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Comment by OrangeMonkey | Hacker News Reader

This is how big tech does damage to humans.

Love it or hate it, the online world is our current public square. A public square, in the united states, has typically been an area where people can shout out their concerns or whatever they want to anyone who can listen and the government cannot stop it.

Currently, our public squares are owned by private megacorporations that not only ban people for reasons many people agree with, but also for insane things like this. There is no appeal unless you convince enough others (using another public square) you are right and they also scream for you.

Eventually, all of us that are 'ok' with this will end up being banned from one service or another for life, with no appeal, and thats that. A perfectly pristine public square filled not with people, but consumers staring at advertising boards.

I would love to know a way this can be solved as its painting a depressing picture. I don't like how this makes me feel.

View on HN

I’m ex Facebook software engineer (even had selfie with Zuckerberg as the avatar picture) who got banned on Facebook. Up to this day I have no clue what for. But it’s extremely annoying because I lost lots of photos that I didn’t back up and close to thousand contracts of people. Users should definitely own this data, not a corporation.

The irony here is that I deleted my FB years ago and back then at least, FB only permitted deleting one photo at a time. Took me well over an hour to delete all of my photos.

In hindsight, I should've just done something obviously ban-able instead.

There’s no guarantee that either method results in your photos being actually deleted.

I'm aware of that, I just wanted them removed from the public view.

Has the deleting single photo thing resolved by now? I too remember deleting close to 100s of photos one by one.

Iirc it is, at least if you live in Europe

Maybe you got banned because you had a selfie with zuck as the profile picture.

Some automated system trying to prevent celebrity impersonation might have flagged you.

Someone maybe disliked you in your old team

Surely you had enough contacts at Facebook to get somebody to look into it for you? Just another concern with tying the Oculus Quest to a Meta account. Google accidentally banned one of their own developers and he almost pulled Terraria off of their Stadia platform.

Here's a fun story. I see that this post is from fanbyte.com.

Existing got me banned from fanbyte.com and all of the websites they own.

Specifically, existing in a particular country. Not an exotic or unusual one on an embargo list or something -- just some country that Fanbyte felt they weren't earning enough profit from.

They banned the entire populations of about ten countries from their entire network of websites earlier this year, for that reason.

If this guy who got banned from Twitter works for Fanbyte, I have no sympathy. I'll never know the details of the story though, because Fanbyte is out there banning entire nations.

Don't have sympathy for an individual - instead, consider the path this is taking humanity down and consider what happened to you.

A bigtech company made the decision that the voices from your country were not worth being heard so banned you from global discussions. Individuals can also be banned, with no recourse, due to an AI model gone awry.

How do we deal with this and make things better? Legit question - I don't know myself and it eats at me sometimes.

But could that be Fanbyte's way of dealing with a specific country's laws? Perhaps they don't have the manpower and those countries are small enough that the only cost effective option is to just not operate in those countries.

Somehow it's only Fanbyte that have this problem with people in Turkey / Serbia etc. Why has no other publisher went to such measures?

Incredibly, they had a remote employee in Serbia, so when they banned all these countries, they banned one of their employees. Last I heard they were telling him to use a VPN to bypass their own corporate rules (which they have admitted exist to dodge Serbian laws...!)

Which is fine.

Because if the company has no physical presence in a certain country, they can basically ignore their laws, because what’s the country going to do? Block your website?

Having an employee there establishes physical presence.

Right, but their stated reason for instituting the policy in the first place was that they couldn't ignore Serbian laws if their websites were available to be viewed in Serbia.

I'd consider the Serbian employee at risk if I wasn't following any applicable Serbian laws. Their explanation seems to be that even the legal review of these countries would cost far more than any revenue they are making, and their lawyers are advising these countries need that review.

> they couldn't ignore Serbian laws if their websites were available to be viewed in Serbia.

With no presence in Serbia, they absolutely can. Serbia has got virtually no recourse in such a situation.

What are they going to do? Sue then in Serbia? They’ll never show up. Then trying to enforce the jugdement overseas will be a monumental (and also completely pointless) exercise.

Try suing someone in, say, the United States for violating Serbian law. Your case will get dismissed because the said US court would have no jurisdiction over the matter even if the company was based in the US.

Absolutely, I agree with you. The only party who disagrees is Fanbyte in their official statements about why they pulled out.

But different companies can make entirely different business decisions in such situations. Another company may decide devoting extra resources is worth it. It is a subjective value assessment that can go either way.

China, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, Serbia and India

Just wow.

Eh, I don't buy the public square argument.

The online world is a cesspool filled with bots and crazy people. I don't need to voice my opinion on Twitter, nor is Twitter a place I need to be.

What matters is how we relate to the people around us, in our communities. Your neighbor isn't a bot, the barista at the coffee shop isn't a russian troll. We need to stop taking the "online world" so seriously and connect with the people around us more.

The real world is also a cesspool filled with crazy people and people trying to abuse the system (something analogous to bots). Also spammers and harassers.

The difference is that on the real world public squares there’s no amplification effect that we have on those platforms, save for some very closely watched exceptions (politicians, celebrities). Also very little anonymity.

The real world is also a cesspool filled with crazy people and people trying to abuse the system (something analogous to bots

No, the real world is an excellent place, filled with great people everywhere.

There is no comparison with the twitter/facebook mob, where 99,99% of people strive for your attention, for monetary gain.

> No, the real world is an excellent place, filled with great people everywhere.

The internet is also filled with those same people. That includes Twitter and Facebook. The reason the bad ones are are extra loud in the internet is because some websites amplify their messages, whereas normal people don’t want the extra attention and prefer privacy.

If I am interpreting this correctly, and I may not be, it seems like you are saying "The online world does not contain public squares, and that is because we need to change what everyone else in the world considers a public square."

If I am interpreting that correctly, I don't know what I can add here. I don't necessarily disagree, but I think we have moved past that possibility. How many of us know our neighbors and talk to them? I've lived in my home for a few years and I don't even know their names fully. But, I now know yours and the fact we (at least slightly) disagree.

Right or wrong, I think humanity has moved on and we are now connected.

I didn't know many neighbors until I started walking a cute, friendly dog. You should try that.

Nearly all my conversations with neighbors involve dogs or flowers.

Yeah, I don't think the problem is public squares, but force multipliers that certain actors, especially well-funded ones, can employ (meaning mostly state actors, but also corporations and other interest groups) can use to dominate digital public spaces.

The bot solution is extremely simple, add more layers of human verification or a paid tier. It hurts the user experience in one way but enhances it in another. Why not at least require verification once per 24 hours? The trolls in person is not any better, we have enormous amounts of crime/lies in the real world. Being online actually protects users physically so much that now arguments are more over what is harming users mentally online. It seems dramatically better to ONLY risk your mental state than risk physical and mental harm in the real world. Someone being online has gotten a bad rap because people can get feelings hurt, but at the same time there are countless options to protect your feelings online also without banning other people. People have the tools to build a bubble around themselves but for some reason instead they often choose to build a prison around others instead.

I get that. The problem is Twitter/TikTok/Facebook does and will spill into the real world and truly effect you.

Not to mention the Orwellian proposition: "delete the pic we deemed wrong so we can unban you". Apparently it's hard to just delete the offending pic, it's better to teach you a lesson and make you do it.

There are four lights

I agree - it’s modern day struggle sessions.

There are four lights.

> Apparently it's hard to just delete the offending pic

Now that would be censorship! /s

It's even worse, "by deleting the pic, you agree with our decision that it was wrong.".

"Yes master, this video of a cat video game is revenge porn and I'm sorry for posting it!"...

Personally I prefer getting a message "delete this please" instead of some of my messages/pictures/etc. silently disappearing without me noticing. Ideally, they would make the pic not available to other users, but still available to me, and notify me that my account will get banned in $N days. Ideally, during that phase there would be the option to pay some minor amount of money and ask to get a human moderator involved to review your case.

> Ideally, they would make the pic not available to other users, but still available to me, and notify me that my account will get banned in $N days. During that phase you might even pay some minor amount of money and ask to get a human moderator involved to review your case.

This would just become another revenue stream given enough time and changes of leadership around such a system. Treading a thin line on just how abusive they can be on the review process to extract money, it would be chock full of perverse incentives.

yup. and as soon it becomes a revenue stream, there is no incentive to prevent false flagging

  The torturer wanted him to say that there were five lights as that would be a signal that Picard was now accepting the torturer's reality. It's based off a concept from Orwell's 1984, where another torturer says that they can make someone believe 2 + 2 = 5.

Also, Asch's “Line Experiment” where people conform against their own perception.

It's not censorship when you delete your own content.

/s?

> Currently, our public squares are owned by private megacorporations

Here's the problem I have with this analogy. Is it analogous to a public square (as in public property, owned by the state, maintained by tax payer money)? Or is it a private property that allows people to congregate for free but puts up ads to raise money, and many consider it as good as a public square, because most people they like hang out here. And like any business, they choose to deny service to some users (and not all users agree on this). Also, there are multiple such private spaces.

Maybe the real solution is just like in the physical world, there should be state owned online spaces that are real "public spaces" and denying service here would be the govt denying rights.

See, I think you got into the area that I am troubled by.

I will state two things I consider to be true that are mutually exclusive:

* Online spaces (facebook, twitter, etc), when they reach a certain level, are de-facto public spaces and excluding people from it by big tech is harmful to humanity. * Online spaces owned by a private corporation is for their benefit, not humanities, and forcing them to keep others on them is an infringement of property rights.

... I am a human and I can simultaneously hold views that exclude each other. I wish I knew a way to make these consistent.

The law deals with this all the time, but it becomes complex when you cross jurisdiction boundaries. If a corporation wants to operate a public space, like a common area within a company town, you generally have to follow the law on what speech is allowed in that space. If your square is in the US, you have to allow Nazis to protest, but if it's in Germany, you probably have a duty to call the police on the Nazis to stop them. What do you do?

Corporations often operate public squares to their benefit, so I have no problem with them having to follow local laws on what needs to happen in that public square. Google already personalizes your search results, and Facebook personalizes your feed. They can add local laws into that personalization algorithm.

Edit: Updated the example to be correct.

> If a corporation wants to operate a public space, like a square with a fountain outside an office building, you generally have to follow the law on what speech is allowed in that space. If your square is in the US, you have to allow Nazis to protest, but if it's in Germany, you probably have a duty to call the police on the Nazis to stop them.

This is not correct. [0]

> Private property owners can set rules for speech on their property. The government may not restrict your speech if it is taking place on your own property or with the consent of the property owner.

[0] https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/protesters-rights

Part of the issue here is that we regard (not just legally, but even in how we talk) corporations as people. Or perhaps that we try to use the same rules for small-scale "ownership" as for vast almost monopolistic levels of control.

I think we should not regard property as a concept so highly. We don't need to paint this as a black/white nihilistic capitalism vs. naive communism issue either. But it sure would help if we'd be a little less fundamentalist when it came to corporations. And also if we didn't try to stretch the metaphor of "this is my pair of shoes!" all the way to "I get to own a significant chunk of everybody's communication!"

Corporations as entities should shield their owners and employees less absolutely, and have more restrictions on rights that are entirely divorced from those of their members than humans have. And we shouldn't assume ownership in-the-large needs to work _exactly_ the same as in the small.

> Online spaces (facebook, twitter, etc), when they reach a certain level, are de-facto public spaces and excluding people from it by big tech is harmful to humanity.

Sure we can treat online spaces like utilities e.g. I dont know what the law is but something like denying water is not legal or you got to have good reason to do so.). And like content, water quality should be maintained to a standard (e.g. moderating scammers, bots, illegal/objectionable content etc.). But the big difference, the govt can set water quality standards but is very reluctant to set content moderation standards (for good reasons). So we end up with a situation, we want content moderation but its not a govt approved standard and so we end up with moderation that not everyone agrees with.

> private property that allows people to congregate for free

People keep implying (and maybe you aren't and I am associating you with them unfairly) that we should be willing to deal with these issues because giving up our privacy/rights is a fair exchange for access to a platform. If people didn't give Facebook access to store and share content that they create, it wouldn't exist.

Worth pointing out that more life exists outside the corporate run stages. Part of their trick is to make you think that the only way of life is via their platforms.

I’m not and never have been a Twitter or or TikTok or Facebook member.

I also avoid those platforms but that also means self-exclusion from entire communities. I've seen large groups (DnD groups, gaming/sports clubs, obscure tech forums etc) being swallowed wholesale by Facebook, then Reddit and now Discord. That may not matter for a random game group but unfortunately Twitter is where most of the worlds journalists post and network.

Where I live now, most sports and hobby clubs coordinate solely via Facebook.

If you don't have a FB account (like myself, currently), you are shit out of luck when it comes to finding out what's going on where/when.

Meetup.com is still working out well for me. Also everyone knows everyone so you end up with a vast contacts network after a bit.

Sure, but getting hundreds or thousands of people to join your Mastodon instance or whatever is a huge barrier when Twitter works fine /most/ of the time.

Or, you know, in real life. Which was more my point. I've done more networking face to face over the last couple of years than I ever got done using the Internet.

I don’t think it’s a trick at all, it’s actually much worse than being kicked out of a public square. Making YouTube videos or Tweets or Facebook posts can be your job and facilitate your entire form of income. You spend 10 years cultivating a following and if you say or do the wrong thing, you don’t just lose the public square, you basically get fired. Yea you can try to diversify but the average person doesn’t do this, they build something somewhere specific. These platforms are tremendously important, both for speech and for peoples livelihoods. Banning people and the appeals should be much more of a delicate process than currently. Right now these moderators are akin to police departments with no court system. One day we will enact laws that force companies of certain sizes to have an appeal process, or in some way dedicate resources to accurate appeals, or maybe just force companies to keep records of the ban and give users the right to sue for mistakes, similar to workers have for with employers. We almost need an entirely new public court system to manage that process so the burden isn’t on companies or users. I don’t have the answers but at some point consumer rights will be needed to stop abuse or lethargy in moderation of important decisions.

> A public square, in the united states, has typically been an area where people can shout out their concerns or whatever they want to anyone who can listen and the government cannot stop it.

Growing up in Birmingham, AL I had a couple teachers who had dog bites and remembered the hoses from when they tried to shout out whatever they wanted in public squares. It's always interesting how people have such a rosy view of history when it comes to forming a much beloved but not well thought out belief.

They remember the dog bites because its cases where the government acted illegally and were taken to task.

Today, the governing actor of our virtual public squares are corporations - and a significant amount of people (maybe not you) seem to be ok with them taking what actions they wish.

> They remember the dog bites because its cases where the government acted illegally and were taken to task.

Uh, no. Society has whitewashed the history of the Civil Rights Movement, but popular sentiment at the time was not with Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, the other freedom riders, etc.

Civilians and the government sometimes acted illegally, sure, but some of those actions were absolutely legal. (Not to mention that the government often leaned on citizens to take illegal vigilante action so that "the government" wouldn't have to - the distinction was not always clear cut).

And either way, it's hard to make the argument that they were "taken to task. Even after Brown v. Board, it took over a decade for many local governments (even in the North!) to be forced into compliance. And the actual individuals responsible for the illegal actions rarely faced any serious consequences.

EDIT: Clarified the point of legality.

The government acted legally. That was (and in a lot of cases still is) the problem. In fact most cities and local governments reserve the right to use hoses and dogs they just don't because it would be bad optics. As the saying goes "the more things change, the more they stay the same".

> The government acted legally. That was (and in a lot of cases still is) the problem.

Sure - I understood "dog bites and hoses" here to be a synedoche for the general government and civilian response to the civil rights protests, some of which was legal and some of which was not. Obviously I don't know the specifics of your teachers' particular stories.

It's easy to write off those atrocities with "that happened, but it was dealt with, and it's in the past now" - which, as you pointed out in the other comment, is a convenient lie. My main point was that these were not isolated incidents (as GP implied), and that - whether legal or not - those involved faced few consequences (if any) for their actions.

Understood and I agree. I always feel like it's important to stress that when those protests happened the government's response (by way of the police force) was considered well within it's right, in support of your main point.

It's a quibble but an important quibble imo.

It wasn't "illegal" for Bull Connor to use dogs and hoses. The problem was that it was legal and for most white people in the south, encouraged. Again this is another example of having a convenient lie ready made to fit a strongly held belief.

Look man is there some reason you presuppose bad intent and ascribe to a difference of opinion as a lie?

There was a time when wanting free speech was a good thing. It wasn’t that long ago.

Something being legal or not isn't a difference of opinion, lmao.

It's better to face opposition like that than to be disappeared from the public square.

You are perpetuating a myth. Malcom Gladwell researched and presented this in his Podcast episode - The Foot Soldier of Birmingham. https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/the-foot...

None of my teachers were Walter Gadsden and noine claimed to be the boy depicted in the statue.

The fact that you took the story of a photo and extrapolated it out to mean that anyone who said they were attacked by dogs is a fraud and are perpetuating a myth says a lot about you.

Also next time link a transcript to the episode than the actual episode when you want to use audio to prove you don't know what you're talking about.

There are plenty of public places in the US, but the so-called "public square" where strangers gather to debate is a total myth. It does not exist anywhere, and I'm not sure it ever has existed. Certainly not in my lifetime, anywhere I've ever lived.

Friends do gather in public squares to talk or lounge or listen to concerts or whatever. But the kind of thing that happens on Twitter, or on HN for that matter, does not happen IRL. Occasionally there's a crazy preacher who attempts to address a crowd of strangers, but mostly the crazy preachers get ignored or ridiculed. There's no real, serious discussion and debate in the public squares among people who didn't already know each other.

You can go to an open city council meeting to discuss and debate public issues, but those meetings are strictly governed by rules and moderated.

It existed in ancient Greece at least

I have no first-hand knowledge of this, but if you have to go back 2500 years for an example... ;-)

Ancient towns were small enough, everyone likely knew each other.

I always wonder why not just rely on the same user reporting and automation systems to downrank, gray out, hide from indexing, mark content as controversial, instead of banning entire user accounts?

Then repeat offenders can be banned with good reason. It seems absurdly heavy handed to remove legitimate accounts, irreversibly and without recourse, for a single post or comment, this should not be legal.

I think your suggestion is better than the alternative we have now - but I think its not the right one either.

What if the majority of people strongly disagree with a minority groups statements or cries for help? What if the users join a mass flagging / downvoting / reporting campaign (either purposefully, or stand-alone-complex style) to exclude these users.

If the statement is "Maybe the majority is telling you they don't like you, asshole" then consider the 1950/1960's. I would state that a significant portion of the US was torn on whether a group should be treated the same as other groups. During that time, I am almost positive if we had this policy, the minority group would have been 'grayed out', 'hidden from indexing', 'marked content as controversial.'

Do I have a better suggestion? No. No I don't. I think yours is better than what we have now, but the tyranny of the majority is a thing.

> I would love to know a way this can be solved

Step 1. Hire humans and pay them enough to think (and communicate with customers).

Step 2. Keep an audit trail of events and communications related to these ban situations. Those can be useful when escalating a dispute (to another human from Step 1, but someone with more authority to make judgement calls).

Detection algorithms can still be used, but they should only be to flag potential bans. Any actual action taken must be done by a human from #1.

Done.

>Step 2. Keep an audit trail of events and communications related to these ban situations.

Hard to imagine these companies, whose whole value proposition is in the data they collect, are neglecting to collect this data.

I don't think they're collecing this type of data... because it almost doesn't exist. It's not like you have a back and forth communication with customer service (because there is no customer service group).

You just have the one or two dispute statements you may have been allowed to submit, and then you have the predictable automatic denial replies.

They probably do save the dispute claims. But that info is useless, both because it has no bearing on the outcome and because there's no oversight anyway.

>> I would love to know a way this can be solved as its painting a depressing picture.

It's possible that the answer is for society to simply go back in the other direction. Despite the initial promise of the Internet, it's possible it will never function as the new public square. Rather, we might have to go back to more traditional methods of expression, in physical spaces, or writing letters to elected officials.

Or perhaps a body of ethics could be developed similar to the body of ethics that guides journalists. But that body of ethics, for journalists, grew up at a time when the USA had many thousands of newspapers, and none were dominant, so the power of the profession was balanced against the relatively small power of any one newspaper. This was back before the New York Times and the Washington Post emerged as national papers. It would be more difficult to develop a similar body of ethics for social media, since the whole space has already consolidated down to 4 major corporations, and there is no obvious profession that can assert a body of ethics independently of those 4 companies.

The public square argument is a distraction and it goes nowhere. What needs to be called out is Twitter just being terrible at enforcing their own TOS, and the human review process apparently having no oversight or consequences for responses like the author received.

This is a straightforward problem of bad and inconsistent service quality.

And the only way to fix it is regulation — with teeth — of privately-owned public communications platforms. Does anyone see another way that could work?

> I would love to know a way this can be solved as its painting a depressing picture.

When a giant corporation says “here’s our private property, use it as your public square”, say “fuck off”.

There are many "public squares" in the world owned by corporations -- 592 in New York City alone including 168 plazas. They don't have the same protections for their users that a true public square has, but they're cheaper for the average voter, and that's what we care about.

Twitter is not the government? Twitter also is not really a public square, it's an advertiser-supported electronic press.

If I own a printing press, I have the freedom to print what I want, including what people send me, and I also can not print what I want, including what people send me. It's my press. Want different rules, get your own or use someone elses.

Because Twitter is a privately owned super-fast electronic press, administered at their whims, people should stop using it for things that matter unless they have an actual contract with the corporation. I don't rely on Twitter for anything other than entertainment.

The fact that people expect rights and meaning with advertiser-supported stuff given to them for free is what's harmful.

This metaphor also fails, in the existing regulatory framework. If you own a printing press and print something, you are liable for its contents. Twitter, under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, is not liable for content that its users post.

Now take this, and multiply it for Zuckerberg’s idea of a multiverse.

The thing with physical public squares is that they are self-regulated - if someone commits a crime, everyone runs away and someone calls the cops, and the offender effectively has their life ruined due to a criminal record. If someone goes around and starts yelling hate crimes at people on the street, they tend to learn their lesson when enough people take notice and confront the individual with a warning to stop.

Unless you bring in real identities onto twitter, none of those societal protections will apply to social media. Nobody can do anything to spam/bot accounts if it's 1000 accounts being created every minute.

> the online world is our current public square

That's right, and that's why virtually no one ever gets banned from using the internet. Twitter is not "the online world".

that’s like saying a car is just one method of transportation. so if you get banned from using cars you have no right to complain. but i can tell from your spastic angry (not to mention logically incoherent) post you are a twitter user who’s afraid of their echo chamber changing

> This is how big tech does damage to humans.

This being whatever AI flagged his post. I would not be surprised. I'm seeing a trend where, Facebook, Discord and I guess now Twitter are trying to use AI to moderate. It is going to backfire hard. Lots of blatantly bad things stay on their platform, but innocent nonsense gets you banned. Either their content moderators are really bad at their job, or silently protesting, or there's an AI involved.

In my case someone posted a video featuring a giant spider on Facebook in a little girls hand, it was bigger than her face, my comment was a meme comment you see all over the internet "girl put that spider down we gotta set the house on fire" there's a recurring meme about burning homes to kill spiders due to arachnophobia. Innocent joke, not actually serious, I got a warning, I guess they thought I was actually advocating burning down a home, but I was not. I appealed and immediately not long after I was denied. There's an AI involved, and whoever does appeals is lazy or the AI itself, or has no concept of internet content memes.

It can be solved by realizing that private websites ARE NOT public fora.

They have never been, are not now, and will never be.

HN has, and will again, removed comments that I have made again, particularly if they stray too far from the party line regarding cryptobros, SEObros, and devs who whore themselves out to ad companies when they could be doing actual real work that benefits humanity while making just a little teeny tiny less money but whores are whores so they'll keep on keeping on.

I'm fine with that. And you should be too.

If HN was a public square I could tell them to fuck off. Nothing I said would meet any community standards and obscenity triggers in any courtroom in any jurisdiction of any court in all of the United States.

"Oh but HN isn't as big as Twit.." is bullshit and has been tried before. Anyone who makes this argument is so intellectually bankrupt they should be banned from the internet for being too stupid to operate an internet browser.

You have the same "public square" rights in Times Square that you have in Lotsee Oklahoma (0.02 mi sq), which is smaller than Times Square (0.25 mi sq).

Private parties can set arbitrary, capricious, subjective, unfair, and mean rules about what they allow on their platforms, and don't even have to set any rules besides "because we said so".

Anything less is tyranny.

edit: if public websites are TRUELY public fora, there could be a very strong argument made that hiding my comment due to downvotes is an assault on my rights, similar to covering my sign with a blanket as I try to agitate in ACTUAL, REAL, public squares for civil rights or the legalization of marijuana or the proselytizing of my TIMECUBE religion. Unless, of course there exists "important and real" free speech and "not important" free speech but allowing for that distinction is probably more dangerous than having no free speech at all...

I had felt the same in 2015 when I got banned from Facebook for not providing my real data (they asked me to provide a photo of my ID which I thought and still think was silly). But then I realised how good it was for me (as a user) and started thinking maybe we should aim to go back to the 'small Internet'. By this I mean small forums, maybe chat rooms or something of that sort. I often go back in memories to the late 90's and remember how I felt using the Internet back then. Of course this is nostalgia, but sometimes I wonder if I can build something to get that feeling back.. like island of the 90's internet

The "smol Internet" movement is what you're looking for. Returning to smaller online communities using things like Gopher, Gemini, fediverse, pubnixes, etc.

https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol...

I think about this too and know it’s mostly nostalgia too. I’m curious about community organized LANs and running older tech. I also concede that almost no one actually wants to run this shit so it seems very unlikely anyone would want it.

These megacorporations answer that you're using a 'private platform' - the answer is to use a public platform.

https://youtu.be/SkaaPcjKI2E

It should be noted that this is self-promotion.

One way to look at this is that the natural state of things is that everyone has access to the local public square, and only a few have access to regional or national public squares. The early internet was a perturbation in this natural state, giving millions access to nationaland global distribution of their thoughts for no cost, but natural law is bringing us back to a steady state where you can only reach your friends, colleagues, and neighbors unless you make a career out of journalism, celebrity, big business, or politics.

Twitter is not "the public square". It is a night club.

Confusing private, for-profit businesses for public assets does a disservice to, and leads to ideas that are damaging for, both.

The only night club.

Ironically this is how night clubs work, too. One gets a monopoly/gets popular and everyone goes there for a time until it because uncool and people move on to the next cool club. In social media see LiveJournal -> MySpace -> Facebook -> Tiktok. Each had a monopoly at the time until something cooler came along. The tenure also, ironically, seems to be around the same duration of a popular nightclub.

Also, don't mistake user bases for monoliths in this analogy, < 18 moved on from facebook a long time ago, > 50 may skip Tiktok entirely but they showed up years after ~18 year olds did so tenure is still relevant.

This is not a good take. First, it's not true that the most popular club has a monopoly in any meaningful sense. But even granting you that farcical premise: any "monopoly" effect is on a city-wide basis and does not scale, and does not trend towards global winner-take-all outcomes that social media does.

I'm not sure which night clubs you are going to, but "popular" ones are very much monopolies. Sure, the local bar that plays music isn't a monopoly, but neither is the "small" social network. You won't see John Mayer in a small night club and you also wont see him on a small social media platform. John creates lock-in for the other high status participants at the club, just like the content creators create lock-in for you being on social media (or HN in this case). I can walk next door, but I have a worse experience in both cases because they have a monopoly over a network is valuable.

Your second point of the global nature misses the point I was making. Social things evolve. Whether on a global scale, country scale, or city level. Assuming there is a social construct that will "just work" until the end of time seems naive. But hey, if we are all using Twitter and Facebook in 20-30 years rather than the new social media company that has come to prominence then it will be a provably wrong take :).

Or maybe a better way to put it is if the next generation is using them, because certain cohorts (see original post) will continue to use it because thats where their network is, but younger people get no utility because their network isnt there. See twitter and facebook.

> A perfectly pristine public square filled not with people, but consumers staring at advertising boards.

Just beautifully written. Do you happen to have a blog?

I only ever hear complaints from far-right people who want their speech to be free-er than other people’s or entities.

Where are the legal recourses? Are EULAs that ironclad? And should you lose all "your" data?

It should be a law that days bans from companies must allow you to download your data, especially snt Publix presence site.

>I would love to know a way this can be solved as its painting a depressing picture. I don't like how this makes me feel.

Easy. Stop banning people unless the content is illegal. Stop acting as moral police. Let the community police itself by burying offensive content. Give users absolute control over what they see. And ban bots.

This “problem” only exists because Twitter wants to control what you see.

The video in question seems to have been (incorrectly) flagged as either a revenge porn or upskirt video, which people have struggled to get taken down before the damage was done.

These global public squares didn't exist until social media so I don't consider it a human right.

I've said it elsewhere in hnn today but I can say it again - I simultaneously think you are right and wrong.

* These global services are de-facto public squares and forcing people out of them is to the detriment of humanity.

* Private corporations shouldn't have their property stolen/appropriated by calling them public squares.

I am a human and that lets me hold contradictory thoughts. I don't know a way to fix this.

Utilities have to deal with this contradiction, they build their critical services on public land.

The previous non-existence of certain technology isn't enough on its own to make this determination. It's also necessary to look at the overall state of a society to tease out the true consequences of these kinds of issues. I think a consequentialist lens is helpful here.

If your local municipality started preventing people who had said objectionable things from crossing into the town via a public road, it would not follow that this is just fine because at one time, roads didn't exist.

If you take a step back, and look at it as an issue of freedom of association and/or free speech, things get a lot murkier. If an entire society morphs itself to use those private entities for public discourse, at some point it almost doesn't matter that the entity is private, if the ultimate outcome is a serious violation of one's rights to associate/speak.

This is at odds with the expectations a private company rightly has about its ability to do business with whom they please, and this is why the issue is so contentious.

Neither side of this issue stands on solid ground.

That's a real issue. It's not just a monopoly in a competitive sense but also a monopoly on 'public squares'. Which is effectively against free speech.

When a company or moderator has the power to ban you from a public space your are ostracized by a non-democratic panel, with unknown agendas.

I am so tired of the public square analogy. You don’t need Twitter. You don’t need Facebook. You don’t need Reddit. And what’s more, you can still read them if you’re banned.

If you think it’s ok for a restaurant to turn you away because of a dress code, then this is a non-issue. The are several major platforms you can use as a megaphone, just like you have plenty of restaurants to choose from for your meal. If you are systematically getting banned from each social media platform and being “cut off from the public square,” that says more about you than it does the current state of speech.

> And what’s more, you can still read them if you’re banned.

That is changing and in many places already no longer true.

Such as?

Instagram.

IG has always hobbled the browser version and always restricted access without an account.

It’s also pretty easy to just set up a new account on a different machine.

Also FB private groups that may be of interest to the user.

For example many football club-related groups are private for obvious reasons, and, as such, getting kicked out of FB also means getting kicked out of your local supporters' forum where the online discussions happen. Yes, people from that group also meet irl, but not all of them attend those meetings and those meetings happen, at most, once every week (after the football season starts). For example we're out-season now but this is also the time of some of the most heated and interesting discussions, because right now we're in the middle of the transfer season.

Twitter throws up a jarring sign-in wall if you scroll down more than a few tweets now.

That’s a very naive argument. If your friends and family are on Facebook, your work contacts across the country are on Twitter, the only forums left alive on the web are on Reddit, how can you not need them?

These things have replaced existing connections you used to have via other channels. You can not step away without severing them now, it is no longer a matter of personal choice.

In what world are people only able to communicate with their family and friends on Facebook?

Who only communicates with colleagues over Twitter?

Unless your family counts two you cannot possibly compare the time facetiming each one of them vs just scrolling an aggregated news feed

Phone call, email, text message, Viber, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Telegram, actually interacting in person.

Half my family isn’t even on Facebook and virtually none of us even use it anymore. If that’s the only way to keep up with family then don’t act like a complete jerk online, or you know don’t harass people, and you’ll be fine. Same as regular society.

Contrary to popular belief, it actually takes a lot to simply get banned. Yeah there are cases like the post above, but the reason it is even here is because it is noteworthy.

It does not take a lot to get banned - you just have to have a stated opinion that does not correlate with a large portion of the user base.

If the civil rights movement was being organized on facebook today with the culture and beliefs of the 1950's as our users, I am very confident MLK would have been banned from every service.

... and someone, somewhere, would say 'don't act like a complete jerk online, or you know don't harass people, and you'll be fine'.

I don't mean this pointed at you, I completely get the feeling, but I think ignoring history and the current in/out groups is likely to lead to conclusions that are not realistic.

This is an accusation by American conservatives that has little to no basis in reality. It’s just an easy source of fake outrage they don’t have to back up. You won’t get banned for “wrong think.” Look how long it took Alex Jones to get de-platformed - the dude was literally starting witch hunts with his accounts.

Look, I will be the first to say we need to rein in social media companies. Their ability to shrug and say “oh well!” with no repercussions as their vaunted algorithms (mis)handle the impossibly large scale of their businesses is wrong. No other industry gets away with so much except maybe religious groups and oil/gas.

That being said, we should not conflate it with the incorrect and frankly dishonest cries of “censorship” by the right.

Related note: I think you’ll find this Twitter bot very interesting: https://twitter.com/facebookstop10/status/154978628117712896...

In the world we live in now.

I knew a guy who was having serious financial trouble, and couldn’t afford to keep a phone line active. He relied on Facebook to stay in contact with his wife and son because he at least had access to WiFi.

You can make a similar argument about phones. People can just reach each other via mail, or physically visit each other…but this doesn’t exactly constitute a healthy state of interaction.

Use email you say! Almost every big email provider requires verification via phone or another email address these days.

It’s legitimately getting harder and harder to communicate in these other ways.

> Who only communicates with colleagues over Twitter?

I don’t use Twitter much these days, but for a period of time, it was by far the easiest way to get/stay in touch with the communities I was organizing. I did dev advocacy, and if I ran a meet up somewhere, I didn’t want to just hand my phone number to a room full of people, but did want the option to stay in contact.

Could I have found another solution? Yeah sure. But at the time, this seems pretty reasonable, and Twitter wasn’t yet banning people for inane things.

If I lost that account now, it’d sever an entire community. Could I work around that? Sure.

But downplaying the significance of these things seems short sighted.

I rarely touch social media these days for many other reasons, but that is definitely an isolating choice to make in 2022.

“These things have replaced existing connections”

I hear this now and then and it puzzles me. All my personal online and business communication is through email, with some friends and groups on WhatsApp and Telegram. People sometimes talk to me on Twitter but, if I want to talk to them, I steer them to email. I seems really risky, as we see in so many incidents reported here, to actually rely on platforms like Twitter for maintaining connections.

For users who are banned from these services, they have to do just what you say.

Lets not confuse ourselves though - the vast majority of America does not feel the way you and I do. My kiddos swim team is on facebook, thats how we track and sign up for service, and if we lose our access we are excluded. Asking everyone on the team to move to email is a nonstarter.

Almost nobody in my circles uses email for personal conversations anymore. People don’t share their email when you meet at a conference. You don’t join the X tech discussion group over email (anymore).

This also implies only talking to people you already know, no opportunities to join or start communities.

And that’s still besides the point: just imagine that your email account is cancelled tomorrow because they don’t like something you said in a mailing list.

I don’t doubt what you’re saying about your circles. I live in a different universe. If someone only communicates through Twitter, etc., that’s a useful filter for me. I don’t have a Facebook account.

“only talking to people you already know”

Far from it. For example, the contact information for an author on a scientific paper often includes an email address.

But I "need" that restaurant because I am hungry, it's only a block away, I really love the pasta they cook, and the bartender I enjoy talking to only works at this particular restaurant :(

If you get banned, just create another account and then don't do the thing that got you banned.

It's really not that difficult.

Banned users creating new accounts is not a feature, its a 'bug' that the current platforms are trying to fix.

Ever create a new facebook account? Even as a flesh and blood human being? Lots of folks have tried to do this for oculus and a great number of them were banned. It made the news on HNN. Facebook is fixing this bug now, and the other sites are trying to do the same.

Eventually, when the big tech companies have 'fixed the bug' and your ban is - in fact - permanent and for life. . . what then?

"Don't do bad things" - a simple question... if the 50's/60's civil rights movement was done today on facebook, would MLK have been banned from twitter/facebook/instagram? I think he would be.

If you know a way to fix this, let me know. I think we - as humans - need to fix this sooner rather than later.

If it doesn't require you to prove your identity with a gov issued document then you'll be able to create a new account. My FB account certainly doesn't have my real name.

If it does require you to do so then run away from that platform very fast.

Yeah, a Million Man Meme is going to be so effective ... BLM & Antfi seem to have no problems organising themselves anyway and apparently they are practically terrorists according to the alt-right.

If you want a way to "fix it" then vote for someone who will bring in regulation to crack down on the powers that tech companies have.

And if you don't want to do that because you're a libertarian fan of light touch regulation of business, then you probably need to have word with yourself.

> If your friends and family are on Facebook, your work contacts across the country are on Twitter, the only forums left alive on the web are on Reddit, how can you not need them?

You can absolutely step away from them and it’s not even hard. Call, text or email your friends and family. It’s far more intimate and frankly more satisfying. You lose the ability to broadcast a curated persona, but honestly in the grand scheme of things that’s better for both you and the rest of humanity.

I did this for years. I regret it. It's overly simplistic to think this works well. The devil is in the details; and being a decent human being also means adapting to other's wishes, needs and habits. Being a small-scale dictator about modes of communication isn't great.

You _will_ miss out of valuable personal communication if you choose to go this route. It's not just about an online curated persona.

I've been doing this since forever, and I don't feel I miss out on anything meaningful. Granted, I've never had that many friends to begin with, but the ones I do have haven't given me any trouble about not being on social media or whatever. In my experience these online platforms cater to shallow communications of dubious value.

> Being a small-scale dictator about modes of communication isn't great.

Oh come now, isn’t this a little dramatic?

If I was forcing them to use one app I want in order to stay in touch you’d have a point, but isn’t that also functionally what you’re saying we should have to deal with? Meeting someone all the way, only on ONE mode of communication they demand?

This also doesn’t address how niche this situation is. There can’t be that many people who can only talk to their family on Facebook messenger. This can’t possibly be a major issue.

It's not just about family; it's about friends too, and perhaps the periphery of extended family. Losing contact is a price. Is it worth paying?

That'll vary from person to person, but my personal experience with this was that this was a mistake I now regret. I incidentally also avoided whatsapp and other facebook-owned apps, which certainly didn't help. And some people are probably naturally great at collecting other contact details and keeping in touch via phone and email; I'm not.

I stand behind the principle, mind you; I just think I should have placed day-to-day human beings I needlessly lost contact with above that principle. I still encourage contacts to avoid facebook, but that's it. But to each their own, for sure.

I'm simply saying this because in a forum such as this one that likes to focus on the abstract and principled it's easy to overlook the plain and quotidian daily existence we all have too; we shouldn't.

They're used to organise the social graph, so the analogy is off but not actually wrong in spirit. Yes, you can gather without them, but organising without them is what's difficult because again, they now nearly monopolise the social graph of acquaintances in terms of organisation (e.g. Facebook groups for a hobby, political protests where most people don't know each other IRL). This wasn't inevitable, but the analogy to me seems to be like saying: you don't need to drive when the country decided to only build roads.

As for your last sentence, well, not necessarily. I just don't see how that logically follows. Bans tell you that you're violating a rule, but those rules can be terrible. That's true of anything ever, I don't see how you can state that it's always the fault of the person being cut off. That's like saying all social ostracisation is really the fault of the person being ostracised. The person who is unpopular might be a terrible person, or they might be right but with uncomfortable facts or opinions.

> You don’t need Facebook.

There are countries that use Facebook for everything, including business and official announcements. If you are not on Facebook then you are left behind. Mostly just because it is available and "free", I think.

People should not use these platforms as their "public square", because their "public square" then becomes hostile territory, but people don't listen to us and indeed use these services as "public squares".

I think that the only way to reverse this trend is regulation that will most likely come when societies finally start to realize the damage that has been caused by moving their communication to computers that are owned by a couple of Californian companies.

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