves to disseminate incitement to violence or to broadcast blatant lies--and then later argue in court that "no reasonable person" should have believed those lies. I'm sure you know the latter actually happened, and the former was the law of the land until Reagan managed to tear down the Fairness Doctrine. [1] Which was found to be compatible with the First Amendment, and the only reason we don't have law to replace the original FCC rule is that Reagan vetoed it.

Regardless, my point is that there is potentially a way to limit speech that doesn't prevent people from complaining about the government but that also prohibits people from outright lying about the government (or other facts).

[1] https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/topic-guide/fairness-...

100% agree. Freedom of speech protects you _from_ government. The idea that government should compel commercial or private entities to give all voices a megaphone is misguided.

That was before global social networking. Now if you're not on the big platforms your opinion may as well not exist.

"Oligopoly".

With the added problem that the big platforms are all subject to US "moral" censorship. Which a takeover by Musk won't fix.

>> Now if you're not on the big platforms your opinion may as well not exist.

Before global social networks your opinion didn’t matter either. And that was probably a good thing. People are entitled to their opinions but most peoples opinions are idiotic and shouldn’t be broadcast around the world to be picked up and amplified by other idiots.

>>> Now if you're not on the big platforms your opinion may as well not exist.

> Before global social networks your opinion didn’t matter either. And that was probably a good thing. People are entitled to their opinions but most peoples opinions are idiotic and shouldn’t be broadcast around the world to be picked up and amplified by other idiots.

Oh but who decides what opinions are idiotic? This is how the idea of free speech emerged :)

> who decides what opinions are idiotic?

This is a valid question. The answer is clearly not a firehose—free speech absolutist forums are selected against by users for the toxic pits they devolve into.

Multiple forums and the gating mechanisms of wealth and literacy were the Enlightenment era’s filters. We don’t want nor have those any more.

The question is further interesting because social media already tried to answer it: you do, for yourself!

At scale, with naive ML clustering algorithms that also prioritize engagement... that devolves into bubbles.

(I think that's still the right answer, but the implementations need work.)

Do both democratic and meritocratic methods of polling suggest the opinion is harmful? Delete.

Otherwise it stays until consensus.

The edge cases pale in comparison to the broadly accepted manipulation of a near-majority. And furthermore compared to the point-of-no-return where the majority is sufficiently manipulated.

Edit: downstream comments emphasizing the edge cases must've missed my last paragraph. The improvement only has to be better than doing nothing. Right now doing nothing is arguably acutely affecting almost 50% of the US population. No way the edge cases add up to that.

> democratic and meritocratic methods of polling suggest the opinion is harmful? Delete.

This is, in essence, selecting for experts spouting popular opinions. That’s a dangerous incentive model. (All before we even get to the question of delineating the experts.)

it's almost as dangerous as non-experts spouting bad, counterfactual objective claims and pretending they are experts

Which doesn’t sound very dangerous to me

Except that in the last 12 months, people have literally died because they believed non-experts creating and amplifying anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.

'I wish I'd been jabbed'...

Thanks for this.

It's like, other people would rather ignore reality, life and death, than budge on their uneducated opinions.

Ego is the enemy.

Should the majority be able to suppress the speech of minorities when they express unpopular opinions on, let's say, civil rights and equality? What is meritocratic polling and who specifically gets to evaluate merit?

What a stupid and idiotic question! Why would you even think to ask such a thing?! I'll have you know that my understanding of the situation is so much more evolved than yours, because I saw a headline referring to an article on another site that said that my assumption with no data is correct, as dictated by my emotions being reinforced with the multitude of soundbites affirming my smugness in my perceived expertise based on my OWN research!

Deleted by me

> Oh but who decides what opinions are idiotic?

I'll gladly clear this one up for you. It is: whoever decided the T&Cs of the platform you're using - the ones you agreed to when you signed up.

If you're banned from Twitter for posting white supremacist hate speech, paedophilia, for organizing targetted harrassment or anything else Twitter deems contrary to their T&Cs remember that (depending on where you live) while you may have the right to express yourself, I have the right as the operator of a platform not to listen to you or have you on my platform.

What most of the people whining about being booted from Twitter are upset about is that they aren't able to annoy the people they want to anymore. I'm fine with this.

If I were to get on twitter right now and start posting my opinions, no one would give a shit. There's something else going on that is promoting polarizing opinions and making these forums devolve.

I think it's monetisation. In the past, monetising your opinion was difficult. It was limited to a select few who could get on the TV or in the print media. Now, people are incentivised to say things which will generate controversy because eyeballs == money. If you got on Twitter and started posting polarising opinions and worked on promoting those eventually the engagement will (possibly) reach a point where you can gain financially from it and you're now incentivised to continue posting polarising content. The content doesn't even need to be ethically right/wrong, it just needs to make one group of people angry and another defensive. There are plenty of things we need to have a debate about as a society (because they are not black/white and require nuance to solve) but they will never get solved properly because both sides refuse to discuss the issue.

(Not related to FB's META)

But we live in a Meta-gopoly. Basically a control system by pseudo-chosen monopolies in various verticals that are all run by NGOs, but in bed with GOs.... with a revolving door of influence.

Look at the revolving door between FB and the NSA, or the fact that Amazon is building, running GovCloud, or that the CEO owns one of the big media firms, and that he is able to get clearance for satellites and rocket launches...

The non-existent lines between global corporate influence and which governments either benefit or suffer from the tech reach is quite disturbing.

What about the people that get pushed off those large platforms through constant abuse, threats and trolling? Do their opinions not matter? Or more general: at what point does an utterance stop being an opinion and start being assault?

> at what point does an utterance stop being an opinion and start being assault?

At the point defined by the letter of the law

> At the point defined by the letter of the law

Well, then, it's interesting that Spike Lee's comments were judged to be threatening harassment (he settled after legal action was taken against him and a judge ruled the case could proceed), yet he was never banned or removed from twitter.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/12/spike-lee-sued-...

Let me be clear, this isn't about the Martin case -- this is about an uninvolved person who had nothing to do with the case at all being singled out for harassment by Spike Lee. And @Jack thought it was just fine. This isn't about supporting some stealth agenda; it's about not telling a posse to attack some innocent old man.

Which law? US law? German law? Chinese law?

What about cases where the defendant can’t pony up the money to sue? What about cases where the defendant has no viable way to sue in the US, where the social media networks mostly reside?

> Which law? US law? German law? Chinese law? That depends on where the abuser is I guess?

> What about cases where the defendant can’t pony up the money to sue?

You don't sue abusers and people who send you death threats you report them to the police

The police will do fuck nothing - if you excuse my language.

> Now if you're not on the big platforms your opinion may as well not exist.

I'm no so sure about that. Since leaving social media, I've become quite involved in local politics. I now know some state legislators on a first-name basis and multiple directors of state departments in multiple states. I can call up people I've helped get elected and get my thoughts right to them. I find my opinion to effect much more change than it did when I was shouting into the digital void.

> Since leaving social media

Oh, irony..

> I can call up people I've helped get elected and get my thoughts right to them.

How about regular citizens who voted for those people but didn't "help them get elected"? Do they get to voice their opinions? Or what you're saying is that your politicians only serve those who directly donated resources (time is a resource) to them? Even though they should theoretically serve their whole constituency?

They absolutely do. The vast majority of the events I interact with these people at are open to the public with announcements in local news papers. They have dedicated communication channels. The last person I helped spent every Saturday for two months hanging out at the town dump to meet people and hear their concerns. He is planning on making it a monthly event going forward. It can be amazing how empty town, village, and county board meetings are. Show up, state your opinion in a respectful manner, come prepared with an informed argument, and take the time to chat with people afterwards. They'll remember you and if you have a consistent track record of being level-headed and productive, you can start to carry some real influence.

Like much in life, half the battle is just showing up.

If you can't be bothered to contact your representative, how does your representative know your opinion?

You don't need social media to inform your representative of your opinions--and quite frankly, more direct communication is probably more effective in informing your representative of your opinions than social media.

Are you somehow under the impression that having your opinion published on Twitter is the same as having your opinion matter?

TIL that, despite the fact that I vote and write and discuss things with my friends, my opinion doesn't exist because I don't share it on Twitter or Facebook.

come on man

Before global social media there were newspapers, TV networks, and books. If you weren't on them, which was much harder to get on, your opinion didn't matter

> Now if you're not on the big platforms your opinion may as well not exist.

As someone who lives in a deep red state, I can tell you that the banning of various alt-right voices from mainstream social media has amplified their appeal among those inclined to listen, not eliminated it. There are plenty of channels for sharing your ideas besides Facebook and Twitter, and they use them.

The solution to that is to break up big companies, not compel them to platform hate speech.

>Now if you're not on the big platforms your opinion may as well not exist.

This view somewhat misses the point. If you get on the big platforms and become famous, TODAY, you might have an opinion that matters to quite a few people. What about BEFORE? What platform were the big youtubers using in 2002? The big instagram influencers, where were their voices being heard in 1998? Paraphrasing you, "their opinions didn't exist".

The "Big Platforms" used to be newspapers, and then TV.... there has always been editing and curation.

Social Media actually was a huge "democratization" of the ability to give a very large voice to some very minority views.

Previously we had subjective - but real - barriers to having a voice.

What about if the government tells private platforms what speech is acceptable, going so far as flagging "problematic" posts?

> What about if the government tells private platforms what speech is acceptable, going so far as flagging "problematic" posts?

Then it would be a clearly different situation.

> Biden administration ‘flagging problematic posts for Facebook,’ Psaki says

If you think that social medias speech policies are developed in a vacuum from influence from politicians, then you're mistaken. How could it be? Imagine being a CEO and getting dragged in front of Congress every 6 months to explain yourself. Or politicians calling your platform a threat to democracy and threatening to break you up. You think that would have no impact on your speech policies?

What would government restriction on speech look like if not soft (effective) influence on big media companies?

https://news.yahoo.com/biden-administration-flagging-problem...

> if you think that social medias speech policies are developed in a vacuum from influence from politicians

Moving the goalpost. Nobody claimed private companies should ignore government sources.

You asked about “the government tell[ing] private platforms what speech is acceptable.” That would be a First Amendment violation.

> What would government restriction on speech look like if not soft (effective) influence on big media companies?

Flippantly: Russia.

Less flippantly: freedoms exist in balance. Taking an absolutist stance on individual speech curtails freedom of association. In practice, I suspect it will make most social media unusable in its current form. (Which may be for the worst.)

> Moving the goalpost. Nobody claimed private companies should ignore government sources.

You asked about “the government tell[ing] private platforms what speech is acceptable.” That would be a First Amendment violation.

You saw the parent's linked article about the White House flagging posts for Facebook, right? Are you trying to make the argument that it's OK if the government "suggests" what Facebook/Twitter should do with posts on their platform, but they're only crossing the line if they _make_ Facebook/Twitter flag certain posts? I think it's a distinction without difference. The usual scenario I give people in this situation is, how would your view on this change if Trump "suggested" how Facebook could flag certain posts and then Facebook followed through with it. No demands, just "suggestions." Still OK with this relationship between the government and a private company?

> Are you trying to make the argument that it's OK if the government "suggests" what Facebook/Twitter should do with posts on their platform, but they're only crossing the line if they _make_ Facebook/Twitter flag certain posts?

No. Nobody was. That’s why it was moving the goalpost [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts

That’s what the first amendment does.

Free speech is a fundamental human right, outside of any document.

Since that's not part of any document it's your opinion as to what "Free speech" is and if it's a human right

The government grants charters to corporations. Corporations are thus franchisees of the state. The idea that corporations are sovereign rule makers for society and not bound to the laws of the land is misguided.

If the government charters corporations that suppress free speech, then they are effectively making a law that abridges free speech.

Which user in the chain of comments above is arguing that "government should compel commercial or private entities to give all voices a megaphone"?

Free speech is a cultural phenomenon in addition to a constitutional policy.

Everyone wants to reduce everything to laws for some reason when the whole reason they are laws is because we value them culturally. The law is a last resort. We shouldn't be setting societal boundaries merely on extreme limits of law.

Trying to fix these cultural issues at gunpoint via courts is no better than trying to fix culture via censorship and social isolation.

There is this constant borrowing of justification from the constitutional/legal side to argue that companies should moderate their platforms in a particular way.

Then there is just a marketing angle of saying you're free speech to pull users from the platform that you think is against free speech.

The whole thing feels really shaky as a genuine movement and feels more like regulating companies they don't like.

I don't. I agree approximately 60-85%. The reality is that big media companies can shape information. This has been going on for years and arguably had a role in getting us into the war in Iraq.

Either way, we are shaping the landscape of free speech, when that's how the vast majority of communication, discussion and organizing happens.

That said, I don't know how someone looks at the history of reddit and still wants uncheck free speech.

The complete merger of the 'private economy' and the 'state government' is a defining feature of both fascism and communism across the 20th century. Such relationships already exist to a large extent across the USA and Europe, notably defense contractors and their government partners, but also increasingly you see corporate media intertwined with state power as well.

This (the Musk thing) isn't about that though, right? It's just him wanting the platform to be more open, not wanting the government to require that any particular platform be open.

>This (the Musk thing) isn't about that though, right? It's just him wanting the platform to be more open, not wanting the government to require that any particular platform be open.

What is Musk's definition of open? How is that any better than the status quo? Because your bias happens to overlap with Musk's? Given his treatment of whistleblowers and employees at his current companies it's not at all clear that he actually values openness and free speech.

Some private enterprises are treated like government services and regulated as such. Utilities, for example. I doubt there are many countries where the electricity company can fire a paying client. The key is not who manages or owns the business, but whether it's a commons platform - something needed to function in society.

So yeah, there's a pretty strong case to be made that certain internet companies are like that. Can you survive without social media? Sure, but you can also survive without sewer. It's just a lot harder to live a normal life.

Electricity and Sewer can and will be cutoff if you do not follow the terms of service. If the electric company discovers that you do not have a circuit breaker you will be cutoff.

Sure, but the terms of service cannot legally include such things as "You have political opinions we dislike" as a valid reason for terminating service.

You're poor, a.k.a a class of society.

Why would they? They are not providing a service for sharing opinions.

Twitter is a service for sharing your opinions with the public. Obviously terms of service are going to include limits around your ability to share your opinions. If the service had no terms, that would mean that you could post 1 million spam replies to every single tweet anyone made.

Similarly Twitter's TOS shouldn't include anything around electricity usage.

Which website contains “you have political opinions we dislike” as a valid reason for terminating service? Unless you are arguing that threats of violence are valid political opinions.

What's interesting is that this is a new manifestation of the free speech argument, from new social and political quarters. Prior to this version of the free speech debate, the defenders of free speech would, say, donate to ACLU, oppose laws that criminalize protests, express concern over authoritarian countries jailing reporters, oppose prosecution of whistleblowers, oppose consolidation of corporate media, etc.

But this new constituency emerged after events like Gamergate and Charlottesville protests, and they show up to defend participants in events like those but can't be mobilized to become active in other issues that historically have been ones where people become involved out of principle.

All of them? That's the whole "We reserve the right to terminate your account for any reason" clause in most ToSes

>such things as "You have political opinions we dislike"

If I wrote the rules, anytime someone used the phrase "political opinions you dislike" there would be a popup list for the following before you can submit your comment:

* violent incitement

* Al Qaeda and ISIS

* state sponsored misinformation campaigns run by automated bots

* coordinated messages from automated bots for marketing & brand management

* harassment

* doxxing

* defamation

* revenge porn & child porn

* vaccine misinformation

* election misinformation

* spam and phishing attacks

And next to each you can click a checkbox to indicate which ones you personally endorse being defended as protected speech, which you believe to be implicated. Then people can mouse over the part of your comment that says "political opinions", see the list of things you clicked on, and know what you are talking about.

This way we don't have to worry that you're equivocating between garden variety political topics (e.g. the economy, taxes) and all the other stuff when you say "political opinions you dislike."

Electric utilities were granted monopoly status in order the treat them as utilities, prior to the 1930s they were just private companies that were wildly successful, and didn’t want to expand into unprofitable rural markets.

That’s not the dynamic occurring today, social media is available in even the most rural setting, albeit in a reduced form to support low bandwidth.

Do we really want to allow Facebook and Twitter monopoly status and then treat them as defacto government entities? Will that result in better services? I do not think so.

As we’ve seen with TikTok’s rise, competition within the space leads to better outcomes, not treating social media companies as “utilities”. Social media companies are not in any way comparable to a sewer system, an electric grid, or a phone line network.

> As we’ve seen with TikTok’s rise, competition within the space leads to better outcomes

I disagree. The whole social media industry is rotten and needs a dose of... something... to bring it back to sanity. Strict limits on user data collection and algorithmic "feeds" would be a good start IMHO. Otherwise the same patterns repeat themselves, where the most rage-inducing content gets spread the furthest.

I think bringing back the adventurous side of the internet is important. Back in the day if you wanted to find information about a specific topic you had to search(not google search) for it. In doing so, you weren't inundated with more and more information that starts relevant, but quickly devolves into whats trending to drive DAUs and add clicks.

The HN front page is an algorithmic feed. Where and how do you draw that line?

This is important.

I dont know where the line is, but we should agree that a line is needed.

People are saying a line is not necessary. That is at the core, the problem. We need to agree that these companies -by accident or otherwise- have become a common good, similar to a "utility"

Take a similar example: at some point a company stops being a company...and becomes a monopoly. Where is that line? We dont know. However its important we recognize private companies operating as monopolies are not in the best interests of society.

Private companies operating as common goods providers should be subject to additional rules. That is what we should agree on. Then let others define what that is.

If you "do something" about algorithmic feeds then that law is going to be written by politicians or their advisers.

If you, engaged user of a tech site, a developers forum, have no idea what that should look like, then why would the "something" from politicians work out better?

Which laws, regulations, rules are not written by politicians?

Incentives. No ads. No engagement (paperclip) maximizers.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Electric power, water, sewage, phone, internet access... each has its own specific history, times 170 countries. Not all identical, but the outcomes are pretty similar.

SM is clearly different from that and very much still in flux, and overly regulating it would be more of a burden than an advantage. Some amount of regulation may help though, especially designed to encourage diversity of ideas.

But mostly I wanted to counter the meme that "it's not censorship if it's a private company". Yes it is, when you have only one twitter and a handful of SM companies in total. It's not the ownership that matters, it's the ubiquity and the effect.

> Some amount of regulation may help though, especially designed to encourage diversity of ideas

I wonder if limited Section 512 reform is the answer [1].

Remove it for social media platforms over a certain size that sell ads. Create a safe harbour if they form an independent appeals commission, like the one Facebook did; but with teeth on enforcement, tightly-scoped but binding rulemaking powers, and rules about how its members are chosen. Company can flag and ban. Users can appeal. Commission can go to the courts to enforce its will or force discovery. (Maybe throw in a couple commission members elected by users, I don’t know.)

[1] https://www.justia.com/intellectual-property/copyright/copyr...

>History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Electric power, water, sewage, phone, internet access... each has its own specific history, times 170 countries. Not all identical, but the outcomes are pretty similar.

They all require physical infrastructure to every house, to provide service capacity. As such, we don't want 7 different companies for each, laying 7 different sewer systems and 7 different electric grids.

When the service is virtual, the same infrastructure limits don't materialize in the same way. We don't need to run new ISP lines to bring on a new platform.

So while ISP are certainly more like classic utilities, websites and social platforms just aren't.

>But mostly I wanted to counter the meme that "it's not censorship if it's a private company". Yes it is, when you have only one twitter and a handful of SM companies in total. It's not the ownership that matters, it's the ubiquity and the effect.

Corporate censorship isn't a "free speech" problem. SM companies just aren't enough like a utility, they are not actually required to function in society (unlike electricity, and running water).

Did you learn nothing from the battle over NetNeutrality?

> As such, we don't want 7 different companies for each, laying 7 different sewer systems and 7 different electric grids.

I think decentralization is better way than building one big ISP controlled by the government. I live in a place (Utah), that has a non profit owned fiber infrastructure and leases it out to different ISPs, where you can even buy the dark fiber yourself for like $2500. I can choose from 10-15 ISPs with highly competitive prices and service. The ISPs can have whatever policies they want but the free market will take care of them pretty fast.

FWIW, there is a precedent regarding shopping malls and the like. They are clearly private property, yet they must provide access for political activity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

> especially designed to encourage diversity of ideas.

Exposure to diversity of ideas is not a problem on social media. What drowns out most ideas is actually threat of cyberbullying and internet mobs, being drowned out by bots, and algorithmic sorting that prioritizes controversial content over moderate voices. Only the last one is related to moderation/editorial choices by the company and it’s rarely framed as a free speech issue.

Except you can argue that we don't have only one twitter. We have many, and potentially thousands. I can fire up my own version of twitter in a couple of minutes. I (or my group, clan, subculture, whatever) can fire up my/our own facebook in minutes. OTOH I only have one electric power supplier to my home.

There are some apt comparisons of social media to sewers, but not in their utility…

SM is not a utility but the ability to disseminate information to huge number of peoples is and it's just as important to regulate as electricity and sewage. Moderation of information is the fourth arm of the government and needs to be developed if we're ever going to be able to trust each other again.

It has never been an issue before because the means of communication have always been limited but modern electronic communication has changed all that and it's clear that we can't exist in this wild west phase anymore.

SM had eroded the trust in institutions and between people and groups. It had put all of us in bubbles just to sell ads. Informational and cognitive hygiene must be recognized and taught to everyone so people can defend themselves and take care of what they hold dear and true.

If an electricity company sells electricity (to you), what does Twitter sell (to you)?

The sell you the opportunity to share your thoughts with other users.

You're missing the point: Twitter doesn't sell you anything, you're the product. They sell ads.

Twitter sells you a voice to a possibly broad audience depending on how many followers you have, the ads are a micro-currency to facilitate these transactions between voice haver and voice hearer.

That's been utterly ruined by the blue check mark verification system.

Promoting a specific type of user over another is antithetical to the original ideals of Internet forums - whereby the most interesting / useful / "good" content filtered to the top regardless of authorship.

Knowledge

> So yeah, there's a pretty strong case to be made that certain internet companies are like that. Can you survive without social media? Sure, but you can also survive without sewer. It's just a lot harder to live a normal life.

Holy crud, then break them up if they're that powerful. The right to private moderation is part of the 1st Amendment and should only be abridged in very specific circumstances; don't get rid of the 1st Amendment just because you're scared of Facebook's lobby arm.

There are lots of platforms other than Twitter/Facebook. Anti-monopoly regulation against tech companies has reasonably wide bipartisan support in the US. We also have more evidence nowadays that social media doesn't necessarily have to result in natural monopolies. There are so many things we could do rather than significantly abridge people's rights to free association.

- The government could dump monetary grants into Mastodon/Matrix or otherwise subsidize federated/self-hosted alternatives the same way that we've subsidized renewable energy.

- The government could stop allowing purchases by these tech giants in general.

- The government could split up Facebook/Instagram/Horizon.

- The government could push for more open app policies on stores or regulate sideloading (seriously, the amount of pushback this idea gets as a violation of Apple's rights, compared to the amount of support for regulating social network moderation is wild to me. Both of those are an interference in private rights, but one of those things is also a significantly bigger restriction of 1st Amendment rights than the other).

- The government could force open APIs between services (Europe is trying to do this, we'll see whether or not they get it right).

- If that's too much interference into the market, the government could explicitly legalize adversarial interoperability and revise the CFAA to make it easier to scrape websites.

- Then there's an entire conversation to be had about payment systems online and why we have some of the market forces that we do have around monetizing eyeballs and paying for content.

----

But to immediately jump to treating Facebook as a public utility -- not only is that a really drastic step with a lot of 1st Amendment implications, it's also kind of a depressing step because it assumes we couldn't make better social networks than Facebook/Twitter, and I absolutely believe we could. It's depressing to think that we can't ever move past them and the only thing we could do is just try to reduce one specific problem that they have.

I don't want Facebook to be an essential service; even if they didn't censor anything I don't want to use Facebook. I don't really care what their moderation policy is. I hate almost everything about the website; I want alternatives, not a more regulated monopoly. I don't even like the ad-supported model in the first place, I think that monetizing attention is antithetical to creating a good social network.

The view that Facebook is an utility assumes the world only consists of the United States. If it’s a utility and 75% of its users are outside the US, whose utility is it? The UN?

That is a really good point. There is a certain kind of nationalism/exceptionalism inherent in the US deciding that Facebook is both too essential to be left to its own devices and that naturally the US should decide what its policies end up being for the rest of the world -- and I often forget that perspective because I'm in the US and to a certain extent guilty of forgetting about the wider implications of US policy sometimes.

On the other hand, a robust market has fewer of those problems -- the US deciding "we don't want a US company to control the entire market, and we want more companies with differing policies" doesn't have the same implications as the US deciding, "we want the US company to do what we want everywhere." So there's a lot less exceptionalism rolled up in the idea of subsidizing alternatives; and non-US governments have already started to talk about either subsidizing some alternatives like Matrix or adopting them internally within government departments.

Unless the idea is to only regulate how Facebook handles content being displayed to US users, but (while companies do often have country-specific policies), drastically increasing the scope of that kind of system has a lot of its own implications about filter bubbles and communication between countries.

I actually agree with the Mastodon/Matrix/federated approach, I'd just be worried about hosting/network neutrality. There is also a bit of a monopoly over popular protocols, esp. when it comes to Microsoft control over windows/edge and google search/chrome.

I'll point out that the 1st Amendment implications of regulating hosting are much less severe than the implications over regulating moderation on sites themselves.

Different people have different ideas about where to draw these lines: I personally am fairly skeptical about requiring hosting services to carry content, I think that has a lot more implications than people realize and I think that autonomy over how people manage computers and what content they serve is something we should try very hard to protect.

On the other hand I was initially skeptical of network neutrality back when it was first entering the public debate, but ended up completely changing my views and supporting it pretty much wholesale, I think that there's decent historical evidence that Title 2 classification didn't harm Internet innovation last time we tried it (in fact, the opposite happened, innovation exploded), and also I think there's much stronger evidence that service providers are actually a natural monopoly and could be treated like a public service. And I think the risk of unintended consequences is much lower.

And I also support either forcing Apple to allow alternative app stores or (possibly better) just forcing them to allow alternate web browsers and to loosen restrictions on what platforms/websites apps can tell the user about, so that PWAs can start making progress again on iOS and browsers can start to fill in the gaps in their platform -- which obviously is a restriction of their rights, I just think the benefits heavily outweigh the downsides.

My feeling is that every time we go deeper down the chain and closer to the "bare metal" of how the Internet works, it becomes a little bit safer to regulate neutrality. We have a lot of low-level changes we can make to the Internet that could go a lot further towards correcting some of the actual flaws that the Internet has, rather than just trying to regulate symptoms of those flaws.

The implications of FAANG moderation are only so serious because FAANG companies control so much of the market. It is better to actually fix that problem rather than to try and slap a band-aide on top of it (especially when that band-aide might carry a lot of unintended consequences).

>The government could dump monetary grants into Mastodon/Matrix or otherwise subsidize federated/self-hosted alternatives the same way that we've subsidized renewable energy.

As one example, France has generous tax deductions that effectively triple the value of your contribution for places like Framasoft, although it's not necessarily targeted just at free software.

I completely agree with you in the abstract, but I worry primarily about this chain of causality:

Network effects -> market forces -> political will

I think splitting up these giants is supremely important, but the only healthy approach long term is to require open APIs for cross-service interoperability. This is the only solution to separate network effects from market forces.

It's not unreasonable to want to be able to communicate with your friends, family, and brands you like in a convenient way.

_Either_ you require interoperability so that people can separate their (real) social networks from their choice of technological-implementation, _or_ you allow things to grow unbounded such that they become de facto utilities.

Longer conversation than I'm willing to go into here, and I assume that you already know this anyway, but this is a point that Cory Doctorow pushes a lot. His take is that sites like Facebook in particular got where they are because they were able to scrape and remotely manage other sites, and that after they rose to dominance (among other things like buying competitors) they also pushed to shut down a lot of those systems and make it harder to do what they did.

I'm interested in seeing how EU legislation works out here. I tend to sometimes be relatively skeptical about EU legislation because I think the final results tend to miss the mark or get compromised or have side-effects, but I have seen a lot of people that I respect a lot say that this legislation is good, so I'm really curious to see what happens with it.

I don't personally think that network effects are the only thing that's factoring into current tech dominance -- my evidence for that is that Facebook has had to buy competitors before, and I don't think they would have felt that threat if they were confident in network effects alone to save them. I've also gone through enough internal emails from the various leaks from Facebook to where I can see some the anti-competitive strategies they tried that (in my mind) were in a very different category than just locking down an API. But network effects are certainly an important part of the puzzle, and even ignoring the market, having more user agency to remotely control accounts and build/use their own clients for services is (in my opinion) a really important part of individual freedom, so I'm all for improvements in that area.

And highly agreed, the problem with Facebook is not that people want to talk to friends and family. I don't think that people's instincts to be connected to each other should be treated as something that's unreasonable or bad.

> Sure, but you can also survive without sewer. It's just a lot harder to live a normal life.

Not really but that sense of learned helplessness is certainly good for their bottom line. I imagine it increases your propensity to buy whatever crap they're spamming your feed with.

In reality life without social media is a much happier existence.

Some peopld say that about showering without soap. I tried, it stank.

The whole point is for that to be a personal decision. Or if you think SM is bad, then it can be a collective decision to ban SM, like we ban heroin.

But ostracism? "Free for all,except those 5". Nah, I don't see it as a good choice, society-wise.

That specifically worked for Greek democracies, which were as much about the ability to exclude the most powerful as they were to enable the public participation in power.

Worked until it didn't. When it was a small forum, yes. When it became just a popularity contest, much less so.

That where the ostracism came in. When the most popular became the most powerful they often got booted…

> Or if you think SM is bad, then it can be a collective decision to ban SM, like we ban heroin.

Off topic but I don't think banning heroin did anyone any good. We still need proper labeling, packaging, and storage laws. We still need laws that prohibit drugging someone without their explicit permission. We probably need laws that don't allow sale to minors. We probably need ban on advertising "controlled substances". We might even say certain things you can only get under medical supervision by a licensed medical professional.

I just don't think possession ought to be a crime like it is today. Endangering others, sure but possession is just asking for abuse by law enforcement.

I know plenty of people who don’t have Twitter accounts and live extremely normal lives. Can you say the same thing about electricity?

Not long ago twitter, telephony/mobiles and electricity didn't exist, and people lived normal lives - but over time "normal" is redefined.

The issue isn't twitter, but online discourse in general, and what happens when it becomes "normal". There is also an issue of choice - it is normal not to read books, as many people do not; yet I wouldn't accept this means you can deprive people who want to read of a library.

The post you are responding to was talking about today, now, not "not long ago". Today, now, not having twitter is totally normal.

If you think it might be a necessity in the future, then we can talk about it then, if you're right.

By "then" it might be too late - lots of discussions leverage "too late to change now". This is how climate change is in such a horrible state.

Also, who says when we "are there"? Maybe we are already?

I don't think it's worth entertaining every prognostication on the off chance that it may eventually one day be true.

As you mentioned, some of them have a convincing case behind them, though, like climate change. Those are worth entertaining, IMO

The implication here is that this doesn't have a convincing case behind it? Then when would you act? There are already plenty of monopolies and "lobbies" in America on the basis of the same efficiency (not acting until it's a "problem") - maybe proactive caution around big business should be the norm given all the historical abuses, from beef to chemicals to medicine to tobacco?

  > The implication here is that this doesn't have a convincing case behind it?

The explication, I guess, yeah. I was and am explicitly saying that, yes.

  > Then when would you act?

When the prediction that this may become a issue becomes more convincing, somewhere between where it's at now, and climate change, which already has a convincing case that it WILL become a issue (nay, IS one!)

  > maybe proactive caution around big business should be the norm given all the historical abuses

Agreed, proactive caution towards things for which there is a convincing case that it is or may become an issue

Right, and not long before that didn’t have electricity before too. In 2022 in the US, living without electricity is very abnormal. Living without Twitter is… not.

If your issue is online discourse in general, then we’re in a good place: it’s very easy to set up your own website and distribute whatever content you want without needing permission from corporations.

Me too. But they have FB accounts, IG accounts, TikTok accounts and so on. The share of people without any kind of social media presence or consumption is shrinking everyday.

Sure. So do we make all of those “public squares”? How many “public squares” can we have before it becomes clear that they’re not?

Really? That question is presuming the outcome and has no place in a good faith discussion.

Does HN count as social media? If not, I haven't used social media in some years. And to see me on the street, you wouldn't even know I'm a weirdo.

Google, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter are all private entities. Let's say they don't like the Democratic party. They can single handedly cause a media block out and be able to unfairly influence the elections, view of the world etc. You won't be able to find a single search result or a speech or tweet.

In this context we can't afford to treat these companies as private entities. They should not be able to block/ban whoever they want just because they feel threatened and challenged by their views.

You say “single handedly”, but you just named five different services by three different companies. Do you see the problem here?

Are all the radios broken? Do newspapers not exist? Has TV vanished? Fox News alone has millions of viewers every week. There are hundreds of other outlets from which people get their news.

You really think Twitter can unilaterally erase something from public consciousness?

"single-handedly" is a red herring. None of the listed entities needs to band up with another to have a great effect on political or social outcomes.

You’re moving the goalposts. There are plenty of entities that can unilaterally have that great effect. That doesn’t mean they’re so vital to public wellbeing that the government needs to take them over or whatever it is we’re talking about.

I didn't set the goalposts :) I just noticed that there is a miscommunication.

The miscommunication is that you presume "That doesn’t mean", whereas the whole discussion is about whether that's desired or not.

I actually don’t think giant corporations are desirable. But that’s not the discussion people are having here. They’re claiming that Twitter is so indispensable, so woven into the fabric of everyday life that it’s tantamount to a public utility, like electricity or sewage.

Which is a perfectly reasonable claim. Rejecting it out of hand doesn't make anyone wiser.

Okay, but you’re acting as though it’s the same claim as “Twitter has a lot of power”.

I’ve explained my reasoning against the utility claim. If you want to defend it, do so. It might be reasonable, but you haven’t offered anything other than substituting it with a different argument.

It's not the same claim as being indispensible, but it's the same claim as being extremely vowen into everyday life. I think that claim reflects what is actually being discussed better. What I offer is not a defense of the claim, but a request to consider the claim seriously.

In the public utility metaphor, utilities were not defined until they became defined. There's no reason to discount a possible category of "utilithing" that shares some properties with the existing one but not others.

It might be that I missed your explanation (was it in a sibling thread?), but in this thread I don't see a consideration for that idea. "They are not so vital" is not an argument against it, but your personal value judgement.

It’s in my root comment in this thread. I’m not giving my personal value judgment — it’s the value judgment of the ~75% of adults in the US who don’t use Twitter. It’s a real stretch to say that something less than a quarter of the population uses is “vital” for everyday life. How many Americans do you think go a month without electricity or sewage?

> it’s the value judgment of the ~75% of adults in the US who don’t use Twitter.

So 5% of all adults? Yes, I just made up that number, just like you did.

Why would I make up a number that’s easily verifiable? https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media...

You served the wrong number: this is the share of population on Twitter. I asked about the share of non-Twitterers sharing your values.

If you don’t use Twitter at all, like over three quarters of adults in the US, you de facto don’t think it’s vital for every day life.

You seem to think about "vital for every individual" when no one said that but you. There were various weaker versions of "powerful" considered.

This discussion isn’t going anywhere; you just keep reusing the same old motte and bailey. Have a nice day!

Well, I tried to save you from fighting a view that no one represents. That only brings further misunderstanding. Good luck.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the majority of those companies already did that with the Hunter Biden laptop story.

If only Fox News is covering something and you’re not allowed to talk about it on Twitter, Facebook, etc. then there’s no effective way for it to reach everyone who doesn’t watch Fox.

Right, which is fine. I don’t watch Fox because I don’t like the content Fox produces. You seem to be interested in turning Twitter into some sort of firehose wherein I’m forced to consume Fox content anyway.

I would say we need less echo chambers, not more. You probably don't think the people that only watch Fox are well informed, and you'd be right.

It’s their prerogative to not be well informed. I certainly don’t think it’s right to force them to watch CNN.

Where does this end, anyway? Should we also force people to consume OAN or InfoWars? Can I get my blog on this required reading list?

This is taking away the very obvious point: at some point, lack of participation alone is seen as a sign of nonconformity. Which itself has caused enough issues for individuals while at least "making it seem" as if the majority are okay with the status quo.

It's one thing to be denied access to these platforms. It's another thing entirely to see a specific opinion pushed on the young and the less critical, trickling down to actual demands, rules and restrictions. These platforms are powerful enough to do so. You can find many examples of misinformation translating to demands in CS and IT alone, and these are still relatively harmless.

And there's already clear evidence of collusion to censor certain entities between those companies. It's hardly a "what if?" scenario.

> I know plenty of people who don’t have Twitter accounts and live extremely normal lives.

Even this I'd say is a stretch. If they're consuming any kind of news or contemporary entertainment, Twitter is absolutely impacting their lives. The degree to which it quickly propagates groupthink and shared narratives is difficult to overstate.

Do you think pre-Internet mass media — one-way communication from corporation to consumer — does not propagate groupthink and shared narratives?

We live in a society, so of course popular things will have nth-order effects on everyone’s lives. TikTok, Facebook, Fox News, the New York Times, Disney, Nintendo, Steam, Itch, Bandcamp, your friend’s podcast. It’s extremely unclear to me why Twitter should be singled out here.

Size. Market penetration of Twitter is orders of magnitude above that of Nintendo or your friend. You should rather ask: how does influence scale relative to size?

> Do you think pre-Internet mass media — one-way communication from corporation to consumer — does not propagate groupthink and shared narratives?

It certainly did, but not as quickly, and not in a separate channel from the media itself.

Put bluntly: today's journalists, entertainers, and influencers can very quickly arrive at the same (sometimes factually incorrect) narrative through following the same in-group of people on Twitter, which then results in "real" news, entertainment, and other media being produced that share the same groupthink and narrative. This can happen in hours, even minutes.

But it's not clear to your average consumer that what's dictating the stories on nightly news, Saturday Night Live, or the late night shows is actually Twitter, and the ease with which the same people can create the same bubbles without explicitly coordinating.

Comparing social media to sewage is appropriate because they are both filled with shit, not because they are both essential to living a normal life.

>So yeah, there's a pretty strong case to be made that certain internet companies are like that. Can you survive without social media? Sure, but you can also survive without sewer. It's just a lot harder to live a normal life.

In my experience, there is actually not a pretty strong case to be made for that, as evidenced by all the people who say there is a strong case to be made, but then fail to make a strong case. Perhaps they mean, "a case which convinces me, specifically, 1 person who is already convinced"?

Also, trying to survive without sewer is what led to The Plague's last big hit. Even the Romans knew it was unhealthy. Meanwhile, in this case, INCREASED use of social media is what's been shown to be unhealthy.

> there is a strong case to be made, but then fail to make a strong case

Especially given:

1) The number of digital outlets. Utilities tend to be regulated when there are no alternatives or merely 1 alternative (especially when monopoly is being intentionally granted for the purposes of not duplicating infrastructure). We're not hurting for options in ways to talk to each other these days.

2) The abundance of very diverse conversations on display on the most popular social media. Political poles are pretty well represented with content in proportion to their influence (and all this even considering that the right of private vehicles for speech to set rules for discussion and even make editorial choices is itself a free speech right).

> 1) The number of digital outlets. Utilities tend to be regulated when there are no alternatives or merely 1 alternative (especially when monopoly is being intentionally granted for the purposes of not duplicating infrastructure). We're not hurting for options in ways to talk to each other these days.

It's anecdotal, but I don't feel this to be true in my personal life. I am not on Facebook by choice. But I feel like it impoverishes my life in a number of ways:

1. Most of my family and friends post their life updates on Facebook. 2. My neighborhood uses a Facebook group for most communication and coordination. 3. Several local companies use their Facebook pages to broadcast their events, sales, etc, and as their primary form of outreach. 4. Several local hobby groups do the same.

In each case, this is general communication and information that I want in my life, but I can't get it easily. Even when I go out of my way to get it (private conversations, visiting websites, etc), I still miss things because Facebook has the network and it's the primary way my communities communicate.

So while in principle I agree with everything you said, in my own life I empathetically agree with the subjective sense that it feels like a utility. It feels like living without something important in some ways.

(It was easier when I was married and my wife was on Facebook and could relay information to me. Also anecdotal, but I've heard of this arrangement a number of times.)

Yeah but Twitter just isn't that relevant. And social media is a many-dimensional gradient of often questionable value.

Leaving FB properties, for example, is actually pretty nice when you've hit a certain spot in your life. Some forums give me much more than FB ever did. HN is more useful. There isn't some necessary set of social media sites everyone has to have.

In those cases the solution isn’t to force those companies to moderate their content differently, but to prevent them from becoming de-facto monopolies.

The popularity of Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and Google’s core products isn’t the issue. The issue is that any time a successful competitor comes up, they can just buy them out.

Imagine if Facebook wasn’t able to buy Instagram, and it had survived as a competing platform?

There’s no need to apply the concept of “free speech” to private companies. There is every need to regulate monopolies so that a handful of tech giants don’t have the power to effectively suppress content across the majority of the outlets people are using every day.

Literally all social media platforms could cease to exist in a second and the world would continue to still function 100% fine.

So would you be happy to see ISIS recruiting videos in your feeds? What about your children's? I would consider the calls for free speech much more believable if they had been made when ISIS accounts were blocked. However, people only started calling out when it affected white supremacists or conspiracy theories popular with a portion of the white conservative constituency.

This tells me that most people are quite happy with limits on free speech, just not "their side".

If I didn't have a sewer in my city they would throw their shit on the streets like they did 150 years ago. If I didn't have social media absolutely nothing happens. It doesn't become a public safety issue...in fact the public will be better off for it.

> This is key for a good user experience

Do you think Twitter optimizes their speech policies for a good user experience? My impression is that things that are very mainstream are disallowed on Twitter while very fringe ideas as allowed

I apologize if I was unclear - the post I was replying to was making a general statement about moderation, and so was I. Some level of moderation is essential to keep good user experience. I do not know enough about twitter’s particular moderation policies to comment on them. It is possible (and likely) that they could be improved - but I do not think removing all moderation would be an improvement.

Thanks for clearing that up. Moderation is definitely important but moderation, apart from the obvious abuse and illegality, should be done on the smallest level possible. Banning someone from a platform for expressing an offensive view is not moderation; its censorship. Creating customizable user filters or groups that hide these people is a better answer. Reddit has a lot of their own problems, but the federated model of subreddits works. The problem arises when some subreddits are banned or the overlap of mods on each subreddit, but in principal its correct.

I would love shared filters on twitter. For instance, if I don't want to hear things about topic X, I can download a topic X filter that's community maintained that hides posts from troll accounts or keywords. You can mix and match filters. This is better than banning people. Is twitter going to allow back all those people that were banned for discussing lab theory?

Show me people banned for only discussing the lab theory. There was a global mistake in harshly categorizing the lab leak theory as wrong, but the people who were banned were banned because they used the theory (which it still is) to advance dangerous views that Twitter decided not to engage with.

There’s the word media in social media. A newspaper will carry a theory, but not an article using the theory to spuriously decry public health mesures.

" apart from the obvious abuse.."

"Banning someone from a platform for expressing an offensive view is not moderation"

What if an offensive view creates abuse? Who defines obvious?

Abuse is spam, doxxing, fraud, etc. Very narrow. I don't think this should include something like banning someone for saying "learn to code" because its a "targeted harassment campaign" [0]. However you can pose with the severed head of a sitting US president and that'll be okay and still standing up today [1] . Come on.

[0] https://reason.com/2019/03/11/learn-to-code-twitter-harassme...

[1] https://twitter.com/kathygriffin/status/1323893513226870786

> Moderation is definitely important but moderation, apart from the obvious abuse and illegality, should be done on the smallest level possible.

That's your opinion, and you're absolutely welcome to hold it. I understand that position, but I don't agree, and I would prefer a more strongly moderated platform. That's my opinion. If a platform has too little moderation for my tastes, I may choose to leave it, and that would be bad for an ad-based platform's profitability, not to mention network effects, etc. Given enough users (and employees!) who think like me, the platform has an incentive to perform stronger moderation.

I think we should have more platforms to choose from, and maybe even require some kind of inter-operation between them. We should enforce existing anti-trust law on these big platforms, not try to force them to change their moderation policies.

Nearly all of the useful "moderation" on Twitter is me choosing who I follow. Some of it is me choosing who I block. Everything else is a rounding error by comparison. Or at least it should be. I've no idea how involved Twitter's algorithms are in my experience and that scares me a little bit.

I don't mind if Twitter wants to offer me their own opinion about which posts are bad and which people are bad, but I should be allowed to opt out of that. Better still, they could have multiple competing paid services offering filtering/blocking tailored to different themes. Paid—because if they have an economic incentive to satisfy their subscribers, they'll satisfy their subscribers. The problem with the free filtering done by Twitter today is that they have an economic incentive to satisfy their shareholders.

> Nearly all of the useful "moderation" on Twitter is me choosing who I follow. Some of it is me choosing who I block. Everything else is a rounding error by comparison. Or at least it should be.

Not really.

…you appreciate the point being made by the parent post right?

Unmoderated communities devolve, in practice, to porn, scams, flame wars and trolling. There’s lots of evidence that’s how things turn out.

What you’re after is different moderation, not no moderation; what you see as excessive moderation can’t be replaced with no moderation without creating a clone of 4chan.

So.. I guess.. just remember what you’re asking for is actually a bad thing. What you actually want isn’t what you’re asking for; unless what you want is 4chan, in which case, you can just go hang out there instead of on twitter..

For what it's worth, my day job is running a reasonably large discussion forum (whirlpool.net.au) which is relatively famous for its heavy-handed moderation. We aren't shy on banning people and we stamp down on trolls hard.

But I don't see the parallel between that kind of moderation and a firehose like Twitter. My experience of twitter is almost entirely defined by the people I follow. Yes there's junk and the occasional troll, but I'm an adult capable of making observations about the properties of any "bad" content I might see. Expecting other people to sanitise my experience for me is unhealthy and doomed to failure.

> My experience of twitter is almost entirely defined by the people I follow

This is probably, broadly speaking, false.

Maybe it was once true, and maybe it should be true, but I guess it’s more likely that most people (including you) see and interact with all the people you follow, interacting with all the people they follow (retweets, etc.) interacting with all the people they follow.

3 degrees of separation.

If you never saw any tweets other than the immediate people you follow tweeting to each other, then perhaps… but, that’s not how twitter works.

…and then on top of that, how did you end up following those people? Personal friends? Or perhaps, via twitters moderated hash tags?

That’s different moderation, not no moderation.

What you’re describing is something closer to signal/WhatsApp groups; different, much less moderated personal groups. Sure. Good for what it is…

There’s an app for that; it’s just not twitter.

> Maybe it was once true, and maybe it should be true

Which is pretty much exactly the point I was making in my original contribution to this thread.

Yes to the degrees of separation. That's the point of following people—to be exposed to their curation. I followed many people because they were friends of friends; I've unfollowed many people because I wasn't impressed with the people they interacted with, even if I had no problem with them.

There are certain topics on twitter that if I say anything about them, even in passing, I'll get dozens of automated @ replies trying to spam something to me. Blocking accounts who use @ to spam would be an example of worthwhile moderation.

On the other hand, blocking someone for making jokes about a celebrity's weight (which Twitter has done!), is something that, in my opinion, is an example of an overreach.

The existence of spam is an immutable fact of any platform, the only question is how sophisticated they need to be to clear whatever hurdles are placed in front of them. Smarter filtering of spam will only lead to more sophisticated spammers.

> Note that you’re choosing to spend your time on HN (a relatively strongly moderated forum) instead of a less moderated forum like 8chan’s

This is a good point!

I agree with both you and the parent - which is to say that I'm entirely torn on this subject.

Moderation on platforms makes sense. Trying to work out where to draw the line is difficult. And free speech is incredibly important.

How to balance these competing concerns is really beyond me.

I'm a proponent of the idea of "the solution to bad speech, is more speech", but if you take this to its logical conclusion on the internet, you often end up in the wild west.

"I'm a proponent of the idea of "the solution to bad speech, is more speech", but if you take this to its logical conclusion on the internet, you often end up in the wild west."

If that's the logical conclusion, and I'm making the assumption this based on your observations, why are you a proponent of it?

"I think this is for the best, however it always leads to problems"

> "I think this is for the best, however it always leads to problems"

Well to be fair, I did say I was torn on this and have no answers :)

The concept of "the solution to bad speech, being more speech" is somewhat of a safe default to me. All things being equal, I think it's more important to err on the side of protecting the voices of those who should and need to be heard, while accepting the risk that these very protections may also inadvertently benefit "extremists" in that they too are more likely to be heard.

I prefer this balance, as opposed to the opposite, of strict moderation. Silencing the voices of those with something important to say, in order to ensure that we don't let any extremists get their views out.

So that's my default starting position.

But I'm not absolutist about it. I think we can't be too binary about it, at either end of the spectrum. The answer is not one of two choices, "100% no free speech" or "100% free speech". Instead, it's presumably somewhere in the middle.

So the answer is probably, "light touch, just enough moderation, based on some form of consensus".

How you define "just enough" is a tough problem.

Perhaps it's the consensus part that's missing at the moment.

I don't think it's a free speech issue. It's just a scalability / UX issue arising from the problem that 100,000 people are trying to communicate in the same room, and 99% of those people have nothing new to add to the conversation. The self-moderation features on Reddit and HN are a step in the right direction. On Twitter and Facebook, there is no downvoting, which amplifies low quality content. This decision is tied to their revenue generation models, because they don't want to limit participation. Reddit and HN focus on improving signal to noise-ratio, which is more important metric, and I think even more can be done in this direction.

I think this only appears to be a contradiction, because your concerns apply at different scales.

You can reconcile the tension by insisting that the public utility platforms (e.g., Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc.) remain neutral with respect to non-criminal content, but give people the tools to moderate and curate speech at a more granular level (like subreddits, or tools to filter who you see on Twitter).

I like this idea, but things like “tools to filter who you see on Twitter” rely on self moderating of content you’re exposed to. We all already have that capability in many respects.

Eg I don’t really use Twitter at all apart from the odd tweet that will be referred to me. I moderate what I see by actively avoiding most social media (aside from HN of course) because I’ve decided that this is the easiest way to avoid sub-standard content that doesn’t add value for me. (A sweeping statement but just for sake of argument).

So let’s say someone says something extremely insulting about a minority group - just on the right side of legal, but otherwise a disgusting remark when measured against social norms.

Do we say that the utility platforms shouldn’t touch this because it’s not illegal?

Because some of those subgroups of people and individuals with the moderation/curation responsibilities will proliferate that content rather than moderate it.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, and I’m not arguing for strong censorship - I don’t have a counter suggestion, I’m just thinking it through…

You raise a good point that does make me wonder: why isn’t there more pressure from free speech advocates to liberalize moderation on HN?

Relevant username ;)

Because moderation here works quite well and they usually aren't the ones being moderated. Like someone wrote earlier in this thread, why aren't the free speech advocates using less HN to debate hacker/tech stuff and using more 8chan or something?

> Because moderation here works quite well

I think that probably stems mostly from Hacker News avoiding controversial subjects in general. When they do slip through, the moderation can be pretty bad, particularly when it comes to new accounts. I've seem innocuous comments shadowbanned for voicing fairly milquetoast heterodox opinions (with shadowbanning in general being a pretty unpleasant action). Usually that isn't an issue with accounts that have been here for a long time, but since Hacker News doesn't allow people to delete comments, you have to be comfortable with having that comment tied to you for decades to come (not always the safest thing in this environment).

The whole thing ends up exerting a chilling effect on alternative opinions.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Discourse on HN is a breath of fresh air compared to reddit, where everything is a knockdown, dragout deathmatch.

If the moderation here starts banning / shadow-banning / hiding prominent voices that run counter to HN's politics, they will.

Assuming the content is the same: why is censoring a prominent voice worse than censoring someone less well-known? Prominent voices inherently have greater platform access, professional clout, etc. Whereas lesser-known figures do not have such privileges and are therefor more greatly impacted by censorship.

Prominence just makes it tougher for the platform to avoid ambiguity in their justifications. Some moderation is valid but other times it can be too much. None of us have the time to spend personally reviewing the claims of every contributor who feels like they were treated unfairly.

We see this with Twitter now. People complain about various tweets being blocked, and there's always a "back-and-forth" about how Tweet A is against their guidelines but somehow Tweet B isn't. But when they outright ban (e.g.) Donald Trump, there's no ambiguity any more. The discussion moves beyond the minutia of spam / bot handling and into something more concrete.

Though you're right: censorship of those with smaller voices is at least as problematic. We just all ultimately have limited resources available and focusing on the more clear-cut examples is more likely to be successful.

As someone who sees dead comments, the moderation here is pretty damned good.

I’ve not noticed a political slant to moderation here. The primary aim seems to just be keeping things civil.

This site self-selects. People who think the moderation is good stay, people who think it is bad leave. There are plenty of alternatives to this site, you can easily find one that suits your needs. It's not an effective monopoly like the big social media giants.

This is a false dichotomy.

There are other ways to implement moderation that isn't censorship.

I've proposed "blocklists" before, where users could create different blocklists (e.g. "no vegans"), other users could subscribe to them, and there would be some default blocklists (e.g. "no porn" and "no gore") that people could also unsubscribe...

The only problem with that idea is that the blocklists will inevitably end up being used to slander and malign other groups as people will use them to assign unpleasant labels to others. In the end, someone will need to moderate the lists, so you're right back at the same moderation problem. Humans on the internet tend to find all the creative ways to be assholes-at-scale.

So long as everyone using the platform can modify their own list, no it's not the same problem at all. The question is: do I get to decide who I listen to, or do you?

Do you get to decide who can use Twitter, or does Twitter?

Who to listen to, where? Out on the street? You do. On someone else's platform? Also you.

You choosing to listen to something doesn't mean you also get to force whatever platforms you want, to carry whatever you choose to listen to.

I find it hard to believe that there is someone you want to listen to, who you currently aren't able to, because twitter deplatformed them.

You can already block people on Twitter. The problem arises with shared blocklists. How is a shared blocklist identified? Well, the odds are that it will probably need to have a name. You now have the following problem: the name can be used to promote hate if the name of that blocklist is visible to other users, or to falsely associate a given user with other nefarious groups, as Google will probably crawl the lists and the results will show up in searches. The whole thing ends up being exactly an added moderation mess, just like what you started with, but with a few more layers of indirection and different ways it can be abused. Plus you still have the original problem of moderating messages that needs to be solved.

Solutions like this look great initially if everyone uses them properly, but everything falls apart when people inevitably start actively abusing the new feature. The design needs to handle assholes-at-scale from the outset.

>free speech in the sense of “everybody should be forced to platform every idea” is silly IMO.

That's a red-herring. The debate isn't really about free speech rights on a private platform. 'Web-scale' platforms will always need a certain level of moderation. This debate is really about the who is within the Overton window and who isn't. Conservatives and certain parts of the Progressive Left want to be within this Overton window, while mainstream Democrats want to keep them out.

Having said that, there is a related matter of government's indirect incursion into moderation policies of private social media companies, by way of use of executive and legislative threats, and what that actually means for constitutionally protected speech. Right now that part is ignored by the supporters of one political party because it serves their political goals.

People have to understand that by accepting the concept of "platforming," they're joining the anti-free speech camp. The whole idea of "platforming" is that there should be no obligation to allow opinions with which the "platform" disagrees. Disagreement occurs whenever the least tolerant, most militant group of employees says so.

Contrary to this, we should have a free speech culture where the norm is that people can say what they want. Moderation is necessary but it should always be an exception.

> Note that you’re choosing to spend your time on HN (a relatively strongly moderated forum) instead of a less moderated forum like 8chan’s /b/.

Moderation on HN is based on tone and quality, not content. This distinguishes it from almost everywhere else on the internet.

"Platforming" is just weasel wording by people who want to justify censorship. Just like "misinformation" has become a blanket justification to censor.

Once you have human arbiters determining what is and what is not "good" information, and censoring based on it, you are acting in bad faith against free speech.

Do you think they just let anyone publish in a newspaper? Outside of cable access, you couldn't just hop on TV previously either.

This is entirely a social media age problem. This isn't "OMG, we're censoring" it's "we're applying the same limitations that have always existed on a new medium" - which is people deciding on what is in good taste (to them) and appropriate for their platform (to them).

They don't let "just anyone" publish in a newspaper but almost all major newspapers allow voices across the political spectrum in the form of letters and op-eds.

That's what free speech culture is about. It's the idea that "everyone gets their say" and by disagreeing and arguing, we get closer to the truth. It's sad that more and more people are taking your view, which is that people can publish contrary opinions but there's no reason in particular to do so.

>They don't let "just anyone" publish in a newspaper but almost all major newspapers allow voices across the political spectrum in the form of letters and op-eds.

Yes... that are heavily curated by the Editors. They don't publish every OpEd, nor every Letter to the Editor they get. Yes, they post dissenting viewpoints constantly - that is the function. But that isn't free speech at all in the context of social media and what you're describing.

>That's what free speech culture is about. It's the idea that "everyone gets their say"

Again, not everyone - not even most people get their say. Certainly none of the rantings and ravings get published. Solid, cogent, fair or interesting letters get published in credible platforms (i.e. newspapers and TV) - as determined by the Editors or the OpEd review boards depending on the governance of the particular platform.

> and by disagreeing and arguing, we get closer to the truth.

Agreed - but that has nothing to do with allowing all view points and anyone with an idea, no matter how dangerous or how bad. Hell, even in full page advertisements, Newspapers can and will choose not to take your money if it's something that they think is harmful or antithetical to their platform. And they always have.

This isn't new or unique.

>It's sad that more and more people are taking your view, which is that people can publish contrary opinions but there's no reason in particular to do so.

What I'm trying to share with you is that you are the outlier here. What everyone is describing is more or less status quo prior to social media taking an "anything goes" stance. That has never been the reality prior to that.

> Yes... that are heavily curated by the Editors. They don't publish every OpEd, nor every Letter to the Editor they get. Yes, they post dissenting viewpoints constantly - that is the function. But that isn't free speech at all in the context of social media and what you're describing.

It's exactly free speech in the context I'm describing; the idea that dissent is good and everyone gets their say. Social media is free and open so it's quite clear that the bar for curation is going to be lower than a newspaper with finite space.

> Again, not everyone - not even most people get their say. Certainly none of the rantings and ravings get published. They sure did on Twitter.

Virtually everyone should get their say. The bar for censorship should be extremely high.

> Agreed - but that has nothing to do with allowing all view points and anyone with an idea, no matter how dangerous or how bad.

Yes it does. How could it not? And who determines what is "dangerous or bad"?

> What I'm trying to share with you is that you are the outlier here. What everyone is describing is more or less status quo prior to social media taking an "anything goes" stance. That has never been the reality prior to that.

It used to be the case that most speech was in-person and local. Most people were relatively tolerant and there wasn't a lot of curation. There was a consolidation in the 20th century, which is what you're referring to. Now things are opening back up.

>It's exactly free speech in the context I'm describing; the idea that dissent is good and everyone gets their say. Social media is free and open so it's quite clear that the bar for curation is going to be lower than a newspaper with finite space.

Explain to me how you would get your OpEd published or get on TV tomorrow, today, or 20 years ago. Explain to me how _everyone_ gets to do it.

>Social media is free and open so it's quite clear that the bar for curation is going to be lower than a newspaper with finite space.

The point is it doesn't need to be. Newspapers are now no longer constrained by how much paper they can fold. TV is no longer constrained by how many channels can be broadcast OTA or via Coax.

>Virtually everyone should get their say. The bar for censorship should be extremely high.

Censorship is not the same thing as not publishing your drivel. Are you suggesting that if you submit an OpEd to the Wall Street Journal and they don't publish it that they're censoring you? They're making a curated, editorial choice, it's not censorship - they are a private company with no obligation to publish or give platform to your ideas.

>Yes it does. How could it not? And who determines what is "dangerous or bad"?

This is what I'm telling you - in all media formats prior to The Internet, the owner of the platform or editor of the platform or governance for OpEds determined what was worth publishing/platforming and what wasn't.

>It used to be the case that most speech was in-person and local.

Is that good or bad?

>Most people were relatively tolerant and there wasn't a lot of curation.

We burned "witches". There has never been a time in human history where we were more tolerant than today.

The Catholic Church murdered people for suggesting that our solar system was heliocentric.

We have less curation than we've ever had in human history - by miles. We may have over-rotated.

>There was a consolidation in the 20th century, which is what you're referring to. Now things are opening back up.

There has always been consolidation - through money and power. There was an opening in the 20th century, and we've been less constrained every day since the invention of the printing press.

Newspapers are a red herring because they have limited space and don't solicit opinion pieces from random people. It is censorship to obstruct someone from posting on some social media site because their post is bad/wrong/dangerous. What else could it be?

Under some conditions censorship is acceptable. The law, for example, sets those conditions at "incitement to imminent lawless action". Private companies need to set their own conditions for censorhip. My argument is that the bar should be high, much higher that it is on most sites, and that free speech culture is extremely valuable.

My historical argument is simply that, in the US, there was a period of openness followed by a period of consolidation. This was the result of the media that existed (nationally prominent papers and tv channels are necessarily centralized). We're heading back to openness due to the internet. Enjoy the ride.

> Newspapers are a red herring because they have limited space and don't solicit opinion pieces from random people.

As I said, Newspapers haven't been constrained by space for 20 years. More than half of their subscribers are digital only.

Anyone is free to submit a letter to the editor or an oped. They don't inherently solicit them. They just actually curate, moderate and only publish the ones they deem worth publishing.

>It is censorship to obstruct someone from posting on some social media site because their post is bad/wrong/dangerous.

Why? If it's my social media site, and I don't like what you're saying, how am I censoring you by saying you can't do it on _my_ platform?

>What else could it be?

Me exerting my rights on my property (my social media platform). Same way I don't have to let you scream whatever you want from my front lawn.

>Under some conditions censorship is acceptable. The law, for example, sets those conditions at "incitement to imminent lawless action". Private companies need to set their own conditions for censorhip. My argument is that the bar should be high, much higher that it is on most sites, and that free speech culture is extremely valuable.

The bar seems very high already for most social media platforms, honestly. Do you believe it is censorship to choose not to allow things to be platformed/printed that are clearly lies?

Is it OK to print lies if no one is harmed (i.e. you're selling crystals to make your sleep better)? What if you're selling crystals that cure cancer and someone buys that instead of actually going to a cancer doctor?

>My historical argument is simply that, in the US, there was a period of openness followed by a period of consolidation. This was the result of the media that existed (nationally prominent papers and tv channels are necessarily centralized). We're heading back to openness due to the internet. Enjoy the ride.

That's just the cycle of things - everything bounces between the extremes. We go too hard one direction, then overcorrect in the other.

The social media age is probably an over correction to openness, with no one fact checking anything, spreading lies rampantly. This was analogous to the snake oil that was the plague of the early 1900s. Do you believe we should go back to that? We stamped that out through regulation and limiting the claims people can make. Is that censorship? Is it bad?

I'm not going to reply anymore, it was good discussing with you.

Twitter is only barely comparable to a newspaper, and only in the ways that fit your narrative. It's almost like new technologies force us into new ways of thinking about things.

> Moderation on HN is based on tone and quality, not content.

... That is still content-based moderation, since it's based on the actual text being written and not the circumstances (time, place, manner) of its writing.

Content may have been a poor word choice. What I meant is that comments here are rarely moderated because the message in the comment is deemed wrong by the moderators.

Sure they are. Broad classes of messages are forbidden on HN. No matter what tone you use, you can't disparage nationalities, genders, or races here, or make arguments that would tend to have that effect; you can't attempt to psychiatrically diagnose other commenters; you can't question the good faith of a commenter here, or suggest that they're shills; you can't collect personal facts about other commenters and marshal them as arguments; the list goes on. These aren't tonal issues, they're substantive. What might set them apart is how sweeping they are.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas suggested extending common carrier legislation to cover social media platforms. That would essentially prevent them from censoring any content legal in the US.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2021/04/09/justice-t...

I don't understand your point about user experience. Twitter is already mostly low effort flame wars, political proselytizing, and porn. But people seem to still use it anyway.

It is completely acceptable for you to choose to moderate your platform to only allow the content you choose.

The caveat is that you should lose your 230 protections. We should only protect neutral, lawful, platforms from user generated content.

>Note that you’re choosing to spend your time on HN (a relatively strongly moderated forum) instead of a less moderated forum like 8chan’s /b/.

>Free speech in the sense of “everybody should be forced to platform every idea” is silly IMO.

This is a strawman. Nobody forced twitter to build twitter. When you build an open platform and let anyone sign up, you're offering a platform. When you then arbitrarily decide to remove people from it for wrongthink you're reneging on the deal. Framing it as "forced to platform every idea" is nonsense. Phone companies are literally required not to discriminate based on content and it's been on the whole a good thing. I don't know why social media gets to be both a platform and an editorial board. It's bullshit.

>ote that you’re choosing to spend your time on HN (a relatively strongly moderated forum) instead of a less moderated forum like 8chan’s /b/.

Why do moderators always act like a person can only use one website? Is it a power thing? I use reddit, facebook, hn, .win, poal, twitter, and 4chan almost every day.

>If you want your platform to be about anything other than those, you need curation and moderation. This is key for a good user experience.

This is just your opinion. For me a good user experience isn't even possible if I'm silenced or "moderated" (read: censored).

I think this topic is a little messier than how you put it.

4chan's /b/ is the same exact place that:

- posted racist, misogynist, misandrist, and shocking porn

- stood up to scientology

- acted as an obfuscator for anonymous

- led raids on other communities

A normal person can pick the things out of that list they don't want and say "be gone". The problem is, the other things on that list don't exist without it. This is generally the allegory and type of connection that keeps our idea of "government free speech" tied somewhat closely with (what I call) "personal free speech".

On the other hand, I moderate smaller communities than /b/ (and other large forums) and I agree, in these smaller settings there are left and right political grifters, there's content that will cause people to leave or backlash, and endless personal disputes that must be mediated.

The problems between my small communities (a couple thousand) and large forums (hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions) are very different, and they serve a very different purpose in the larger ecosystem of communication that I think is difficult to quantify.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025740.

(Not for moderation reasons—simply to prune the thread so the server isn't quite as overwhelmed.)

You guys should start a fundraiser or something, so you can stop hosting this on your basement Raspberry Pi cluster and finally rent out some proper cloud hosting :D

It's frustrating that this topic keeps being discussed as if there are only two options. Why not provide each individual users with powerful tools that let them specify the type of content they want to see and when. They can have a large amount of presets and with a single button click users can change what they'll be seeing or they can spend some time and modify it to their liking. People can also share the filters they created. Even better create an open API and let companies compete with each other over who provides the best filters.

Moderation is important, but why leave it up to executives at these massive companies to decide what is acceptable and what isn't. Let each user decide for themselves.

> Why not provide each individual users with powerful tools that let them specify the type of content they want to see and when.

Agreed, but that's the issue - many people don't want anyone to see some content because they are convinced such misinformation causes people they don't like to be elected, etc. I'm of the opinion that filtering is its own type of propaganda.

> Why not provide each individual users with powerful tools that let them specify the type of content they want to see and when

Tools like adblock/ublock/etc dramatically improve user experience and performance on the internet, yet less than 30% of desktop users employ adblocking. Requiring end-users to set up filters to not be accosted by content that most people find objectionable will generally not be a winning proposition.

I don't think that is a good analogy. In this case these filters would be presented to you as you setup your account. In addition with filter sharing any user would only be one button press away from adopting someones else's filter. There could be a wide diversity of filters and users can change their filter by the minute. Imagine if browsers treated adblock/ublock/etc as integral parts of your experience and not as an extra add-on.

Governments don’t control these massively influential communications platforms (Maybe they should?)

In some ways, huge tech companies are more powerful than governments. So why should they have the power to essentially remove ideas from public discussion?

What? I am not aware of a single company that is at least as powerful as the smallest government. What do you mean?

Try paying for things at a shop or service that only accepts credit cards when you've been banned from having one. Who bans you from that? Payment processors.

If all the insurance companies decide they won't insure you, how will you get health care? The government had to intervene (with the ACA) because that particular problem was so bad.

People trying to immigrate often have to use email to communicate with government agencies. If gmail bans their account, they can no longer talk to the immigration agency. I've seen a couple different people have this exact problem.

There are plenty of other examples.

Certainly governments have the power to do all these things as well, but large influential companies can absolutely ruin your life if you get the wrong kind of attention (or in the case of automated policy decisions, get unlucky).

This is something much different from the previous claim (that companies are as powerful as states). None of this means that the company is more powerful than any state.

And regardless - no business is going to send you to prison, while the state can. No business will shoot you, while the state can. So even in this interpretation of "how much can they fuck up my life" the state wins.

Many of the things I cited are powers that businesses have and the US government does not have. I don't know why this is hard to understand.

Businesses are free to shoot you as well, private security guards can carry guns in most parts of the US. Businesses can also send you to prison via false police reports, which is a thing that has happened periodically.

All things you listed are entirely in the power of governments - even the smallest ones. I'm actually fighting with the state about one of these you listed as we speak (healthcare insurance).

While governments technically have the power, they are easily manipulated by interests with large amounts of money.

Why are my large amounts of money not helping at all, then?

That sounds like an argument against monopolies, not and argument against moderation.

or argument *for* inter-op of those platforms (reducing network effects of monopolies)

> So why should they have the power to essentially remove ideas from public discussion?

They don't. They never have. You're ascribing way more power to tech companies than they've ever had.

That being said, the combined power of tech companies and media companies -- of which there are many -- does have the ability you're talking about. (For example, Fox, Warner, Google, Nytimes, etc.) The lines certainly have become a bit blurred, with Comcast and Verizon buying media companies though.

I agree a single company doesn't have all the power, but for some reason they generally seem to act in concert with one another. Take for example the Hunter Biden laptop story. It was suppressed "by mistake" according to Jack himself [1]. Later, survey indicated many voters believed it was a "very important" story [2].

Another example is lab leak.

Thus, yes, yes they do.

[1] https://nypost.com/2021/03/25/dorsey-says-blocking-posts-hun...

[2] https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/gen...

Do you have any evidence the laptop story suppression wasn't a mistake?

Do you have evidence that it wasn't? Why do you get to decide the null hypothesis?

Twitter claimed it was a mistake, that's all the information we have. You're claiming they are lying, you have to offer evidence to prove that claim.

You've ignored the point. Twitter made the claim that they made a mistake, should they be held to your standard that "you have to offer evidence to prove that claim."

I'm sorry, you think every social media company censoring a story at the same time was somehow a mistake??

Strangely, practically everyone knows about the Hunter Biden laptop story, so no, that was certainly not very suppressed -- and you certainly did see articles about it in established media organizations, just not all of them. So, no, it was not "essentially removed" from "public discussion" as the OP claimed.

In fact, your bringing up the story (which I immediately recognized) proves the point. It is indeed, part of public discussion.

Yes now it is. It wasn't nearly as well known _before_ the election.

There were articles about the story published by many mainstream news organizations before the election -- including the Washington Post, The New York Times, Politico, Vox, Techcrunch, CNN, CBS News, and USA Today, among others. I fail to see the "supression" of the story from the public discussion, based on the reality of the situation.

Edit: The point is that the story was part of the "public discussion" -- though I understand that some people disagree with some of the articles that were part of the public discussion. Disagreement is a normal part of "discussion." The original claim I was responding to was that this story was "suppressed" from "public discussion." It was not.

You're making no distinction between the content of the coverage. The Hunter Biden laptop story was widely covered pre-election in the context of it being false or disinfo.

Politico: "Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say" source: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/hunter-biden-story-...

NPR: "Analysis: Questionable 'N.Y. Post' Scoop Driven By Ex-Hannity Producer And Giuliani" source: https://www.npr.org/2020/10/17/924506867/analysis-questionab...

Compilation of journalists calling it disinfo: https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1440402740409110528

I honestly don't think I am following your argument at all. The fact that they wrongly reported on something without evidence is exactly the point.

It was extremely well known. What you're doing is how Foxnews, the number one cable news network in many situations, claims a story isn't being reported on by the "main stream media".

Streisand effect.

> So why should they have the power to essentially remove ideas from public discussion?

A private company is not required to publish your rants on the current state of underground mole peoples' infiltration of the highest offices of the world's governments. If you somehow get it onto the platform, and they are made aware of it, they can unpublished it.

Just like the NYT is not required to post every opinion piece that is submitted to them.

> Just like the NYT is not required to post every opinion piece that is submitted to them.

That worked when there were more than two platforms to post your opinions on.

You say that like there aren't hundreds of social media platforms out there now and like it isn't trivial for a technical person to set up your own social media service on some "bulletproof host" in Lithuania or Russia.

There isn't a dearth of social media. There are a couple of GIANT social media websites that have sprung up in the last 2 decades, but there are dozens of semi-popular niche-ier forums that cater to any rant you might want to leave.

Today there are more platforms to post your opinions on than ever before.

And very easy ways for people to create their own platforms/blogs with their own rules too, they almost certainly won't have the same reach as the larger platforms but it seems to be a common view that Facebook/Twitter/etc. owe people access to their platform and maximum potential audience for some reason. Personally I really don't understand how those espousing free speech principles are making arguments that seem to require other private individuals and companies to repeat/amplify speech they don't want to

> And very easy ways for people to create their own platforms/blogs with their own rules too, they almost certainly won't have the same reach as the larger platforms

That's the point. FB/Twitter are now public utility size and usefulness. Your blog, not so much.

Okay, but how is the situation worse than it was before FB and twitter existed?

The amount of eyeballs available today for even small sites is far greater than it used to be pre-facebook.

So this is all about, as another commenter said, complaining that you can't get the largest audience for your mole people rant. Facebook and Twitter are both very large social hubs, but they still get to pick what they publish. They are giving you the ability to publish anything you want until enough people (or the right people) complain about it.

It is democratized moderation. If your following is small enough to skirt the mods, then you can post what ever you want. If your following is huge and you post a bunch of lies about sewer mutants, or that the covid vaccine gives you rabies, or that Hillary Clinton is actually a space alien in cahoots with Planned Parenthood to subsist off the flesh of aborted 6 year olds, then YES, they will remove your posts, and potentially ban you for a period of time.

This literally happens to my aunt every few weeks. She gets a weeks long ban for basically reposting only Russian spam, gets her account back and does it again. It has never even been permanent.

I'm sympathetic to the argument that Facebook/Twitter/etc. are too large and have too much power for lobbying/influencing public discourse, although I think if anything making them a public utility would make that situation far worse as opposed to just breaking them up or something else to make the market more competitive

But also just because they are big platforms why does that give people a right to be on them? Is my speech less free because I have a smaller audience?

This is complaining that you won't be able to get all the audience you want for a deranged mole people rant. It wasn't too long ago that there were only one or two TV channels in any one area - should the mole people rant have been a mandatory presence on those media as well?

We didn't even have those two platforms during most of my life.

The NYT can control what they print, and they are also responsible for what they print.

Twitter can control what it "prints", but is not responsible.

Those situations aren't the same. At all.

Historically, there were platforms (like newspapers) that had full control of what information they disseminated and had full responsibility for that information, and "common carrier" platforms (like the phone company) that did not control what information was disseminated and accordingly were not responsible for it.

Twitter and its brethren want the best of both worlds -- freedom to censor, but no responsibility.

They should have to choose one or the other.

Why can't they not be responsible and censor, how are these related?

Because power without responsibility is a recipe for abuse.

If they are responsible for the comments they'll censor more.

> Twitter can control what it "prints", but is not responsible.

I agree that this is a problem that I wish was addressed, but honestly, I dont know what kind of overreaching, anti-freedom (/s kind of?) law would need to be passed. The reason it worked for news papers was they were printing news, and news has to be true (or at least not outright lies).

Twitter, Facebook, *chan, parlor, Truth social (is that actually a thing yet?) would all just say they dont print the news, and that every post is opinion.

Which even the NYT opinion pieces don't fall under the same editorial scrutiny as their news, and legally are completely separate.

I think you'll find that both print media and online media have substantially similar protections for third-party content.

I think you'll find that online media is explicitly protected from being sued for defamatory or infringing content under the DMCA, as long as they take the material down.

No such protection exists for print media.

Print media cannot "take down" content, but does enjoy a similar immunity as regards third party content. You should probably educate yourself on the subject, it would save you from making silly arguments.

> The NYT can control what they print, and they are also responsible for what they print.

Nonsense

You should look at the thingy called "Opinion", and what kind of disclaimer NYT put around it

Labeling it "opinion" does not protect you from being sued for libel, or for copyright infringement, or...

Someone is spouting nonsense here, but it isn't me.

Sure

you could sue person, much harder to sue newspaper

you could sue someone for a twit if you want to, nothing could stop you

>If you somehow get it onto the platform, and they are made aware of it, they can unpublished it.

And that's called censorship.

You are absolutely correct. Do you remember when your parents would have some weird rule you didn't agree with, and their justification was "my house, my rules." This is basically the same thing. You don't have to follow the rules, but if you get caught breaking them, there could be some grounding and privileges taken away.

I do not get why people are under the impression that Twitter has to indulge their every tweet. They do not, will not, should not, and have not since the founding of the platform.

If you walk into a McDonalds and start selling your own hamburgers out of the bathroom unbeknownst to them, is it censorship when they finally discover the atrocity and have you removed? Is it stifling competition or free speech? Probably, but their house, their rules.

> In some ways, huge tech companies are more powerful than governments

Sure, but in other ways, they are not.

They do not, for example, break the government's monopoly on force; tech companies generally cannot compel you to pay taxes or imprison you. If you make them unhappy, mostly the worst thing they can do is ignore you -- and unlike a government, they cannot force others to ignore you, and they cannot much affect your life outside of their own transactions with you.

The centralization of multiple forms of power is more concerning than the mere existence of power in separate spheres. You say "maybe they should?" but collaboration between the organization that controls force and the organizations that control speech seems like an opportunity for much more substantial oppression.

> Governments don’t control these massively influential communications platforms (Maybe they should?)

Trusted News Initiative says otherwise. Which is why all big platforms either censor or warn public on information that is counter to the Western governments narratives.

If social media companies actually had the true power to remove topics from public discussion, there would not be public discussion on increasing regulation on these companies or breaking them up.

the key word we might be hung up on is "remove". they can't just remove, but they can sway just enough to have real social impact.

And yet Trump was elected in 2016 and almost in 2020. Polls also indicate he would win an election between him and Biden right now. https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/600146-poll-trump-lead...

33% of the US population thinks the 2020 election was stolen https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2021-12-28/pol...

What evidence do you have that they hold sway over society?

Ever heard about HB laptop?

Yes, what about it?

Well the former Democratic PAC leader now Facebook PR executive had that story pulled until such time it could be “fact checked”. Still waiting 16 months later.

https://twitter.com/andymstone/status/1316395902479872000

There is a fairly interesting documentary of what Denmark thinks of free speech. To an extent where politicians are protected from setting the Quran on fire, full well knowing that it is designed to incite hatred. I don't know what the danish voice on silencing dissenting eastern perspectives on the war in Ukraine is, but the EU citizens seem to be themselves cheering on censorship more and more these days.

The documentary itself is quite interesting in my opinion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sM8p7hnprM

Internet forum moderation is nothing like government censorship.

If you don’t like a forum’s moderation policies, you can go to another forum.

If you run afoul of your government’s censorship, they can jail you or even end your life.

But some forums like Twitter (and HN, for that matter) are pretty unique, IMO.

For Twitter, perhaps a good compromise would be: instead of banning problematic accounts, set to them a "default-mute" state where only people who choose to follow the account can see its tweets.

See also Section 1.F of https://www.journaloffreespeechlaw.org/volokh.pdf , which distinguishes how Twitter's 'hosting' function might be treated differently from its curation functions.

It may be good idea hundred years back where (only?) government was being all powerful in a person's life . So if government denied people speech they are roughly blocked from everywhere.

Now with huge dependency on cloud/ social platform to conduct daily life they are pretty much government. SO getting blocked from them has much larger impact then it would be 50-100 years back.

Spending time or getting blocked on HN is not as materially impacting as it would be on big cloud services. So it does not compare well.

> Left alone user content rapidly devolves into the most low-effort salient content - flame wars, political proselytizing and porn, mostly.

Polemics, porn, and politics

Nobody is upset that Twitter is moderating porn. (And in fact it allows porn!) People are upset that Twitter censored what turned out to be a true story about the son of the now President, or that you can be blocked or banned for running afoul of rules of decorum embraced by a small minority of the population. If Twitter banned porn and not those other things, people wouldn't be complaining!

The difference between the two is less significant when a few large tech companies monopolise online discourse. Water an electricity is considered a "utility" but still delivered by many private companies - why isn't the same argument used there? I'm sure plenty of people would support cutting off utilities for neo-nazis; that doesn't men it's a good precedent.

Consider gabber et al was cut off by their hosting companies, a much harder space to enter for non-established companies - maybe net-neutrality should be extended from traffic to hosting/computing facilities?

> Left alone user content rapidly devolves

> you need curation and moderation

the thing about online content is that it doesn't work like a free-speech bazaar. You can choose which soapbox you want to visit. You can choose what networks to participate in.

Also, it should be noted that that these types of places sometime devolve because of bubbles/moderation; e.g. reddit /politics/ is a toxic echo chamber because it bans/downvotes dissenting opinion, resulting in a groupthink-mentality.

> instead of a less moderated forum like 8chan’s

and that's a choice, until it isn't (e.g. 8chan is banned/blocked/deplatformed)

Not enough people are aware of the Paradox of Tolerance:

"The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance."

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

I find it hilarious when this paradox is trotted out because Popper’s final conclusion was we should tolerate intolerance up until it promotes imminent violence.

He’d be entirely opposed to censoring intolerant views the way most people think of intolerance.

I think everyone on the Internet has heard of that paradox by now, and it is always misinterpreted by people who only want their speech to be allowed.

Popper was talking about literal Nazis. We do not know what percentage of the numerous Twitter bans he would have approved (my guess is around 5%). We do not know if he would have been astonished by the fact that proponents of his paradox never use it against overt communist propaganda but only against alleged fascist propaganda (the bar for being called a Nazi has never been lower).

what brought people here was not the moderation, but the (perceived) access to SV people and capital

You're arguing as if "platforms" exist in a vacuum, sealed off from the the 'free expression area'.

How much do you think Twitter matters?

It’s not just the government. Companies like Twitter are so ubiquitous that they are a form of government entity now, especially when they enforce government talking points. When Twitter decides that talking about the lab leak theory gets you kicked off the platform, they are becoming nothing more than a government tool. This was the breaking point for Musk and for me as well.

Not giving a “platform” to alternative views, no matter how “damaging” you or the government feels it is is crucial for a democracy.

Twitter is not a forum though. I understand the need to moderate a forum, since it’s equivalent to a public place with a limited number of rooms.

Twitter, on the other hand doesn’t map to that model. If me and my friends want to tweet things to our group, no one is being forced to follow or read that content. I don’t see any justification to moderate that, beyond content that’s actually illegal like child porn, terrorism, etc.

I think the large issue with some of these major platforms is that there's some pretty transparent government "suggestion" into these platforms regulating speech that the government doesn't like. It's along the lines of "take care of this or you'll be getting some "help" with your taxes, stocks, etc."

It's, in fact, the opposite of free speech.

Now, there may be an argument that Twitter, for example, has become such an integral part of the public square that the government SHOULD compel Twitter to allow every form of speech on it. And that could be a reasonable argument to make.

What it wouldn't be is free speech. It would, in fact, be coerced speech.

Never heard of 8chan. Quick Google search indicates it is shutdown.

What if ISPs start really inspecting your traffic and then ban you when you start visiting certain sites they don't like? You going to say the same thing then especially when how ingrained the Internet has become in everyday life?

I’m surprised this hasn’t already happened. If everyone’s browsing history was published in the way everyone’s opinion is published on twitter then I bet ISPs would be blocking sites left and right

> “everybody should be forced to platform every idea”

Not everybody should have to, but the behemoths that are the only thing that resembles a public square today, e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit, should have to.

There is a difference between a civil discourse and abuse filled with obscenities. There is also a difference between fair moderation and suppression of dissent.

When I post on HN anything about Trump or vaccines, HN doesn't add a note to my post informing readers about the 'correct' view on the problem. HN does restrict personal insults, and does it consistently for all sides of the conversation. That is fair moderation. Because it is fair, I don't feel that my (or anyone) right for free speech is limited here. The spirit of free speech principle is not violated.

Twitter, on the other hand, was applying their rules very selectively, discrediting views that they consider 'incorrect' with various notices, and blocking or restricting users with political views they don't like. That's suppression.

Of course, Twitter, like other plaftorms, DOES have the right to run their platform as they see fit, private company and all, but here comes another facet of this problem: everything can formally be a private platform, yet everything can be run by the government. It is not a hypothetical situation, in Russia every remaining media source is directly or indirectly controlled by the government. Putin's best friend, an oligarch, owns all social networks in Russia, and can just shut down any user that tries to oppose the war. No, not censorship, free enterprises.

It is a known fact that oligarchy can merge with the government very closely, and do become a de-facto cernsorship arm of the ruling party, while formally retaining their rights to block anyone who's views they don't like. This is not a theoretical problem and this is what happening now.

So the free world is not facing a difficult problem, how to balance the possibility (and dire necessity!) of having a public discourse on painful problems faced by the society with the rights of the commercial platforms that this discourse takes place on. I'd prefer Twitter to be politically neutral than trying to actively taking one side. That would be better for them, for their users, and basically for everybody. And it is actually fully within their rights.

I think we're not discussing the real point here which isn't whether "full completely unregulated free speech" should be the norm on twitter or not. Elon isn't proposing allowing CP or whatever the worst stuff you see on 8chan is. The battleground is simply in a much subtler grey area of idea space. Elon basically seems to think there's been push to disallow discussion about quite reasonable subjects (which indeed would have been allowed on HN too, e.g. covid vaccine pros and cons) and he'd like it to be allowed again.

Note also that twitter is quite different from traditional forums in the way it's structured. You follow people, you can block people. The analogy to traditional forums needing moderation isn't really one-to-one.

Pretty sure you can discuss cons of vaccinations as long as you don't delve into conspiracy theories / claims without scientific backing.

Edit: But I do recall the COVID origin discussion being quite a censorship trainwreck.

Thats supposed to be how it works, but in reality the decisions skew much more towards 'that person disagrees with what I personally believe, so ban'

Making claims without scientific backing probably shouldn't be a bannable offence. The spirit of science is about discussion and counter arguments and being open to being wrong or even the idea that the consensus might be invalid, not about coercion.

> spirit of science is about discussion and counter arguments and being open to being wrong or even the idea that the consensus might be invalid

I have seen very few antivax arguments made in the spirit of science. Those that were got repeated lacking the original comment’s nuance.

Keep in mind that the spirit of science was developed with the gates of wealth, literacy and education in mind. Remove those, add in anonymity, or even pseudonymity, and the system veers towards chaos. We are far more open, today, than the Enlightenment-era West was. That requires new tools and guardrails. (What this discussion, broadly, is about.)

Keep in mind, Merriam-Webster changed the definition of 'anti-vax' to include being against vaccine mandates [0]. So if you are against mandatory COVID vaccines for 5 year olds, you are technically an 'antivaxer'.

I don't know how many people have gotten banned over this (though I'd guess nonzero) but it shows just how easy it is to fall under the new draconian speech policies enacted by the majority of social media.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anti-vaxxer

People get banned from yt and twitter for quoting scientific papers that don't align with "the message". In fact it's been yts official policy since mid 2020 to ban anything COVID that doesn't conform to what the WHO is saying.

Indeed.

The subtle point is that the public forum cannot be owned, and that while the public forum is subject to the law, no one can moderate its content.

What has effectively happened is that the public forum has arisen in the cyberspace. We were not prepared for that since that has never happened.

If the govt hired a contractor to oversee a public good, the contractor could not decide who was allowed in or not, or who was allowed to speak, that wouldn't fly under the law.

Some of the large platforms have (accidentally?) come to own the commons. They cant exercise control just like any other standard property, while the commons are still subject to the law of the land.

Instead of a blanket statement like "my property, my rules" we should be working to define the commons. That is a valid debate. We can debate that definition, which is similar to "what constitutes a monopoly?"

This is the correct perspective imo. Our tech has outpaced our laws. We as a society need to rethink how we operate and move forward with these new technologies without being buried under the wave of change they bring.

Section 230 was our first attempt and it has served us decently. I think it's time for a tune-up with a fresh perspective now that we have a few decades of experience under our belt.

HN may be “heavily” as you say, moderated, but you are allowed to discuss things that counter any narrative as long as you make a reasonable effort at presenting your ideas in a reasonable way.

You don’t get banned for criticizing bitcoin, VCs, Hunter Biden, US policies, BLM, the police, inflation, gender, feminism, masculinity, etc., etc, whereas Twitter tends to ban things that go counter to particular narratives even in the face of evidence. You’re a epidemiologist and critique Covid policies? Not allowed!!!

Drawing equivalence between Twitter bans and government censorship is the height of western privileged ignorance.

Not when the government lobbies the companies for certain viewpoints.

Not when there’s bidirectional communication happening between govt and tech companies on these issues. We’ve seen them coordinate to erase particular stories from the public narrative etc. They literally have manipulated elections by doing this.

These companies were engaged in a covert surveillance program on behalf of intelligence agencies too. That by itself makes them effectively an extension of the state.

It does become an issue of government censorship when the heads of these companies are hauled before congress with the threat of breakup or regulation, while simultaneously being questioned about the "incorrect" speech they allow on their platforms.

Hacker News isn’t comparable to Twitter. They’re not doing coordinated censorship with other big tech companies or working on behalf of intelligence agencies to spy on their users etc. Twitter & other large corps aren’t just private companies because they have such strong relationships with the government. Politicians also threaten to penalize them for not doing censorship the way that they want, so they aren’t really acting in a free market regardless.

Looking at what is not allowed on HN, the same things are disallowed here. How is that not the same?

Elon will either let Twitter be run over by political spam and see it lose its value, or realize he needs to healthily stifle some speech to maintain his investment.

>> Looking at what is not allowed on HN, the same things are disallowed here. How is that not the same?

Not true. If Donald trump wanted to post here on tech or business I think he'd be allowed. The ban hammer might come quick not because of his views, but his inflamitory style. Twitter sensors ideas, not language.

What idea have they censored?

>> What idea have they censored?

Why did they cancel Donald Trump?

BTW I'm not supporting him, just pointing out censorship.

Do they? In my experience they don't - e.g. the lab leak hypothesis.

If you hypothesise about it, that's A OK, if you claim that it's 100% verified, that's not, because it's not been proven one way or the other.

>> If you hypothesise about it, that's A OK, if you claim that it's 100% verified, that's not, because it's not been proven one way or the other.

But what is used as the ground truth? For the lab leak it will likely never be known. Even so, if Twitter is declaring certain parties as authorities on subjects that's not good - particularly in highly politicized situations.

> They’re not doing coordinated censorship with other big tech companies

You ever notice how you’re not permitted to comment on Y-combinator company announcement posts on HN?

You can comment on anything but job ads on this site.

Not really in the same ballpark as simultaneously banning an individual or a news story across every social media platform

People keep moving the goalposts and it never ends up making sense. The fact of the matter is that HN has moderation which people enjoy. You can't come in here talking about whatever you want, however you want. The same goes for Twitter. Trying to split them apart by size, audience or whatever is meaningless.

People like the moderation policies of Hacker News but not the ones of Twitter. This isn't some grand hypocrisy.

HN has generally good & reasonable moderation and isn’t engaged in blatant political censorship, it’s not that complicated.

HN is a fraction of Twitter's size, and moderation isn't going to scale linearly. I doubt anybody, including Elon could really solve this problem apart from taking the reddit approach.

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