Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

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This is what we get when we expect corporations to police speech, and when governments pressure them to do it.

We really would be better off with no censorship. Even allowing obvious conspiracy theories and fake news is better than trying to police the truth and getting it wrong. When moderators get it wrong even one time they lose trust forever and give the conspiracy theorists even more ammo — in some cases by making the conspiracy theories about censorship become true!

Besides, even if you wanted corporations to police speech and decide what is true, would Twitter and Facebook really be the ones you would want to do it?

It’s been very sad to see Westerners, especially Americans, and especially American liberals be so fearful and weak that they discarded the single most important principle of freedom, liberty, and human rights: freedom of speech.

That sacrifice got us nothing. Misinformation still spreads and it is more attractive than ever to the conspiracy-minded precisely because they can see the attempts to suppress it! Forbidden knowledge is always more attractive. It wasn’t worth it!

The only way out of this is to stop asking corporations and governments to censor things. Just stop.

You are mistaking social media companies as platforms for speech. The are not. They are for profit companies that must police their content to attain maximum ad revenue. They will curate, filter and edit content solely for that purpose.

I don’t know why everyone is so up in arms about what Twitter does on their website. If it vanished tomorrow, I’d be fine. Most of us knew what was going in the 90’s just fine.

Parent wasn't making a legal argument. A bunch of the comments in this thread are about trust. Do you think it's good for trust to have "for profit companies policing their content to attain maximum ad revenue"?

Is maximizing profit the only thing that social networks should care about? Or are there other obligations also?

Do I think it’s good? I do not. That’s one of the reasons I dislike the crux of the argument about free speech on Twitter. Social media doesn’t care about those things. They may say they do when they are flush with money (remember Google’s “don’t be evil”), but when push comes to shove, they’ll do anything to make a buck.

There is a place for social media in our world, I just don’t want to hold it up to such lofty aspirations that it will never achieve.

Twitter is by far and away the #1 place to exchange and debate ideas. It is critical that speech on it remains free.

I'd flip that around and say that it is critical that we ensure Twitter is not the #1 place to exchange and debate ideas.

There should not be a single, privately owned town square. There should be thousands of town squares where people can go and engage. Some should be public and some should be private. Placing all our free speech eggs in the Twitter basket will not end up well.

The importance is that every free and democratic nation in the world has its’ policies influenced by the loudest voices on Twitter. So if Twitter amplifies an idea it becomes reality.

Does it really do that? Or is it just a distraction? All the noise from the Twitter didn’t stop Trump from giving his speech on Jan 6th. Biden didn’t backtrack on the pull out from Afghanistan because of Twitter. No gun bans. No end of drag show book time.

I’d say it’s just a reflection of us, not our compass.

Quite a lot of people know what Trump tweeted, even though they never had Twitter accounts.

Sometimes it seemed like most of the news coverage of Trump consisted of news anchors reading his tweets on air. His tweets got a lot of the people into DC on the 6th to hear his speech in the first place.

Twitter is not just a distraction, sometimes it is the news.

Social media companies try to portray themselves legally as platforms in order to eliminate legal liability for the content that users post on their platform.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...

Ok I stand corrected on this law, which basically says that companies aren't liable for user-generated content (the article could've just said that in the first line).

Either way from a moral perspective doesn't change the fact that a platform censoring viewpoints is a violation of the principal of free speech, and morally reprehensible in a free democratic society. Twitter tried to be the Orwellian Ministry of Truth, and I'm glad that Twitter's new management recognizes the error of their former ways and is committed to not repeating the same Orwellian mistakes.

They are absolutely platforms for speech and in many cases they are the main source of news for people. Facebook and Twitter matter more than CNN.

By the way, all the newspapers and mainstream media that were displaced by social media are almost all ad-based, for-profit enterprises too.

There is a lot of speech on Twitter and Facebook, but the purpose of those companies is profit. If they could curate and filter content to increase revenue, they will. Plus, telecom laws protect them from liable so they can get away with publishing outright lies.

The fact that people use these poorly vetted sites as their primary source of news is unsettling. There is a lot of quality content, but it’s surrounded by a lot of garbage (from both the left and the right).

The NYT and WSJ both operate by much higher standards than I’ve ever seen on FB or Twitter. The newspapers are far from perfect, but they do abide by ethical standards. And most importantly, they are liable for their content.

And yet the purpose of the NYT and WSJ is also profit. They also publish a lot of total dreck.

You are chasing after a distinction without a difference.

Right, but you don't expect NYT or WSJ to be required to print every "letter to the editor" submitted by anyone in the world. They are for-profit, non-government, and they print what they want. Twitter is also for-profit and not the government – so why is it different if they also choose not to broadcast some things?

Newspapers and TV media also have always received a lot of government pressure trying to spin their coverage or convince them to downplay (or emphasize) certain stories. I'm still confused about why it's suddenly so much more scandalous that anything similar happened with Twitter.

> I'm still confused about why it's suddenly so much more scandalous that anything similar happened with Twitter.

It's obviously bad in both cases, and it's clear that this kind of behavior has actually increased the attraction of misinformation and decreased trust in mainstream media -- which is the opposite of the intended result.

i would be more alright with twitter doing no policing if they also did nothing to promote or curate any content. this means no recommendations, no trending, no "recommendations" and might also mean no ads.

if they are gonna to have all that, which i think they need to survive as a business, then the next best thing would be to empower users to have more control over the content they see ala email filtering

Free speech on centralized platforms is a pipe dream. Every company always has motivations to censor including legal, financial, personal, practical usability, etc.

Just because the ticket has finally come in for censorship that offends your sensibilities, does not change the fact that this dynamic has existed for the past two decades. The pot has been slowly boiling, and you are now realizing it. Good - jump out!

The only way out of this is decentralized platforms running on Free software, period.

This is incredibly naive. Popular platforms receive a lot of horrific stuff being posted. Some things need to be censored. Without moderation every platform would dissolve into a race to the bottom. For an example of this see this article https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57088382

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