I think the Streisand Effect is overstated. Apple has nearly two thirds of the podcast market.[0] Together with the other platforms that have removed these podcasts, upwards of three quarters of podcast listeners will no longer be able to easily access or discover this content. Starving this show of its largest audiences is more likely to cripple it, not galvanize it.
Eh, no. The Streisand effect applies to getting attention to something that wouldn't have otherwise, and gaining momentum because of it.
This is about providing a platform to someone who willfully spreads lies.
There has been research into the effects of Reddit clamping down on hate speech a few years ago. Guess what: not giving assholes a platform actually works. It's still a cesspool but less so than it used to be.
Could you link if you have it? I'm genuinely curious.
I'm also suspicious -- what stops the aforementioned individuals from finding another website/forum? I seem to remember hearing that after Reddit closed down several of the more unsavory/flat-out-awful subreddits, a large contingent of those users moved to another site (can't remember which though).
FWIW, I support clamping down on hate speech, but only if it's accompanied by some form of education (otherwise, you're just hiding the problem).
Social science research indicates that it isn't about "hiding" hate directed speech, but rather to consider the impact on the victims of such speech. That is, when one is able to say the word "hiding", it is spoken from the position of privilege; it is a very real existential threat to those impacted.
Constricting hate speech has a notable impact on the dignity and well-being of those impacted[1].
Free speech refers to the freedom to not be thrown in jail by the government for things you have said that fall under protected speech. It has nothing to do with being allowed to post anything on any website you’d like.
If you're yelled at, boycotted, have your show canceled, or get banned from an internet community, your free speech rights aren't being violated. It's just that the people listening think you're an asshole and they're showing you the door.
I guess I am worried that as the societal norm for allowing ideological differences to be expressed degrades that it will leak into politics in the form of hate speech laws. We are starting to have fully private struggle sessions on Twitter, using such tools to sick the mob on opponents. A new sort of bully pulpit.
I am not sure any populist politician has quite realized this power. Trump has to an extent but he has no backing from anyone in media, education, or most government employees. Now that Trump has broken so many tacit rules, I fear a charismatic leftist populist would be able to nationalize these private struggle sessions and vastly amplify his or her power.
The mob has not been a force in politics for a long time. I fear a resurgence.
Twitter, Apple etc are still private enterprises. This very forum exercises its rights every day - whether you call it censorship or moderation depends on your ideology.
I would happily "kill" your idea of "beauty" if it means more people can live the life you are without detrimental effects of hate speech on them, yes.
You realize which country has some of the more effective and stringent hate speech laws in the world? If you do, did you stop to ask yourself why?
I would never support the government throwing Alex Jones in jail espousing his views (Assuming we're not talking about edge cases where freedom of speech does not apply).
But I also fully support the property rights of Twitter, Facebook, etc to exercise control over the content of their platforms.
You wouldn't permit someone setting up camp on your front lawn, passing out, say, NAMBLA literature would you? It's unlikely you'd say "Sir, I do not like that that you are on my lawn evangelizing man-boy love, but it's your god-given right to do so!" -- you'd probably (rightly say) "Get get the F--- off my lawn!"
The inevitable discussion about the
need for hate speech laws in the USA is lurking. Sadly, the USA had a chance at them a while back, but I believe it was Justice Scalia who struck it down?
> Guess what: not giving assholes a platform actually works.
In other words, these platforms are powerful enough to silence people. Today, it's people you agree with silencing. Tomorrow, it may be people you disagree with silencing. It's not a good thing that massively powerful private companies are deciding what speech should be allowed and what should not. The law doesn't require it, but as users, we should demand that these major platforms are open to everyone, not just the ones that the majority currently approves of.
> The Streisand effect applies to getting attention to something that wouldn't have otherwise, and gaining momentum because of it.
This is about providing a platform to someone who willfully spreads lies.
Those aren't orthogonal. They seem to both be true in this case (what "it is about" is subjective).
I've seen Infowars regularly mocked in mainstream comedy TV shows. Shining light on Infowars misinformation / ill intent is probably a good thing.
Adding barriers to passive consumption, by vulnerable (misinformed) people, is probably also a good thing. It's not being censored/outlawed, just made slightly less convenient to access. Fake news are a threat to democracy.
"It's not outlawed, just inconvenient to access" is more than enough influence to dramatically (~90%) shape what information is consumed with no natural truth-seeking mechanism beyond your trust in the people imposing the inconvenience. There's a reason it's illegal for the government to do this, and we should demand that neutral platform organizations like Apple, Facebook, or a university don't do it either (which is not the same thing as saying that they should be forced by law to do it).
>and we should demand that neutral platform organizations like Apple, Facebook, or a university don't do it either (which is not the same thing as saying that they should be forced by law to do it)
What sorts of demands would be listened to or have any chance of being effective if not having the weight of force of law behind it?
The same thing that induces universities to behave reasonably well as neutral platforms. It is a combination of pressure from public esteem and the moral principles of the university (both the principles of individual administrators/professors and the principles explicitly endorsed by the organization as a whole). And all of that is interlinked.
It is an awful misconceptions that the only way to effectively get other people to act differently is with law. It is lazy and leads to unnecessary use of force. Most things that are bad are not illegal (e.g., lying to your friends, being mean, abandoning your parents, cheating on your spouse) and yet occur at much lower rates than they would without the many extra-legal mechanisms that keep them in check.
It's gonna be awkward when comedy TV shows mock content that you can no longer access on facebook. Will comedy shows be reprimanded by fb in the future for posting show clips that contain cuts of Infowars saying crazy stuff?
Censoring "fake" news is not the way to a healthy democracy. Educating people on how to use different sources and do their own critical thinking is what we need.
In theory people would have consciousness and would have time to evaluate good from bad sources
In practice that's not what happens.
So yeah, I'm not shedding a tear over IW (though they probably have a point, on one occasion or another. Other media address these points so it's not dependant on them)
I agree we need better education about this sort of thing. I think it would be useful for all public schools to include this as part of their curriculum; I think you could easily spend an entire semester on learning to qualify media sources.
However, I think we should make the tradeoff explicit here. Just saying "Apple shouldn't do this because it's censorship, and censorship is bad" is a rather naive attitude. I would argue two things:
1. This isn't censorship, it's a refusal to broadcast. It's one thing to say "You can't say that", and another to say "I'm not going to allow you to use our platform to say that." The government is not allowed to prevent speech, but that doesn't mean that private companies are required to enable it.
2. It's not "fake" news. It's fake. It's literally made up stories, about child sex rings in pizza parlors and slave colonies on Mars.
So you might say, what's the harm in making up stuff? Well, people are shooting up restaurants and making on-air death threats to journalists and generally gravitating towards authoritarian viewpoints sponsored by organizations such as infowars. And guess what tool authoritarians love to employ? CENSORSHIP. Failing to hold these jokers accountable for their words and instigation actually and inevitably leads us farther down the path towards actual censorship than refusing to give them a platform. I would rather companies take a stand against this stuff than just allow them to exploit our misguided notions of democratic rule to undermine actual democratic rule.
> Educating people on how to use different sources and do their own critical thinking is what we need.
It is, just like we need to teach kids not to drink poison. But we also don't use "we need to teach kids not to drink poison" as an excuse to leave easily drinkable poison in reach.
At some point, we'll have educated people better on how to do their own critical thinking. But we're not there yet, and acting as if we were isn't a strategy for success.
Except they're targeting vulnerable people. To some extent, it's not very different from spammers who do on purpose to write full of typos, so that most "smart enough" people will just delete their emails, not bother investigating/reporting it.
Fake news isn't a threat to democracy. People have lied about shit and given false narratives for all time. An uneducated or easily influenced population is a risk to democracy. There is no easy fix for old and uneducated people, we just need to make sure the next generation is less susceptible to bad influences.
Do you really think that this action is going to bring more attention to Infowars? I really doubt whether the Streisand Effect is a factor here. Anyone who didn't know what Infowars is already won't be interested in this news.
It’s also factually true that human violence has enabled certain bloodlines the opportunity to advance, while hindering others.
I’m leery of people who cite one scientific data point alone. It smells like an appeal to authority. And you’re throwing up a strawman with your rhetoric about blocking a communist podcast.
Alex Jones himself has said in court it’s an act and he’s just an entertainer. Sometimes the act gets old and shows get canceled. Is that censorship?
In this case the show isn’t even canceled. Just removed from one of dozens of podcast directories. It’s still findable at the source. Your complaint is really about the creation of a slight inconvenience. There’s no real censorship here.
Lots of people don’t know where Barbara Streisand lives (despite the Streisand effect, I don’t). It would have to be a pretty deep cave you live in to not have heard of Alex Jones, especially if you stand any chance of enjoying his show.
I don't think the Streisand effect applies in this case. The site has repeatedly broken the terms of usage of all of these platforms. The ban should therefore appear reasonable to people.
The Streisand effect applies when the attempt is to hide or censor information for no reason other than hiding information.
I'm most worried about Spotify, who already plays kingmaker for upcoming artists. They could use Twitter-like 'shadowban' techniques take punitive measures against 'bad' music artists. Because isn't there a lot of music that plausibly contains 'hate speech' or 'incitements of violence'?
Not saying they will, because they haven't indicated that yet, but they are working with the extremist SPLC to craft a policy around 'hate' content and 'hateful' content (the latter to presumably include content that isn't hate content but could be misconstrued as hate content, perhaps?).
Yes. The SPLC put reform Muslim Maajid Nawaz and anti-FGM campaigner Ayaan Hirsi Ali on their list of hate speech advocates until threatened with legal action by Nawaz.
That was the moment when I cancelled my spotify account.
Oh and to be sure, they don't need to "working with the extremist SPLC" to do that. This ban has more to do with some sort of pseudo moral outrage, wich the right is quite capable of on their own.
Nah, the Streisand effect only applies when increased attention on a subject would result in a negative result. "Barbera Streisand wants photos of her beachfront mansion removed because she thinks it's an invasion of her privacy" reflects badly on Barbera Stresiand. "Apple is removing Infowars because it traffics in outright lies" reflects badly on Infowars.
arguably having infowars be high up on the "most downloaded" podcast list would be worse. especially if they categorize themselves as news or politics instead of entertainment.
FB doesn't cite a specific post (eg, the implication that some of the school shooting victims were part of a hoax), which is a pity.I dislike Infowars, but I like a consistently applied ToS:
'Glorifying violence' is vague - should all police/military/veterans/people who celebrate July 4 be banned from Facebook? How is 'glorifying violence' treated the same as 'graphic violence'? One is praising violent action, the other is depicting it. They are clearly not the same thing.
As an Austinite (well now Iowan) who grew up with plenty of Alex Jones on the airwaves, it's stuff like this I'll actually-in a morbid kind of way-really miss. I suppose you have to be exposed to it long enough to grow numb to it but Alex Jones became a source of entertainment as I grew older just to see what wackiness he'd come up with next. Gay frogs still manages to put a grin on my face even on my most stressful days.
It was almost a contest between he and the considerably less inflammatory but still uniquely weird John Aielli.
This isn't, nor should be read as a defense of Alex Jones by any sane person-but an acknowledgement of the absurd. I mean come on. Gay frogs? You gotta admit--it's chuckleworthy.
> I suppose you have to be exposed to it long enough to grow numb to it
That's why most of us consider Alex Jones to be a joke, but the reason Apple and Spotify are making this move is because many people, exposed long enough to Alex Jones, start to believe what Alex Jones has to say.
Oh, heard, understood and acknowledged. I get that completely (don't know that I agree that it's a good reason to take him off the air). My story wasn't meant to suggest this isn't the case for many, but to just share an anecdote of the humor Mr. Jones brings to my life because I tend to appreciate absurdity when I see it.
I'm still sitting behind this keyboard chuckling slightly at the idea that a human being has the capacity to be so completely apoplectic over homosexual amphibians.
if he was playing a character, and had disclaimers as such at the beginning, middle, and ending of his podcast, i'd love alex jones. kind of a "what would he say next?" sort of thing, mixed with plenty of onion-esque satire.
the problem is he's not. he holds these beliefs, and with his platform, he's leading other people to hold them as well. some are fairly benign, like gay frogs. others are downright sick, like calling the sandy hook kids crisis actors.
what i'm getting at is someone needs to mirror him, with disclaimers that everything that comes out of the host's mouth is ludicrous, asinine, and should never be considered rational thought. like the jackass intros, "you, and all your stupid little friends, should never try this at home."
ehh, i'm thinking more colbert report's take on conservative tv. john definitely has the wacky "what will he say next" down, but it's not a satire of aj. i'm looking more for someone who speaks like aj does, about conspiracies as dumb if not dumber than gay frogs.
Personally I don’t think adults need their world wrapped in disclaimers, warnings, and ratings. Particularly when the same become a kind of censorship, like how all DRUDGE tweets come up moderated as sensitive on Twitter.
I often wonder if there's a way to talk about this without the C word coming up, as it seems to quickly slide down the rabbit hole of definitions and what the substantive merit of 'censorship' is.
Okay, sure YouTube telling Alex Jones to kick rocks isn't censorship, because only the government has that power.
It used to be a go-to move of mine to remind the holder of that opinion that government (supposedly) exists as a stand-in embodiment of the will of the people. The kind of laws we pass (or allow to pass) are macro-indicators of what we value. Certain amendments are passionately argued as being just that-weirdly, except the first amendment. It gets all sort of special treatment that sometimes (operative word) looks like selective application of the argument of "only government" can curtail speech.
Lately though I'm beginning to wonder if a better argument against "only the government can enforce speech" looks something like questioning the power given to corporations (those private enterprises that are free to curtail speech as much as they like) to suppress or hide what Edward R Murrow called "unpleasant or disturbing information"[1] with how much power and influence these corporations have at large, comparatively speaking at the government level.
Or, said much more succinctly: I'm terrified of the eagerness to treat 'freedom of speech' as something that is universally, and singularly granted by the government-and I think it hides some really painful truths about the speaker that they probably would never admit themselves if pressed.
Our free speech laws prevent government censorship, but also stretch to include the concept of corporate censorship in the sense of allowing access to “the public square”. IMO this public square concept will inevitably extend to major internet service providers like Facebook, Google, and Apple.
Similar to how we’ve come to understand the Internet as a whole as a utility which should provided as a dumb-pipe service by companies which must promise neutrality, a similar argument can be made that despite being run by private enterprise (so is most internet infrastructure anyway) that these monopolistic services are so core to how we actually use — and harness — the power of the internet that there is a level of neutrality required in their administration as well.
Serious question: how do you make sure that none of this stuff you're listening to leaks into your perception of the real world? Are you sure you're just regarding it as some weird dystopian fiction, like Scarfolk or the SCP foundation, and not letting it affect your real politics?
I suppose that question would require a bit of insight into how you define "affect" and a deeper inquiry into what my "real" politics currently are, in order to draw a meaningful contrast-wouldn't it?
As asked-I'm not particularly sure I'm open to arbitrarily unloading all of that context-and reduce it all down to a simplified yes or no.
It's a shame this is getting downvoted because it's a good point, and the very same can be said about late night comedians and their "I'm just a comedian bro, you expect me to be accurate and consistent, lol" bits on the news of the day. These things do have an effect on perception of reality.
I admit I wasn't at all surprised to see it getting downvoted so heavily-I was not one of them I as I agree; it's a good question-even if, directed at me-I'm not inclined to go through all of the setup and groundwork necessary to give a response in the affirmative or otherwise.
Being willing to critique ones own body politic is a healthy thing. My lack of surprise comes from this strange phenomenon going about that presumes anything short of full-fledged vociferous condemnation or admonishment must automatically mean harbored complicity and is worth the harshest rebuke or silent dissent in the form of drive by downvotes without much contemplation or substantive discussion in the slightest.
> this strange phenomenon going about that presumes anything short of full-fledged vociferous condemnation or admonishment must automatically mean harbored complicity and is worth the harshest rebuke or silent dissent in the form of drive by downvotes without much contemplation or substantive discussion in the slightest
It's not so much strange, it's simple human nature really. The strange part to me is how common it is becoming on a forum as intelligent as HN. Most people here see themselves as a cut above the general public when it comes to intellectual capability, and they're right, but even with this genuine intellectual advantage so few people seem able to notice that they too are neck deep in the cultural meme war, and guilty of many of the same (or at least similar) transgressions of those they criticize, albeit to a lesser degree.
To me, this is the big elephant-in-the-room problem we should be talking about rather than obvious idiots like Infowars, and the stakes are very high in the long term.
(.....and, possibly relevant, I'm "you're posting too fast" throttled, once again. Is that message 100% consistent with the underlying algorithm? Oh right, "freedom of speech doesn't guarantee you a platform", there's nothing more to be said about the matter, full stop. As long as we follow the law to the letter, "it's all good bro".)
I find that most of it strengthens my opposing view and a sliver of it makes me reconsider my own beliefs.
I find radio which has a perspective that matches my own to be insufferable. It’s not funny, it’s uptight, it’s often miserable in it’s Subject matter.
I just prefer my entertainment to be creative people arguing absurd points over boring professors explaining climate change.
I agree; I "got into" Alex Jones because it was genuinely funny to see this narrative of a reality that exists only in video games and conspiracy fiction. It was so nakedly transparent as a kind of LARP and entertainment to front a largely boring reactionary conservatism (edit: and sell powders).
That all changed when either he "lost the plot" and began to believe it all, or the constant need to stay ahead of the news cycle (everything's a false flag, everyone in Hollywood or DC is a homosexual/pedophile/drug user, etc), combined with increasing mainstream coverage, make it genuinely harmful.
That the mask only drops in response to lawsuits is the tell, I think, and that's why I'm not really concerned about this having hugely unintended consequences and chilling effects. If his lawyers are to be believed (yeah, I know, don't @ me) then he's a grifter and actor but his storyline is harmful. No one has to carry his content; he can create his own media network and distribute it there.
Google "atrazine frogs" and you'll get plenty of left leaning environmental articles talking about pesticide runoff turning frogs from male to female.
The "turning frogs gay" is reductive and hyperbolic, but unlike most of the nonsense spouted by Jones it is at least grounded in something resembling fact.
Abby Martin a crazy 9/11 truther who constantly lies and bends facts to fit her nerrative to the point where even pRopagandaToday had to boot her out.
Today she is affiliated with some Venezuelan news outlet but she still spreading her lies on the Empire Files and other outlets.
I can't find something that specific but here is a democratic elected official saying that her supporters should harass her political opponents https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sus_0zebE-k
Alex Jones is a fruitcake, but I don't like this as a general trend. Effectively, once things aren't available on the main marketplace, they don't exist anymore for most people. RSS is still kind of a thing for podcasts, but everything wants to use either iTunes or Soundcloud etc. iTunes is so bad on Windows that I want to rip my hair out...
First off, I have never listened to or read any of Infowars material, my knowledge is from what is reported. When the censoring is not meted out equally is when I get worried. I noticed in more than one article that they labeled specific groups you cannot say anything derogatory about but left it open that other groups may not be protected.
There should be no group selection, it should be all or nothing. We also need to be damn careful of the recent attempt to brand speech some groups do not agree with as "weaponizing speech" which seems to be a new means to get the government to step in. With hate speech the government is still very limited on First Amendment grounds however by branding some speech as "weaponized" it implies violence and that does not have the same protection.
Frankly I don't mind the haters being out there, at least then I know who they are. Let them post, let them march, because in public venues we can at least assess when they are truly dangerous or not.
tl;dr censoring is fine when applied equally, be wary of anyone trying to change how speech is labeled as a means to get the government to do their censoring for them
The question is: will Apple apply the same rules to equally hate mongering shows on the far left wing. I don’t think so. This is less about censorship and more about Apple making its own political statement of what it believes is “right”.
I agree with the comments that it's their store and they can do what they want with it, and Jones actively uses his platform to bully individuals so I'm not disappointed to see it diminished.
That said, the trend of centralization of Podcasts worries me a bit. Podcasts were one of the few real success stories of an open syndication format that allowed an ecosystem of podcast apps to flourish. I've noticed a trend where podcasts make it hard to find the RSS URL or even make it hidden and require you subscribe on the major platforms. Let's not turn podcasting into the same walled garden we have for every other aspect of syndicated content!
The fact that private stores can do what they want does not mean that they should do what they want or that consumers shouldn't demand otherwise. More generally, not all bad behavior is or should be illegal. The fact that the first amendment only legally applies to the government does not mean that free speech as a concept doesn't have moral force on other organizations.
For instance, we expect universities to act as neutral debate platforms for all sorts of views that are not endorsed by the university administration. When they fail to do this, they are not legally penalized (modulo constraints from accepting government funding), but we (should) lower their public esteem. Newspapers and online media companies like Apple and Facebook could and should be held to a similar standard by the public, although in practice they are unfortunately given more latitude.
""Debate"" needs to have a minimum legitimacy requirement to be taken seriously. You can't just make up a string of provably false stuff and use it as a pretext for harassment, Sandy Hook passim.
Sure, by the private individual. The problem is many things that were major moments in world history didn't pass the ruling-class's "minimum legitimacy requirement" at the time. Top-of-my-head examples: the Magna Carta, the Protestant Reformation, Indian Independence, anybody else's independence, Snowden, etc.
The Magna Carta is literally an agreement among the ruling class.
By "legitimacy" I don't mean that people agree with the conclusion being expressed, but that people agree it's at least an attempt at a structured argument based on actual facts. The 95 Theses were complaints against real injustices, not a set of fabricated smears.
Colonial independences generally were discussable - and discussed - at the time and in advance of their happening.
> The Magna Carta is literally an agreement among the ruling class.
Not in the way you're thinking. This is at the time when the King had absolute or near absolute authority. King John was the ruling class. While it was the English nobility that opposed the king, they did so (1) at great risk to their own safety, and (2) as the only ones in a position to do so. Certainly no serf could have accomplished this -- they would have been killed.
Second sentence of the (excellent) Wikipedia article about it:
> First drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury to make peace between the unpopular King and a group of rebel barons, it promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown, to be implemented through a council of 25 barons.
> the King had absolute or near absolute authority. King John was the ruling class.
In theory, perhaps. But the barons could and did challenge the King with a degree of success. The king did not have a practical monopoly on the use of force. So the description of Magna Carta as an 'agreement among the ruling class' seems reasonable.
> but that people agree it's at least an attempt at a structured argument based on actual facts
This is far easier said than done. Just for starters, which "people" get to decide, and that's not even getting into the messy details at analyzing any arguments or facts.
We know who gets to decide - the owners of the communications platform and those who influence them. If Apple wanted to be more inclusive in the decision making, they could choose to do so.
We know who gets to decide - the owners of the communications platform and those who influence them, under current democratic legislation, which is completely subject to change according to the will of the citizens of a democratic country.
It's interesting how easy it is to observe stereotypical right-wing pedantically technical justification behaviors be adopted by the left (feel free to correct me if my assumption is wrong) as the topic of specific discussion moves around various dimensions of reality.
Step back and see the bigger picture. I think most of us think Infowars is a weird nuisance. But I was responding to the claim that political opinion should have to meet a pre-approved "minimum legitimacy requirement". If this is normalized, no other, actually important issue will be able to gain traction.
It’s either the targeted harassment campaigns against parents who’ve lost children, or the attempts to push the idea that liberals are planning a civil war and they need to be violently resisted. It may sound like he’s trying to incite violence but that’s just because you haven’t stepped back and appreciated the larger picture.
No, there doesn't need to be an minimum reasonableness to speech for it to be protected. The ravings of a lunatic are and should be protected. The issue of where to draw the line between speech/persuasion/debate and harassment/threats/shouting-fire-in-a-crowded-theatre is an important thorny one, but it is completely separate from the quality or reasonableness of legitimacy of the speech.
I don't know anything about the facts of the case at hand. I am responding to the argument, made above and many place in this thread, that the only sorts of protections on free speech are legal ones, and that in particular they don't apply to legal actions taken individuals or private organizations.
It's not like Apple is deleting his media. Apple is deleting the pointers, as they don't want to be associated with him (which is perfectly reasonable - I wouldn't want that either).
His right to free speech is not infringed. He is still free to host the RSS feed and the media files however he sees fit.
We all acknowledge that it's a violation of the first amendment if the government simply makes it hard to access speech even if it's still technically available. The government can't order Google to stop indexing your website even if they allow your website to remain online.
Plenty of people here have argued for the gravely mistaken position that free speech protections should only apply to the government, but I've never heard anyone argue that private individuals and organizations are morally bound to protect free speech in certain circumstances but this only applies if they are completely wiping out the speech rather than just making it difficult to access. I don't understand why that would be the case.
The key word in your argument is 'morally'. What's moral is fluid and varies from person to person. I think it's perfectly legitimate to suppress free speech locally when you protect it globally - for example, in the case of hate speech that demands free speech of certain groups to be globally suppressed.
More generally, not all bad behavior is or should be illegal.
Not all bad behaviors are illegal but calling for active, illegal harassment of an individual, which other people carry out, is, in fact, illegal and given this is often Jones' modus operandi, his activities are illegal and his overall strategy has involved staying one step ahead of lawsuits.
Has he done that? Jones is an asshole, I think the Sandy Hook thing was awful (and could be constituted as harassing them himself) but I haven't heard of him 'calling for active, illegal harassment of an individual' before. Not saying he wouldn't do that, it's just that the ban doesn't mention this and I haven't heard of it.
Well, when a company is looking at someone using their platform for a activities that look blatantly illegal, it's common for them to preemptively ban them. These platforms have no obligation to wait for a court ruling.
In case of Jones, He blatantly defamed the parents of Sandy Hook victims in a fashion that had considerable negative consequences for the parents due to constant harassment by Jones followers.
I agree this would be a reasonable response if this were the actual justification. But in fact, all the coverage I've seen of this cites his hate speech as the justification, not illegal activity.
Hate speech is correctly generally protected by the first amendment, and it should likewise be protected as free speech by private parties.
Hate speech is not protected by the first amendment. It is correct that something being hate speech by itself not sufficient cause for it to lose first amendment protections. But hate speech can loose first amendment protections for all the reasons other speech can; commercial speech, fighting-words and liable/slander included.
And of course, the first amendment doesn't require Apple or Facebook to host anyone so them banning first amendment protected hate speech is not a problem by itself, which is to say the second part of your claim isn't justified.
I mean, Jones' vicious rants are hate speech, slander, and falsehoods. They are intended to damage innocent, a-political, private individuals and have indeed damaged a-political, innocent private individuals. Which reason a company actually gives to ban Jones probably involves a PR calculation ("hate speech" sounds best) but whatever the given reason, I can't see this as unjustified.
> It is correct that something being hate speech by itself not sufficient cause for it to lose first amendment protections....
"Hate speech is correctly generally protected by the first amendment" obviously does not mean "all hate speech is protected regardless of other properties it may have". That's the entire point of the word "generally". The point is that Apple and others are using "hate speech" alone as the justification.
> the first amendment doesn't require Apple or Facebook to host anyone so them banning first amendment protected hate speech is not a problem by itself, which is to say the second part of your claim isn't justified.
I have explained at least half a dozen places in this thread why it's a mistake to think there's no moral imperative for private individuals and organizations free speech just because the first amendment applies only to the government. I didn't want to repeat myself, so I explicitly acknowledged in the comment you're replying to that it is an additional moral claim. Your comment just states your disagreement without actually arguing for it, or engaging with any of the arguments I have given elsewhere.
I have explained at least half a dozen places in this thread why it's a mistake to think there's no moral imperative for private individuals and organizations free speech just because the first amendment applies only to the government.
There is a moral imperative for private organizations to protect open expression in fashion appropriate to their position the national and world media "sphere" (Google suppressing a search is distinct from Apple not selling a tune is distinct from Youtube not hosting a video). None of them are identical to a government so none of them have imperatives identical to a government.
It's worth noting also that Facebook and others are transnational entities - hate speech is not protected speech in Europe, for example.
> None of them are identical to a government so none of them have imperatives identical to a government.
I didnt claim they were identical and I have in fact already given an example elsewhere in this thread for where they are different. If you want to argue for a particular difference in this case, do so. But just pointing out that I haven't fully anticipated and defeated to all possible counterarguments in a single 100-word HN comment is not constructive.
Well, my most recent argument above was explaining the logic behind my earlier claims about what was appropriate for the various platforms that recently banned Jones (I've been assuming hn readers connect the dots). I don't think Facebook, youtube or Apple have made Infowars in any way impossible to find or learn about - indeed, they've given him lots of publicity which no doubt allows many to discover his hateful ideas, still freely available on his website (still indexed by Google).
The various media platforms have, however, strongly interfered with his ability to profit from his lies, slander and malice and appropriately so. One can hope that a despicable thug like Jones winds-up in with his commercial empire collapsing and in state of destitution but unfortunately, he will mostly likely just slow shrink away.
Earlier you argued that Apple et al were justified in banning Jones because he was using the platform to conduct illegal activity (albeit for which he has not yet been convicted). I agreed this would be a plausible justification, it's just not the one they actually cite. But now it sounds like you're saying they are justified in banning him because, although it may actually increases the spread of his message (thereby, presumably, increasing his ability to lead harassment in the short-term), it deprives him of the ability to profit from it. However, my understanding is that, at least with regard to first-amendment government constraints, speech doesn't become less protected just because it's intertwined with profit-making activity. (Of course, for-profit activities may introduce additional considerations that must be balanced against free speech, but the mere existence of profit does not reduce protection.) I don't see why that should be different when considering the free-speech duties of private individuals and companies vs. the government.
> we expect universities to act as neutral debate platforms for all sorts of views that are not endorsed by the university administration
Public universities. I wouldn't dream of asking the same thing of Liberty University. The difference being, the one is a branch of government, and the other is not.
Free speech is narrowly intended to be something that limits the government's ability to impose restrictions on non-government entities for good reason. Asking private organizations (e.g., Liberty University) to follow the same limitations would undercut free speech by preventing ones with a particular point of view (e.g., a conservative Christian one) from actually being able to express that point of view.
Now, if we all wanted to agree that Facebook needs to be granted common carrier status for publicly arguing with your family about politics, that would be different.
Huh? Most universities in the US are private, including the large majority of the top ones that host controversial debates. (All the Ivys, Stanford, MIT, CalTech, etc.) These universities are held to rather high standard of neutrality even though it's not legally required for them to do so (modulo restrictions from government grants, which are empirically not the main drivers of their behavior with regard to free speech). They behave this way because the university professor and administrators believe the world is better for it, and because otherwise the public would lower their esteem as honorable places of learning (and good places for donations!).
> Free speech is narrowly intended to be something that limits the government's ability to impose restrictions on non-government entities for good reason
No! The First Amendment is intended to limit the government. Free speech is a much wider concept! If you don't understand why free speech is an idea that has important moral implications for individuals and private organizations, you should read "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mills, the classic canonical defense of this. It's only 100 pages and available free.
I am a Liberty University student. I ask them to be a neutral debate platform and they claim to be such. They also shutdown free speech on campus and do not permit open debate on topics that they disagree on. It is always kind of interesting. One day they talk about how important free speech is, the next they ban someone for his/her political views.
Honestly, I want Liberty to support open and honest debate. Otherwise, what is the point of having a university? I understand that their professors are going to be required to sign their statement of faith. Such is not required of the student and students of all faiths are welcome.
I can say what I want at work but I can get fired for that speech. Same thing you can loss your advertisers and your platforms for the same speech.
I grew up in the last house in Bethel, CT before Newtown (Sand Hook), heck my mom went to elementary school in Sandy Hook. Friends of mine had children in the school. People don't know how crazy it was the first 6 months there.
The tension was HUGE that first two weeks with Westboro Church trying to get there to protest (I knew that the people in CT would do everything to keep them away). Then the conspiracy crazies got involved and it just was a mess.
Still today I still get people who ask if it really happened. Those poor parents are hounded still. Think the Flat Earthers going after astronauts and multiply it by 10.
Jones is absolutely responsibly for his speech. Sure he can say it but platforms don't have to allow it. Terrorist, Nazis and Infowars should break every platform's policies.
> Freedom of Speech != Speech without Consequences. I can say what I want at work but I can get fired for that speech.
You should only be fired if that speech directly interferes with the performance of that job, e.g., if the cashier says offensive thing to the customers or an employee tries to convince their coworkers to shirk their duties. Political opinions that are separate from an employee's job that the employee expresses on their own time should not be punished.
Free speech is about cordoning off a realm of ideas that is free from reprisals in meat space. If you don't understand why this is important, and applies to individuals contemplating economic reprisals just as much as to government incarceration, you should read "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mills, the classic canonical defense of this. It's only 100 pages and available free.
The question of whether businesses should refrain from firing employee with unpopular opinions because the businesses fear anti-free-speech punishment from their customers (e.g., a boycott of a grocery store because the shift manager is pro-choice) is complicated, but it is very similar to the sorts of moral trade-offs made in the personal sphere all the time: if a group of students are being mean to Alice for no good reason and they will shun me if I stay friends with her, am I morally bound to stay friends with her? Yes, there is a presumption that I should not punish Alice unjustly, but there is also a limit on the size of negative consequences I am morally bound to endure on behalf of Alice. Likewise, businesses generally ought to refrain from firing employees who tweet unpopular opinions for free speech reasons, but it is unreasonable to expect businesses to take unlimited economic losses on behalf of such employees due to anti-free-speech customers.
And who gets to define "racism"? If I defend my company's policy of only accepting resumes from coding boot camp graduates if they're a woman, Black, or Latin is that racist or sexist? How about if I criticize these policies? I know plenty of people that would call the former racist and also a good number of people that would say the same of the latter.
The US government gets to define racism, if legal requirements to employ a precisely calibrated ratio of whites, women, blacks, and latinos are any guide. This is America, after all, and that’s what freedom means.
"Sure he can say it but platforms don't have to allow it. "
Yep, he has plenty of money to set up his own broadcast channels if he must. If nothing else, Jones can broadcast on shortwave. Which is probably a good place for him.
the consensus thus far has been any speech leading to harm/death is not allowed/legal (i.e. screaming FIRE in a theater). This is no different, we can sit here all day and try to assess who should be in charge but there is clear evidence InfoWars is leading to armed morons showing up in pizza places and/or harassing parents of school shooting victims. If this case was more nuanced i.e. suppressing political ideology i could see your point, but this is a pretty clear cut case of hate speech leading to real consequences
> More generally, not all bad behavior is or should be illegal.
Apple hasn't said (that I know of) that Infowars speech is illegal. Merely that they want no part of it.
>The fact that the first amendment only legally applies to the government does not mean that free speech as a concept doesn't have moral force on other organizations.
Morals differ between organizations and individuals (just ask any church, the supposed arbiters of morals). Morals are relative to groups and individuals because they are created without/despite the input of other groups and individuals. If there were an absolute moral authority (which would obviate the need for other sets of morals) then perhaps this might be different.
All of this to say: good riddance to bad rubbish. His followers may feel differently, but to Hell with them, too.
> Apple hasn't said (that I know of) that Infowars speech is illegal. Merely that they want no part of it.
You misunderstand. The person I was responding to was equating the legality of Apple's suppression or speech with the acceptability/morality of that suppression. We weren't discussing the legality of Infowars' speech.
> Morals differ between organizations and individuals
People believe different things about empirical facts, but we don't think those difference of opinion mean there isn't a fact-of-the-matter which is separate from those opinions.
If you want to argue for moral relativism you need to argue for the non-existence of moral facts, which is fine and a reasonably popular position among some philosophers. But it's hard to convince anyone to listen to any of your arguments about what should be done, in this case or any other, if you admit it's just a personal opinion (like a preference for strawberries over blueberries) and you don't actually think they have any moral imperative to listen to you.
> The person I was responding to was equating the legality of Apple's speech suppression with it's acceptability. We weren't discussing the legality of Infowars' speech.
Well, then, to clarify on my part, I believe it's perfectly acceptable for Apple to say they want no part in some form of speech. It's perfectly legal since the American 1st amendment only binds the government. Apple really only has the power that it has convinced consumers and shareholders to willingly given it (begrudgingly or not), aside from whatever power is granted by incorporation.
I don't have to agree with their decision (in this case, I do). If they were to drop some musical artist I really like (say, Peter Gabriel) I would probably feel differently, but that wouldn't make me any more right, just mad.
My main peeve with this is Google Podcasts which still doesn't allow you to subscribe to an RSS podcast. It solely allows you to listen to podcasts which Google is granted permission to upload to their own servers. As a podcast owner, I'm not comfortable agreeing to Google's terms, and have opted not to participate. To which I sometimes get complaints.
I don't understand why Google refuses to accept standard podcasting convention and let users consume my RSS feed direct and download my show from the servers I've provided.
For iTunes, as a counter example, de-listing InfoWars will hurt their discoverability obviously, but their listeners can easily subscribe themselves manually in the iTunes client.
I'm sure someone from Google will tell you it is to control the quality/experience. I remember back when I used iTunes that sometimes one podcast or another wouldn't download for a while, because their server was down or whatever, whereas most Google things it is reliably never the server's fault. Google would not be wrong to say it can ensure a better user experience if its providing the podcast over referring to another server which could very well be someone's Raspberry Pi.
But to be listed on Google Podcasts, they consume your RSS feed and upload it. The terms include the standard granting Google irrevocable worldwide royalty-free rights to your intellectual property and includes highlights like their ability to use your podcast content even if you remove it from your feed later.
Since most other podcast apps don't do anything but help others find your RSS feed, I've never had to agree to terms and prove my ownership to be listed anywhere else, Google's demand of IP rights seems unique in this space. I've actually found my podcast listed on all sorts of sites I've never heard of with no such terms required.
Sounds like AMP. "Google hosts it for performance reasons!"
I'm not too worried for myself since I plan to release it all in a Creative Commons album anyway, but I'll keep it in mind if I see someone talking up Google Podcasts.
After Google Listen (and a long line of similar shutdowns -- Google Reader, Google Wave, GChat/Voice/Hangouts/Allo), why would you use Google Podcasts anyway?
I'm not affiliated in any way, but Pocket Casts has been running for years and is an excellent option on both iOS and Android. I know there are some other good options on Android as well, if Pockets Casts isn't your thing for some reason.
Whenever i try sharing an episode with someone I end up searching that podcasts website for archive with unique episode urls. This is not optimal because it makes users load it up in a browser instead of player, but seems the only reliable way to share an episode. Otherwise the "share" link is app specific (i.e. itunes) or just takes a user to the podcast instead of individual episode. Seems like a lack of open standard to offer deep linking using "default" podcast player. also fuck InfoWars
Won't change anything.
Do you really think that InfoWars listeners really use Apple as their only point of exposure.
Also a little hypocritical of Apple, they have some very inflammatory/deceptive podcasts run by some pretty nasty people, but because they aren't InfoWars it's ok.
Apple is not virtuous, nor will they ever be, regardless of what they want you to think.
Reposting this here since just after I posted in the Ars version of this that got marked as a dupe:
I consider myself an extremely strong First Amendment advocate and "free speech absolutist" when it comes to government force, and I am also uncomfortable about where the line should be for "private entities" that manage to achieve quasi-governmental levels of power, though I do not think that any level of non-violent restriction is directly comparable to censorship via the government's monopoly on physical force.
That said, a major question for me that has been growing bigger and bigger in my mind over the last decade is what exactly should be Free Speech's answer to denial of cognition attacks (and I want to be extra clear that it is a question, I have not been able to come to at all a satisfactory universal answer myself yet). Likely everyone on HN will be familiar with the concept of resource exhaustion attacks in the context of computers and networks. DOS mitigation has regrettably become a near requirement for any significant public facing Internet service. But fundamentally resource exhaustion attacks apply equally well to humans. In the idealized world of discussion and debate and philosophy abstract models of conduct are often used, but at the end of the day "implementation" still comes down to individual humans, each of whom only has so much mental capacity and so much time. And many arguments involving reality can easily be asymmetric too: it takes very little time and energy to make an assertion but a great deal to disprove it. Reality is under no obligation to be simple and elegant to human preferences.
I have seen this get put into practice with ever greater sophistication on a lot of my favorite forums. Someone arguing BS will throw out a bunch of simple stuff that takes a great deal of careful posting to show is wrong. If people volunteer their time to answer in that thread, it does no good in preventing the exact same assertions from being tossed out again (maybe remixed) in a new thread a week or month or whatever later. Eventually people just get tired or are busy. If they try to point towards a centralized source instead, that source can then be attacked and you see "argument from authority durr" and the like thrown out. It's bad faith but in a way that exploits a lot of the norms around free speech and argumentation, which classically didn't have the same scaling and automation threats. In fact, perhaps even more pernicious is when it's not bad faith but someone who has been fed a bunch of stuff they are arguing in all earnestness, yet there simply isn't time to address them individually. They must be directed to authorities and be expected to educate themselves on it.
I'm not sure what the answer is but we do clearly have a problem as some of the previous natural barriers due to cost of speech have fallen. It is common to speak of a "Marketplace of Ideas" when it comes to Free Speech, but it's important to remember that "Free Markets" are specific real tools that require regulatory support to function and have no goals of their own. Costs need to be internalized, information and processing ability needs to be symmetric, there needs to be a shared base of legal structure and norms to work on top of. Getting too far away from that results in market failure. I don't know how that might be translated to Free Speech but I do think we're seeing a "market of ideas failure" to some extent right now, and that it could easily get much worse in the near future unchecked. There is a need for better ways to improve the signal/noise cost function, and for systems to re-internalize that the point of Free Speech, of marketplaces of ideas or markets of anything at all, is to come up with good products. They're tools to serve humanity. Bad ones shouldn't be banned by force but they shouldn't be flourishing either, if they are then something is...
I think the answer is fairly easy. If someone is an asshole online, you ban or ignore them.
Free speech is the right to speak your mind without being prosecuted by the government, it’s not the right to force your opinion on people who don’t want it.
To call that "fairly easy" seems a little overly glib maybe? I mean just look at the HN comments on this, or the comments on the WSJ article or the Ars version. Lots of people have internalized that banning people is "censorship" and nearly always wrong, and that the "right answer" to bad information is more information. Of course that framework for dealing with info attacks doesn't really address what to do when the shear amount of information is the attack.
As it stands though, within current speech norms and ideals of debate dating back to Athens at least, there are lot of people very angry about bans. And that matters to commercial entities in particular, which means banning isn't "easy" (even ignoring the lack of any time equivalency token system to deal with the economics of suspensions or bans better).
>Free speech is the right to speak your mind without being prosecuted by the government, it’s not the right to force your opinion on people who don’t want it.
You don't need to tell me that, I covered in the first paragraph of my post. But it's not unreasonable to talk about wider concepts for the "marketplace of ideas" as it serves society beyond the critical foundation of the 1A. I think we may need better norms and tools to help private entities in determining where lines should be and how to go about that. And I also think it's disingenuous to not address private entities that achieve levels of societal power that approach modern government even if they don't have armies of their own, particularly when there is in fact subtle government backing down the chain somewhere (DMCA for example).
It’s not my fault people have the wrong assumption that free speech meant you could say what you want without consequences.
Part of why free speech work is because adults accept responsibility for their actions, and part of that is living with the consequences of how you behave. When you offend people for a living, people are going to get offended and then they genuinely won’t want to listen to what you have to say.
He is very clearly talking about something broader and more nuanced/complex, a "marketplace of ideas", yet you've twice misinterpreted that as a simplistic appeal to a pedantic interpretation of "free speech as defined by the US Government".
Dismissing any discussion on this topic as simply "you have the right to free speech, but you're not guaranteed a platform" in the age of the internet, with absolutely no consideration whatsoever for larger long term considerations and risks displays that the speaker is not righteously unbiased. Sure, they're undoubtedly more correct than Alex Jones and his ilk, but they're not fully willing to support a marketplace of ideas on principle. If your ideological team is winning, this is a natural tendency, but consider a scenario where your team isn't - then what?
From where I sit, this is a good demonstration of the nature, difficulty, and importance of the problem we're dealing with in our complex societies.
It's not broader or more nuanced though, the first amendment is very clear. Apple is no more forced to include infowars on their platform, than inforwars is forced to post an article you sent them.
It has nothing to do with free speech.
I can see why inforwars readers aren't happy with this, but I don't really care what they think. People who send death threats to parents who lose children in school shootings because infowars labeled them as actors in false flag operations are assholes.
Who wants to listen to them? And it's not like they're not allowed to say what they want, they absolutely are, they just can't force anyone to listen.
Ironically, if you want the government to force private companies to include inforwars on their platforms, well, then you're really not very different from the left-leaning marxists who wants the government to force companies to hire 50/50 male/women directors.
Equality of outcome is always evil, and there is nothing complicated or nuanced about it.
You do, none of this was done in secret. If you fundamentally disagree with then decision the nobody is forcing you to visit infowars.com through itunes.
It was solved, Alex Jones broke the rules and reaped the consequences. If you posted the same sort of content you would have been banned a lot sooner, and rightly so, being popular shouldn’t give you the right to be evil.
I mean, by all rights, Trump should have been banned from twitter as well, but I guess you can become popular enough that rules don’t apply.
Yeah he broke “the rules” of Apple, Facebook, Spotify and YouTube all on the same day. Whatever you think of Alex Jones, this is a political message, not a cultural one.
>> He [xoa] is very clearly talking about something broader and more nuanced/complex [than the first amendment], a "marketplace of ideas", yet you've twice misinterpreted that as a simplistic appeal to a pedantic interpretation of "free speech as defined by the US Government"
His initial post:
"I consider myself an extremely strong First Amendment advocate and "free speech absolutist" when it comes to government force, and I am also uncomfortable about where the line should be for "private entities" that manage to achieve quasi-governmental levels of power, though I do not think that any level of non-violent restriction is directly comparable to censorship via the government's monopoly on physical force.
That said.....<where he goes into some other related but distinctly different (from the first amendment) ideas...>"
And then your reply, where having literally just finished reading a substantial block of text (the above is just one excerpt), you act as if he was specifically discussing the first amendment, and only the first amendment:
> It's not broader or more nuanced though, the first amendment is very clear.
He is not talking only about technicalities of the first amendment, yet you continue to reply as if he is.
My questions to you:
Are you aware that you are doing this? Is this behavior accidental, or is it intentional?
One idea xoa discusses is the notion of "human resource attacks": "I have seen this get put into practice with ever greater sophistication on a lot of my favorite forums. Someone arguing BS will throw out a bunch of simple stuff that takes a great deal of careful posting to show is wrong. If people volunteer their time to answer in that thread, it does no good in preventing the exact same assertions from being tossed out again (maybe remixed) in a new thread a week or month or whatever later. Eventually people just get tired or are busy. If they try to point towards a centralized source instead, that source can then be attacked and you see "argument from authority durr" and the like thrown out. It's bad faith but in a way that exploits a lot of the norms around free speech and argumentation, which classically didn't have the same scaling and automation threats. In fact, perhaps even more pernicious is when it's not bad faith but someone who has been fed a bunch of stuff they are arguing in all earnestness, yet there simply isn't time to address them individually. They must be directed to authorities and be expected to educate themselves on it."
I would assert that what's happening here is a specialized variant of a more general "human resource attacks", specifically patience, and it is something one will see repeatedly in forums, particularly on topics that fall under the the social sciences. In this case, xoa is trying to have a genuine conversation in good faith about an important topic, and you are exhibiting a behavior where you repeatedly behave as if you misunderstand the specific point he is trying to make, even when it is explicitly pointed out to you that in your responses you are changing the subject from what he is actually talking about to a related topic of your choosing, and then using that to dismiss his points.
I wonder if anyone has catalogued all of these behaviors/techniques. I recall encountering mention of some sort of a handbook on disrupting online forums or communities, I wonder if this might be something it covered, because these techniques (techniques if conscious and deliberate, behaviors if an observation of subconscious human behavior) are very effective, and in my experience (from looking for these types of behaviors while reading forums for quite some time), very common.
When it comes to the internet, Apple, Facebook, and Google are more powerful than the most powerful governments in the world. They should uphold the principles of free speech, despite not being required to by law.
Everything that is legal to say, which is almost everything, should have a equal access to these major platforms. Everyone else should have the basic faith in humanity that whatever problems this causes are a price worth paying of living in a free society.
I'm more concerned with the cynical fools gleefully espousing the anti-free speech perspective than I am with the relatively(!) small number of dumbos that follow people like Alex Jones.
Whatever happened to the beautiful American principle of defending the right of your fellow humans to have equal rights as yourself? Is it young people that don't know history, people becoming more cynical, or are we just hearing more from the loud fools?
My fundamental faith in humanity makes me believe we'll have a backlash from the freedom-loving majority. Most people are smart and principled and will see the error of going down this dark path. It may take a while but I'm not worried.
The principal of free speech isn’t the same thing as the right to an audience though. It’s the right to say what you want without being prosecuted.
Alex Jones wasn’t prosecuted and he had the right to say what he wants, he just can’t do it on Facebook. But that isn’t an infringement of his rights, it’s a simple consequence of being a total asshole.
If you always talk about how great eating feces is at every dinner party you attend, you’re not going to go to jail, but you’re probably going to find yourself without any dinner party invitations.
You could argue that Facebook and Apple are big platforms, but so what? I’m fairly sure infowars wouldn’t publish your submission if you sent an anti-trump article. Does that mean they are hindering your free speech? No.
It's amusing to watch so many people, for probably the first time in their life, fight so hard for the 'rights' of a large multinational corporation.
The basic problems, of course, are the natural monopolies and near-monopolies that came from networks. Given the amount of power you'll find in those companies given the surveillance society, I wish that antitrust law would actually come into existence again.
The be fair, there's nothing new here. Whether it was the day of Hearts newspapers or the big 2 1/2 TV networks, mass media outlets have always been political tools that are argued over.
There's a weird balance where just saying "hey we don't want to censor things" doesn't seem to make you seem very neutral when you're hosting something that is hateful towards others or just straight false information.
Apple doesn't host any podcasts in iTunes - it's just a directory. And you can still use iTunes or the iOS Podcasts app to subscribe to the podcast via it's RSS feed.
This is an interestingly coordinated move. It seems a most like each of the platforms was waiting for one of the others to make the first move at wiping InfoWars off their platform entirely instead of just censoring specific episodes, and then the dominoes fall.
I’ve never listened to an InfoWars podcast, so I don’t know what I’m missing. But from what I gather Alex is an entertaining quack who is ultimately harmless except in the sense that his message is subversive to the “wrong” groups. We’ve come a bit further along the slope from banning Daily Stormer now haven’t we?
The more interesting contrast which I’ve been watching the last few days is between how NYT handled Quinn Norton’s firing for old tweets which actually used banned words in an positive context versus NYT claiming hundreds of racists tweets by Sarah Jeong amount to the same thing and now that’s a reason not to fire her.
I don’t know anything at all about Jeong, other than some highly... erm... problematic old tweets. I knew a bit about Quinn and was very disappointed to see her fired for what I thought were highly misconstrued old tweets... but I think the contrast between how they were each handled really demonstrates how poorly companies tend to handle these matters, and specifically how much it matters which group is apparently being slighted.
And so it all just makes me wonder. When we selectively censor or fire people for specific views, when these views dont actually cross red lines into illegal speech (inciting to violence), how the decision really comes down to a political one. Companies are of course free to make political choices about who works for them or what content they host, but they’re only lying to themselves if they think it’s about morales or ethics.
Various campaigns have been trying to downrank, delist, or demonetize sites like InfoWars or Breitbart. This is no doubt a form of asymmetric information warfare trying to limit the audience for contrary messages. Personally I find the drive toward censorship all extremely concerning.
> I don’t know anything at all about Jeong, other than some highly... erm... problematic old tweets.
That's the power of a smear campaign, right? Planting a negative perception in people who previously had no attitude about a person. I recommend researching a bit before repeating the message of the campaign ("racist tweets"). Jeong is okay.
I didn’t watch the video, just read the transcript. Your quote is the headline but it’s merely paraphrasing what was actually said.
The transcript is talking about how media is trying to drum up a narrative that any violence against the media is Trump and InfoWars and Breitbart fault. This is seen as another means of censorship and blame gaming.
The specific example that comes to mind is of the attack in Baltimore Capital Gazette which just last week journalists were yelling “What about Baltimore?!” at Sarah Huckabee Sanders, when we know the gunman had specific personal animus and had even made Twitter threats against the paper, and yet CNN anchors claim it’s Trump fault for inciting violence against reporters....
Statements like this are purely political. There was no call for violence. This is discussing current events and the narrative around inciting violence against the media (“Acosta’s life threatened at Trump rally”) which is kind of an important story going on right now. But because they are on the “wrong” side of the narrative, we’ll find a way to call it hate speech and ban it?
I do have a fairly strongly held belief that speech is not “dangerous” unless it is a direct incitement to violence. I believe it’s much more likely (and has happened consistently throughout history) that “subversive” speech is labeled as dangerous in an attempt to silence the message or messenger. Very often the benefit of time shows that the particular censorship was actually about oppression and not security.
I actually have learned a lot over the last few years on HN in discussions on all sorts of thorny topics with people holding diverse viewpoints.
Throughout those discussion I try very hard to avoid ad hominem attacks, or personally disparaging remarks. We’re not obligated to engage or reply to comments espousing different viewpoints, but if we do, we’re obligated to keep it civil please!
I’m not sure I’d call Alex Jones harmless considering the parents of Sandy Hook victims received death threats after his show labeling them as actors in a false flag operation.
I think this is the fine line where the limit should be drawn.
I am entertained as anyone by conspiracy theories, and I am free to believe them or not. But if tomorrow morning, I would wake up with my name on infowars, saying I am part of the plot, it would not take long to create serious problems.
> But from what I gather Alex is an entertaining quack who is ultimately harmless except in the sense that his message is subversive to the “wrong” groups.
"Jones insisted that the kids’ deaths were a great hoax, a performance staged by gun-control activists backed by the American government. As a result of that, Noah Pozner’s family says, they have been stalked and subjected to death threats by Jones’s legions of epistemically gullible yet digitally savvy followers—a fact that has, doxxing by doxxing, forced them to move seven times over the past five years, ever farther away from the body of their slain son."
The NYT editorial board is mostly white man. While they are probably left leaning, they might probably have a streak of racism in them due to their "white privilege". So to counter balance that, you hire an overt anti-white racist.
This is the thinking in liberal left circles, they need vocal anti-white racists to balance the unconscious racist biases in the white liberal people:
>"Various campaigns have been trying to downrank, delist, or demonetize sites like InfoWars or Breitbart."
Good, because those sites are absolutely notorious for spreading lies and false rumors that have caused documented harm to innocent people, under the guise of "asking questions".
It is way too easy to spread lies in simple black/white slogan form. They embed themselves and influence opinion. It takes much more effort to disprove them, because reality is complicated and nuanced.
There's your asymmetric information warfare. The virulent hatemongers know that people want simple scapegoats, and they play to that, with anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, anti-tolerance retoric.
The guidelines specifically ask you not to do what you did with this Sarah Jeong and Quinn Jones thing: Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
I think the totality of my comment makes clear the relevance. In the matter of interpreting historical internet posts and judging whether the speaker should be censored or punished for them, or not, the lines are quite blurred.
Is there not something worth discussing here — as we examine the reactions to Sarah Jeong, Quinn Jones, Alex Jones.... to me these are all part of the same movement. By which I don’t mean necessarily something explicitly planned and orchestrated, but rather shifting public consensus on public discourse, what consequences should be dealt, and how the visceral response in these cases may be weaponized and subverted.
Upon second thought though, perhaps the more apt comparison is Roseanne Barr. I certainly agree that bringing up Jeong did not result any useful dialog on the topic, so I’ll be more careful about that in the future.
They aren't. The lines between a professional conspiracy- and snake-oil-monger, a person whose friendship with Nazis made them lose a job offer and a person against whom a targeted smear campaign failed are not at all blurred. These things are not closely related and piling Roseanne Barr on to this blob of amorphous grievance-gunk just makes it more sealion-shaped and sealion-sized. It's not a good HN topic - polite flamebaiting is still flamebaiting.
Even more clearly, Apple choosing to be selective about who they'll retain in their podcast catalog is not at all the same discussion as The New York Times choosing who to hire. This is practically the textbook case of an unrelated controversy derailing a thread.
My comment was in relation to the waterfall effect which proceeded Apple’s decision to delist InfoWars, not to Apple exercising editorial control over its store, which IMO by itself would be entirely unnewsworthy.
That's true, the distinction is greater than I made it out to be.
On the other hand, derailment was a serious concern during the industrial revolution and some thread-workers violently opposed new, disruptive technology. This is a technology site. Bears, beets, Battlestar Galactica, all this has happened before and will happen again and is totally not unrelated.
If you don’t see any parallels to the NYT firing a new tech editor based on her offensive tweets and the NYT not firing a new tech editor for her offensive tweets, then I can certainly understand how you don’t see any relation to InfoWars being censored, and I won’t press the point.
It seems like you feel like this is all so cut and dry, however the public discussion on all sides would seem to discredit that notion. It’s what NYMag calls, “on the one hand, utterly obvious ... and at the same time muddled and thorny.” [1]
I had to Google the sealion reference, I think you’ve quite abused the term. [2]
Alex Jones torments families of Sandy Hook victims with lies in order to enrich himself. Private social platforms can not only choose to not to be complicit in this evil--they have an obligation not to be complicit.
They go further than that. We had an app for models and fans to interact which showcased Instagram models and celebrities with profiles built using the Instagram API for verification. Apple told us we had to tone it down and censor a lot of the sexier photos like bikini and so on that was found on their Instagram profiles. We explained they were simply using the same photos found on their Instagram and if they had a problem with their images they should report them to Instagram. They basically told us no, we would have to manually censor the profiles instead. They found another reason to remove us from the store in the end flushing years of work down the toilet for us. They are completely arbitrary in how they censor the stores, there's no equitable standard. Basically, if you're Instagram or Twitter you can push the limits, but smaller businesses like ours get thrown out.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadSometimes it's better to just not do anything, but I guess that doesn't get you PR points.
[0] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-market-share-of-podcast-ap...
This is about providing a platform to someone who willfully spreads lies.
There has been research into the effects of Reddit clamping down on hate speech a few years ago. Guess what: not giving assholes a platform actually works. It's still a cesspool but less so than it used to be.
http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
I'm also suspicious -- what stops the aforementioned individuals from finding another website/forum? I seem to remember hearing that after Reddit closed down several of the more unsavory/flat-out-awful subreddits, a large contingent of those users moved to another site (can't remember which though).
FWIW, I support clamping down on hate speech, but only if it's accompanied by some form of education (otherwise, you're just hiding the problem).
Constricting hate speech has a notable impact on the dignity and well-being of those impacted[1].
[1] EG: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13504630.2015.11...
I am not sure any populist politician has quite realized this power. Trump has to an extent but he has no backing from anyone in media, education, or most government employees. Now that Trump has broken so many tacit rules, I fear a charismatic leftist populist would be able to nationalize these private struggle sessions and vastly amplify his or her power.
The mob has not been a force in politics for a long time. I fear a resurgence.
You realize which country has some of the more effective and stringent hate speech laws in the world? If you do, did you stop to ask yourself why?
But I also fully support the property rights of Twitter, Facebook, etc to exercise control over the content of their platforms.
You wouldn't permit someone setting up camp on your front lawn, passing out, say, NAMBLA literature would you? It's unlikely you'd say "Sir, I do not like that that you are on my lawn evangelizing man-boy love, but it's your god-given right to do so!" -- you'd probably (rightly say) "Get get the F--- off my lawn!"
Your property, your rules.
There is a correlation between the support of freedom of speech and gender / race, unsurprisingly.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1559-1816....
https://voat.co/
In other words, these platforms are powerful enough to silence people. Today, it's people you agree with silencing. Tomorrow, it may be people you disagree with silencing. It's not a good thing that massively powerful private companies are deciding what speech should be allowed and what should not. The law doesn't require it, but as users, we should demand that these major platforms are open to everyone, not just the ones that the majority currently approves of.
Their platform, their rules, within the confines of the law.
Those aren't orthogonal. They seem to both be true in this case (what "it is about" is subjective).
Adding barriers to passive consumption, by vulnerable (misinformed) people, is probably also a good thing. It's not being censored/outlawed, just made slightly less convenient to access. Fake news are a threat to democracy.
What sorts of demands would be listened to or have any chance of being effective if not having the weight of force of law behind it?
It is an awful misconceptions that the only way to effectively get other people to act differently is with law. It is lazy and leads to unnecessary use of force. Most things that are bad are not illegal (e.g., lying to your friends, being mean, abandoning your parents, cheating on your spouse) and yet occur at much lower rates than they would without the many extra-legal mechanisms that keep them in check.
In practice that's not what happens.
So yeah, I'm not shedding a tear over IW (though they probably have a point, on one occasion or another. Other media address these points so it's not dependant on them)
However, I think we should make the tradeoff explicit here. Just saying "Apple shouldn't do this because it's censorship, and censorship is bad" is a rather naive attitude. I would argue two things:
1. This isn't censorship, it's a refusal to broadcast. It's one thing to say "You can't say that", and another to say "I'm not going to allow you to use our platform to say that." The government is not allowed to prevent speech, but that doesn't mean that private companies are required to enable it.
2. It's not "fake" news. It's fake. It's literally made up stories, about child sex rings in pizza parlors and slave colonies on Mars.
So you might say, what's the harm in making up stuff? Well, people are shooting up restaurants and making on-air death threats to journalists and generally gravitating towards authoritarian viewpoints sponsored by organizations such as infowars. And guess what tool authoritarians love to employ? CENSORSHIP. Failing to hold these jokers accountable for their words and instigation actually and inevitably leads us farther down the path towards actual censorship than refusing to give them a platform. I would rather companies take a stand against this stuff than just allow them to exploit our misguided notions of democratic rule to undermine actual democratic rule.
It is, just like we need to teach kids not to drink poison. But we also don't use "we need to teach kids not to drink poison" as an excuse to leave easily drinkable poison in reach.
At some point, we'll have educated people better on how to do their own critical thinking. But we're not there yet, and acting as if we were isn't a strategy for success.
It doesn't just show up in your podcast feed.
This is obviously not true. Apple has had a ridiculous "no politics" policy on the App Store for years, censoring the anti-war left.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/538kan/apple-just...
I’m leery of people who cite one scientific data point alone. It smells like an appeal to authority. And you’re throwing up a strawman with your rhetoric about blocking a communist podcast.
Alex Jones himself has said in court it’s an act and he’s just an entertainer. Sometimes the act gets old and shows get canceled. Is that censorship?
In this case the show isn’t even canceled. Just removed from one of dozens of podcast directories. It’s still findable at the source. Your complaint is really about the creation of a slight inconvenience. There’s no real censorship here.
The Streisand effect applies when the attempt is to hide or censor information for no reason other than hiding information.
Not saying they will, because they haven't indicated that yet, but they are working with the extremist SPLC to craft a policy around 'hate' content and 'hateful' content (the latter to presumably include content that isn't hate content but could be misconstrued as hate content, perhaps?).
https://newsroom.spotify.com/2018-05-10/spotify-announces-ne...
No.
Right leaning source: http://dailycaller.com/2018/04/19/splc-maajid-nawaz-muslim-e...
Left leaning source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/opinion/southern-poverty-...
http://www.metalsucks.net/2017/09/14/infant-annihilator-bann...
That was the moment when I cancelled my spotify account.
Oh and to be sure, they don't need to "working with the extremist SPLC" to do that. This ban has more to do with some sort of pseudo moral outrage, wich the right is quite capable of on their own.
'Move thrusts tech giant into the debate over censoring content on internet platforms'
https://www.facebook.com/InfoWars-80256732576/
FB doesn't cite a specific post (eg, the implication that some of the school shooting victims were part of a hoax), which is a pity.I dislike Infowars, but I like a consistently applied ToS:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dj6T8ppXoAIqbXB.jpg
'Glorifying violence' is vague - should all police/military/veterans/people who celebrate July 4 be banned from Facebook? How is 'glorifying violence' treated the same as 'graphic violence'? One is praising violent action, the other is depicting it. They are clearly not the same thing.
It was almost a contest between he and the considerably less inflammatory but still uniquely weird John Aielli.
This isn't, nor should be read as a defense of Alex Jones by any sane person-but an acknowledgement of the absurd. I mean come on. Gay frogs? You gotta admit--it's chuckleworthy.
That's why most of us consider Alex Jones to be a joke, but the reason Apple and Spotify are making this move is because many people, exposed long enough to Alex Jones, start to believe what Alex Jones has to say.
I'm still sitting behind this keyboard chuckling slightly at the idea that a human being has the capacity to be so completely apoplectic over homosexual amphibians.
the problem is he's not. he holds these beliefs, and with his platform, he's leading other people to hold them as well. some are fairly benign, like gay frogs. others are downright sick, like calling the sandy hook kids crisis actors.
what i'm getting at is someone needs to mirror him, with disclaimers that everything that comes out of the host's mouth is ludicrous, asinine, and should never be considered rational thought. like the jackass intros, "you, and all your stupid little friends, should never try this at home."
Okay, sure YouTube telling Alex Jones to kick rocks isn't censorship, because only the government has that power.
It used to be a go-to move of mine to remind the holder of that opinion that government (supposedly) exists as a stand-in embodiment of the will of the people. The kind of laws we pass (or allow to pass) are macro-indicators of what we value. Certain amendments are passionately argued as being just that-weirdly, except the first amendment. It gets all sort of special treatment that sometimes (operative word) looks like selective application of the argument of "only government" can curtail speech.
Lately though I'm beginning to wonder if a better argument against "only the government can enforce speech" looks something like questioning the power given to corporations (those private enterprises that are free to curtail speech as much as they like) to suppress or hide what Edward R Murrow called "unpleasant or disturbing information"[1] with how much power and influence these corporations have at large, comparatively speaking at the government level.
Or, said much more succinctly: I'm terrified of the eagerness to treat 'freedom of speech' as something that is universally, and singularly granted by the government-and I think it hides some really painful truths about the speaker that they probably would never admit themselves if pressed.
---
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/39004-we-have-currently-a-b...
Similar to how we’ve come to understand the Internet as a whole as a utility which should provided as a dumb-pipe service by companies which must promise neutrality, a similar argument can be made that despite being run by private enterprise (so is most internet infrastructure anyway) that these monopolistic services are so core to how we actually use — and harness — the power of the internet that there is a level of neutrality required in their administration as well.
As asked-I'm not particularly sure I'm open to arbitrarily unloading all of that context-and reduce it all down to a simplified yes or no.
Being willing to critique ones own body politic is a healthy thing. My lack of surprise comes from this strange phenomenon going about that presumes anything short of full-fledged vociferous condemnation or admonishment must automatically mean harbored complicity and is worth the harshest rebuke or silent dissent in the form of drive by downvotes without much contemplation or substantive discussion in the slightest.
It's not so much strange, it's simple human nature really. The strange part to me is how common it is becoming on a forum as intelligent as HN. Most people here see themselves as a cut above the general public when it comes to intellectual capability, and they're right, but even with this genuine intellectual advantage so few people seem able to notice that they too are neck deep in the cultural meme war, and guilty of many of the same (or at least similar) transgressions of those they criticize, albeit to a lesser degree.
To me, this is the big elephant-in-the-room problem we should be talking about rather than obvious idiots like Infowars, and the stakes are very high in the long term.
(.....and, possibly relevant, I'm "you're posting too fast" throttled, once again. Is that message 100% consistent with the underlying algorithm? Oh right, "freedom of speech doesn't guarantee you a platform", there's nothing more to be said about the matter, full stop. As long as we follow the law to the letter, "it's all good bro".)
I find radio which has a perspective that matches my own to be insufferable. It’s not funny, it’s uptight, it’s often miserable in it’s Subject matter.
I just prefer my entertainment to be creative people arguing absurd points over boring professors explaining climate change.
That all changed when either he "lost the plot" and began to believe it all, or the constant need to stay ahead of the news cycle (everything's a false flag, everyone in Hollywood or DC is a homosexual/pedophile/drug user, etc), combined with increasing mainstream coverage, make it genuinely harmful.
That the mask only drops in response to lawsuits is the tell, I think, and that's why I'm not really concerned about this having hugely unintended consequences and chilling effects. If his lawyers are to be believed (yeah, I know, don't @ me) then he's a grifter and actor but his storyline is harmful. No one has to carry his content; he can create his own media network and distribute it there.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100301151927.h...
They are removing the podcast from their directory of podcasts, not blocking the ability to subscribe.
I'd love to see that.
It really doesn't prevent infection, just warns you about stuff that may be unhealthy.
Instead of censoring, how about coming up with a candidate that actually has some substance instead of !trump??
There are plenty of offensive and overdramatic left-leaning podcasts that aren't censored or removed from any platform.
This is what tells me that it has nothing to really do with helping anyone and based on pure hatred for anyone that has an opposing opinion.
This is what's dividing our country.
The "turning frogs gay" is reductive and hyperbolic, but unlike most of the nonsense spouted by Jones it is at least grounded in something resembling fact.
How many of them accuse the victims of mass shootings of being false flag actors?
There should be no group selection, it should be all or nothing. We also need to be damn careful of the recent attempt to brand speech some groups do not agree with as "weaponizing speech" which seems to be a new means to get the government to step in. With hate speech the government is still very limited on First Amendment grounds however by branding some speech as "weaponized" it implies violence and that does not have the same protection.
Frankly I don't mind the haters being out there, at least then I know who they are. Let them post, let them march, because in public venues we can at least assess when they are truly dangerous or not.
tl;dr censoring is fine when applied equally, be wary of anyone trying to change how speech is labeled as a means to get the government to do their censoring for them
All hail our corporate overlords.
That said, the trend of centralization of Podcasts worries me a bit. Podcasts were one of the few real success stories of an open syndication format that allowed an ecosystem of podcast apps to flourish. I've noticed a trend where podcasts make it hard to find the RSS URL or even make it hidden and require you subscribe on the major platforms. Let's not turn podcasting into the same walled garden we have for every other aspect of syndicated content!
For instance, we expect universities to act as neutral debate platforms for all sorts of views that are not endorsed by the university administration. When they fail to do this, they are not legally penalized (modulo constraints from accepting government funding), but we (should) lower their public esteem. Newspapers and online media companies like Apple and Facebook could and should be held to a similar standard by the public, although in practice they are unfortunately given more latitude.
By "legitimacy" I don't mean that people agree with the conclusion being expressed, but that people agree it's at least an attempt at a structured argument based on actual facts. The 95 Theses were complaints against real injustices, not a set of fabricated smears.
Colonial independences generally were discussable - and discussed - at the time and in advance of their happening.
Not in the way you're thinking. This is at the time when the King had absolute or near absolute authority. King John was the ruling class. While it was the English nobility that opposed the king, they did so (1) at great risk to their own safety, and (2) as the only ones in a position to do so. Certainly no serf could have accomplished this -- they would have been killed.
Second sentence of the (excellent) Wikipedia article about it:
> First drafted by the Archbishop of Canterbury to make peace between the unpopular King and a group of rebel barons, it promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown, to be implemented through a council of 25 barons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta
In theory, perhaps. But the barons could and did challenge the King with a degree of success. The king did not have a practical monopoly on the use of force. So the description of Magna Carta as an 'agreement among the ruling class' seems reasonable.
This is far easier said than done. Just for starters, which "people" get to decide, and that's not even getting into the messy details at analyzing any arguments or facts.
We know who gets to decide - the owners of the communications platform and those who influence them, under current democratic legislation, which is completely subject to change according to the will of the citizens of a democratic country.
It's interesting how easy it is to observe stereotypical right-wing pedantically technical justification behaviors be adopted by the left (feel free to correct me if my assumption is wrong) as the topic of specific discussion moves around various dimensions of reality.
I don't know anything about the facts of the case at hand. I am responding to the argument, made above and many place in this thread, that the only sorts of protections on free speech are legal ones, and that in particular they don't apply to legal actions taken individuals or private organizations.
His right to free speech is not infringed. He is still free to host the RSS feed and the media files however he sees fit.
Plenty of people here have argued for the gravely mistaken position that free speech protections should only apply to the government, but I've never heard anyone argue that private individuals and organizations are morally bound to protect free speech in certain circumstances but this only applies if they are completely wiping out the speech rather than just making it difficult to access. I don't understand why that would be the case.
Not all bad behaviors are illegal but calling for active, illegal harassment of an individual, which other people carry out, is, in fact, illegal and given this is often Jones' modus operandi, his activities are illegal and his overall strategy has involved staying one step ahead of lawsuits.
In case of Jones, He blatantly defamed the parents of Sandy Hook victims in a fashion that had considerable negative consequences for the parents due to constant harassment by Jones followers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/us/politics/alex-jones-de...
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/lifestyle/2018/08/apple-pulls...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/06/apple-rem...
Hate speech is correctly generally protected by the first amendment, and it should likewise be protected as free speech by private parties.
Hate speech is not protected by the first amendment. It is correct that something being hate speech by itself not sufficient cause for it to lose first amendment protections. But hate speech can loose first amendment protections for all the reasons other speech can; commercial speech, fighting-words and liable/slander included.
And of course, the first amendment doesn't require Apple or Facebook to host anyone so them banning first amendment protected hate speech is not a problem by itself, which is to say the second part of your claim isn't justified.
I mean, Jones' vicious rants are hate speech, slander, and falsehoods. They are intended to damage innocent, a-political, private individuals and have indeed damaged a-political, innocent private individuals. Which reason a company actually gives to ban Jones probably involves a PR calculation ("hate speech" sounds best) but whatever the given reason, I can't see this as unjustified.
"Hate speech is correctly generally protected by the first amendment" obviously does not mean "all hate speech is protected regardless of other properties it may have". That's the entire point of the word "generally". The point is that Apple and others are using "hate speech" alone as the justification.
> the first amendment doesn't require Apple or Facebook to host anyone so them banning first amendment protected hate speech is not a problem by itself, which is to say the second part of your claim isn't justified.
I have explained at least half a dozen places in this thread why it's a mistake to think there's no moral imperative for private individuals and organizations free speech just because the first amendment applies only to the government. I didn't want to repeat myself, so I explicitly acknowledged in the comment you're replying to that it is an additional moral claim. Your comment just states your disagreement without actually arguing for it, or engaging with any of the arguments I have given elsewhere.
There is a moral imperative for private organizations to protect open expression in fashion appropriate to their position the national and world media "sphere" (Google suppressing a search is distinct from Apple not selling a tune is distinct from Youtube not hosting a video). None of them are identical to a government so none of them have imperatives identical to a government.
It's worth noting also that Facebook and others are transnational entities - hate speech is not protected speech in Europe, for example.
I didnt claim they were identical and I have in fact already given an example elsewhere in this thread for where they are different. If you want to argue for a particular difference in this case, do so. But just pointing out that I haven't fully anticipated and defeated to all possible counterarguments in a single 100-word HN comment is not constructive.
The various media platforms have, however, strongly interfered with his ability to profit from his lies, slander and malice and appropriately so. One can hope that a despicable thug like Jones winds-up in with his commercial empire collapsing and in state of destitution but unfortunately, he will mostly likely just slow shrink away.
Public universities. I wouldn't dream of asking the same thing of Liberty University. The difference being, the one is a branch of government, and the other is not.
Free speech is narrowly intended to be something that limits the government's ability to impose restrictions on non-government entities for good reason. Asking private organizations (e.g., Liberty University) to follow the same limitations would undercut free speech by preventing ones with a particular point of view (e.g., a conservative Christian one) from actually being able to express that point of view.
Now, if we all wanted to agree that Facebook needs to be granted common carrier status for publicly arguing with your family about politics, that would be different.
Huh? Most universities in the US are private, including the large majority of the top ones that host controversial debates. (All the Ivys, Stanford, MIT, CalTech, etc.) These universities are held to rather high standard of neutrality even though it's not legally required for them to do so (modulo restrictions from government grants, which are empirically not the main drivers of their behavior with regard to free speech). They behave this way because the university professor and administrators believe the world is better for it, and because otherwise the public would lower their esteem as honorable places of learning (and good places for donations!).
> Free speech is narrowly intended to be something that limits the government's ability to impose restrictions on non-government entities for good reason
No! The First Amendment is intended to limit the government. Free speech is a much wider concept! If you don't understand why free speech is an idea that has important moral implications for individuals and private organizations, you should read "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mills, the classic canonical defense of this. It's only 100 pages and available free.
https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/mill/liber...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Liberty
Honestly, I want Liberty to support open and honest debate. Otherwise, what is the point of having a university? I understand that their professors are going to be required to sign their statement of faith. Such is not required of the student and students of all faiths are welcome.
I can say what I want at work but I can get fired for that speech. Same thing you can loss your advertisers and your platforms for the same speech.
I grew up in the last house in Bethel, CT before Newtown (Sand Hook), heck my mom went to elementary school in Sandy Hook. Friends of mine had children in the school. People don't know how crazy it was the first 6 months there.
The tension was HUGE that first two weeks with Westboro Church trying to get there to protest (I knew that the people in CT would do everything to keep them away). Then the conspiracy crazies got involved and it just was a mess.
Still today I still get people who ask if it really happened. Those poor parents are hounded still. Think the Flat Earthers going after astronauts and multiply it by 10.
Jones is absolutely responsibly for his speech. Sure he can say it but platforms don't have to allow it. Terrorist, Nazis and Infowars should break every platform's policies.
You should only be fired if that speech directly interferes with the performance of that job, e.g., if the cashier says offensive thing to the customers or an employee tries to convince their coworkers to shirk their duties. Political opinions that are separate from an employee's job that the employee expresses on their own time should not be punished.
Free speech is about cordoning off a realm of ideas that is free from reprisals in meat space. If you don't understand why this is important, and applies to individuals contemplating economic reprisals just as much as to government incarceration, you should read "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mills, the classic canonical defense of this. It's only 100 pages and available free.
https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/mill/liber...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Liberty
The question of whether businesses should refrain from firing employee with unpopular opinions because the businesses fear anti-free-speech punishment from their customers (e.g., a boycott of a grocery store because the shift manager is pro-choice) is complicated, but it is very similar to the sorts of moral trade-offs made in the personal sphere all the time: if a group of students are being mean to Alice for no good reason and they will shun me if I stay friends with her, am I morally bound to stay friends with her? Yes, there is a presumption that I should not punish Alice unjustly, but there is also a limit on the size of negative consequences I am morally bound to endure on behalf of Alice. Likewise, businesses generally ought to refrain from firing employees who tweet unpopular opinions for free speech reasons, but it is unreasonable to expect businesses to take unlimited economic losses on behalf of such employees due to anti-free-speech customers.
Yep, he has plenty of money to set up his own broadcast channels if he must. If nothing else, Jones can broadcast on shortwave. Which is probably a good place for him.
No, this is not where the line is drawn. In the case of first-amendment protection of free speech, the speech has to induce imminent lawless action
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action
Thus, hate speech and speech that advocates violent revolution is protected.
Apple hasn't said (that I know of) that Infowars speech is illegal. Merely that they want no part of it.
>The fact that the first amendment only legally applies to the government does not mean that free speech as a concept doesn't have moral force on other organizations.
Morals differ between organizations and individuals (just ask any church, the supposed arbiters of morals). Morals are relative to groups and individuals because they are created without/despite the input of other groups and individuals. If there were an absolute moral authority (which would obviate the need for other sets of morals) then perhaps this might be different.
All of this to say: good riddance to bad rubbish. His followers may feel differently, but to Hell with them, too.
You misunderstand. The person I was responding to was equating the legality of Apple's suppression or speech with the acceptability/morality of that suppression. We weren't discussing the legality of Infowars' speech.
> Morals differ between organizations and individuals
People believe different things about empirical facts, but we don't think those difference of opinion mean there isn't a fact-of-the-matter which is separate from those opinions.
If you want to argue for moral relativism you need to argue for the non-existence of moral facts, which is fine and a reasonably popular position among some philosophers. But it's hard to convince anyone to listen to any of your arguments about what should be done, in this case or any other, if you admit it's just a personal opinion (like a preference for strawberries over blueberries) and you don't actually think they have any moral imperative to listen to you.
Well, then, to clarify on my part, I believe it's perfectly acceptable for Apple to say they want no part in some form of speech. It's perfectly legal since the American 1st amendment only binds the government. Apple really only has the power that it has convinced consumers and shareholders to willingly given it (begrudgingly or not), aside from whatever power is granted by incorporation.
I don't have to agree with their decision (in this case, I do). If they were to drop some musical artist I really like (say, Peter Gabriel) I would probably feel differently, but that wouldn't make me any more right, just mad.
Again: the fact that something is legal doesn't make it moral.
> I believe it's perfectly acceptable for Apple to say they want no part in some form of speech.
You haven't actually engaged with my argument about the morality of this action, just stated you believe the opposite.
as a customer of Apple I'm delighted by this move.
I don't understand why Google refuses to accept standard podcasting convention and let users consume my RSS feed direct and download my show from the servers I've provided.
For iTunes, as a counter example, de-listing InfoWars will hurt their discoverability obviously, but their listeners can easily subscribe themselves manually in the iTunes client.
But to be listed on Google Podcasts, they consume your RSS feed and upload it. The terms include the standard granting Google irrevocable worldwide royalty-free rights to your intellectual property and includes highlights like their ability to use your podcast content even if you remove it from your feed later.
Since most other podcast apps don't do anything but help others find your RSS feed, I've never had to agree to terms and prove my ownership to be listed anywhere else, Google's demand of IP rights seems unique in this space. I've actually found my podcast listed on all sorts of sites I've never heard of with no such terms required.
I'm not too worried for myself since I plan to release it all in a Creative Commons album anyway, but I'll keep it in mind if I see someone talking up Google Podcasts.
I'm not affiliated in any way, but Pocket Casts has been running for years and is an excellent option on both iOS and Android. I know there are some other good options on Android as well, if Pockets Casts isn't your thing for some reason.
Do you have an example of what you mean?
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/23/us/alex-jones-sandy-hook-suit...
Also a little hypocritical of Apple, they have some very inflammatory/deceptive podcasts run by some pretty nasty people, but because they aren't InfoWars it's ok.
Apple is not virtuous, nor will they ever be, regardless of what they want you to think.
So much this. Apple is a corporation. Every action the company takes is in the interest of increasing their profits, whether directly or indirectly
I consider myself an extremely strong First Amendment advocate and "free speech absolutist" when it comes to government force, and I am also uncomfortable about where the line should be for "private entities" that manage to achieve quasi-governmental levels of power, though I do not think that any level of non-violent restriction is directly comparable to censorship via the government's monopoly on physical force.
That said, a major question for me that has been growing bigger and bigger in my mind over the last decade is what exactly should be Free Speech's answer to denial of cognition attacks (and I want to be extra clear that it is a question, I have not been able to come to at all a satisfactory universal answer myself yet). Likely everyone on HN will be familiar with the concept of resource exhaustion attacks in the context of computers and networks. DOS mitigation has regrettably become a near requirement for any significant public facing Internet service. But fundamentally resource exhaustion attacks apply equally well to humans. In the idealized world of discussion and debate and philosophy abstract models of conduct are often used, but at the end of the day "implementation" still comes down to individual humans, each of whom only has so much mental capacity and so much time. And many arguments involving reality can easily be asymmetric too: it takes very little time and energy to make an assertion but a great deal to disprove it. Reality is under no obligation to be simple and elegant to human preferences.
I have seen this get put into practice with ever greater sophistication on a lot of my favorite forums. Someone arguing BS will throw out a bunch of simple stuff that takes a great deal of careful posting to show is wrong. If people volunteer their time to answer in that thread, it does no good in preventing the exact same assertions from being tossed out again (maybe remixed) in a new thread a week or month or whatever later. Eventually people just get tired or are busy. If they try to point towards a centralized source instead, that source can then be attacked and you see "argument from authority durr" and the like thrown out. It's bad faith but in a way that exploits a lot of the norms around free speech and argumentation, which classically didn't have the same scaling and automation threats. In fact, perhaps even more pernicious is when it's not bad faith but someone who has been fed a bunch of stuff they are arguing in all earnestness, yet there simply isn't time to address them individually. They must be directed to authorities and be expected to educate themselves on it.
I'm not sure what the answer is but we do clearly have a problem as some of the previous natural barriers due to cost of speech have fallen. It is common to speak of a "Marketplace of Ideas" when it comes to Free Speech, but it's important to remember that "Free Markets" are specific real tools that require regulatory support to function and have no goals of their own. Costs need to be internalized, information and processing ability needs to be symmetric, there needs to be a shared base of legal structure and norms to work on top of. Getting too far away from that results in market failure. I don't know how that might be translated to Free Speech but I do think we're seeing a "market of ideas failure" to some extent right now, and that it could easily get much worse in the near future unchecked. There is a need for better ways to improve the signal/noise cost function, and for systems to re-internalize that the point of Free Speech, of marketplaces of ideas or markets of anything at all, is to come up with good products. They're tools to serve humanity. Bad ones shouldn't be banned by force but they shouldn't be flourishing either, if they are then something is...
Free speech is the right to speak your mind without being prosecuted by the government, it’s not the right to force your opinion on people who don’t want it.
As it stands though, within current speech norms and ideals of debate dating back to Athens at least, there are lot of people very angry about bans. And that matters to commercial entities in particular, which means banning isn't "easy" (even ignoring the lack of any time equivalency token system to deal with the economics of suspensions or bans better).
>Free speech is the right to speak your mind without being prosecuted by the government, it’s not the right to force your opinion on people who don’t want it.
You don't need to tell me that, I covered in the first paragraph of my post. But it's not unreasonable to talk about wider concepts for the "marketplace of ideas" as it serves society beyond the critical foundation of the 1A. I think we may need better norms and tools to help private entities in determining where lines should be and how to go about that. And I also think it's disingenuous to not address private entities that achieve levels of societal power that approach modern government even if they don't have armies of their own, particularly when there is in fact subtle government backing down the chain somewhere (DMCA for example).
It’s not my fault people have the wrong assumption that free speech meant you could say what you want without consequences.
Part of why free speech work is because adults accept responsibility for their actions, and part of that is living with the consequences of how you behave. When you offend people for a living, people are going to get offended and then they genuinely won’t want to listen to what you have to say.
Which is their right.
Dismissing any discussion on this topic as simply "you have the right to free speech, but you're not guaranteed a platform" in the age of the internet, with absolutely no consideration whatsoever for larger long term considerations and risks displays that the speaker is not righteously unbiased. Sure, they're undoubtedly more correct than Alex Jones and his ilk, but they're not fully willing to support a marketplace of ideas on principle. If your ideological team is winning, this is a natural tendency, but consider a scenario where your team isn't - then what?
From where I sit, this is a good demonstration of the nature, difficulty, and importance of the problem we're dealing with in our complex societies.
It has nothing to do with free speech.
I can see why inforwars readers aren't happy with this, but I don't really care what they think. People who send death threats to parents who lose children in school shootings because infowars labeled them as actors in false flag operations are assholes.
Who wants to listen to them? And it's not like they're not allowed to say what they want, they absolutely are, they just can't force anyone to listen.
Ironically, if you want the government to force private companies to include inforwars on their platforms, well, then you're really not very different from the left-leaning marxists who wants the government to force companies to hire 50/50 male/women directors.
Equality of outcome is always evil, and there is nothing complicated or nuanced about it.
Who watches the watchmen?
I mean, by all rights, Trump should have been banned from twitter as well, but I guess you can become popular enough that rules don’t apply.
But that is frankly wrong.
His initial post:
"I consider myself an extremely strong First Amendment advocate and "free speech absolutist" when it comes to government force, and I am also uncomfortable about where the line should be for "private entities" that manage to achieve quasi-governmental levels of power, though I do not think that any level of non-violent restriction is directly comparable to censorship via the government's monopoly on physical force.
That said.....<where he goes into some other related but distinctly different (from the first amendment) ideas...>"
And then your reply, where having literally just finished reading a substantial block of text (the above is just one excerpt), you act as if he was specifically discussing the first amendment, and only the first amendment:
> It's not broader or more nuanced though, the first amendment is very clear.
He is not talking only about technicalities of the first amendment, yet you continue to reply as if he is.
My questions to you:
Are you aware that you are doing this? Is this behavior accidental, or is it intentional?
One idea xoa discusses is the notion of "human resource attacks": "I have seen this get put into practice with ever greater sophistication on a lot of my favorite forums. Someone arguing BS will throw out a bunch of simple stuff that takes a great deal of careful posting to show is wrong. If people volunteer their time to answer in that thread, it does no good in preventing the exact same assertions from being tossed out again (maybe remixed) in a new thread a week or month or whatever later. Eventually people just get tired or are busy. If they try to point towards a centralized source instead, that source can then be attacked and you see "argument from authority durr" and the like thrown out. It's bad faith but in a way that exploits a lot of the norms around free speech and argumentation, which classically didn't have the same scaling and automation threats. In fact, perhaps even more pernicious is when it's not bad faith but someone who has been fed a bunch of stuff they are arguing in all earnestness, yet there simply isn't time to address them individually. They must be directed to authorities and be expected to educate themselves on it."
I would assert that what's happening here is a specialized variant of a more general "human resource attacks", specifically patience, and it is something one will see repeatedly in forums, particularly on topics that fall under the the social sciences. In this case, xoa is trying to have a genuine conversation in good faith about an important topic, and you are exhibiting a behavior where you repeatedly behave as if you misunderstand the specific point he is trying to make, even when it is explicitly pointed out to you that in your responses you are changing the subject from what he is actually talking about to a related topic of your choosing, and then using that to dismiss his points.
I wonder if anyone has catalogued all of these behaviors/techniques. I recall encountering mention of some sort of a handbook on disrupting online forums or communities, I wonder if this might be something it covered, because these techniques (techniques if conscious and deliberate, behaviors if an observation of subconscious human behavior) are very effective, and in my experience (from looking for these types of behaviors while reading forums for quite some time), very common.
Everything that is legal to say, which is almost everything, should have a equal access to these major platforms. Everyone else should have the basic faith in humanity that whatever problems this causes are a price worth paying of living in a free society.
I'm more concerned with the cynical fools gleefully espousing the anti-free speech perspective than I am with the relatively(!) small number of dumbos that follow people like Alex Jones.
Whatever happened to the beautiful American principle of defending the right of your fellow humans to have equal rights as yourself? Is it young people that don't know history, people becoming more cynical, or are we just hearing more from the loud fools?
My fundamental faith in humanity makes me believe we'll have a backlash from the freedom-loving majority. Most people are smart and principled and will see the error of going down this dark path. It may take a while but I'm not worried.
Alex Jones wasn’t prosecuted and he had the right to say what he wants, he just can’t do it on Facebook. But that isn’t an infringement of his rights, it’s a simple consequence of being a total asshole.
If you always talk about how great eating feces is at every dinner party you attend, you’re not going to go to jail, but you’re probably going to find yourself without any dinner party invitations.
You could argue that Facebook and Apple are big platforms, but so what? I’m fairly sure infowars wouldn’t publish your submission if you sent an anti-trump article. Does that mean they are hindering your free speech? No.
The basic problems, of course, are the natural monopolies and near-monopolies that came from networks. Given the amount of power you'll find in those companies given the surveillance society, I wish that antitrust law would actually come into existence again.
The be fair, there's nothing new here. Whether it was the day of Hearts newspapers or the big 2 1/2 TV networks, mass media outlets have always been political tools that are argued over.
I’ve never listened to an InfoWars podcast, so I don’t know what I’m missing. But from what I gather Alex is an entertaining quack who is ultimately harmless except in the sense that his message is subversive to the “wrong” groups. We’ve come a bit further along the slope from banning Daily Stormer now haven’t we?
The more interesting contrast which I’ve been watching the last few days is between how NYT handled Quinn Norton’s firing for old tweets which actually used banned words in an positive context versus NYT claiming hundreds of racists tweets by Sarah Jeong amount to the same thing and now that’s a reason not to fire her.
I don’t know anything at all about Jeong, other than some highly... erm... problematic old tweets. I knew a bit about Quinn and was very disappointed to see her fired for what I thought were highly misconstrued old tweets... but I think the contrast between how they were each handled really demonstrates how poorly companies tend to handle these matters, and specifically how much it matters which group is apparently being slighted.
And so it all just makes me wonder. When we selectively censor or fire people for specific views, when these views dont actually cross red lines into illegal speech (inciting to violence), how the decision really comes down to a political one. Companies are of course free to make political choices about who works for them or what content they host, but they’re only lying to themselves if they think it’s about morales or ethics.
Various campaigns have been trying to downrank, delist, or demonetize sites like InfoWars or Breitbart. This is no doubt a form of asymmetric information warfare trying to limit the audience for contrary messages. Personally I find the drive toward censorship all extremely concerning.
That's the power of a smear campaign, right? Planting a negative perception in people who previously had no attitude about a person. I recommend researching a bit before repeating the message of the campaign ("racist tweets"). Jeong is okay.
....and you'll find stuff like a bizarre conspiracy theory about the Rolling Stone UVA rape hoax.[0]
[0] https://archive.fo/ByFXt
The transcript is talking about how media is trying to drum up a narrative that any violence against the media is Trump and InfoWars and Breitbart fault. This is seen as another means of censorship and blame gaming.
The specific example that comes to mind is of the attack in Baltimore Capital Gazette which just last week journalists were yelling “What about Baltimore?!” at Sarah Huckabee Sanders, when we know the gunman had specific personal animus and had even made Twitter threats against the paper, and yet CNN anchors claim it’s Trump fault for inciting violence against reporters....
Statements like this are purely political. There was no call for violence. This is discussing current events and the narrative around inciting violence against the media (“Acosta’s life threatened at Trump rally”) which is kind of an important story going on right now. But because they are on the “wrong” side of the narrative, we’ll find a way to call it hate speech and ban it?
We can all laugh about "gay frogs" but the guy is dangerous.
Let's just agree to disagree. I read your comment history. There's no point in debating you.
I actually have learned a lot over the last few years on HN in discussions on all sorts of thorny topics with people holding diverse viewpoints.
Throughout those discussion I try very hard to avoid ad hominem attacks, or personally disparaging remarks. We’re not obligated to engage or reply to comments espousing different viewpoints, but if we do, we’re obligated to keep it civil please!
I am entertained as anyone by conspiracy theories, and I am free to believe them or not. But if tomorrow morning, I would wake up with my name on infowars, saying I am part of the plot, it would not take long to create serious problems.
"Jones insisted that the kids’ deaths were a great hoax, a performance staged by gun-control activists backed by the American government. As a result of that, Noah Pozner’s family says, they have been stalked and subjected to death threats by Jones’s legions of epistemically gullible yet digitally savvy followers—a fact that has, doxxing by doxxing, forced them to move seven times over the past five years, ever farther away from the body of their slain son."
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/th...
The NYT editorial board is mostly white man. While they are probably left leaning, they might probably have a streak of racism in them due to their "white privilege". So to counter balance that, you hire an overt anti-white racist.
This is the thinking in liberal left circles, they need vocal anti-white racists to balance the unconscious racist biases in the white liberal people:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/the-uti...
Good, because those sites are absolutely notorious for spreading lies and false rumors that have caused documented harm to innocent people, under the guise of "asking questions".
It is way too easy to spread lies in simple black/white slogan form. They embed themselves and influence opinion. It takes much more effort to disprove them, because reality is complicated and nuanced.
There's your asymmetric information warfare. The virulent hatemongers know that people want simple scapegoats, and they play to that, with anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, anti-tolerance retoric.
Is there not something worth discussing here — as we examine the reactions to Sarah Jeong, Quinn Jones, Alex Jones.... to me these are all part of the same movement. By which I don’t mean necessarily something explicitly planned and orchestrated, but rather shifting public consensus on public discourse, what consequences should be dealt, and how the visceral response in these cases may be weaponized and subverted.
Upon second thought though, perhaps the more apt comparison is Roseanne Barr. I certainly agree that bringing up Jeong did not result any useful dialog on the topic, so I’ll be more careful about that in the future.
They aren't. The lines between a professional conspiracy- and snake-oil-monger, a person whose friendship with Nazis made them lose a job offer and a person against whom a targeted smear campaign failed are not at all blurred. These things are not closely related and piling Roseanne Barr on to this blob of amorphous grievance-gunk just makes it more sealion-shaped and sealion-sized. It's not a good HN topic - polite flamebaiting is still flamebaiting.
On the other hand, derailment was a serious concern during the industrial revolution and some thread-workers violently opposed new, disruptive technology. This is a technology site. Bears, beets, Battlestar Galactica, all this has happened before and will happen again and is totally not unrelated.
It seems like you feel like this is all so cut and dry, however the public discussion on all sides would seem to discredit that notion. It’s what NYMag calls, “on the one hand, utterly obvious ... and at the same time muddled and thorny.” [1]
I had to Google the sealion reference, I think you’ve quite abused the term. [2]
[1] - http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/02/why-quinn-norton-and-the-...
[2] - https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sea-lioning
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17702100
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17702100
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17702036
The guidelines mention:
> Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle.
We should allow discussion of hate speech, regardless of ideology, on a thread about how hate speech is handled online.
This is not a close call.