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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

At what point can we finally admit there is a coordinated war on against freedom of expression online?

The platforms censor on their own accord, the government pushes the platforms to censor even more, the legislature is talking about ways to make the platforms censor more yet.

It seems they're afraid of the situation where anyone can publish to anyone regardless of content. Our efforts should be along these lines, on the most popular of devices.

TikTok doesn't even let you access bio links in a normal browser, and you can't copy them. You can get banned from TikTok based on what you have listed in your bio link webpage on a different service.

Instagram doesn't linkify URLs in comments or descriptions.

Apple doesn't let things in the App Store unless they're firmly PG13. This is what killed Tumblr and ruins the photography site 500px's native app.

There are whole domains of URLs that you can't even send in DM on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, or Discord.

Personally I delete my accounts on these and use Signal exclusively, but how do we solve for the society-wide censorship problem?

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These don’t really sound like examples of a war on expression, nor are they really related to the government making questionable requests of private companies.

Instagram isn’t obligated to render text in their app in a way that you’d prefer.

Freedom of speech isn't just about what the government does.

We can dislike a platform because it's a poor means of expression and urge people to stop using it.

Dislike away, but don't justify your dislike of a specific UX using the language of human rights abuse. An app kind of sucking is not a humanitarian crisis.

Accessibility is one obvious counter-example of where a specific UX “kind of sucking” can in fact be a humanitarian crisis, albeit one that disproportionately affects disabled persons. Fortunately we have laws on the books for that and people have sued and won.

I'll grant that, but that still doesn't excuse OP making it sound like this UX issue is about freedom of expression. I'd readily believe that Instagram's UX is bad for screen readers.

UX that limits expression (not linking urls, not allowing some speech) is just that.

These apps limit expression because it makes them more money. But they still limit expression. Instagram doesn’t want you linking out of instagram so you stay and view more ads. Tiktok bans for off site bios because it wants less controversy so they sell more ads. Etc etc.

By this logic, a forum for cooking that doesn’t permit discussion of biking is “limiting expression”. As is a restaurant that doesn’t let me stand up and start singing in their dining room.

Being a private entity that allows users to express themselves isn’t a restriction on the types of expression you don’t allow. The default is that Instagram doesn’t exist, not that it exists and must all anything you want it to.

It is limiting expression. Just like removing spam. Or HN not allowing personal attacks.

The question is the extent of the limitation. And what’s “reasonable.”

If I sell you a burger, I haven’t limited your dinner.

Instagram offers what they offer. A forum for a topic or a medium offers something to you. The fact that they’ve chosen not to offer other things isn’t a limitation on your expression, any more than my burger shop is for not selling salads.

And we're allowed to say Instagram is a bad burger shop, we don't like their burgers and we don't want to buy their burgers. We can choose to do business with someone else, and make use social pressure on the people who still use Instagram.

We don't owe Instagram some sort of being nice or saying nice things. If they run a subpar business that punishes freedom of expression, we can call that out and say it sucks.

You're, of course, welcome to not like Instagram, and to not do business with them, and to do business with other people, and to suggest that other people shouldn't use Instagram.

But it's absolute baloney to claim that they punish freedom of expression because the venn diagram of "content they're willing to host on their infrastructure" and "content you want to publish" aren't perfectly aligned. Calling my burger shop bad because it doesn't serve salads is similarly baloney.

UX decisions are not humanitarian crises. Full stop.

I never suggested you couldn’t dislike a platform. I dislike eggplant, but I’m not going around saying eggplant is part of a war on broccoli consumption.

Let's say if _every_ restaurant in town, when you tried to order broccoli, gave you eggplant instead.

You say "hey, I don't want eggplant, I don't like eggplant" and the restaurants response is to say "but eggplant is really good and only bad people don't like eggplant. You aren't anti-eggplant are you?"

It's not an issue when it's one restaurant - that's just weird - but when it starts being 90%... 95%.. when they restaurants all get together and form an anti-broccoli commission, and start colluding to make selling broccoli illegal..

When the restaurants go to the Federal Government and say they need laws making broccoli illegal?

Restaurants are free to petition the government, in the same way that you're free to petition the government. And insofar as there has been lobbying to make some kinds of expression illegal, I've generally been opposed to it. But as far as I can tell, every modern example of a group lobbying the government to make kinds of expression illegal have not come from social media platforms, they've come from Republican lobbying groups trying to get books banned or drag shows banned.

Well, we're commenting on an article where the Whitehouse, the President of the United States, has been told to stop abusing their authority to censor speech.

I would point out those book bans are not banned from reading or publication.. they are banned from school libraries because they have graphic descriptions of sex. If you feel it's important for your kid to be exposed to a storybook primer on gay oral sex... I suppose you should write your congressperson.

And in banning drag shows, the prohibition is on drag shows with underage attendees, usually without parental permission. Again, if you feel your kid needs to see someone in drag hip thrust in yoga pants on a stage without your consent.. you're welcome to lobby for that as you see fit.

I will spend my time fighting and continuing to fight for the freedom of expression.

Freedom of speech isn't just about what the government does.

As far as the first amendment is concerned, government limitation of free speech, political speech in particular, is what matters.

> Instagram isn’t obligated to render text in their app in a way that you’d prefer.

They are if we pass a law saying that they are. Suggesting such a law be passed is just normal democracy.

By exactly the same argument, OP's "coordinated war against freedom of expression online" is also "just normal democracy."

No, because that didn’t involve any sort of legislative action and is in fact clearly contrary to legislative intent.

On the contrary: yes, because that's irrelevant; the back-and-forth between disparate interests, and over interpretations of current legislation (and the constitution, for that matter), is just what normal democracy has that is lacking from other polities.

I don’t know what to say other than that is obviously and completely incorrect and anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history should know that.

It seems, then, that I am to be judged wrong just on your say-so, for no particular reason.

I wouldn’t have made the reply I did if the post I replied to was advocating passing laws about social media platforms.

But if Instagram is blocking links in DMs between second and third parties at the request of the state (which we saw happening at Twitter), then that is a different matter entirely.

What makes you think Meta would be exempt from the same pressure Twitter received, given that Meta's platform is larger?

> Instagram doesn't linkify URLs in comments or descriptions.

This is a personal preference you have that Instagram decided against in order to offer a slightly larger barrier to scams. Not a great example.

> This is what killed Tumblr and ruins the photography site 500px's native app.

I know nothing about 500px, but forcing PG-13 killed Tumblr because Tumblr was built on NSFW. They tried to pivot too late. Apple has never had their brand wrapped up in NSFW—on the contrary, their brand is explicitly family-friendly and this policy is designed to keep it that way.

Honestly, there may well be a coordinated war on freedom of expression, but your examples kind of suck. Each of them is trivially explained by companies pursuing their own goals in ways that are only vaguely related to each other and only tangentially related to freedom of expression.

Decentralize.

Break up social media into far smaller segments with the segments required to provide api for competing services and for users to download their data.

Also, the data should be obscure to the company Facebook account should only be able to encrypted junk. My friends, then are given decryption keys.

Of course, there needs to be through data auditing requirements for any large store of data, just like we mandate external audits of any large publicly traded company

That idea turns what was a soapbox into a lot of tiny speakeasies. It's a very different model. And one that also goes against free expression.

"You're free to express yourself as much as you like with people you invite to your private room" is the sex motel model of free speech.

Welcome to Lemmy.

It’s a big catch-22 kind of problem. “Politics is downstream from culture” but right now politics is being weaponized against culture.

> Instagram doesn't linkify URLs in comments or descriptions.

You think this is evidence of a "coordinated war on against freedom of expression online"?

Yes.

https://www.anildash.com/2019/12/10/link-in-bio-is-how-they-...

It's an attack on the web, to promote censorship platforms that replace it.

They don't have to admit it because nobody is against it anymore. Everyone just has a different idea of what should and should not be allowed, even what should and should not be legal.

How do you balance the free speech of the platform operator relative to the free speech of the members of the platform? There is some zero sum free speech here. If you require platform operators to include all of their member's speech, you are violating the operators speech.

The operators, as corporate entities (that only exist at the government's permission in the first place) rather than human beings, do not have all the same freedoms. Their behavior can be coerced or restricted in many different ways.

This is a valid argument when it comes to things like recommendations but there are some simple functions of platforms that in no way constitute the platforms speech:

- When two people privately chat with each other, this is not the chat platforms speech, anymore then a phone call is the phone company's speech, it is something that should fall under common carrier laws, just like phone companies.

- When someone explicitly decides to follow someone else and that person posts something, then relaying that post is not the platforms speech, anymore then delivering a magazine to a subscriber is the postal services speech.

That analogy falls down because there is speech you aren't allowed to convey via the telephone or postal service.

I think there's a very reasonable distinction here between platforms that publish content without promoting it, and what Facebook is in the business of doing which is promoting content. Facebook opens itself to additional liability by increasing the reach of posts which do well.

In practical terms I see the basic issue as being a lack of downvotes. Users can do nothing to combat disinformation, because every form of engagement boosts posts.

>At what point can we finally admit there is a coordinated war on against freedom of expression online?

Just call it a war of hate speech or "disinformation" instead and plenty of people will admit it.

The only war against freedom of expression is the constant threat of no longer allowing private organizations their freedom of speech by letting them publish what they want.

Society doesn’t have a censorship problem, we have an entitlement problem. People now apparently think they’re entitled to someone else’s platform, when they’re not.

It's one thing for instagram to not show things; it's quite another for the government to even request they not.

No it isn’t, not so long as Instagram is the one making the decision.

The the government requesting your employer fire you is ok as long as your employer makes the decision?

That’s not how the law works.

The government can’t limit speech, except in rare exceptions. Making suggestions to limit speech is still limiting speech.

Absolutely, request away, and yes it is absolutely how the law works. Anyone can ask for anything, you’re free to just say no.

You do not have an absolute right to free speech when it impinges on the free speech rights of somebody else.

An entity that has power over you "asking" you to do anything is inherently coercive.

The point is they don’t have power, as stated in the First Amendment.

That's a nice legal fiction, but realistically, they did until the moment the courts stepped in and told them to back off. Unless there are severe consequences for unconstitutional actions, the abuse always comes first.

...none of this is what the parent comment was talking about in their claim that there is a "war on free speech".

You are confusing de jure power with de facto power. Government has shown, again and again, that they will abuse and overstep without any legal right to do so. In the meantime until the courts catch up, that coercive power imbalance still exists.

I literally just said this isn’t what the person I replied to was talking about. I’m mistaking nothing.

The other issue is often it is government employees who have been paid by laws passed by congress (appropriations) making these requests. So the act of making the request potentially makes the appropriation a violation of the first amendment. I don’t think it’s a stretch to interpret the government using money to pay people to request twitter to remove protected speech as ‘abridging free speech’ and such appropriations as congress passing a law. There is similar case law for how publicly funded universities must conduct themselves. Though, even though you could make a similar argument for how public universities work I suspect courts have used a different argument to justify that framework.

But it’s very weird to me that universities run by the state must be viewpoint and content neutral in their speech restrictions even if there is no explicit law passed by the government to restrict speech but the government is allowed to employ a mass of people to make ‘requests’ and such requests don’t need to pass a viewpoint and content neutrality test. The situations are very similar because in both cases there is not an explicit law passed by the government punishing people for making bad speech.

This is simply not true.

A request from someone with power is bound by law.

I went through a ton of government contract law training. I can’t request that my contractor wash my car. I can’t “just ask” that they work unpaid labor. Etc etc.

It’s one thing if a rando or equal power requests. But a person in authority can’t do that.

Imagine all those jerk bosses saying “I just asked my secretary to perform fellatio on me. I didn’t require it. And I never even threatened to fire them.” That defense doesn’t work just like the courts found that the government requesting isn’t allowed.

It is factually incorrect to claim a request from someone with power is bound by law.

You can absolutely do those things as a matter of law. You can’t do those things as a matter of policy, however. You were trained on policy, written out of an abundance of respect for the law, training it’s clear needs to be more common, but the law itself is less clear.

What I mean is that the person making the request is bound by law to not make those requests.

The government needs to follow the laws that bind it. And making an illegal request is just that.

I didn’t mean that you are legally required to follow the request.

They are not bound by law not to make those requests, they are bound by policy.

No, the courts have ruled that the law prevents these types of illegal requests. Policy was created to make it easier for the government to follow the law.

They have not, this is false.

The problem, as you can see in the story we’re commenting under, is that often requests from the government can imply (either intentionally or not) the threat of retaliation or force.

The government spends a lot of time making requests of private companies, of other governments, and of individuals. But they have a duty to avoid crossing the line and applying unfair pressure to coerce the response they want.

Agreed, the threats were going too far. But those are clearly being dealt with, and not in any way indicative of a free speech crisis such as what was referenced to in the parent comment.

I really don't get it. There was a massive wave of misinformation during covid-19 that contributed to the USA having the worst mortality count of any country.

A lot of people died. This isn't a case where people thought the wrong things and it made them vote wrong. It caused them to spread diseases to other people and kill them.

That's what this court case is about right? I'm shocked that people think this is a case where the government should not step in. I think they should have been much more aggressive.

Why does the state have an interest in what free people choose to talk about?

The state has an interest in keeping people alive, and in having people not make decisions which will negatively impact those around them. Someone not taking simple precautions like wearing a mask or getting vaccinated and taking a bed in a full hospital is a legitimate state concern – but a time-limited one, too, which is only compelling during a crisis.

The state has an interest in forcing people to make the Right Decisions. Thus... who cares about free speech anyway, when it can lead to the Wrong Decisions?

But yes, that is one of many Legitimate State Concerns.

It's sad that you're being downvoted only because you disagreed with the prevailing pov here.

for all its talk of being an open exchange of ideas, HN often devolves into exactly the opposite.

If it is legal for the state to aggressively censor what the state deems misinformation in the case of a real crisis, it is similarly legal for the state to aggressively censor true things that the state deems misinformation in the case of a manufactured crisis.

That's the issue: we do not trust the state to be impartial enough to decide what is or isn't misinformation. Remember when they lied and told us not to wear masks so they could hoard them for healthcare workers? In that instance if they had been "much more aggressive" as you advocate, saying the true and correct statements of "this is an airborne respiratory virus and you should wear a mask" would be subject to such censorship.

Given that we've seen governments carry out all manner of atrocities (eg the US CIA torturing people in the wake of 9/11 for a recent example, or the Third Reich's famous death camps) throughout literally all of human history up to and including present day without exception, by both "good" governments and "the bad guys" (also without exception), why on Earth should we allow such organizations the power to decide with force of law what is or isn't true?

A lot more people will die from direct and intentional actions by government than will die from misinformation.

> how do we solve for the society-wide censorship problem

Or: how do we "solve for" the people-that-want-absolute-freedom-of-speech problem? Because that's the other side of the coin. Some mild restrictions on what can or cannot be said in public environments is not tyranny.

Maybe you should read the text of the first amendment?

I don’t think you understand the first amendment - there are numerous Supreme Court decisions that place limits: obscenity, defamation, fraud, incitement, speech integral to criminal conduct, threats, child pornography.

You cannot have absolutism in a well functioning country.

Mild is subjective. Truth isn't determined by a majority.

Tyranny is on a dimmer switch.

> Truth isn't determined by a majority.

It's not about truth. It's about stability, safety. How do you keep a bunch of pretty hard-core fascist propagandists from stirring up the people without any repercussion? A government needs control, or it loses its legitimacy. I think that's at least implied in the main text of the constitution.

> How do you keep a bunch of pretty hard-core fascist propagandists from stirring up the people without any repercussion?

A million Iraqis probably have the same question.

Preserving the ability of the public to organize and publish freely is probably one of the foundational elements of the solution to keeping a populace from getting so hijacked. The problem is that the incumbent state and military fits your description much better and more often than any upstart group.

I honestly don't understand why anyone with this attitude wants to live in the United States, when the default worldwide is this, and the United States is the sole exception.

The US is not and has never been an exception, it has always recognized legal limits on free speech[0].

You may disagree with those limits but they've always been there.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

The US is the exception in the sense that it is the only country that has seriously tried to narrow down these limits to what is absolutely necessary.

Obviously not. "Seriously" and "absolutely necessary" are subjective terms, essentially matters of personal opinion, and plenty of Americans argue that the limits in the US are either too loose or too rigid (see the current debates around social media, Section 230 and whether or not private platforms should be forced to act as common carriers.)

Meanwhile, cultures differ, and people outside of the US may well see their own governments' drawing the lines elsewhere, for instance banning of hate speech and Nazi propaganda, as "absolutely necessary."

Yeah, this attitude that what sort of limit is absolutely necessary is "subjective", "essentially a matter of personal opinion" is exactly what the US (not every single american, but american first amendment jurisprudence) is the exception to.

It really isn't, even the Supreme Court has differed on the matter over time.

To differ doesn't mean to accept that something is subjective. Even mathematicians have differed about proofs.

> To differ doesn't mean to accept that something is subjective.

Yes it does. That's what subjective means.

Obviously, many people refuse to accept that their personal opinions on political matters are anything less than absolute, immutable, objective fact, but that isn't relevant, because refusing to accept that doesn't make it, or you, objective.

>Even mathematicians have differed about proofs.

Politics isn't math. There is no equation or statement that can quantify the American model of freedom of speech, nor prove it correct, much less more correct than all other models, in the same way as E=MC^2 or Pythagoras' theorem.

See: https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/social.pdf

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