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Comment by robust-cactus | Hacker News Reader

If this passes, basically what's going to happen is a lot of pre-filtering of people entering social networks akin to next doors strategy.

I've worked at a civic tech social network that had no rules, and eventually the extremists pushed out all the normal folks - it's just stupid shouting matches. We tore it all down and made isolated communities. It's basically the only way to have real discourse.

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Yet Reddit, that follows this model, still manages to engage in suppression of on-topic viewpoints that moderators and/or Reddit employees disagree with.

Probably because mods are unpaid and not employees.

And reddit was a massive experiment in far right takeover. It went from hosting the rally for reason to electing Donald trump at lightning speed.

Not because of the overall community, but because of business actions, manufactured turmoil, and well funded trolling.

I'm surprised to see this being downvoted. It was shocking to see how large /r/TheDonald was around the 2016 election. Now, whether they were real, voting US citizens is a valid question.

You still see on subreddits like /r/wayofthebern and /r/conspiracy accounts which are posting full-time (i.e. dozens of posts and comments a day) with pro-Russia, pro-China, anti-US content.

The admins, who are paid employees, also engage in similar suppression by banning subreddits they dislike.

Proof? Read about how reddit suppressed dissent during the pandemic.

I'm not going to post any particular link because the topic is too political and every source (left and right) spins things in some way that I dislike.

The facts, without spin, are these: reddit banned and/or quarantined many anti-lockdown subs. Initially, they said they would not, because "Dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy", but ultimately, they did.

Proof?

You should cite sources instead of saying the equivalent of "do your own research "

What evidence do you have of reddit employees censoring information they disagree with?

Obligatory: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/5ektpc/rthe...

This says an admin was accused of editing posts, it doesn't provide proof. It then says users down voted him not employees of reddit.

Also subbit reddit admins aren't employees , I believe most people can create a subreddit and be an admin

> This says an admin was accused of editing posts, it doesn't provide proof. It then says users down voted him not employees of reddit.

SubredditDrama is a meta-subreddit. They linked to the post by Spez where he admitted to editing the comment — unfortunately, it's no longer available due to Reddit banning r/the_donald, but you can find numerous news articles that include his original comment. E.g., https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-38088712

> Also subbit reddit admins aren't employees , I believe most people can create a subreddit and be an admin

In Reddit terminology those are moderators. Administrators are site-wide and employed by Reddit.

He admitted it himself that he did it:

https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...

That's one person in a large company the original comment claimed it was multiple employees and a policy of the company

That's the founder and CEO at the time, he created the reddit culture and he did the worst thing you can do in that situation: silently editing the posts of people you disagree with. Nobody said that post was proof that lots of admins do this, but it is proof that Reddits leadership is rotten to the core. If the CEO is fine with editing others speech to make it look like they said things they didn't, then obviously he is also fine with unfairly banning people or communities he disagrees with since that is a much lesser evil.

One look at r/worldnews or r/news? Those are not even some obscure subreddits.

It's a community ruled by progressives, posted into by progressives and mostly read by progressives. The content reflects that. This has been achieved by years of content filtering and banning of any centrist or right wing views. It's the definition of an echo chamber. Or another of the main subreddits, r/video, just recently I'm watching a post where a guy describes some valve or whatever and his little kid comes in yadda yadda cute video of dad with his daughter. In the comments it's all about how the guy said something about supporting truckers or whatever and how terrible that was. Yep. Meanwhile the video has basically no dislikes on Youtube..But by reading the r/video thread you'd think it's unpopular and the guy is a nazi or something. No. It's just that Reddit is a manufactured community of left wingers.

Btw try to talk about how "trans women are not women" and refer to transitioning people by their pre-transition name (because you don't recognize their transition or it is against your religion), which is absolutely a political/religious statement and 100% a point of view, see how long your account lasts :)

>It's just that Reddit is a manufactured community of left wingers.

After US election day 2016, it was actually possible for about a day to post non-leftist posts and comments to /r/politics without them being instantly downvoted or removed for being "off topic", because the mods hadn't received new marching orders. It was quite a change, albeit temporary.

Reddit banned /r/TheDonald, which would have certainly run afoul of this law. You may respond that there were policy based reasons for doing so (brigading, harassment, etc.) and you'd be right. But that's true of moderation decisions made by Facebook and Twitter too, or at least they would say so. In fact that ban was far more egregious than any of the moderation decisions that are being targeted by this law at the big platforms.

Prior to banning /r/The_Donald, Reddit created /r/popular as a default alternative to /r/all to prevent posts from /r/The_Donald from making it to the front page. Interestingly, they didn't ban any of the other obnoxious political subreddits that people were complaining about.

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5u9pl5/intro...

(Not a Trump fan or even right-leaning, just pointing out that Reddit administrators went to great lengths to suppress a subreddit they disliked long before banning it.)

Yeah I mean I think it is and should be within their rights. /r/TheDonald was not merely expressing a political viewpoint. It was doing a lot of other stuff. But the proponents of this law would view banning it was a violation.

> reasons for doing so (brigading, harassment, etc.)

This happens on Reddit all day along with pretty much every political sub on the platform. But they chose to only ban /r/TheDonald.

Reddit had a policy for banning accounts that were calling for violence. Yet during the 2020 riots they conveniently dropped this rule. This smells of massive hipocracy.

It already passed, it's a law on the books in Texas. And now it's been upheld at by both trial and circuit courts.

FWIW: there's one last chance at SCOTUS to undo this, but if that doesn't work out what we're almost certain to see instead of "pre-filtering" is just "No Tweeting from Texas".

It's kinda interesting how a world like "no tweeting from Texas" might jive with EU laws which want to restrict IO and data storage to just inside the region or country.

Are we about to get more decentralized just because the laws are accidentally forcing us to?

Imagine connecting to EU or Texas Twitter to see what's going on there.

Oh, it’s not accidental.

It’s not accidental. I don’t see how the old “Wild West” era of the internet was ever going to be compatible with any two sovereign nations that had even a minuscule difference of opinion about any of copyright and database rights, privacy, obscenity, hacking, incitement, libel, or anything else that might come broadly under the heading of “free speech”.

Maybe they can finally secede and take Elon with them.

Simple. Shut off Texas. You don’t have a right to use social media. I wouldn’t even appeal the decision. Let Texas lie in the bed they made.

If Texas were shut off from social media, would net mental health and productivity of Texans increase?

I say we do the experiment and find out!

My exurban Texan neighbors wouldn't be able to post their dog whistles on the neighborhood FB page. Oh! Woe is me!

Didn't happen with EU's internet laws. Instead, we get cookie banners all over the world. I don't think exiting a market full of money because of ideology is good business.

There's a few sites (e.g. local city news sites) that return 451 status code for EU IP addresses

Sure, but they have no "customers" in the EU. Quite the opposite with these platforms.

This year "Meta" basically said they might have to leave the EU. Some of the reactions were "and good riddance !".

To be fair, it's the USA, starting with the police-state-like Patriot Act, that basically made US companies illegal in the EU...

(I don't remember if there were any revelations in the Snowden scandal about Facebook helping the NSA to spy on EU citizens, companies, governments... IIRC the documents (we got) talked mostly about Google and Microsoft ?)

No tweeting from Texas sounds like a great idea! We can expand it to no tweeting from anywhere after we see the effects on Texans. Then I bknow the popular nexts step would be to get rid of FB and Instagram, but I'm in favor of dissolving Pinterest first. It is like charlie and the football everytime I follow a link from an image search looking for something only to notice it was Pinterest right afterwards but before it loads, realizing I am about to be hounded to load an app, then log in, and then be shown that image is no longer part of Pinterest.

Actually, they will likely ask for en banc first. This is just a three judge panel

The obvious byproduct is their happiness and productivity would increase, and other states would swiftly copy them to remain competitive. Then social media would have to respond to that.

The apparent disdain for Texas in this thread is bizarre.

I mean… it’s the state that implemented this law. So we’re not talking about Montana or something here.

I’m a big fan of simply exiting sovereign markets that are not worth it and would like to see corporations do this more frequently

It is very easy for private sector of almost any size to remind sovereigns about overplaying their hand

As a not-Texan, almost all of what I hear about Texas is oil, conservatism, failed power systems during winter, anti-abortion-rights, and using immigrants as political theater by sending them to DC/NY. I don't know that the disdain is unexpected given the political leaning of people working in technology.

You're probably living in a filter bubble. You'd be hearing only the same kind of things about California if you were in a different bubble.

Whataboutisn.

He didn't claim what he heard was true.

He didn't say he doesn't hear things about other states.

Nor did he make a judgment about Texas.

He only offered a possible explanation to the gp

I get most of my national news from NPR. What news am I missing about Texas? I guess I forgot the Uvalde school shooting police response in my list.

I do hear bad things about California - homelessness, drug use, lots of petty theft that doesn't get prosecuted, ridiculously expensive housing, NIMBYs - but that's unrelated.

I'd better not get too involved in this because it's ugly politics nonsense, but it's easy enough to find criticisms of California for its power grid, leftism, pro-abortion-rights (which is obviously seen as a bad thing by many people), and political use of immigrants.

There wouldn't be disdain for Texas if Texas didn't do stupid things.

Would you please stop taking HN threads further into flamewar? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Because they are the state that implemented the law while at the same time is actually censoring information. A direct violation of the first amendment. A public library is a public space and the state government is an authority that can impose punishments.

The hypocrisy is insane

"Texas governor calls books ‘pornography’ in latest effort to remove LGBTQ titles from school libraries"

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/04/us/texas-lgbtq-books-schools/...

I've got nothing against Texas except for this weird law.

I am a Texan, and I think we deserve the disdain in this case - we elected those politicians who want to force the main platforms people use for all sorts of communications to allow themselves to become /pol/.

I hope the internet returns to this model for like a dozen reasons. Insofar as we can be sure this kind of regulation gets there it should be celebrated imo.

The internet should be a common carrier. A private company that sits on top of the internet is not a common carrier. Why should the government be able to regulate what private companies publish?

I bet you dollars to doughnuts that neither RedState or Truth social would want to be under the same regulations. I’ve been banned from RedState twice.

But if the company is the de-facto monopoly in the political discourse, like Twitter is, then it should be treated as a common carrier/utility/etc...

How is Twitter a de facto monopoly? They have a monopoly on what exactly - communication forums on the Internet? Why is it that conservatives are unable to create an alternative?

They have a monopoly on political discourse. Why isn’t there an alternative? Network effect.

So there is no other way that people can talk about politics without going on Twitter? If Twitter is a monopoly and doing is badly as they are financially. They must be doing something wrong.

I’m sure if Fox News or a billionaire ex-president wanted to start a social media platform he could. He has plenty of people coming to his rallies. He couldn’t get enough of his 75 million voters to come to Truth Social to make it successful.

Moderation is double edged sword sadly, you need it else the extremists will do exactly that, interpret the ideas of community in the extreme all while pushing out people that they think are not extreme enough.

But on other side... good luck looking for one. The people that volunteer to have a bunch of power over a community and decide who's allowed to stay and who have to go are usually exactly the type you don't want to moderate anything, or have any power whatsoever over anything.

I've seen few times where self moderation mostly worked but it was due to established culture there and any newcomer that misbehaved was just scolded by the more veteran members and that was usually enough. You can see it on smaller subreddits too.

Sure but it moves the goalposts, away from employees. I think it's better if individual sub-networks selfregulate

No, if this passes, tech companies will just stop operating in Texas outright. It's really as simple as that.

The Texas law makes it illegal to not do business with Texas

Which is hilarious, but who the hell knows what the courts will decide these days

Is there anything to prevent a platform from categorizing content without censoring it?

It’s called living offline.

I wonder if the underlying goal of all this is actually classic authoritarian restriction of freedoms. The big public platforms are much better for spreading progressive ideas than conservative ideas. Maybe this was the underlying reason they wanted to repeal section 230. It wasn’t a misunderstanding it was strategic.

The only research that has been done on this found that on Twitter the conservative voices were amplified more than progressive voices:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/10/27/twitter-am...

The opinion of three journalists working for the same retail tech conglomerate is hardly "research." WaPo has suffered a Pulitzer Prize revocation in 1981 for fabricating stories, has continuously circulated advertisements from China Watch (operated by the CCP), repeatedly settled on libelous claims made for profit, and on numerous occasions assisted in providing platforms for anti-Western and anti-Semitic groups supported by Iran. It's a joke to imagine they would do research in hopes of drawing any conclusion but the one that makes them the most money.

It would take some time to fact check your assertions, so I only looked into the first one. It involved a single reporter, not systemic plagiarism by the paper, and she was fired when it came to light. The Post's ombudsman, who handles readers' complaints as well as internal problems, undertook an investigation.

Wait, so you mean a bunch of wild assertions posted on the internet were in fact false? But I did research!

Thanks for making my point.

Really you had to go back to 1981?

Yeah, I guess I couldn't find any examples of journalism for profit since 1981. Or maybe, I chose an old example to make a point about how it's always been for profit.

So have many other media outlets. It's an old company with many employees some of whom aren't going to be ethical.

As for the Chinese government ads: do you want them to censor it?

You're too generous. It's all media, it's all for profit, and it's all unethical. No editor will willingly submit a piece that makes his/her company, or conglomerate overlords LESS money. That is, unless he/she plans to change careers. The circumstances imply that only the most submissive journalists, who are most willing to lie, are left in action.

Interesting point, I guess I’m making the assertion that conservative ideas can spread better in small groups then liberal ideas since liberal ideas are trying to change the status quo they just have to plant a seed. Conservative ideas have to be fought for since “everyone already know them” (quotes for broad generalizations without data, but leaning into the fact that conservative ideas should be inherently more well known since they’ve been practiced in the past.)

So conservatives viewpoints spread in small groups better, a situation where you are less likely to be challenged and less likely to hear opposing viewpoints (because of the size)

Are you sure? Seems like Twitter&FB and the like were more likely to promote the reactions to conservative ideas, which by necessity gives more airtime to those.

> The big public platforms are much better for spreading progressive ideas than conservative ideas.

wouldn't be necessary to suppress the opposition as much as they do if that was true.

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