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Comment by tomatowurst | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I mean Parag was not going to make it. He was a lame duck but the product itself can't be changed much as it is still about amplifying status updates.

Pushbacks on Elon threatening to bring free speech back (hopefully addressing the toxic witch hunts, cancelling) were seemingly orchestrated by incumbent billionaires with their own mainstream media outlets feeling threatened by it—because it would undermine the impact of their own loudspeakers if views that challenge popular narratives or The Current Thing.

Anyways, I am not a fanboy of Elon by any means other than SpaceX, I think it was a refreshing move for a billionaire to not just buy another mainstream media outlet. Unsure what will happen going forward ....

but strictly from a business point of view, buying Twitter for the purpose of profiteering was a bad one, but at his level, money has become irrelevant, its more about control here.

Having said that I do question how far he would be able to take the free speech thing as a private company.

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> Pushbacks on Elon threatening to bring free speech back ... were seemingly orchestrated by incumbent billionaires with their own mainstream media outlets feeling threatened

The alternative facts and hate speech that dominate Facebook have been incredibly harmful for society, and I think there should be tighter guardrails for online content moderation. There are legitimate reasons to disagree on this issue.

Wasn’t YouTube deleting content that suggested covid was airborne transmitted? Now we are seeing the scientific community agree it is in fact airborne. We should not have guard rails it only leads to censoring and whenever there is censorship there will be abuse of it.

Do you think it’s possible for the understanding of complex scientific phenomena like the type of spread of a novel virus to change as scientists gain more knowledge? Or do you just get one shot, and that’s the final answer forever?

Isn't that supporting their point? If things change then surely differing views should be allowed, if not encouraged.

Yes, scientific consensus can change, which lends support to the idea that platforms shouldn’t be banning ideas that aren’t the current scientific consensus.

I don't see how that follows. The people saying it was airborne early on were not saying it with scientific backing, they might as well have been saying it was waterborne. Basically, they guessed and got lucky.

Just because there wasn't scientific consensus doesn't mean there was no scientific backing. How about just not censoring?

Because most people don't have the capability to tell the difference between bullshit and scientific fact.

What's your suggestion for censorship then? How do you know the current understanding is correct?

You can censor comments suggesting the current understanding of the science might be flawed, but then what happens when the understanding shifts to that censored understanding? Do you go censor all of the comments, CDC articles, and news clips that communicated the incorrect understanding? Do you remove the censorship for the old comments? Are there any repercussions for unknowingly leading people astray, and perhaps even causing some deaths for those who thought they were protected by flawed guidelines?

A coronavirus that's not airborne?!

When was this exactly that YouTube was banning videos for saying it was airborne? Examples?

The fact that the comment you are responding to seems to represent a mainstream and legitimized perception of twitter and the broader concept of free speech gives me zero confidence that we are headed towards more free speech.

I'm considering running for president on a one issue platform: A constitutional amendment to criminalize false claims that a non-governmental actor has violated your free speech.

It's a good thing you'll never be elected, then.

Once you install "guardrails" (ie: limits to acceptable speech), they then immediately become the lever of power that the extremes vie to control.

"Unacceptable views" could include: Covid came from a wet market, the Iraq war was about WMD, etc. Pick your controlversial topic, there's going to be a battle over even the limits of rational debate - ones you agree with and ones you definitely don't.

You may be happy with the censorship flavour of the month now, but wait until a government comes into power that you dislike. Imagine what G.W. Bush would have done with the censorship powers available now?

You're opening the floodgates to massive governmental and corporate control. I want no part of that, and I don't want my democracy to be destroyed by the broader effects that would have. If you're consciously advocating for that, then I disagree with you in the strongest terms. Yes, there's an ocean of trolls out there. And the effects of strong censorship are far worse.

I think a much better guardrail would be better context. Unfortunately much of the average population may not be interested in that so much as getting their rage or cute animal picture hit, and that's going to be a huge societal challenge going forward as misinformation itself is now its own lever of power. Just muddying the water exerts a powerful influence on societal stability. But a platform designed explicitly to fill in the details surrounding an issue so that simple mistruths lose some of their power could help. Using dark algorithms and UI for light instead, and using all those carefully researched nudges to get people to find facts instead of rage mob.

That's an interesting proposition. I'm interested in the platforms out there to add in the missing nuance, but I must say I'm sad by what's happened with both Snopes and these 'fact checker' sites.

I think a big problem is the short attention span of most people - myself absolutely included. But finding ways to amplify the influence of those who have paid attention and reduce it from those who only read the titles - that could be interesting as well. There's lots of info out there to use ML to discern low quality input, it'd be interesting to see it applied for good instead of evil!

Maybe this is OpenAI's next challenge :)

> You're opening the floodgates to massive governmental and corporate control.

The irony of this statement in a discussion about taking a public company private

Can you please explain the irony?

Public companies are subject to attacks by billionaires using shorting and disinformation. No sensible company should go public in today's world.

Going public is usually massively profitable for the founders although.

Speech has always had guardrails...

"common limitations or boundaries to freedom of speech relate to libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury."

Then read his comment as "more restrictive guardrails" or "moving the guardrails", to understand his point.

His point is moot because twitter has never claimed to be a free speech platform and I wouldn't expect rights guaranteed to protect me from the US government apply to a private corporate entity.

That Twitter never claimed to be a free speech platform? Please check the history of Jack Dorsey's statements, he was very much a proponent of free speech on his platform.

Regardless of if his or the company's official claims, when network effects centralize virtually everyone into a small number of platforms, it becomes a defacto utility. This has wide ranging and damaging effects on actual democracy. I don't particularly care what statements Twitter has made, if their platform has such wide ranging negative effects then it becomes an issue that needs to be addressed. How that's addressed is another question, but being a private entity doesn't magically free them from accountability of the negative effects of their platform.

The terms of service you agreed to when you signed up for twitter determined that was a lie. People say all sorts of things that aren't true, especially in the business world. If you're taking people at face value, that is your problem, not mine.

Twitter is a business and it literally has nothing to do with democracy at all. Using twitter is a personal choice, if you don't like it, don't use it. That's the solution. Your perception of their business being negative or even positive is neither here nor there.

Yeah, but then it turned out "being a free speech platform" meant the thing was flooded with nothing but spam. Getting rid of the spammers took a massive hit in the public market because their numbers plunged dramatically, but it saved Twitter from becoming completely irrelevant. People have a right to speak, but they don't have a right to be published.

Once that was done, they noticed that people aren't free to speak & won't use a platform where they are constantly under attack from racists, sexists & harassers. As a private entity, Twitter cared more about people feeling comfortable participating than it did about other people's "right" to bully, harass or send dick pics.

They also realized that if they kept letting their platform be used to radicalize terrorists, the government was going to shut them down because they were harmful to the community. It's also possible that they didn't feel great about helping people murder people they hated. Repeatedly.

By that point Jack had realized that "Free Speech" is a lot more nuanced than he imagined as a 29 year old with no background in sociology, philosophy, law or political science. Jack still believes in freedom: he just knows now, experimentally, that you can't achieve that by letting might make right.

It's still possible, and useful, to talk about these things, in the context of a private company, especially much of what he said happened. The concept of social media is new. It's ok to talk about that new thing, in order to understand it and what it's doing to society as a whole.

Nobody is arguing that constitutional rights directly apply here. They're arguing that free speech is important, especially when the government has been pushing around that private company: https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2021/07/15/gover...

That's from the 3rd paragraph here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

You open the floodgates no matter what. What voices do you actually see dominating a completely free environment like this? To me it will just be government and corporate bot farms instead of actual people.

I don't want to live in China, and I don't want the US to become China, so I vehemently disagree. The excuse censors in China use is almost always that the content is harmful for society. This is a tradeoff that was chosen carefully and specifically by those who designed the laws and principles of the US. During difficult times is not when you start throwing out basic principles - in fact quite the opposite. It's easy to stand by your principles during quiet periods.

> Parag was not going to make it. He was a lame duck [..]

He was recently quoted as having "[..] encouraged employees to remain focused and told them 'we as employees control what happens'"?

Is that quote accurate?

If so, not only is the latter part apparently a straightforward falsehood, but seems to demonstrate more ability re: daft virtue-signalling than creating value for shareholders.

I'm not sure why anyone would trust corporate leadership in crisis times, and Twitter's board was completely divorced from any negative outcomes to twitter in terms of their holdings. They never had skin in the game except as a platform for improving their resumes or social networking.

Canceling is a good thing. People should be held to account for their actions. Further, people should be willing to take responsibility for their actions.

"Cancelling" is not a good thing when it's done by a mob of knee-jerk reactionaries with the attention span of a fruit fly.

"Being held to account" is only meaningful if the ones holding you to account are doing so in good faith, and via a semblance of rationality.

> "Cancelling" is not a good thing when it's done by a mob of knee-jerk reactionaries with the attention span of a fruit fly.

Why not? How much time and effort have to go in to recognizing shitty behavior (cat calling, brown face, jerking off in front of someone without consent, etc)?

Besides, if they have such a short attention span, they can't cancel anyone -- canceling only works if you keep shunning them for a long period of time.

I think problem is that 10 million people take 15 seconds to repeat something without verifying, the target can lose their job and housing, only to be proven innocent months later.

Arguably, the root cause lies with the employer that fires them or landlord that evicts them, but it take a lot of integrity to stand up to a large angry mob filled with ignorant and self-righteous anger.

As a great example - the Covington kid video.

If you watch the full, unedited video it's actually very easy to see the situation was far more complex than the media portrayed it to be: A crowd of young kids wearing Trump hats (distateful to say the least, and a powderkeg of a situation), some _actual_ black supremacists (the Black Israelites) spouting off some real hate, and a smaller group of indigenous protesters. This was a recipe for bad interactions, but in reality the kid (Nicholas Sandmann) that got all the online hate appeared to be trying to keep the peace (getting his friend to stop doing the tomahawk chop), and was confronted somewhat aggressively by a grown adult (Nathan Phillips).

There's more nuance to be had of course (and those kids should not have been there, wow!), but the media got it completely backwards based on some very creative editing apparently to support a given narrative.

Cancel culture in this case turned the mob against that kid. With little to no understanding of the actual situation, and based only on the most superficial stereotypes (red trump hat, conservative, probably doesn't like indigenous people, etc). I'll admit even I fell for that trap before I watched the whole video. It is simply unfair and inappropriate to target a CHILD who happened to get caught up in this crazyness. We have a young offenders act in my country for exactly this reason. And the amount of hate he got was incredible.

So yes, cancel culture has, does, and will continue to make mistakes. "How much time and effort" should you go to to not ruin an innocent person's life?

I don't know, but you should at the very least make an effort to get informed on the situation via multiple sources before you break out the daggers. And be aware that you're being fed a diet of what is often corporate misinformation.

>"Cancelling" is not a good thing when it's done by a mob of knee-jerk reactionaries with the attention span of a fruit fly.

canceling is a label applied to play the victim when people are being held accountable for things they don't want to be or by people they don't consider equal.

> canceling is a label applied to play the victim

What word should we use instead then?

What word is suitable to describe low-context, online-mob-driven pile-ons / denunciations?

(Perhaps you’ve never seen that happen?—that would be remarkable.)

You just described it?

The problem, as usual, being that you are trying to describe something with a term where the common usage is just plain bad faith.

Unfairly attacked?

Harassed?

There’s lots of words…the common usage of cancelling is none of them nor what you described. The common usage is what no one in this thread seems to want to admit. And it’s why the same people who cry about cancel culture want to use it’s supposed existence as a reason to actually restrict others free speech.

I think a new word or phrase is in order because a new dynamic exists (a sufficiently quantitative difference equals a qualitative one) where this sort of thing doesn't just happen but is characteristic of today's web.

But I think I see your point. It's a phrase that can be used lazily and in bad faith and itself contribute to degraded discourse.

Appreciate that this can be a reasonable conversation.

It’s important to note that there is a significant portion of the people employing this term in bad faith who are doing now intentionally and to cause confusion. The problem with a new term is that it will, almost inherently, be co-opted by these same groups.

The attempts to mislabel are intentional and coordinated. I think you are coming from a good hearted place, and it’s nice to be able to have this convo, but a new label won’t fix it because the label isn’t the problem the use is.

It's hilarious to me when cancellation defenders call it "being held accountable", as if the she\her anime-profile-picture pronouns-in-the-bio low-IQ types doing the cancelling are some sort of neutral indifferent court that persecutes all equally and without regards to wealth or power. As if the result of all that impotent rage is actually more order and justice and not random lone heretics being burned at the stake and more and more silent mass of people hating the inquisition ever more.

> as if the she\her anime-profile-picture pronouns-in-the-bio low-IQ types

Man you're just coming out swinging.

It’s always nice when the counterpoint speaks for itself

Courts and law are patriarchy, oppression dur dur something something letter salad+

Remember when a scientist was cancelled over a shirt? On a day of greatest achievement of his professional life? We remember.

> canceling is a label applied to play the victim when people are being held accountable for things they don't want to be or by people they don't consider equal.

Justine Sacco was definitely canceled, in exactly the way you are denying happens. There is a legitimate discussion to be had on the phenomenon, and it can't be hand-waved away by claiming it's completely legitimate. Clearly it's not.

Part of that legitimate discussion would necessarily include whether people are using abusing the term.

The fact that real things happen doesn’t make using the same term to describe not real things happening acceptable.

I can’t call out of work because there was a blizzard if there wasn’t a blizzard recently where I actually live

I agree that misuse of the term is a concern, but it's of far lesser concern than of people's lives being ruined (often without justification) by mobs.

Cancel culture is a real thing. It's a new thing enabled by the structure of the systems we've only just created. I think a label is justified (even if this one kind of sucks). And of course concept creep will find this label weaponized almost as soon as it's been created.

That's kind of the era we live in: bad faith abuse of language by the extremists on all sides.

There's a middle ground here, but the argument you're making is essentially the same for the rule of elites as arbiters on what constitutes good faith and rationality on a society. These are emergent properties that come from free speech, and it's frustrating to me that free speech advocates aren't making this argument. I'm cognizant of Twitter occupying this mindshare as a "public forum" while being private, but even then, "canceling" is an emergent seizure of power, and while damaging, all the arguments decrying it seem off the mark to me.

Certainly there is room for some form of group response to bad behaviour. The Will Smith slap is a good example of something that was fairly roundly condemned, and I think we had sufficient evidence from which to form an opinion. Interesting to note the lack of 'accountability' forced on him in this case however.

Not sure where your 'rule of elites' angle into play here, good faith and rationality are things that are debated and roughly agreed upon within societies and institutions (perhaps I do agree with your statement "These are emergent properties that come from free speech"). My point(s) were explicitly that: - Cancellation often happens with ill intent from bad actors: partisan, one sided policies that don't apply to 'their side'. You'll see little in the way of due process, benefit of the doubt / chairitable intepretation. - That combined with reactionism and little desire to combat base stereotypes, makes an easily weaponizable army.

I found Jonathan Haidt's description of cancel culture to be on the mark. It's all about intimidation: Not just for the one being cancelled, but of everyone else who's watching. It's a prelude to a wave of self-censorship.

> Interesting to note the lack of 'accountability' forced on him in this case however.

He got banned from all Academy events for 10 years

Exactly, that's barely a slap on the wrist for an assault filmed in front of millions of people.

Let’s be honest, cancelling is a good thing as long as you are in power and doing the cancelling.

No, cancelling is a bad thing. It represents a barabaric and ignorant Hobbesian paradigm of "justice" by the mob. The people who praise cancelling only do so out of ideological agreement with the dominant cancelling mobs and will be the first to cry if a mob of opposite ideological polarity did the same to them.

Anything legal should be allowed, this already excludes 95% of cancel targets. For the rare illegal 5%, only the courts and public authorities should be allowed to investigate and administer punishment.

>Mob lynching is a good thing. People should be held to account for their actions. Further, people should be willing to take responsibility for their actions.

> Elon threatening to bring free speech back (hopefully addressing the toxic witch hunts, cancelling)

How would those two things not increase under absolute freedom of speech?

>hopefully addressing the toxic witch hunts, cancelling

How do you do that while keeping the content open? Of course Twitter itself can simply not ban people or hide/remove posts, but that's all part of Musk's free speech angle. Apart from that how do you tamp down witch hunts etc without interfering with the content itself?

> but strictly from a business point of view, buying Twitter for the purpose of profiteering was a bad one, but at his level, money has become irrelevant, its more about control here.

Agreed. Bezos, Gates, Musk, etc don't buy media companies for money. They buy it for influence, propaganda, etc.

> Having said that I do question how far he would be able to take the free speech thing as a private company.

I like Musk and generally support things he is trying to do. But I'm not holding my breath. No way he allows twitter to be a free speech platform. Nobody spends $44 billion to allow others to have their say. Nobody spends $44 billion for other people's benefit. Maybe he'll make some symbolic gesture like letting trump back on the platform, but I'm guessing twitter will be his personal megaphone to push his products mostly.

Or maybe this is a watershed moment and elon's purchase of twitter is the start of a shift back to what the internet/social media used to be.

> Elon threatening to bring free speech back (hopefully addressing the toxic witch hunts, cancelling)

how is he supposed to address these without restricting speech?

There are a lot of potential strategies. One big suggestion I've seen is to ensure that pileons aren't artificially amplified by the "what's happening" sidebar.

>Anyways, I am not a fanboy of Elon by any means other than SpaceX,

Maybe there is more behind it? https://app.finclout.io/t/A3lkgnE

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