Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

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This might be the most interesting and important point:

"The thing is, this banning/terminating/deleting troll crap has been going on since I first got my modem in 1986. I’ve been on every popular web platform, every one — and I’ve been “un-platformed” each time, because of specious complaints. The emerging media companies court early adopters, and then they can’t get rid of us fast enough."

She participated in the famous WELL, back in the 1980s. It is interesting how long this particular struggle, over moderation policies, has been going on.

She makes a good point that each of these companies has followed a similar pattern of first courting the kinds of radical experimenters who blaze new trails, and then later kicking them off platforms because they are not respectable:

"This has been going on for decades now. It isn’t just Google, it’s all the majors: Apple, Amazon, FB, Twitter, Microsoft, AOL, on and on. I could name a dozen others who’ve disappeared in the social media mist. It’s cruel that each of them censor the very people who created their original incubators. Did you know that On Our Backs was the first magazine, of any kind, to publish with an early Apple computer and Adobe Pagemaker 1.0? Yes, we were. I was on The WELL in the 80s. Our idealism and commitment was ferocious!"

>She makes a good point that each of these companies has followed a similar >pattern of first courting the kinds of radical experimenters who blaze new >trails, and then later kicking them off platforms because they are not >respectable

IMO/IME this is not exactly how it happens. What really happens is that as these platforms grow, they attract the attention of religious zealot groups who conduct absolutely massive campaigns to take down any content that they personally see as inappropriate. They have their own private blogs and mailing lists, with people given names/emails to contact to lodge complaints about "highly offensive" content that they have never even viewed, they were just instructed to file complaints against it.

A big part of the issue is that much of this content really only appeals to a small group of people, and many times those people do not even realize these attacks are happening in the background. The content platforms then decide it is easier to just ban this content so that they do not get overwhelmed with the religious zealot protests.

I wish we could charge those kinds of groups with the impediment of free speech (at least in the US) and fine them out of existence.

Religious groups have certainly been responsible for chilling _some_ content in modern times, but they are far from the biggest threat.

The biggest threat is that only a handful of companies operate most of the Internet now and they want it to have all the diversity and culture of a suburban shopping mall.

Religious content bans happen all the time. Consider the ban of Lightyear in 14 countries last week.

Also, it has never been easier to form geographically dispersed but aligned cultural groups.

I don't know which Internet operators you are talking about, but mine does not give a crap about the culture of the content I consume--only the ability to sell me ads about it.

Just because they don't broadcast that they're doing it doesn't mean it's not happening.

I think companies embrace moral relativism and attempt to stay within the Overton Window (or at most dabble near the edges). It's a survival necessity because their own profitability will suffer if they are found to facilitate content that is outside of that window. The Overton Window does drift, which explains how content can suddenly become objectionable in a matter of months.

UK cellular network operators by default enforce an ‘adult content filter’, and require you to provide proof of being over 18 to get this removed (typically in the form of a credit card number as an identifier, not as a mechanism to be charged).

These content filters block large swaths of the internet. Urban Dictionary is the one that trips me up every time I change networks.

LGBTQIA+ related content has typically gotten caught up in this as well.

You’re lucky if your Internet operator does not care. Unfortunately, there’s plenty of places where censorship is rampant, under the guise of just “think of the children.”

I don’t think their remark is limited to conventional religions.

Zealot is the key word. People who are enthusiastically intolerant.

But why do companies want things so bland? It's because of the very vocal religious communities.

> religious zealot groups who conduct absolutely massive campaigns

The campaigns don't even need to be very big. The baseline of organic complaints against the average show/video/site is vanishingly small, so even a group of a few thousand people all hitting the same target at once looks like a tidal wave of backlash by comparison.

"She participated in the famous WELL, back in the 1980s. It is interesting how long this particular struggle, over moderation policies, has been going on."

This has been going on at least since publishers existed (ie. centuries ago).

Publishers have always held the reigns of power, and decided who had a voice and who didn't.

That's where self-publishing comes in, but of course self-publishing and independent platforms/publishers won't have the reach of huge organizations.

At least for now we still have a choice where to turn our attention, even if it's only a minority who'll make the effort to do so and stay informed from outside of mainstream media.

I think the difference is that in the past there were many publishers. You're right that editorialising and censorship has been going on forever, but in the past much of it was kind of (unintentionally) decentralized.

Not that it was always perfect or anything, but this is a key difference. You can get content out there without going through Facebook/Google, but it's much harder. It's like the postal service doing the censorship.

The challenges faced by Facebook and Google are also substantial, although most of these revolve around user-generated content, a bit different from publisher-generated content. Maybe it shouldn't treat them as identical.

> It's like the postal service doing the censorship.

See 18 U.S. Code § 1461

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1461

> I wish we could charge those kinds of groups with the impediment of free speech (at least in the US) and fine them out of existence

That would be an actual violation of free speech, penalizing a legal, private, first amendment-protected activity. Remember, the first amendment only prevents the government from constraining the speech of citizens. Telling an organization, especially a religious organization, what they can and cannot advocate for would be an egregious violation of first amendment protections.

https://xkcd.com/1357/

Sorry, this is a pet peeve of mine. The expression "free speech" has a meaning outside the US constitution. It's like if I were to start quoting the Magna Carta at you. I'd further argue that it clearly has a meaning outside of a legal one.

When the author states they want to fine the groups, specifically in the US, based on violating free speech principles, it is clear that they are referencing the legal free speech in which a government would impose a penalty when an institution violates the law.

My comment was in response to the mention of the US. I could have been more exact, instead of "actual violation of free speech", it would be "an actual violation, in the US, of the First Amendment guarantees of free speech. Outside the US, that doesn't apply.

I get what you are saying, but these groups effectively operate as a DDoS attack against content they do not like. Content which is not promoting or showing anything "bad", it just violates their beliefs.

Those groups are, and would be, free to voice their concerns and beliefs on their own platforms, in their own buildings, etc. I am not saying they should not have an equal right to free speech, just that their should be a cost or penalty for trying to impose your beliefs on all of society via those kinds of organized actions.

But isn't this category of "bad" the entire dispute? People opposed to pornography don't typically agree with your perception that it's just about their individual tastes; they argue that it is "bad", in precisely the same way as racial slurs or planning a crime or any of the things that you and I think obviously need to be prohibited.

> should be a cost or penalty for trying to impose your beliefs on all of society via those kinds of organized actions.

At least in the US, "organized actions" would be protected under "right of the people peaceably to assemble" part of the First Amendment. Unless those organized actions presented a "clear and present danger"[1], it's difficult for me to see how a government could restrain organizing.

1 Cantwell v. Connecticut, 310 U.S. 296 (1940)

> What really happens is [...]

Do we have data on this? How do you know this? How does this effect interact with the usual claim of YouTube self-policing to be able to sell ads?

Yep, this has been going on forever. That's why the Spritely Foundation and Project were created to put all the knowledge on this subject to use in a standards effort.

https://spritelyproject.org/

The WELL is still around, by the way.

Compared to modern forums, it's a bit hard to read because the subject lines don't change. Topics can last for many years and keep getting rolled over when they're full.

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