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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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."
To me that sounds only fair trade. You editorialize content. You are liable for all content. In every possible way.
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
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.