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Comment by nullc | Hacker News Reader

But is it?

The opinion NYT is reporting on is clear that the censorship in question went beyond Covid: "Their content touched on a host of divisive topics like the COVID-19 lab-leak theory, pandemic lockdowns, vaccine side-effects, election fraud, and the Hunter Biden laptop story" ... "Individual Plaintiffs seek to express views—and have been censored for their views—on topics well beyond COVID-19, including allegations of election fraud and the Hunter Biden laptop story."

Yet the NYT only mentions covid and the discourse on HN-- which at the moment is substantially making excuses for the administration on the basis of "but covid!"-- is worse off for it.

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I’m reading it a bit differently. Yes the censorship of political speech related to political figures is bad but we’re coming out of a period where much more fundamental rights were violated due to a slightly stronger than usual respiratory virus. The seriousness of the covid reaction is an order of magnitude greater than any alleged biden corruption. Until people are ready to reevaluate what happened, we’re still in danger of a return of extreme restrictions - since there are plenty of other things that have high death rates such as cars, drugs, and obesity.

An important thing here though is that it doesn't matter that the views the government was imposing were right or wrong. 1A prohibits the imposition.

The fact that the NYT article only touches on one point has turned the HN thread into a debate over if tweets about masking, vaccine cardiac side effects, or whatever were right or wrong.

But that's immaterial to the law here and it's important because there is clear polarization between posters on the underlying facts. But we don't have to agree on the substance of the censored speech to recognize that the state's use of coercion to suppress views it disagreed with is plainly unlawful. The 1A doesn't only apply when we agree with the speech being protected -- in fact it's most important when we don't: Speech almost everyone agrees with is going to get communicated no matter what the government does to censor it, it's unpopular views that are the most in need of 1A protection.

So I think NYT does us a disservice by falsely portraying this as being about 'covid misinformation', as it invites everyone to substitute a discussion about the states power to censor here with yet another debate on covid -- a debate itself which has been tainted by politics and censorship.

COVID matters as we generally agree that during public health crisises it is reasonable for the government to overstep bounds a little to reduce loss of life.

Objectively it is different.

Additionally you are going to have a hard time justifying that the federal government shouldn't do anything about disinformation. We cannot allow foreign adversaries to include our politics by saying "but the first amendment".

So while we cannot be too broad with our actions and any action should be carefully monitored for violation it isn't fundamental that the government cannot say "please don't give a platform to disinformation".

Generally speaking most of the things involved weren't deleted but deplatformed. Most commonly by not recommending them or adding a warning to them.

Deletion did occur but my understanding was it wasn't a significant portion of the actions taken by platforms.

> ...we generally agree that during public health crisises it is reasonable for the government to overstep bounds a little to reduce loss of life.

No, "we" don't agree in the slightest. In fact, in my view, a "crisis" is exactly when government boundaries are most important and need to be strictly enforced, not relaxed, in order to prevent significant abuse.

We shouldn't allow the government to act quickly? That is nonsensical, going slower during a crisis makes zero sense.

You can argue what boundaries should be relaxed and how far to relax them but "hold the government to a tighter standard ahead of time during a crisis" is the opposite of helpful.

We normally hold the government to a strict limit due to there being no time limit.

> That is nonsensical, going slower during a crisis makes zero sense.

I never said anything about "going slower," I disagreed with your assertion that "we all agree" that government should be allowed to "overstep bounds" in a crisis. I am unsure why you think speed of action implies violating boundaries. Speed up your crisis response all you want, but do so within established boundaries.

> You can argue what boundaries should be relaxed and how far to relax them

I can argue whatever I want. And my argument is that no boundaries whatsoever should be "relaxed" for any reason. Ever.

> We normally hold the government to a strict limit due to there being no time limit.

No, we hold the government to strict limits because we have seen throughout history what governments that are not held to strict limits do to people during times of "crisis" and "emergency."

At the time we worry less and give deference to the government. Sue later if they screwed up.

Exactly what is going on is what you want, you don't need to add "they shouldn't have done anything in the first place" as if they very act of trying to prevent misinformation that was actively leading to the spread of a contagious virus was fundamentally flawed.

> trying to prevent misinformation

An unsubstantiated and highly arguable claim.

> that was actively leading to the spread of a contagious virus

Again, so you claim.

And, yes, it was "fundamentally flawed" either way because it involved government exercising powers it has no right to exercise.

> COVID matters as we generally agree that during public health crisises it is reasonable for the government to overstep bounds a little to reduce loss of life.

Don't agree at all. Especially when the very same public health "experts" proved themselves entirely incompetent fools who don't understand their own data.

What these "experts" did was absolutely insane. It blows my mind so many people went along with it with nary a hint of intellectual curiosity and still to this day defend it.

Yes mistakes were made. The mask kerfuffle was a black eye on the CDC 100%.

But calling it overall insane and pretending everyone was ignorant at the time only makes sense if you are ignoring everything that wasn't eventually confirmed true.

Felt to me the CDC wanted to appear competent and authoritative while being caught flat footed[1] with something they hadn't dealt with before.

Me I tried to figure out what mitigations were needed and decided it wasn't knowable so did them all until the picture became clearer.

[1] CDC thought the next big pandemic was going to be influenza. And then got hit with something different. But then executed as if it was. Bonus for about 50 years they didn't fund any research on how influenza and other respiratory viruses spread either.

The Fifth Circuit really isn't credible currently as they just make up rules as they go along depending on if it fits the politics they like. This sums it up nicely:

https://twitter.com/JamesSurowiecki/status/17005123233188249...

> The Fifth Circuit Court has now held that it's unconstitutional for the federal govt to influence platforms' moderation decisions, while also holding it's constitutional for Texas to compel platforms to leave up content they want to take down. Impossible to square that circle.

It's as if this crazy court ruled on one hand that the USPS can't refuse to deliver your mail just because they don't like your opinions, but at the same time the court ruled that Texas is allowed to force the USPS to deliver everyone's mail regardless of their opinions?

To be fair saying "there was election fraud" is disinformation at this point, we very carefully checked and the only real problems were people following Trump's advice and voting multiple times for him (on extremely small scales that didn't matter for the overall election so not material)

There is nuance in the laptop story. There were things said that were objectively disinformation so if those things were targeted it could make sense.

Now the White House ideally would have kept and arms length to put forward a "not protecting my own" attitude but there is a wide gap between ideally and illegal coercion.

The first amendment protect the right of the people to say wrong things, not just right things. The legality of the government suppression doesn't depend on the things being said being right or not.

People who said wrong thing may have committed crimes or subjected themselves to liability for doing so-- freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. But the government doesn't get to go shutting down speech it deems wrong if it did the first amendment would have no force, because inevitably whatever is censored is viewed as "wrong" in some respect by whomever is doing the censoring.

They weren't prevented from saying wrong things or even penalized for lying.

They were deplatformed. You don't have a first amendment right to use platforms as you like and those platforms have the same first amendment right you do to decide what is brought forward as emphasized by that platform.

Should the government be allowed to influence that and in what way is an interesting question but it is less the end users rights and more the platforms rights in question here.

Getting removed from the algorithm isn't censorship.

>They were deplatformed,

which is a penalty for "lying" and prevents them from saying "wrong" things.

in that time What's "wrong" and what's a "lie" could change within a few weeks (do masks help? in march 2020 people were called lunatics for believing so, in October 2020 people were called lunatics for not believing so. or consider the absurd psyop about the accidental lab leak hypothesis)

People weren't deplatformed for saying masks helped.

people spreading the absurd notion that face masks work the same outside hospitals as inside hospitals are causing panic and mask shortages. therefore they needed to be silenced. (that was the state of public discourse in april 2020, maybe you have repressed the memory)

Being deplatformed at the request of the government and being censored look an awful lot alike to me.

Platforms can deplatform you, they're not beholden to the first amendment. The government cannot. The case made here is that it was the government that performed the deplatforming by coersively deputizing the platforms to act on their behalf.

It's uncontroversial that the government cannot lawfully force private parties to do what it cannot lawfully do itself. The controversy here is mostly over if the governments actions were sufficiently coercive here for this to apply.

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