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Comment by zmgsabst | Hacker News Reader

Why wouldn’t they?

Nominal proponents of open society in the West were all too happy to engage in censorship during an emergency rather than stand by their principles.

What would motivate people to embrace an open society if the nominal proponents don’t?

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Its not even random people you don't see - its us. Us, in HN, the people you are talking to now - we would rather have censorship than free speech. You get the government you deserve.

The article yesterday "Backsliding on free expression around the world needs to end" shows exactly what the majority of people here think.

In short, the vast majority prefer "right speech" over "free speech".

The vast majority prefer many things that are relatively low-quality, stupid, etc.

I think pretty much nobody stands by their principles. Because ultimately principles are a means to an end, and if the end is not achieved, they're discarded.

And this really makes perfect sense to me when you think of it. We're not logical robots. If whatever principles we hold backfire badly enough, we'll discard them or add exceptions because the reason for those principles is that we believe they make a better world. If the world is not made better, then the principles failed in their aim.

Morality needs a degree of flexibility to survive, or somebody will exploit it.

Except that, in this case, discarding them led to a worse world:

- bitter divisions in the nation because they subverted the consensus mechanism

- poor policy decisions because we didn’t have a robust debate about options

- poor medical outcomes because we didn’t exercise due caution

The reason we had those principles in the first place was to avoid repeats of past bad outcomes from not having them — and they were discarded at a societal level for shortsighted reasons.

Your job as a leader is to uphold those principles in hard times because they’re the path to a better outcome. And our leaders badly failed us.

Actually I'm not sure what you're talking about. Give specific examples of those things?

I guess it depends on what you define as a principle. You are in a manner correct, but saying that "nobody stands by their principles" is not nuanced enough.

I personally would broaden the definition that a principle depends on the context, and in the simplest sense a principle has to work in your favor in the long run. For example honestly is generally a good policy, but not if you are a Jew trying to hide your ethnicity in Nazi Germany.

Which emergency are you referring to? And what censorship methods are you referring to?

For example, I think the media choosing not to cover a story immediately when it is being peddled by an unreliable political agent doesn’t qualify as censorship. Even if it turns out to be true.

>The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.

>Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

Or maybe because the large public doesn't care reading about some things, thus the press will not write about it. That's capitalism at work and the freedom of the press. There's no law forcing us to read everything, luckily, and just because a few people consider something of interest doesn't automatically make it of interest.

It takes a special type of hubris to read Orwell on censorship and say you know better.

COVID was the example I had I mind, where they censored medical professionals, politicians, and journalists who said lockdowns were a bad idea, questioned the data supporting mRNA (eg, Robert Malone), etc.

But since you mentioned not covering a story — we also have the Hunter Biden laptop, which wasn’t merely not covered, but actively censored on social media during an election. (Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg admitted as much.) The whole point of freedom of speech is the censors are notoriously bad at deciding what is “misinformation”, as they were in that case… where they shut down a political story which hurt their preferred candidate but was nonetheless true.

Social media != the government

Social media censors partly because of pressure from governments that make it clear that regulation will be coming if they don't do it "voluntarily".

Examples of such pressure from the government? Do you mean when Trump threatened to remove section 230 protection from social media companies because he didn't like "the way he was treated" on their sites?

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/23/916096008/justice-department-...

FB censored the Hunter laptop story during the election at the behest of the FBI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN3PIGLDscQ

That doesn't sound like pressure at all, that just sounds like a tip from the FBI that they could do whatever they want with. Furthermore, they didn't even ban the story anyway.

“Basically, the background here is the FBI basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know you should be on high alert,’ ” said Zuckerberg. “ ‘We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that so just be vigilant.’ ”

"Facebook did not completely ban sharing of the article, but instead limited how much its algorithm automatically shared it to other people for a week, while third-party fact-checkers tried to verify the reporting."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532

https://nypost.com/2022/08/28/fbi-put-the-hunter-biden-story...

The Biden administration have said they are “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation”

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/202...

The FBI (government) told Facebook (private company) to censor things that aren't illegal, and they did. In this case, social media === government for all intents and purposes.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532

https://nypost.com/2022/08/28/fbi-put-the-hunter-biden-story...

Which means FB has a working relationship with the FBI doing whatever the FBI says without asking questions.

FBI didn't tell them to censor the fake piss dossier on Trump, and that was 100% bullshit.

Along comes a Biden run for president, and real, legitimate, truthful damaging information about Biden's entire degenerate family gets suppressed.

BIG HMMMMMMM.

You're saying Trump's DOJ and FBI threatened FB with _______ unless they blocked the spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story?

FB didn't even ban the story though? Even if FB is suppressing information at the request of the FBI, there are hundreds of other news sources out there that people can use. I don't use Facebook, especially not for news consumption.

Here's a more concrete example:

Trump's DOJ threatened FB with removal of section 230 protection, or complete shutdown in Twitter's case, unless they stop censoring news stories that these companies believe to be false or misleading.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/05/28/trump-sign...

Private companies should be free to allow or disallow whatever they want at their discretion on their private platforms, left or right. If I owned a social media platform, I would also probably block stories that I think are false, because I don't think that being known as a platform for the spread of misinformation would be good for my brand. I don't complain about Facebook or Twitter's censorship, and I don't complain about Truth Social or Parler, all are private companies that can do what they want as far as I'm concerned. I don't get my news from any of those sources, no one should.

> You're saying Trump's DOJ and FBI threatened FB with _______ unless they blocked the spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story?

Where on earth did you get that from? FB is in cahoots with the FBI (and ADL), period.

FB has a censorship regime that massively favors one set of politics, which is guided by the FBI, ADL, and probably many other political orgs we don't even hear about.

Isn't that what you were insinuating?

In any case, I agree with you that FB is in cahoots with the FBI. FB has a ton of juicy information that the FBI would love to get their hands on. But getting back to the topic at hand, this looks like a case of "you scratch our back I'll scratch yours," not government censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story which the FBI would have no incentive to do, especially under Trump. FB wants to remove disinformation from their platform (or at least appear like they're making an effort), and the FBI wants a friendly relationship with FB so they can lean on them for whatever data they need.

I really don't get the arguments that there is government censorship going on when the Hunter Biden laptop story was one of the most widely publicized stories of 2020 available on pretty much every news outlet nationwide.

Alright i'll humor you: what proves the hunter biden laptop story? Last I checked some guy said he had it, and that it had damning evidence on it, but for some reason refused to produce said evidence, or any evidence that the laptop was bidens or that there was a laptop at all.

You'd think if the contents of said laptop were as damning as they were purported to be, they would be all over, yet the guy who supposedly had it didn't release it. Why?

I say this as someone who still thinks it is overblown and fair that the social networks didn't let it get amplified as a distraction right before the election. (It was being pushed by people who trafficked in all kinds of misinformation)

It did come out, it was real, and had real emails from Hunter being a total idiot trying to use his Dad to make connections and get paid. It also had nudes and drug use and other embarrassing dumb shit.

It is just a distraction though. Everyone knows Hunter has problems and it had nothing to harm Biden’s character if you are an independent third party looking at the evidence.

So… this bugs me when it becomes the rally point for “censorship”. Give me a break.

Media companies are not the government, and they do not have a legal responsibility to promulgate all views. In the case where a majority of the medical community perceives that misinformation and disinformation is directly leading to people dying, media companies may feel they have a moral obligation to publish the scientific mainstream over the fringes.

The same goes for political coverage. Fox News is within their rights not to broadcast Senate hearings featuring multiple conservative Republicans alleging that Donald Trump attempted to overthrow the democratically elected government.

What Trump attempted on January 6th was treason against the United States. What Fox News promulgates is merely media content to sell advertising space.

> Nominal proponents

Could you be slightly more specific?

Governments which claim to support values like freedom of speech, but in fact do not.

Eg, the US — who is outspoken on that issue, but during an emergency used social media companies to censor doctors, politicians, etc who did not agree with them.

They passed laws making those social media companies censor them?

They didn’t have to.

They had officials coordinate with social media companies to coordinate takedowns of accounts and messages which disagreed with them.

So, public health officials asked social media companies to stop accounts from spamming that vaccines cause autism?

There was no law and no threat, just public and private coordination.

I have no problem with that. Sorry, this is not even close to censorship.

If a member of the government asks their friend in a social media company to quietly take down a post, they are using influence and corruption (of the company) to impose government censorship. If they ask the legal representatives of the company to make a policy decision to take down a post, there is the implied threat of regulation, and it is government coersion. Both are legally violations of the first amendment.

I think it's bad public policy for government to coerce social media companies into censoring information, however it's not clear whether that legally amounts to a First Amendment violation. There are no clear legal precedents in that area. It will be interesting to see how the courts rule on the Missouri v. Biden case.

https://ago.mo.gov/home/news/2022/05/05/missouri-louisiana-a...

You have freedom to yell "FIRE!" in a crowded theatre.

Just as you have freedom to pay for the consequences of that.

Bad example

Exactly! Good example!

That metaphor was originally used to justify criminalizing protesting wars.

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