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Comment by _trampeltier | Hacker News Reader

As always. What could go wrong with a such setup.

> The GIFCT was formed by Meta, Microsoft, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube in 2017 in a joint effort to stop the spread of mass shooting videos and other terrorist material online. When a member of the group flags a photo, video or post as terrorist-related, a digital fingerprint called a “hash” is shared across all its members

In effect, that means a bikini pic wrongly flagged as jihadist propaganda on Instagram can also be quickly censored on Twitter or YouTube, all without the poster or public knowing that it was placed on the list — much less how or why

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> GIFCT was formed by Meta, Microsoft, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube in 2017 in a joint effort to stop the spread of mass shooting videos and other terrorist material online

This information sharing should be investigated as a potential breach of competition law. For example, are Snap or TikTok disadvantaged because Facebook, Microsoft and Google are sharing information [1]?

[1] https://gifct.org/membership/#

>are Snap or TikTok disadvantaged because Facebook, Microsoft and Google are sharing information

While I think it's ridiculous entities like Meta have taken it up on themselves to have their own "watch lists", in this instant I'd say absolutely not. Indeed I would argue one of the significant reasons Tik Tok is continuing to explode in popularity is they aren't participating in the overt censorship going on in the rest of big tech.

TikTok has had some serious issues with censorship, and is way more directly political than some of the other companies you've named. Like, if you care about this stuff, please be careful of who you try to hold up as a good example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_on_TikTok#Political...

We didn't read enough dystopian novels yet to that describe the privatisation of law enforcement. We wanted the real thing.

Law enforcement started out privatized, and has basically always existed mainly for the benefit of the privileged private class.

+1 insightful. Also, Ancient Egyptian Police Had Trained Monkeys https://www.ranker.com/list/police-in-ancient-societies/mike...

Having a trained monkey try to chase you down (presumably with a weapon) sounds terrifying, yet somehow I'm not convinced it would be all together worse than what we have now

Law and order:

Laws are made and signed by the ruling class (not saying all laws are bad, we need them), and they (hopefully) reflect which values the people wants their justice system to protect.

Order can be interpreted in two ways; keeping society stable, but also keeping the order (the status quo) of the social classes as they are.

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread" -Anatole France

There's some nice beach city where people are not allowed to have a nice walk on the beach at night because they made some law to prevent homeless people sleeping there... if only Google was still a proper search engine I could post the link..

I've always felt that "large" providers should not be able to ban someone except for something that is illegal in the real world.

Every time I post it people hate the idea "it's a private service you can't tell them what to do".

And the alternative is what exactly?

(And yes, I know there are some details to work out, what is "large", what about Spam, what about offtopic messages. But those are details, my post is about the main idea of banning someone. Hate speech and harassment are already illegal.)

The alternative is designation as a public utility.

Hate speech isn't necessarily illegal nor do I know what you have in mind when you say "harassment" is illegal, there are 50 states in the U.S. with 50 sets of laws.

Let's say I've got a website called Jay's Cool Community for Elementary School Kids and their Parents. Steve comes in and starts posting nazi symbology, and as soon as I delete his content he just posts more. Nazi symbols aren't illegal in the country where Steve and I reside, so under your regime I can't boot him from my website. Do I, as Jay, have no recourse now?

You should be able to ban him from your website. But not all other websites on the Internet.

Can't they also say "Steve is a Nazi" and let other site owners ban him as well? That's the same thing happening here (albeit with extra steps).

Agree but the fact is "all other websites on the Internet" turned into just Google, Facebook, Amazon, Instagram and so on. The web is quite centralized nowadays, getting banned from one of these sites can significantly harm a person.

It is like the difference between a private club and the telephone company.

Should your private club be able to expel neo-Nazis? Absolutely.

Should the telephone company be allowed to disconnect neo-Nazis? That's more iffy. What if they are a monopoly? What if there is an oligopoly, and all the oligopoly firms make the same decision? Neo-Nazis are terrible people, but if we set the precedent that one is allowed to deny them telephone services, will less obviously terrible groups be next?

Maybe we should also let the telephone company disconnect the Islamist violent jihad sympathisers, they are obviously terrible people too. But what happens when some Islamophobe starts stretching the definition of "Islamist violent jihad sympathiser" so that Muslims who have zero sympathy for that get labelled with it anyway? (Yes, the classic "slippery slope argument" – but some slopes really are slippery.)

Some websites, such as "Jay's Cool Community for Elementary School Kids and their Parents", are like a private club. But facebook.com, google.com, etc, they are like the telephone company, not like a private club. Different rules should apply to different kinds of websites.

> But facebook.com, google.com, etc, they are like the telephone company, not like a private club.

At what point did they become utilities? How do we define such?

It is a matter of scale, of market share, of user counts.

Obviously, a website with a few hundred or few thousand regular users is more like a private club. A website with tens or hundreds of millions of users is more like the telephone company.

There is no clearcut boundary, but there doesn't need to be. Competition regulators frequently impose limits on market-dominant firms which they don't impose on small players – yet there is no clearcut boundary between a market-dominant firm and a small player. In practice, many individual cases will be obvious, and in the non-obvious cases, all we need is someone with the authority to make a decision–and if someone else thinks they've made the wrong call, there are the usual judicial and political processes to address that.

Imagine a restaurant that followed your rules (customers are never kicked out unless they do something illegal). Would you eat there? How long do you think it would stay in business?

While some would argue that private companies have the right to censor users without exception - when private companies form a near-monopoly on artistic expression online, they should ethically inherit the government's ethical responsibility to protect freedom of expression.

In this case this isn't only a violation of the users' freedom of expression - it is also a clear anti-trust violation as they are abusing their monopoly position for illegal anti-competitive tactics.

If they didn't work together people would instead complain about there being more extremist content. None of these companies want the bad PR from "news" articles saying that they aren't stopping extremist content from their platform.

>it is also a clear anti-trust violation as they are abusing their monopoly position for illegal anti-competitive tactics.

It doesn't look anticompetitive to me considering you can ask to join the group.

What companies have a "near-monopoly on artistic expression online?" I can have a web site up and running in an hour publishing any art I have the right to publish, with just an IP from my ISP and optionally a domain name. I don't need to ask any company's permission.

That's akin to saying that booting someone from the US telephone system isn't censorship because they can always setup their own phone line from their living room to a phone installed on their front lawn - that anyone can come and talk to them on.

The reality of the world is that social media is a completely separate medium from social media. A monopoly on social media is not relevant to the ability to create your own URL.

Except there is no feasible alternative to the phone system for making phone calls (although there are a multitude of video, voice and text chat apps), whereas there are many social media companies and also many blog hosts and VPS services and web server software and so on. You have so many choices. I'd argue that if you want to publish something on the Internet, there has been no better time to do it than today, and it keeps getting better!

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