That "and/or" is doing a lot of work here. There's a huge difference between government censorship and forcing private companies to host content they don't want to host on servers they own.
Then again, Alphabet is now claiming they did want to host it and mean old Biden pressured them into pulling it so if we buy that, maybe it doesn't matter.
> What if they started banning tylenol-autism sceptical accounts?
What if it's pro-cannibalism or pedophilia content? Everyone has a line, we're all just arguing about where exactly we think that line should be.
I've already described above that even in this thread there's a sentiment which is that, "as long as somebody has gained coercive power legitimately then it is within their right to coerce." I see terms thrown around like, "if somebody owns" or, "if somebody is the CEO of..." which speaks to the growing air of illiberality an liberal autocranarianism which is a direct result of the neoliberal assault founding and funding thousands of Cato Institutes, Adam Smith Societies, and Heritage Foundations since the neoliberal turn in the late 1960's. We've legitimized domination ethics as an extension of the hungry rights of pseudotyrants and the expense of people in general.
I wonder what people in general might one day do about this? I wonder if there's a historical precedent for what happens when people face oppression and the degradation of common cultural projects?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution#October_Rev...
If I choose to put a Kamala sign in my yard and not a Trump sign, that’s an expression of free speech.
If the marketing company I own decides to not work for causes I don’t personally support, that’s free speech.
If the video hosting platform I’m CEO of doesn’t host unfounded anti-vax content because I think it’s a bad business move, is that not also free speech?
> we want to be sure that you have a handle on vaccine hesitancy generally and are working toward making the problem better. This is a concern that is shared at the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the White House
Saying you want to make sure they will censor these videos is a threat, and then they said that Biden was behind this to add legitimacy to the threat.
If it was just a friendly greeting why would they threaten youtube with Bidens name? If youtube did this willingly there would be no need to write such a threatening message saying they want to make sure Youtube censors these.
You can read the whole report here if you wanna see more: https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j...
And if you don't see that as a threat, imagine someone in the trump administration sent that, do you still think its not a threat? Of course its a threat, it makes no sense to write that way otherwise, you would just say you wanted to hear how it goes not say you wanna make sure they do this specific thing and threaten them with the presidents powers.
We don't need to imagine anything. The chair of the FCC publicly threatened ABC over Kimmel. This morning Trump posted a direct threat of government reprisals if they didn't fire a comedian over a joke he doesnt like.
Nothing vague or implied about it. Just the government of the United States directly threatening free speech
I wont link to truth social. You can Google it.
Fortunately, the Trump administration has given us an example of what a threat and coercion actually looks like. They declared exactly the action they would take if they did not get their preferred outcome and it’s clearly politically motivated.
That’s quite a bit different than we’re concerned about this misinformation and would like you to do something about it.
I think a reasonable and nuanced debate can be had on whether or not that was appropriate, but there is a difference.
I very much agree. It's reasonable to ask if the Biden admin overstepped their boundaries by politely asking if Youtube would help them stop people from murdering each other with disinformation and trying to overthrow the government.
I think the current situation is much less debatable. The government is now issuing ultimatums and very publicly threatening corporations to stifle free speech.
It’s a problem especially if there is a direct or implied threat to use the powers of the government to impact a business if the government is acting counter to the first amendment. This is essentially the government causing the outcome, not a business using its free speech after an independent business decision.
One could argue a business might come to a decision to pull content the government doesn’t like independently without coercion if they had an antitrust case pending with the DOJ. There’s probably a line here where the government needs to act in a specific way to threaten to make it coercion. Maybe the line was crossed in YT’s case?
On all of these cases I come to the conclusion there needs to be separation of powers on some of these executive branch actions. I’m not sure how to do it something is needed to protect individual rights from executive overreach (regardless of which party is in power).
I want to recapitulate this sentiment as often and as widely as possible-- Rand and her cronies know as much about virtue, freedom, and Aristotle as they do about fornicating; not much.
Even if I disagreed with you I would upvote for this gem. I'll be chuckling at this one randomly for weeks.
In short-- no. Your right is to positively assert, "Trump sign" not, "excludes all other signs as a comparative right" even though this is a practical consequence of supporting one candidate and not others. "Owning a marketing company" means that you most hold to industrial and businesss ethics in order to do business in a common economic space. Being the CEO of any company that serves the democratic public means that one's ethical obligations must reflect the democratic sentiment of the public. It used to be that, "capitalism" or, "economic liberalism" meant that the dollars and eyeballs would go elsewhere as a basic bottom line for the realization of the ethical sentiment of the nation-state. This becomes less likely under conditions of monopoly and autocracy. The truth is that Section 230 created a nightmare. If internet platforms are now ubiquitous and well-developed aren't the protections realized under S230 now obsolete?
It would be neat if somebody did, "you can put any sign in my yard to promote any political cause unless it is specifically X/Trump/whatever." That would constitute a unique form of exclusionary free speech.
How does one determine the democratic sentiment of the public, especially a public that is pretty evenly ideologically split? Seems fraught with personal interpretation (which is arguably another form of free speech.)
I'm reminded of that old line by Tolstoy-- something like, "happy families are all happy for precisely the same reasons; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The point from an Adam Smith perspective is that healthy societies might all end up tending toward the same end by widely different means: Chinese communists might achieve superior cooperation and the realization of their values as, "the good life" by means dissimilar to the Quaker or the African tribesperson. The trick is seeing that the plurality of living forms and their competing values is not a hinderance to cooperation and mutual well-being but an opportunity for extended and renewed discourses about, "what we would like to be as creatures."
Worth mentioning:
https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Courses/Antirepresentationa...
If those two private companies would host all legal content, this could be a thriving market.
Somehow big tech and payment processors get to censor most software.
Modern democracies aren't founded on realist ethics or absolute commitments to economic liberalism as totalizing-- they're founded on a ethical balance between the real needs of people, the real potential for capital expansion, and superior sentiments about the possibilities of the human condition. As a kid that supported Ron Paul's bid for the Republican nomination as a 16-year-old I can't help but feel that libertarian politics has ruined generations of people by getting them to accept autocracy as, "one ethical outcome to a free society." It isn't.
The irony in me posting this will be lost on most: https://www.uschamber.com/
I simply don't believe people who say they want to support a culture of free speech on a media or social media site. They haven't really thought about what that means.
While I'm with my dudes in computer space-- it all starts with the passing of the Mansfield Amendment. You want to know why tech sucks and we haven't made any foundational breakthroughs for decades? The privatization of technology innovation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_of_Silicon_Valley
https://www.nsf.gov/about/history/narrative#chapter-iv-tumul...
The American civilization has deep flaws but has historically worked toward, "doing what was right."
https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/book-v-of-the-reven...
This private-public tyranny that's going on right now. The FCC can't directly tell Kimmel, "you can't say that" they can say, "you may have violated this or this technical rule which..." This is how Project 2025 will play out in terms of people's real experience. You occupy all posts with ideologically sympathetic players and the liberality people are used to becomes ruinous as, "the watchers" are now, "watching for you." The irony is that most conservatives believe this is just, "what the left was doing in the 2010's in reverse" and I don't have a counterargument for this other than, "it doesn't matter; it's always bad and unethical." Real differences between Colbert and Tate taken for granted.
We must be able to have those debates, but we must also guard against grifters selling 5g-proof underwear to the functionally illiterate or serving up vaccine skepticism based more on their desire to score political points than science.
The devil will always be in the details, and it's a tough balancing act. I personally suspect that the way we do this is by checking credentials.
Doctors and scientists should be allowed to offer alternative theories. Meth-addicts posting from labs hidden in the Ozarks, software developers, and unqualified politicians, maybe not.
The legal process already did all the hard work of reaching consensus/compromise on where that line is, so just use that. At least with the legal system, there's some degree of visibility and influence possible by everyone. It's not some ethics department silently banning users they don't agree with.
It really depends. I remember after the Christchurch mosque shootings, there was a scramble to block the distribution of the shooter's manifesto. In some countries, the government could declare the content illegal directly, but in others, such as Australia, they didn't have pre-existing laws sufficiently wide to cover that, and so what happened in practice is that ISPs "proactively" formed a voluntary censorship cartel, acting in lockstep to block access to all copies of the manifesto, while the government was working on the new laws. If the practical end result is the same - a complete country block on some content - does it really matter whether it's dressed up as public or private censorship?
And with large tech companies like Alphabet and Meta, it is a particularly pointed question given how much the market is monopolized.
OTOH if the goal is to prevent copycats then I don't see the point of a 90-day embargo. People who are likely to take that kind of content seriously enough to emulate are still going to do so. Tarrant, for example, specifically referenced Anders Breivik.
Power is power. Wealth is power. Political power is power. The powerful should not control the lives or destinies of the less powerful. This is the most basic description of contemporary democracy but becomes controversial when the Randroids and Commies alike start to split hairs about how the Lenins and John Galts of the world have a right to use power to further their respective political objectives.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm (Leviathan by Hobbes)
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50922 (Perpetual Peace by Kant)
https://www.heritage-history.com/site/hclass/secret_societie...
This throws out spam and fraud filters, both of which are content-based moderation.
Nobody moderates anything isn’t unfortunately a functional option. Particularly if the company has to sell ads.
The reason we ban government censorship is so that a private actor can always create their own conspiracy theory + snuff film site if they want, and other platforms are not obligated to carry content they find objectionable. Get really into Rumble or Truth Social or X if you would like a very different perspective from Youtube's.
At the crux of things the libertarians and the non-psychos are just having a debate on when it's fair game to be unethical or cruel to others in the name of extending human freedom and human dignity. We've fallen so far from the tree.
What you are arguing for is a dissolution of HN and sites like it.
As a book publisher, should I be required to publish your furry smut short stories? Of course not. Is that infringing on your freedom of speech? Of course not.
Compelled speech is not free speech. You have no right to an audience. The existence of a wide distribution platform does not grant you a right to it.
These arguments fall completely flat because it’s always about the right to distribute misinformation. It’s never about posting porn or war crimes or spam. That kind of curation isn’t contentious.
Google didn’t suddenly see the light and become free speech absolutists. They caved to political pressure and are selectively allowing the preferred misinformation of the current administration.
And I don't think it erodes any fundamental rights to put restrictions on huge monopolies.
If you force Google alone to amplify certain speech then what competitive advantage does a less censorious service provide?
> If it's purely by making them suck less, I'm okay with that risk.
Define “suck less”. Now ask yourself if you are comfortable with someone you completely disagree with defining what sucks less.
> And I don't think it erodes any fundamental rights to put restrictions on huge monopolies.
You’re talking about antitrust, not free expression.
Compelled speech is an erosion of the first amendment. You may think that erosion is acceptable but you can’t deny it exists.
If that's the only "advantage" another service has, I don't care if it has no competitive advantage. If it offers anything else then that's the advantage.
Seriously this idea is super weird to me. There are plenty of reasons to avoid too much regulation. But "don't force company X to make their users happier because happy users won't leave" is a terrible reason.
>Define “suck less”. Now ask yourself if you are comfortable with someone you completely disagree with defining what sucks less.
A big part of the "if" is that people are making their own evaluations.
> You’re talking about antitrust
I am not talking about antitrust. I'm saying that the bigger and more powerful a corporation gets the further it is from a human and human rights.
> Compelled speech is an erosion of the first amendment. You may think that erosion is acceptable but you can’t deny it exists.
In this case, barely at all, and it's the same one we already have for common carriers.
The value proposition of a less censorious YouTube alternative is exactly that it is less censorious. You’re seemingly arguing against free markets.
> Seriously this idea is super weird to me. There are plenty of reasons to avoid too much regulation. But "don't force company X to make their users happier because happy users won't leave" is a terrible reason.
The problem with compelled speech is that the government should not be in the business of deciding what kind of speech makes people happy.
> A big part of the "if" is that people are making their own evaluations.
People should have the freedom to choose the media they consume. Compelled speech takes that choice away from them by putting the government in the position of making that decision for the people. This distorts the marketplace of ideas.
I don’t have time to read every comment or email or watch every video. Private content moderation is a value add and a form of expression. We need competition in that space, not government restriction.
> I am not talking about antitrust. I'm saying that the bigger and more powerful a corporation gets the further it is from a human and human rights.
If your problem with Google is how much influence they have then yes, you are talking about antitrust. That’s the regulatory mechanism by which excessive corporate influence can be restricted.
> In this case, barely at all, and it's the same one we already have for common carriers.
“A little” is still more than nothing which was your previous assertion. You may be comfortable with the rising temperature of our shared pot of water but I say it is a cause for concern.
You're only talking about the people that like a feature. Why do you need a free market for that if every company can do it?
Not everything has to be a free market. There are reasons to use competition but not this reason.
> the government should not be in the business of deciding what kind of speech makes people happy
I did not say or intentionally imply they should.
> People should have the freedom to choose the media they consume. Compelled speech takes that choice away
Not if the compelling is just that they can't ban content. That only adds choice.
> If your problem with Google is how much influence they have then yes, you are talking about antitrust. That’s the regulatory mechanism by which excessive corporate influence can be restricted.
There can be other mechanisms, and more importantly my argument there isn't about mechanisms. They are barely barely humanlike, so human rights are barely barely relevant.
> “A little” is still more than nothing which was your previous assertion. You may be comfortable with the rising temperature of our shared pot of water but I say it is a cause for concern.
It's barely any increase because we already have common carrier rules.
And I stand by the statement that it doesn't erode fundamental rights. The right of giant corporations to have free speech is at the edge, not fundamental. And a rule like that increases the free speech of so many actual humans.
It is literally the very first thing you said in this comment thread. It either frames your entire argument or you have no idea what you are talking about.
> How is compelling google to censor less going to entrench their dominance? If it's purely by making them suck less, I'm okay with that risk.
And even if it would objectively make them suck less in some scenario, there's still nothing in that post that says I want the government to force them to do it. That post was only about whether it entrenches their dominance or not.
Then in my next comment I:
* put the word 'advantage' in scare quotes
* clarified that "if they suck less" is supposed to be evaluated by individual people and not me
* stated that there are reasons to not want regulation, but that I was skeptical of this specific entrenchment reason
The first two should make it clear that I'm not even saying it's an advantage, and the third should make it clear that I'm focusing on this specific argument and not making an overall case for government intervention. So that's three reasons I'm not saying the government should do it.
How do I make my non-endorsement clearer?
Also you were the one calling it a "competitive advantage" and "value proposition". That's not endorsement but it's definitely closer to endorsement than what I was saying.
Edit: Wait, I made this whole post interpreting the "should" as about government intervention. But I think technically that "should" was actually about the government deciding what makes people happy? If that's what you meant to ask then I have no idea how you got there. The sentences you quoted don't support that interpretation at all. The "suck less -> entrenchment" theory only works if users are actually happy, completely separate from what the government thinks.
The effect of YouTube’s content moderation size on speech is a symptom of weak antitrust policy, not of free expression. So sure, mention the effect on speech if you want but don’t ignore the solution.
Hosting content is not giving someone an audience.
If I take my stool into the main square and stand on it, giving a speech about the evils of canned spinach. People pass by but no-one stops and listens(or not for long), I did not have an audience.
If I record the same thing and put it up on Youtube and the same reaction happens. I only get 5~10 views, Youtube is not giving me an audience. They are hosting the video, just like they do for many other videos that are uploaded everyday.
If Youtube suddenly starts pushing my video onto everyone's "Home", "Recommended " or whatever; then that would be them giving me an audience.
If the Big Spinach Canners find my video and ask Youtube to take it down, that is censorship.
Yes, it is.
> If I take my stool into the main square and stand on it, giving a speech about the evils of canned spinach. People pass by but no-one stops and listens(or not for long), I did not have an audience.
Well, yes, you did. They are free to cheer, boo, or leave. YouTube is more like an open mic night. I reject the idea that it is a public space like a main square.
> If I record the same thing and put it up on Youtube and the same reaction happens. I only get 5~10 views, Youtube is not giving me an audience. They are hosting the video, just like they do for many other videos that are uploaded everyday.
I am lucky to have never worked in content moderation but I’m certain YouTube refuses or removes submissions every day. So while your spinach speech may survive there are many other videos that don’t.
> If Youtube suddenly starts pushing my video onto everyone's "Home", "Recommended " or whatever; then that would be them giving me an audience.
Being on YouTube at all is YouTube giving you an audience. Their recommendation algorithm is the value proposition of their product to consumers whose attention is the product sold to advertisers.
> If the Big Spinach Canners find my video and ask Youtube to take it down, that is censorship.
Perhaps in the strictest dictionary sense it is censorship but it is not censorship in a first amendment sense. This is a private business decision. You’re free to submit your video as an ad and pay Google directly for eyeballs. And they can still say no.
The only problem here is the size of YouTube relative to competitors. The fix there is antitrust, not erosion of civil liberties.
Consider the landscape that evolves in a post-YouTube environment with an eroded first amendment and without section 230 protections. Those protections are critical for innovation and free expression.
I want to see how steep this hill you're willing to die on is. What's that old saying-- that thing about the shoe being on the other foot?
We have the right to do a potentially limitless amount of unbecoming, cruel, and oppressive things to our fellow man. We also have the potential for forming and proliferating societies. We invented religion and agriculture out of dirt and need. Let us choose Nazarenes, Jeffersons, and Socrates' over Neros, Alexanders, and Napoleons. This didn't use to be politically controversial!
Are you the government? If not then it is not oppression. It is free speech. This is the point of my rhetorical device.
My fear is that this is incredibly uncontroversial this is until it's not-- when pushes becomes shoves we start having debates about what are, "legitimate" concentrations of power (wealth) and how that legitimacy in itself lets us, "tolerate what we would generally condemn as intolerable." I feel we need to take a queue from the Chomsky's of the world and decree:
"all unjustified concentrations of power and wealth are necessarily interested in control and as such we should aggressively and purposefully refuse to tolerate them at all as a basic condition of democratic living..."
This used to be, "social democracy" where these days the Democratic Party in the United States' motto is more, "let us make deals with the devil because reasons and things." People have the power. We are the people. Hare fucking Krsna.
I think government censorship should be strictly prohibited. I think "company" censorship is just the application of the first amendment.
Where I think the problem lies with things like YouTube is the fact that we have _monopolies_, so there is no "free market" of platforms.
I think we should be addressing "big tech" censorship not by requiring tech companies to behave like a government, but rather by preventing any companies from having so much individual power that we _need_ them to behave like a government.
We should have aggressive anti-trust laws, and interoperability requirements for large platforms, such that it doesn't matter if YouTube decides to be censorious, because there are 15 other platforms that people can viably use instead.
I've seen stupidity on the internet you wouldn't believe.
Time Cube rants — four simultaneous days in one rotation — burning across static-filled CRTs.
Ponzi pyramids stretching into forever, needing ten billion souls to stand beneath one.
And a man proclaiming he brought peace in wars that never were, while swearing the President was born on foreign soil.
All those moments… lost… in a rain of tweets.
We've got LLMs now, letting interested parties (government or not) overwhelm everyone with an endless barrage of the worst, cheapest, lowest quality AI slop, the kind that makes even AI proponents like me go "ah, I see what you mean about it being autocomplete", because even the worst of that by quality is still able to bury any bad news story just as effectively as any censorship. Too much noise and not enough signal, is already why I'm consuming far less YouTube these days, why I gave up on Twitter when it was still called that, etc.
And we have AI that's a lot better at holding a conversation than just the worst, cheapest, lowest quality AI slop. We've already seen LLMs are able to induce psychosis in some people just by talking to them, and that was, so far as we can tell, accidental. How long will it be before a developer chooses to do this on purpose, and towards a goal of their choice? Even if it's just those who are susceptible, there's a lot of people.
What's important is the freedom to share truth, no matter how uncomfortable, and especially when it's uncomfortable for those with power. Unfortunately, what we humans actually share the most is gossip, which is already a poor proxy for truth and is basically how all the witch hunts, genocides, and other moral-panic-induced horrors of history happened.
It is all a mess; it is all hard; don't mistake the proxy (free speech in general) for the territory (speak truth to power, I think?); censorship is simultaneously bad and the only word I know for any act which may block propaganda which is also bad.
On their platform, that’s exactly what they are entitled to do. When you type into the box in the Facebook app, that’s your speech. But unless the platform wants to add your contribution to their coherent speech product, they have every right to reject it.
Otherwise, the government is deciding what people can say, and you’d be against that, right?
Further, if I wanted to start a social media platform called thinkingtylenolcausesautismisstupid.com, wouldn’t restricting my right to craft my product defeat the whole point of my business?
Giving platforms the ability to moderate their output to craft a coherent speech product is the only reason we have multiple social networks with different rules, instead of one first-mover social network with no rules where everyone is locked in by network effects.
Have we all lost the ability to reason? Seriously, this isn't hard. No one owes you distribution unless you have a contract saying otherwise.
But these days, when you can count the forums on one hand even if you're missing a few fingers, and they all have extremely similar (American-style) censorship policies? To me it's less clear than it once was.
Might be a boon for federated services—smaller servers, finer-grained units of responsibility…
It makes sites not count as the publisher or speaker of third party content posted to their site, even if they remove or moderate that third party content.
Even today, I was listening to NPR talk about the potential TikTok deal and the commenter was wringing their hands about having a "rich guy" like Larry Ellison control the content.
I don't know exactly what the right answer is. But given their reach -- and the fact that a lot of these companies are near monopolies -- I think we should at least do more than just shrug and say, "they can do what they want."
The common carrier law says you have to for for some things, so it makes sense to institute such a law for some parts of social media as they are fundamental enough. It is insane that we give that much censorship power to private corporations. They shouldn't have the power to decide elections on a whim etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
Is there perhaps another name for what you're describing? It piques my interest.
So the equivalent of Google banning anyone talking about Covid is the same as a phone service provider ending service for anyone mentioning covid on their phones. Nobody but the most extreme authoritarians thinks phone providers should be allowed to do that, so why not apply this to Google as well?
If they did that, people would leave the service in droves for a competitor with reasonable moderation. Nobody wants to use a site that is overrun with spam and porn.
Did people leave Google in droves in favor of a competitor that censors out all porn from search results? No, people had no issue that you can find porn on Google, they still used it. Youtube providing porn to those who want it does not cause problems for anyone, just like it doesn't for Google search, and Google even run both so they can easily apply this same feature on Youtube.
> Nobody wants to use a site that is overrun with spam and porn.
The internet is overrun by spam and porn yet people still use it, so you are clearly wrong. Google already manages as search engine over the internet that is capable of not showing you porn when you don't search for it, but you can find it if you do, so Google has already solved that problem and could just do the same in Youtube.
You might ask yourself why you are here, instead of another website with less or no moderation.
I would prefer if discord / reddit and similar became common carriers of forums, not messages. So discord and reddit can't control what a subreddit does and what its moderators do, but the moderators can control what the people posting there can do.
By having a common carrier forum provider anyone could easily make their own forum with their own rules and compete on an open market without needing any technical skills, and without the forum provider being able to veto everything they say and do on that forum. That is where we want to be, in such an environment HN wouldn't need to depend on ycombinator, you could have many independently moderated forums and you pick the best one.
Discord and reddit today aren't that, both ban things they don't like, it would be much better if we removed that power from them. Both reddit and discord admins allows porn and spam, their censorship adds zero value to the platform, the only thing it does is kick some political factions out of the platform which doesn't add any value to it, as I wouldn't visit those discords / subreddits anyway so they don't hurt me.
So it isn't hard to imagine how to draft such laws where all our favorite usecases are still allowed while also adding much more freedom for users and making life easier for these content platforms since they are no longer targeted by takedown request spam, it is a win win for everyone except those who want to censor.
Unless you make a law preventing all moderation, the users and advertisers are going to migrate to the moderated forums.
Thanks for answering why the law is needed, as you explained a private solution cannot solve this. Advertisers wouldn't be able to push reddit to ban things if reddit weren't allowed to ban them, so you would still be able to run ads with such a law, it just reduces the power those ad companies has over you.
And no, the ad companies doesn't really care if you show porn or show terrorist propaganda on your site, you can both watch porn and read terrorist propaganda on Google without leaving the site yet every advertiser I know is happily spending a massive amount of money on Google ads. If they actually cared they would leave Google, instead they just care about bullying those who can comply, if they know the target wont budge due to a law then they would just continue to advertise like they do with Google.
These kind of regulations are needed when the free market results in oppressive results, there are many such cases where regulations do a good job and I don't see why these internet companies should be an exception.
If you take proposals from whoever and then only approve ones you specifically like, for whatever reason, then I don’t think anyone would feel silenced by that.
If you take anything from anyone, and a huge volume of it, on any topic and you don’t care what, except for a few politically controversial areas, that feels more like silencing. Especially when there is no alternative service available due to network effects and subsidies from arguably monopolistic practices.
Of course they would never check things before allowing them to be posted because there isn’t any profit in that.
Sure, Google doesn't need to host anything they don't want to; make it all Nazi apologia if they thing it serves their shareholders. But doing so and silencing all other viewpoints in that particular medium is surely not a net benefit for society, independent of how it affects Google.
I’d even search for “coronavirus” and primarily get “official” sites about Covid-19 even tho that’s just one of many coronaviruses. At least Wikipedia makes the front page again, with the Covid-19 page outranking the coronavirus page…
I’d even search for “coronavirus” and primarily get “official” sites about Covid-19 even tho that’s just one of many coronaviruses. At least Wikipedia makes the front page again, with the Covid-19 page outranking the coronavirus page…
SCOTUS. Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, holds that governments cannot coerce private entities into censoring speech they disfavor, even if they do not issue direct legal orders.
This was a publicly announced motivation for Elon Musk buying Twitter. Because of which we know the extent of this illegal behavior.
Mark Zuckerberg has also publicly stated Meta was asked to remove content by the US government.
>In April 2021, White House advisers met with Twitter content moderators. The moderators believed the meeting had gone well, but noted in a private Slack discussion that they had fielded "one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn't been kicked off from the platform."
Is there a difference between the White House stating they are looking at Section 230 and asking why this one guy has not been banned?
Also, spreading disinformation about covid has real-world implications.
Orange man getting his feelings hurt because comedian said something isn't even in the same ballpark
Your logic can be used to censor anything that goes against the narratives of the arbiters of disinformation.
> Orange man getting his feelings hurt because comedian said something isn't even in the same ballpark
Pejorative. Lack of evidence. Ignoring contradictory evidence. Sounds like you are locked in.
"Shouldn't they(Facebook and Twitter) be liable for publishing that information and then open to lawsuits?" - MSNBC "Certainly, they should be held accountable, You've heard the president speak very aggressively about this. He understands this is an important piece of the ecosystem." - White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield
Source: https://reason.com/2023/01/19/how-the-cdc-became-the-speech-...
So yes, MSNBC brought up Section 230 and the White House Communications Director says "Yes, we are looking to hold social media accountable."
>Also from the same source: The Twitter moderators believed the meeting had gone well, but noted in a private Slack discussion that they had fielded "one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn't been kicked off from the platform."
>Throughout 2020 and 2021, Berenson had remained in contact with Twitter executives and received assurances from them that the platform respected public debate. These conversations gave Berenson no reason to think his account was at risk. But four hours after Biden accused social media companies of killing people, Twitter suspended Berenson's account.
I don't care about Trump's feelings but if we want to be able to speak truth to power, we have to be willing to let people talk shit as well. Yes, COVID has real world implications. Almost everything does.
People on the left say "Think about the children and implications with regard to this." People on the right say "Think about the children and implications with regard to that."
Notice how none of them seem to be saying "Let's lay out the facts and let you think about it."
Preventing people from having a platform for content-free asshattery doesn't have that problem.
(A fun implication of this line is reasoning, is that the claim that Kimmel's comments were "lies" makes the jawboning against him more morally bad rather than less bad.)
More here: https://sbgi.net/sinclair-says-kimmel-suspension-is-not-enou...
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/06/trump-fcc-sinclair...
https://upriseri.com/sinclair-nexstar-duopoly-right-wing-con...
That can’t be your point, but I also can’t think of a more charitable interpretation.
You seem to think there's a bright line of "silenced" vs "not silenced". In reality there's many ways of limiting and restricting people's expressions. Some are generally considered acceptable and some are not. When huge swaths of communication are controlled by a handful of companies, their decisions have a huge impact on what speech gets suppressed. We should interrogate whether that serves the public interest.
What I'm trying to get at is it's possible to stifle people's freedom of expression without literally blocking them from every platform. Threatening their livelihood. Threatening their home. Kicking them off these core social media networks. All of these things are "silencing". And we should be wary of doing that for things we simply disagree about.
The other distinction you seem to be ignoring is that the Biden administration was doing it because of public health concerns. Trump and the FCC was doing it because a comedian said meab things aboit him and a devout racist.
What favoritism did the Biden administration show? They still went after Google for being a monopoly.
Unlike Trump who only had his administration approve the Paramount deal after accepting a $15 million bribe in public
That distinction is a relic of a world of truly public spaces used for communication— a literal town square. Then it became the malls and shopping centers, then the Internet— which runs on private pipes— and now it’s technological walled gardens. Being excluded from a walled garden now is effectively being “silenced” the same way being excluded from the town square was when whatever case law you’re thinking was decided.
To me that sounds only fair trade. You editorialize content. You are liable for all content. In every possible way.
I think if public health bodies just laid out the data they had honestly (good and bad) and said that they think most people should probably take it, but left it to people to decide, the vast, vast majority of people would still have gotten the vaccine but we wouldn't have allowed anti-vaccine sentiment to fester.
Nah, the same grifters who stand to make a political profit of turning everything into a wedge issue would have still hammered right into it. They've completely taken over public discourse on a wide range of subjects, that go well beyond COVID vaccines.
As long as you can make a dollar by telling people that their (and your) ignorance is worth just as much - or more - than someone else's knowledge, you'll find no shortage of listeners for your sermon. And that popularity will build its own social proof. (Millions of fools can't all be wrong, after all.)
There's always going to be people for all kinds of reasons pushing out bad ideas. That's part of the trade-off of living in a free society where there is no universal "right" opinion the public must hold.
> They've completely taken over public discourse on a wide range of subjects
Most people are not anti-vax. If "they've" "taken over public discourse" in other subjects to the point you are now holding a minority opinion you should consider whether "they" are right or wrong and why so many people believe what they do.
If can't understand their position and disagree you should reach out to people in a non-confrontational way, understand their position, then explain why you disagree (if you still do at that point). If we all do a better job at this we'll converge towards truth. If you think talking and debate isn't the solution to disagreements I'd argue you don't really believe in our democratic system (which isn't a judgement).
Some of these public school districts in Texas have >10% of students objecting to vaccines. My kids are effectively surrounded by unvaccinated kids whenever they go out in public. There's a 1 in 10 chance that kid on the playground has never had a vaccine, and that rate is increasing.
A lot of the families I know actively having kids are pretty crunchy and are at least vaccine hesitant if not outright anti-vax.
https://www.dshs.texas.gov/sites/default/files/LIDS-Immuniza...
"A total of 913 participants were included in the final analysis. The adjusted ORs for COVID-19 infection among vaccinated individuals compared to unvaccinated individuals were 1.85 (95% CI: 1.33-2.57, p < 0.001). The odds of contracting COVID-19 increased with the number of vaccine doses: one to two doses (OR: 1.63, 95% CI: 1.08-2.46, p = 0.020), three to four doses (OR: 2.04, 95% CI: 1.35-3.08, p = 0.001), and five to seven doses (OR: 2.21, 95% CI: 1.07-4.56, p = 0.033)." - ["Behavioral and Health Outcomes of mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination: A Case-Control Study in Japanese Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises" (2024)](https://www.cureus.com/articles/313843-behavioral-and-health...)
"the bivalent-vaccinated group had a slightly but statistically significantly higher infection rate than the unvaccinated group in the statewide category and the age ≥50 years category" - ["COVID-19 Infection Rates in Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Inmates: A Retrospective Cohort Study" (2023)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10482361/)
"The risk of COVID-19 also varied by the number of COVID-19 vaccine doses previously received. The higher the number of vaccines previously received, the higher the risk of contracting COVID-19" - ["Effectiveness of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Bivalent Vaccine" (2022)](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.17.22283625v...)
"Confirmed infection rates increased according to time elapsed since the last immunity-conferring event in all cohorts. For unvaccinated previously infected individuals they increased from 10.5 per 100,000 risk-days for those previously infected 4-6 months ago to 30.2 for those previously infected over a year ago. For individuals receiving a single dose following prior infection they increased from 3.7 per 100,000 person days among those vaccinated in the past two months to 11.6 for those vaccinated over 6 months ago. For vaccinated previously uninfected individuals the rate per 100,000 person days increased from 21.1 for persons vaccinated within the first two months to 88.9 for those vaccinated more than 6 months ago." - ["Protection and waning of natural and hybrid COVID-19 immunity" (2021)](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.04.21267114v...)
It's often a lot better to just let kooks speak freely.
There is nobody more confident in themselves than the middle-class.
Here's an overview study that reviewed other studies: https://jphe.amegroups.org/article/view/9493/html
"Pre-COVID-19 interviews with a high-income vaccine hesitant sample in Perth, Australia found that vaccine hesitancy was based on an inflated sense of agency in making medical decisions without doctors or public health officials, and a preference for “natural” methods of healthcare (30)."
"A similar study in the United States reported on interviews from 25 White mothers in a wealthy community who refused vaccination for their children (31). These participants reported high levels of perceived personal efficacy in making health decisions for their children and higher confidence in preventing illness through individual “natural” measures such as eating organic food and exercising. Additionally, these participants report lower perceived risk of infection or disease, which is contrasted with their high perceived risk of vaccination."
"Vaccine hesitancy among those with privilege may be more than just a product of resource access. There is evidence that individuals with high socioeconomic status perceive themselves to be more capable, hardworking, important, and deserving of resources and privileges than others (32,33)"
They have always been able to speak freely. I still see vaccine conspiracies on HN to this day. It was rampant during COVID as well.
The only reason you believe that is because all information to the contrary was systematically censored and removed from the media you consume. The actual data doesn't support that, there are even cases where it increased mortality, like https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11278956/ and increased the chance of future covid infections, like https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39803093/ .
People have become more anti-Vax because the Covid vaccines were at best ineffective and as you said anything contra-narrative is buried or ignored.
If you push a shitty product and force people to take it to keep their jobs it’s going to turn them into skeptics of all vaccines, even the very effective ones.
More harm than good was done there. The government should have approved them for voluntary use so the fallout would not have been so bad.
The first paper seems to claim a very standard cohort study is subject to "immortal time bias", an effect whereby measuring outcomes can seem to change them. The typical example of sampling time bias is that slow-growing cancers are more survivable than fast-growing ones, but also more likely to be measured by a screening, giving a correlation between screening and survivablility. So you get a time effect where more fast-acting cancers do not end up in the measurement, biasing the data.
But in measurements such that one outcome or the other does not bias the odds of that outcome being sampled, there can be no measurement time effect, which is why it's not corrected for in studies like this. The authors do not explain why measurement time effects would have anything to do with detecting or not detecting death rates in the abstract, or anywhere else in the paper, because they are quacks, who apply arbitrary math to get the outcome they want.
As another commenter pointed out, randomized controlled trials -- which cannot possibly have this made-up time effect -- often clearly show a strongly positive effect for vaccination.
I did not read the second paper.
That said, I think it's important to separate personal experiences from what the larger body of evidence shows. Many vaccinated people still got COVID, especially once Omicron came along. The vaccines were never perfect at preventing infection. But the strongest data we have from randomized trials and real-world results show that vaccinated people were far less likely to end up in the ICU or die from COVID. That's what the vaccines were designed to do and that's where they consistently worked.
As for cancer, I understand why you'd connect your wife's diagnosis to the vaccine -- it's natural to search for causes -- our brains are wired to look for patterns especially when big events happen close together. But cancer registries and monitoring systems around the world haven't found an increase in cancer rates linked to COVID vaccines. The vaccines give a short-lived immune stimulus; they don't reprogram the immune system or permanently shut down T-cells. My family has a long history of cancer going back generations. Literally every other member of my family has had cancer long before COVID. The idea that there is a low probability of two people in the same family getting cancer in the same year is unfortunately not as unlikely as you want to believe. That is perhaps a cold comfort but doctors and scientists aren't seeing the pattern you're worried about.
That isn't to say there aren't side effects to the vaccine. Myocarditis and clotting problems are well documented but rare side-effects. In fact, someone I know about indirectly had a heart attack immediately after the COVID vaccine -- his family is genetically predisposed to this kind of heart attack but it was directly triggered by the shot (he survived). It's good to acknowledge those risks. But when you look at the big picture, health agencies estimate that the vaccines prevented millions of deaths. I sadly know of a few people who died from COVID prior to vaccine availability and have family members with permanent lung issues. They're currently struggling to get another COVID shot because they don't think they can survive getting it unprotected again.
A sibling read the your first link and noted the problems with it. I read just the abstract of the second link, and it's clear their methodology and description of what they're measuring can't actually support their conclusions.
These are just things that some of the population will be more attracted to, I don't think it has anything to do with censorship, lockdowns, or mandates. At most the blame can be at institutions for lacking in their ability to do effective scientific communication.
*And this skews more to less educated and intelligent.
If you allow crazy people to "let it ride" then they don't stop until... until... hell we're still in the middle of it and I don't even know when or if they will stop.
Very analogous to people who don't like how inefficient governments function and somehow conclude that the solution is to put people in power with zero experience managing government.
I don't believe Trump's or Kennedy's ideas about COVID and medicine are the ones that deserve to win out, but I do think that top-down suppression of ideas can be very harmful to truth seeking and was harmful during the pandemic. In North America I believe this led to a delayed (and ultimately minimal) social adoption of masks, a late acceptance of the aerosol-spread vector, an over-emphasis on hand washing, and a far-too-late restriction on international travel and mass public events, well past the point when it could have contributed to containing the disease (vs Taiwan's much more effective management, for example).
Of course there's no guarantee that those ideas would have been accepted in time to matter had there been a freer market for views, and of course it would have opened the door to more incorrect ideas as well, but I'm of the view that it would have helped.
More importantly I think those heavy restrictions on pre-consensus ideas (as many of them would later become consensus) helped lead to a broader undermining of trust in institutions, the fallout of which we are observing today.
Experts can study and learn from their prior mistakes. Continually doing bottom-up when we have experts is inefficient and short-sighted, no? Surely you would streamline part of the process and end up in the pre-Trump framework yet again?
Also, I'm curious why you have such a rosy picture of the bottom-up alternatives? Are you forgetting about the ivermectin overdoses? 17,000 deaths related to hydroxychloroquine? The US president suggesting people drinking bleach? It is easy to cherry pick the mistakes that science makes while overlooking the noise and misinformation that worms its way into less-informed/less-educated thinkers when non-experts are given the reins
I'm criticizing them for suppressing the dissemination of ideas that did later turn out to be correct. I hope the distinction is clear.
If you're going to impose a ban on the dissemination of ideas, you'd better be ten thousand percent sure that nothing covered by that ban later turns out to be the truth. Not a single one, not even if every other idea that got banned was correctly identified as a falsehood. Otherwise, the whole apparatus falls apart and institutions lose trust.
I'm not forgetting ivermectin overdoses. I don't believe my picture is rosy. I'm aware of all the garbage ideas out there, which is why the measles is back and all the other madness. But I'm firmly of the opinion that trying to suppress these bad ideas has only redoubled their strength in the backlash, and caused a rejection of expert knowledge altogether.
The first amendment was written in the 1700s...
People should be free to say what they want online. But going down "YouTube conspiracy theory" rabbit holes is a real thing, and YouTube doesn't need to make that any easier, or recommend extreme (or demonstrably false) content because it leads to more "engagement".
But if 100 tweets each get 1000 likes, they're never singularly important enough to community note.
In person, things are different. The dominant side can and often enough does drown out dissent. In that case, the intent is to silence. So that would be "censorship" in a cultural, not legal sense which would be hostile to the freedom of speech in the cultural sense, not legal.
In this sense platforms like X need to be regulated more like gambling. In some ways X is a big roulette wheel that's being spun which will help stochastically determine where the next major school shooting will take place.
The words of world renown epidemiologists who were, to be frank, boring and unentertaining could never possibly compete with crunchymom44628 yelling about how Chinese food causes covid.
Bad takes have the advantage of the engagement of both the people who vehemently agree and the people who vehemently disagree. Everyone is incentivized to be a shock jock. And the shock jocks are then molded by the algorithm to be ever more shock jockish.
Especially at a time when we were all thrown out of the streets and into our homes and online.
And here I'll end this by suggesting everyone watch Eddington.
One of the sentiments I've been flirted with in posts below/above is the idea that while bad takes and their amplification are indeed a kind of societal evil-- in a society which was more effectively mediated bad takes might serve a vital purpose in the discourse. Societies committed to their own felicity might treat disagreements as an opportunity to extend the public discourse. This seems to be the crux of the thing-- we can take all day about checks and balances but unless a society is truly at some level committed to its own preservation and expansion those checks and balances will end up becoming tools for domination and exploitation as we see in the United States.
It don't care how well you can bake you can't make apple pie with rotten apples. No amount of sugar will correct the rot. Th trick is growing healthy apples.
It massively amplified the nuts. It brought it to the mainstream.
I'm a bit amazed seeing people still justifying it after all we've learned.
COVID was handled terribly after the first month or so, and hopefully we've learned from that. We're going to endure the negative consequences for years.
And to state my position like the root guy, I'm a progressive, pro-vaccine, medical science believer. I listen to my doctor and am skeptical if not dismissive of the YouTube "wellness" grifters selling scam supplements. I believe in science and research. I thought the worm pill people were sad if not pathetic. Anyone who gets triggered by someone wearing a mask needs to reassess their entire life.
But lockdowns went on way too long. Limits on behaviour went on way too long. Vaccine compliance measures were destructive the moment we knew it had a negligible effect on spread. When platforms of "good intentions" people started silencing the imbeciles, it handed them a megaphone and made the problem much worse.
And now we're living in the consequences. Where we have a worm-addled halfwit directed medicine for his child-rapist pal.
>COVID was handled terribly after the first month or so, and hopefully we've learned from that. We're going to endure the negative consequences for years.
In theory, I agree, kind of.
But also - we were 10+ months into COVID raging in the US before Biden’s administration, the administration that enacted the policies the article is about, came to be. Vaccine production and approval were well under way, brought to fruition in part due to the first Trump administration. The “nuts” had long been mainstream and amplified before this “silencing” began. Misinformation was rampant and people were spreading it at a quick speed. Most people I know who ultimately refused the vaccines made up their minds before Biden took office.
We already had a pretty strong undercurrent of contrarianism regarding public health already -- it's absolutely endemic on here, for instance, and was long before COVID -- but it mainstreamed it. Before COVID I had a neighbour that would always tell me hushed tones that he knows what's really going on because he's been learning about it on YouTube, etc. It was sad, but he was incredibly rare. Now that's like every other dude.
And over 80% of the US public got the vaccine! If we were to do COVID again, I doubt you'd hit even 40% in the US now. The problem is dramatically worse.
[1] That infamous Zuck interview with Rogan, where Zuck licked Trump's anus to ingratiate himself with the new admin, was amazing in that he kept blaming Biden for things Meta did long before Biden's admin took office or even took shape. Things he did at the urging of the Trump admin pt 1. I still marvel that he could be so astonishingly deceptive and people don't spit in his lying face for it.
Google makes it very clear that these were choices they made, and were independent of whatever the government was asking. Suggesting these policies are anything other than Google's is lying.
It would be a mistake to think such operations care too much about specific talking points, the goal is to drown out moderate discussion to replace it with flamewars. It's a numbers game, so they'll push in hundreds of different directions until they find something that sticks and also both sides of the same conflict.
Content that makes people angry (extreme views) brings views.
Algorithims optimise for views -> people get recommended extreme views.
You can test this with a fresh account, it doesn't take many swipes on Youtube Shorts to get some pretty heinous shit if you pretend to be a young male to the algorithm.
Trump thought so too.
Now vaccines are getting banned and the GOP is gerrymandering the hell out of the country to ensure the end of the democratic process. Sure, let's do nothing and see where that brings us. Maybe people will magically come to their senses.
The same thing since time eternal will continue to occur: the educated and able will physically move themselves from risk and others will suffer either by their own volition, or by association, or by lot.
Is it? How does that work at scale?
Speech generally hasn’t been restricted broadly. The same concepts and ideas removed from YouTube still were available on many places (including here).
Yet we still have so many people believing falsehoods and outright lies. Even on this very topic of COVID, both sides present their “evidence” and and truly believe they are right, no matter what the other person says.
People don’t believe the scientific consensus on vaccines because there were no WMDs in Iraq, to give one of many huge examples.
“But those were different experts!”
No they weren’t. Not to the average person. They were “the authorities,” and “the authorities” lied us into a trillion dollar war. Why should anyone trust “the authorities” now?
Tangentially… as bad as I think Trump is, he’s still not as bad as George W Bush in terms of lasting damage done. Bush II was easily the worst president of the last 100 years, or maybe longer. He is why we have a president Trump.
Have you actually tried to shine sunlight on online misinformation? If you do you will quickly find it doesn't really work.
The problem is simple. It is slower to produce factually correct content. A lot slower. And when you do produce something the people producing the misinformation can quickly change their arguments.
Also, by the time you get your argument out many of the people who saw the piece you are refuting and believed it won't even see your argument. They've moved on to other topics and aren't going to revisit that old one unless it is a topic they are particularly interested in. A large number will have noted the original misinformation, such as some totally unsafe quack cure for some illness that they don't currently have, accepted it as true, and then if they ever find themselves with that illness apply the quack cure without any further thought.
The debunkers used to have a chance. The scammers and bullshitters always had the speed advantage when it came to producing content but widespread distribution used to be slow and expensive. If say a quack medical cure was spreading the mainstream press could ask the CDC or FDA about it, talk to researchers, and talk to doctors dealing with people showing up in emergency rooms from trying the quack cure, and they had the distribution networks to spread this information out much faster than the scammers and bullshitters.
Now everyone has fast and cheap distribution through social media, and a large number of people only get their information from social media and so the bullshitters and scammers now have all the advantages.
My biggest problem with YouTube isn't what it does/doesn't allow on its platform, it's that it will happily feed you a psychotic worldview if it keeps you on the site. I've had several family members go full conspiracy nut-job after engaging heavily with YouTube content.
I don't know what the answer is. I think many people would rightly argue that removing misinformation from the recommendation engine is synonymous with banning it. FWIW I'd be happy if recommendation engines generally were banned for being a societal cancer, but I'm probably in the minority here.
If 'silencing people' doesn't work- so online platforms aren't allowed to remove anything? Is there any limit to this philosophy? So you think platforms can't remove:
Holocaust denial? Clothed underage content? Reddit banned r/jailbait, but you think that's impermissible? How about clothed pictures of toddlers but presented in a sexual context? It would be 'silencing' if a platform wanted to remove that from their private property? Bomb or weapons-making tutorials? Dangerous fads that idiotic kids pass around on TikTok, like the blackout game? You're saying it's not permissible for a platform to remove dangerous instructionals specifically targeted at children? How about spam? Commercial advertising is legally speech in the US. Platforms can't remove the gigantic quantities of spam they suffer from every day?
Where's the limiting principle here? Why don't we just allow companies to set their own rules on their own private property, wouldn't that be a lot simpler?
In the open, it becomes normalized, it draws in more people. Do you rather have some crazies in the corner, or 50% of a population that believes something false, as it became normalized.
The only people benefiting from those dark concepts are those with financial gains. They make money from it, and push the negatives to sell their products and cures. Those that fight against it, do not gain from it and it cost them time/money. That is why is a losing battle.
Few countries have more restrictions on Nazi speech than Germany. And yet not only AfD is a thing, but it keeps growing.
How about "If the content isn't illegal, then the government shouldn't pressure private companies to censor/filter/ban ideas/speech"?
And yes, this should apply to everything from criticizing vaccines, denying election results, being woke, being not woke, or making fun of the President on a talk show.
Not saying every platform needs to become like 4chan, but if one wants to be, the feds shouldn't interfere.
In this case it wasn't a purely private decision.
1) They are public corporations and are legal creation of the state and benefit from certain protections of the state. They also have privileged access to some public infrastructures that other private companies do not have.
2) By acting on the behest of the government they were agent of the government for free speech and censorship purposes
3) Being monopolies in their respective markets, this means they must respect certain obligations the same way public utilities have.
2. This has already been adjudicated and this argument lost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murthy_v._Missouri
3. What market is Youtube a monopoly in?
The 6–3 majority determined that neither the states nor other respondents had standing under Article III, reversing the Fifth Circuit decision.
In law, standing or locus standi is a condition that a party seeking a legal remedy must show they have, by demonstrating to the court, sufficient connection to and harm from the law or action challenged to support that party's participation in the case.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the opinion, stating: "To establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a government defendant and redressable by the injunction they seek. Because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction."
The Supreme Court did not say that what was done was legal, they only said that the people who were asking for the injunction and bringing the lawsuit could not show how they were being or going to be hurt.
Except many people don't roll their eyes at it, that's exactly the problem. QAnon went from a meme on 4chan to the dominant political movement across the US and Europe. Anti-vax went from fringe to the official policy position of the American government. Every single conspiracy theory that I'm aware of has only become more mainstream, while trust in any "mainstream" source of truth has gone down. All all of this in an environment of aggressive skepticism, arguing, debating and debunking. All of the sunlight is not disinfecting anything.
We're literally seeing the result of the firehose of misinformation and right-wing speech eating people's brains and you're saying we just have to "let it ride?"
Silencing people alone doesn't work, but limiting the damage misinformation and hate speech can do while pushing back against it does work. We absolutely do need to preserve the right of platforms to choose what speech they spread and what they don't.
It actually does work. You need to remove ways for misinformation to spread, and suppressing a couple of big agents works very well.
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07524-8 - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1... - https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3479525 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.11864
Obviously, the best solution would be prevention, by having good education systems and arming common people with the weapons to assess and criticize information, but we are kinda weak on that front.
Doesn't it though? I've seen this repeated like it's fact but I don't think that's true. If you disallowed all of some random chosen conspiracy off of YouTube and other mainstream platforms I think it would stop being part of the larger public consciousness pretty quickly.
Many of these things arrived out of nothing and can disappear just as easily.
It's basic human nature that simply hearing things repeated over and over embeds it into your consciousness. If you're not careful and aware of what you're consuming then that becomes a part of your world view. The most effective way to bring people back from conspiratorial thinking (like QAnon) is to unplug them from that source of information.
We also tried letting the propaganda machine full-blast those lies on the telly for the past 5 years.
For some reason, that didn't work either.
What is going to work? And what is your plan for getting us to that point?
People can post all sorts of crazy stuff, but the algorithms do not need to promote it.
Countries can require Algorithmic Impact Assements and set standards of compliance to recommended guidelines.
The US military also promoted anti-vax propaganda in the Philippines [0].
A lot of the comments here raise good points about silencing well meaning people expressing their opinion.
But information warfare is a fundamental part of modern warfare. And it's effective.
An American company or individual committing fraud can be dealt with in the court system. But we don't yet have a good remedy for how to deal with a military power flooding social media with information intentionally designed to mislead and cause harm for people who take it seriously.
So
> I think we have to realize silencing people doesn't work
it seems to have been reasonably effective at combating disinformation networks
> It just causes the ideas to metastasize
I don't think this is generally true. If you look at old disinformation campaigns like the idea that the US faked the moon landings, it's mostly confined to a small group of people who are prone to conspiracy thinking. The idea of a disinformation campaign is you make it appear like a crazy idea has broad support. Making it appear that way requires fake accounts or at least boosters who are in on the scheme. Taking that away means the ideas compete on their own merit, and the ideas are typically real stinkers.
[0] https://www.btimesonline.com/articles/167919/20240727/u-s-ad...
In general, you can't argue or 'fact' people out of beliefs they were not argued into. The best you can do is give them a safe place to land when disconfirmation begins. Don't be too judgy, no one is immune to propaganda.
Neo-nazis and white nationalists went from their 3-4 replies per thread forums, 4chan posts, and Telegram channels, to now regularly reaching millions of people and getting tens of thousands of likes.
As a Danish person I remember how American media in the 2010s and early 2020s used to shame Denmark for being very right-wing on immigration. The average US immigration politics thread on X is worse than anything I have ever seen in Danish political discussions.
Silencing absolutely works! How do you think disinformation metastasized!?
Reality is, i have personally seen what this type of uncontrolled anti-vax stuff does. The issue is that its harder to disprove a negative with a positive, then people realize.
The moment you are into the youtube, tiktok or whatever platform algorithm, you are fed a steady diet of this misinformation. When you then try to argue with actual factual studies, you get the typical response from "they already said that those studies are made up"... How do you fight that? Propaganda works by flooding the news and over time, people believe it.
That is the result of uncensored access because most people do not have the time to really look up a scientific study. The amount of negative channels massive out way positive / fact based channels because the later is "boring". Its the same reason why your evening news is 80% deaths, corruptions, thefts, politicians and taxes or other negative world news. Because it has been proven that people take in negative news much more. Clickbait titles that are negative draw in people.
There is a reason why holocaust denial is illegal in countries. Because the longer some people can spew that, the more people actually start to believe it.
Yes, i am going to get roasted for this but people are easily influenced and they are not as smart as they think themselves are. We have platforms that cater to people's short attention span with barely 1~3 min clips. Youtube video's longer then 30min are horrible for the youtubers income as people simply do not have the attention span and resulting lost income.
Why do we have laws like seatbelt, speed limits, and other "control" over people. Because people left to their own devices, can be extreme uncaring about their own family, others, even themselves.
Do i like the idea of censorship for the greater good, no. But when there are so many that spew nonsense just to sell their powders, and their homemade vitamine C solutions (made in China)... telling people information that may hurt or kills themselves, family or others.
Where is the line of that unbridled free speech? Silencing people works as in, your delaying the flow of shit running down a creek, will it stop completely? No, but the delay helps people downstream. Letting it run uninterrupted, hoping that a few people downstream with a mop will do all the work, yea ...
We only need to look at platforms like X, when "censorship" got removed (moderation). Full of free speech, no limits and it turned into a soak pit extreme fast (well, bigger soak pit).
Not sure why i am writing this because this is a heated topic but all i can say is, I have seen the damage that anti-vax did on my family. And even to this day, that damage is still present. How a person who never had a issue with vaccinations, never had a bad reaction beyond the sour arm for a day, turned so skeptical to everything vaccination. All because those anti-vax channels got to her.
The anti-vax movement killed people. There is scientific study upon study how red states in the US ended up with bigger amounts of deaths given the time periodes. And yet, not a single person was ever charged for this, ... all simply accepted this and never looked back. Like it was a natural thing, that people's grandparents, family members died that did not need to die.
The fact that people have given up, and now accept to let those with often financial interests, spew nonsense as much as they like. Well, its "normal".
I weep for the human race because we are not going to make it.
I agree, but how do you combat propaganda from Putin? Do you match him dollar for dollar? I am sure YouTube would like that, but who has deep enough pockets to counter the disinformation campaigns?
Similar issue with Covid... when you are in the middle of a pandemic, and dead bodies are piling up, and hospitals are running out of room, how do you handle misinformation spreading on social media?
This is the conundrum social media has created. In the past only the press, who were at least semi-responsible, had the ability to spread information on a massive scale. Social media changed that. Now anyone can spread information instantly on a massive scale, and often it is the conspiracy theories and incorrect information that people seek out.
"We were a bit naive: we thought the internet, with the availability of information, would make us all a lot more factual. The fact that people would seek out—kind of a niche of misinformation—we were a bit naive." -- Bill Gates to Oprah, on "AI and the Future of us".
Yes. An unfortunate conclusion I’m approaching (but have not reached, and frankly don’t want to reach) is the First Amendment doesn’t work in a country that’s increasingly illiterate and addicted to ad-powered algorithmic social media.
On the internet everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart looks as legit as the BBC. Sacha Baron Cohen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM
Excerpts:
Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people.
Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.
Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.
What are your suggestions on accomplishing this while also bent compatible with the idea that government and big tech should not control ideas and speech?
Time delay. No content based restrictions. Just, like, a 2- to 24-hour delay between when a post or comment is submitted and when it becomes visible, with the user free to delete or change (in this case, the timer resets) their content.
I’d also argue for demonetising political content, but idk if that would fly.
Who decides agar falls in this bucket. The government? That seems to go against the idea of restricting speech and ideas.
Congress for the first. Either the FCC or, my preference, private litigants for the second. (Treble damages for stupid suits, though.)
> For all content or just “political”?
The courts can already distinguish political speech from non-political speech. But I don’t trust a regulator to.
I’d borrow from the French. All content within N weeks of an in the jurisdiction. (I was going to also say any content that mentions an elected by name, but then we’ll just get meme names and nobody needs that.)
Bonus: electeds get constituent pressure to consolidate elections.
Alternative: these platforms already track trending topics. So an easy fix is to slow down trending topics. It doesn’t even need to be by that much, what we want is for people to stop and think and have a chance to reflect on what they do, maybe take a step away from their device while at it.
Allow citizens to sue social media companies for the harm caused to them by misinformation and disinformation. The government can stay out of this.
May I suggest only repealing it for companies that generate more than a certain amount of revenue from advertising, or who have more than N users and have algorithmic content elevation?
It's taking a sword to the surgery room where no scalpel has been invented yet.
We need better tools to combat dis/mis-information.
I wish I knew what that tool was.
Maybe 'inoculating information' that's specifically stickier than the dis/mis-info?
Social media platforms in the United States rely heavily on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides them immunity from liability for most user-generated content.
If you were on the early Internet, you were self policing with the help of admins all the time. The difference was you had niche populations that had a stake in keeping the peace and culture of a given board
We broke those boundaries down though and now pit strangers versus strangers for clicks and views, resulting in daily stochastic terrorism.
Police the damn speech.
But along with fringe Covid ideas, we limited actual speech on legitimate areas of public discourse around Covid. Like school reopening or questioning masks and social distancing.
We needed those debates. Because the unchecked “trust the experts” makes the experts dumber. The experts need to respond to challenges.
(And I believe those experts actually did about as best they could given the circumstances)
I would put my trust in the people I knew were trained for this and adjust from there.
I suspect many of these opinions are born from hindsight.
Experts have a worse track record than open debate and the COVID censorship was directed at even experts who didn’t adhere to political choices — so to my eyes, you’re saying that you’d give in to authoritarian impulses and do worse.
At some point in any emergency, organized action has to be prioritized over debate.
Maybe that is still authoritarian, but they do say to have moderation in all things!
Ah… so… ”we must do something! Even if it’s the wrong thing”
Hot take.
From health emergencies to shootings to computer system crashes to pandemics — doing things without a reason to believe they’ll improve the situation is dangerous. You can and many have made things worse. And ignoring experts shouting “wait, no!” is a recipe for disaster.
When we were responding to COVID, we had plenty of time to have that debate in a candid way. We just went down an authoritarian path instead.
I don't see how that turns into you needing to mandate what I read and who's opinions I hear.
I have a three month old son. At the time he was being born, in my city, there was an outbreak of one of those diseases that killed more then one kid. Don't tell me this stuff doesn't have a direct impact on people.
Society as a whole has a responsibility to not do that kind of shit. We shouldn't be encouraging the spread of lies.
There's a big difference, and in any healthy public discourse there are severe reputations penalties for lies.
If school reopening couldn't be discussed, could you point to that?
It's very odd how as time goes on my recollection differs so much from others, and I'm not sure if it's because of actual different experiences or because of the fog of memory.
>As super low hanging fruit: > June 8, 2020: WHO: Data suggests it's "very rare" for coronavirus to spread through asymptomatics [0] > June 9, 2020: WHO expert backtracks after saying asymptomatic transmission 'very rare' [1] > 0: https://www.axios.com/2020/06/08/who-coronavirus-asymptomati... 1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/09/who-expert-bac... > Of course, if we just take the most recent thing they said as "revised guidance", I guess it's impossible for them to contradict themselves. Just rapidly re-re-re-revised guidance.
My hypotheses for our discrepant viewpoints were 1) my aging memory, or 2) different experiences, but it's actually 3) not using words to have the same meaning!
Citing this as "blatant truth suppression" weakens my view of any other evidence or argument you put forward, because I no longer trust that we can use words in ways that are compatible with each other.
More seriously, it's just not this simple man. I know people really want it to be, but it's not.
I watched my dad get sucked down a rabbit hole of qanon, Alex Jones, anti-vax nonsense and God knows what other conspiracy theories. I showed him point blank evidence that qanon was bullshit, and he just flat out refuses to believe it. He's representative of a not insignificant part of the population. And you can say it doesn't do any damage, but those people vote, and I think we can see clearly it's done serious damage.
When bonkers ass fringe nonsense with no basis in reality gets platformed, and people end up in that echo chamber, it does significant damage to the public discourse. And a lot of it is geared specifically to funnel people in.
In more mainstream media climate change is a perfect example. The overwhelming majority in the scientific community has known for a long time it's an issue. There were disagreement over cause or severity, but not that it was a problem. The media elevated dissenting opinions and gave the impression that it was somehow an even split. That the people who disagree with climate change were as numerous and as well informed, which they most certainly weren't, not by a long shot. And that's done irreparable damage to society.
Obviously these are very fine lines to be walked, but even throughout US history, a country where free speech is probably more valued than anywhere else on the planet, we have accepted certain limitations for the public good.
We've had these debates for decades. The end result is stuff like Florida removing all vaccine mandates. You can't debate a conspiracy or illogical thinking into to going away, you can only debate it into validity.
It’s not if Google can decide what content they want on YouTube.
The issue here is that the Biden Whitehouse was pressuring private companies to remove speech that they otherwise would host.
That's a clear violation of the first amendment. And we now know that the previous Whitehouse got people banned from all the major platforms: Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc.
The current administration has been openly threatening companies over anything and everything they don't like, it isn't surprising all of the tech companies are claiming they actually support the first amendment and were forced by one of the current administration's favorite scapegoats to censor things.
It's easy to see how at minimum there could be a conflict of interest.
You had direct statements like this from scientific experts, those experts turned out to be the middleman group that was funding Wuhan via NIH grants.
Peter Daszak, a zoologist and president of the EcoHealth Alliance, who has been among the most vocal critics of the idea of a lab leak, wrote, “I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Given an expert statement like that, youtube can and did take down lableak videos because they were misinformation (contrary to the information provided by the experts).
What happens when the “police” disagrees with and silences what you believe is true? Or when they allow the propagation of what you believe to be lies?
Who gets to decide what’s the truth vs. lies? The “police”?
This keeps coming up on this site. It seems like a basic premise for a nuanced and compassionate worldview. Humility is required. Even if we assume the best intentions, the fallible nature of man places limits on what we can do.
Yet we keep seeing posters appealing to Scientism and "objective truth". I'm not sure it is possible to have a reasonable discussion where basic premises diverge. It is clear how these themes have been used in history to support some of the worst atrocities.
The simple solution is repeal Section 230. When information can be transmitted instantly on a massive scale, somebody need to responsible for the information. The government should not police information but citizens should be allowed to sue social media companies for the harm caused to them.
Both have always been massively shady. I'm old enough to remember the big stink around the Al Gore election loss, or the robust questioning of the 2016 election for that matter. So ridiculous for self-proclaimed defenders of democracy to want to ban the discussion and disagreement about the facts around elections. Democratic processes and institutions should be open to doubt, questioning, and discussion.
The response to covid vaccines was actually extremely rational. They were highly taken up by the elderly who were shown to have the greatest risk, despite that demographic skewing more conservative (and arguably could be most at risk of "misinformation" from social media). And they were not able to stop transmission or provide much benefit to children and younger people, so they didn't get taken up so much among those groups. So there was really no need for this massive sustained psychological campaign of fearmongering, divisiveness, censorship, and mandates. They could have just presented the data and the facts as they came to hand, and be done with it.
With questioning elections, I think Jan 6 would be a pretty good indication of why it wasn't appropriate? This wasn't how questioning the results of elections goes in democracies. Instead, even after courts had investigated, the outgoing president refused to accept the result without any substantiated evidence.
Pushback on what? There's always been new age hippy garbage, Chinese medicine, curing cancer with berries, and that kind of thing around. I don't see that causing much damage and certainly not enough to warrant censorship. People can easily see through it and in the end they believe what they want to believe.
Far far more dangerous and the cause of real damage that I have seen come from the pharmaceutical industry and their captured regulators. Bribing medical professionals, unconscionable public advertising practices, conspiring to push opioids on the population, lying about the cost to produce medications, and on and on. There's like, a massive list of the disasters these greedy corporations and their spineless co-conspirators in government regulators have caused.
Good thing we can question them, their motives, their products.
> With questioning elections, I think Jan 6 would be a pretty good indication of why it wasn't appropriate?
I don't understand your question. Can you explain why you think Jan 6 would be a pretty good indication that discussion and disagreement about elections should be censored?
> This wasn't how questioning the results of elections goes in democracies. Instead, even after courts had investigated, the outgoing president refused to accept the result without any substantiated evidence.
I never quite followed exactly were the legal issues around that election. Trump was alleged to have tried to illegally influence some election process and/or obstructed legal transfer of power. Additionally there was a riot of people who thought Trump won and some broke into congress and tried to intimidate law makers.
I mean taking the worst possible scenario, Trump knew he lost and was scheming a plan to seize power and was secretly transmitting instructions to this mob to enter the building and take lawmakers hostage or something like that. Or any other scenario you like, let your imagination go wild.
I still fail to see how that could possibly justify censorship of the people and prohibiting them from questioning the government or its democratic processes. In fact the opposite, a government official went rogue and committed a bunch of crimes so therefore... the people should not be permitted to question or discuss the government and its actions?
There are presumably laws against those actions of rioting, insurrection, etc. Why, if the guilty could be prosecuted with those crimes, should the innocent pay with the destruction of their human rights, in a way that wouldn't even solve the problem and could easily enable worse atrocities be committed by the government in future?
Should people who question the 2024 election be censored? Should people who have concerns with the messages from the government's foremost immigration and deportation "experts" be prohibited from discussing their views or protesting the government's actions?
New age medicine has been around forever, yes. But the effects are only known to be negligible outside of pandemics. We know from history that people did many irrational things during past pandemics due to fear and social contagion.
It's a tough problem, everyone believes themselves an expert on everything, plus trolls and disinformation campaigns. There's also a significant information asymmetry.
It's funny you mention opioids as I just recently came across a tweet claiming that Indians were responsible for getting Americans addicted to them via prescription. In one of the buried reply chains, the poster admits they have no evidence and are just repeating a claim someone made to them sometime. But how many people will read that initial post and reinforce their racist beliefs vs see that the claim was unsubstantiated? And when that leads to drastic action by a madman, who's going to be the target of the blame? The responsibility is too diffused to target any specific person, the government obviously won't, madmen don't act in a vacuum and so the blame falls on the platform.
Yes, no one should have the power to determine what ideas are and are not allowed to propagate, but on the other hand, you could still go to other platforms and are not entitled to the reach of the major platforms, but then again, these platforms are extremely influential. At the same time there's also the problem that people in part view the platforms as responsible when they spread bad ideas, the platform operators also feel some level of social responsibility, while the platform owners don't want legal responsibility.
I don't understand how your question relates to the discussion. Perhaps you could answer my earlier questions first and it might clear things up for me.
Being censored by the robber from discussing the burglary is not a measure to protect your belongings any more than giving the government the power to prevent freely speaking about their carrying out the democratic processes is a measure to protect democracy from abuse by government officials.
Should Trump have had the power to censor news and discussion of the 2016 election when there were a lot of election deniers and conspiracy theorists concerned about the legitimacy of the election and conspiracies with Russia? Absolutely not.
> New age medicine has been around forever, yes. But the effects are only known to be negligible outside of pandemics. We know from history that people did many irrational things during past pandemics due to fear and social contagion.
There are unfounded claims about how much damage was caused by people exercising their right to speak about covid, and they all come from authoritarians who sound like they have ravenous thirst to gain the power to silence their critics and the population at large. So I consider them totally unreliable handwaving at best, and more likely fraudulent fabrications. I actually don't think there's anything wrong with letting them use social media platforms like anybody else. It's fine if those companies decided to decide whose message to amplify or create their own terms of use, but having governments pressure corporations to carry out this censorship is a crazy overreach and violation of human rights by the government.
The response, policies and messaging and communication by governments and bureaucrats has caused far more damage to society, to public health, to trust in institutions and trust in vaccines and medical science than common people talking about it.