Not that I agree with it but the safe strategy for any big company is to ban anything that seems risky since 95% of content most users consume is benign which is what keeps them on the platform.
If social media platforms have devolved into only cat memes and sponsored clothing shoots, that's pretty disappointing for the human race. While crackpots like Alex Jones are objectionable to all people of sense, I don't trust Facebook/Twitter/Et Al to act as arbitrators of free speech.
They wouldn't have to be the arbitrators if there was a free market for social networking with different instances that set their own rules.
The real issue is that Facebook is a publisher only when it benefits them, and a dumb pipe all other times. Either regulate it like a phone company, and force free speech on the platform, or force interoperability so Facebook alternatives can have a level playing field.
YouTube seems to have had a lot of success with the same strategy. They are a private company and not required to host content that constitutes fair use because, well, terms of service says they can. I don't agree with it and it's one of the reasons I don't publish on the platform anymore.
I don't think banning anything provocative is a good strategy anymore. If anything, the triumph of Internet-logic over mainstream logic has involved a wide variety of people being willing to go out of their way to find provocative content.
In a lot of ways, the broad mainstream seems like and often is bland, feel-good propaganda of its own - a product of both the cold war and media consolidation.
Outrageous and destructive theories like Antivax or climate-change-denial circulate because it's easy for their proponents to point at an apparent group-think in the mainstream. Banning everything controversial out of a concern for self-defense rather than truth just maintains this situation. Now that that crazy and not-that-crazy dissent has a foothold, actually arguing with it is the only way to deal with these problem theories. Of course, that also involves confronting real, serious problems in our society, which might be relegating things to an ever-growing bin is desired by the mainstream.
I mean, Jones' most common rant about "gay frogs" is a bizarro-mirror distorted version of a serious chemical pollution problem, estrogen analogue pollution, see;
> I don't think banning anything provocative is a good strategy anymore. If anything, the triumph of Internet-logic over mainstream logic has involved a wide variety of people being willing to go out of their way to find provocative content.
Which users do you think bring in more ad-revenue?
> In a lot of ways, the broad mainstream seems like and often is bland, feel-good propaganda of its own - a product of both the cold war and media consolidation.
It's risk adverse content that goes out of it's way to avoid forming anything close to an opinion or offending anyone.
I agree with your sentiment that banning any controversial discussion they essentially just move it somewhere else they cannot police, but I don't think those discussions are of much value to them because of the nature of advertising.
Indeed. It's long been rather clear that giving crackpots a platform is very different from shining a spotlight on their crackpottery, and the last decade or so have confirmed it even further, platforming crackpots and handing them ways to reach a wider audience is a net detriment to society.
Agreed. Also, freedom of speech doesn’t mean unlimited rights to all broadcast venues for speech.
If these guys want to publish stuff on their own website, no one is stopping them.
Hate speech is extremely restricted in most democratic European countries. In France for example if you publicly deny the Holocaust you get to visit prison for some time.
> In France for example if you publicly deny the Holocaust you get to visit prison for some time.
In theory, it's 1 year in prison and 45k€ (and it's denial of any recognised crime against humanity), same penalty as provoking racial, religious or ethnic discrimination, hatred or violence; however the maximum penalties (and prison time) are rarely reached e.g. well-known far-right asshole Alain Soral only got a 6k€ fine for publishing and selling a poster ruled denialist, defamatory and inciting religious hatred against jews back in 2014.
Yes, America has the First Amendment of the Constitution.
It's a principle based approach to speech in that it's free unless it incites violence. Like Maxine Waters last week telling her followers to harass Trump supporters.
The article says as much, but this is a hard problem with no great solutions.
Some of the places that traffic in Jones kind of craziness are the conspiracy and greatawakening subreddits. The former is absurdly abused by the mods while Holocaust deniers and child abuse accusations run rampant (this is why that's not cool Musk) and you get banned for opposing that and other lunacy.
The latter subreddit is kind of terrifying. It's straight on cult behavior complete with subprophets with obvious mental illness breaking down their supposed communications from Trump and "Q" - and people not only believe it but celebrate it.
I've no doubt this existed before (how did the militant movements organize prior to Waco and OKC?) but I wonder if the spread of some of this lunacy (Q) would be possible if the platform wasn't provided to them. I kind of wait for the day that Reddit has to shut that down because of how bad it looks, but I hope it's not because of some violent and paranoid act fueled by it.
Yeah, it was a pretty good article with good ideas. But Facebook and Google can't do everything about this issue. The fear and anger which give rise to conspiracy theories are part of being human. We've always been a violent, deceitful species. We have to find ways to acknowledge who we are and deal with it better than we have been. We can't just censor the madness and pretend it doesn't exist. The madness will break out in uncontrolled ways.
Being banned from prominent platforms in a country which professes to believe in free speech (professes, because there's a bunch of caveats) is only going to boost the signal.
This (in concert with the banning of certain DNS entries) is going to bite us in the ass. Of course, what else are we to do?
Of course, it raises the concern - it's not the platform exercising free speech, it's a couple of individuals acting on behalf of the legal entity that owns the platform. Treating the platform, or the legal entity, as a being capable of expressing themselves - let's be honest with ourselves - is just a shield for the company owners to express themselves without being held accountable.
its those couple of individuals prerogative. it was never a discussion about the platform it was a discussion about the legal entity. what is there a need to be honest about, what segment of the society is confused about that, I'm personally not familiar with those people and it doesn't anything about what I understand is congruent with the constitutional social contract of the privately run platform to exercise their free expression to boot off someone is also exercising their free expression.
Please don't make it look like Apple is a random company. They are a giant with monopolies. If Apple/FB/ABC start censoring the world will not become a better place.
Isn't the problem, then, that these companies are Monopolies? Why are we talking about whether private companies should ban content or not, when the real problem is that Facebook and Apple have built monopolies around lock-in and network effects, and that consumers don't have a meaningful choice to go elsewhere.
Yes, that's one gigantic problem. Before that's fixed we must not tolerate censorship, otherwise fixing it will be much harder. (Imaging the big corps to censor all criticism of monopolies!)
Every great advancement looks like a crackpot idea until it doesn't. The beauty of a public space is that anyone can bring their soapbox and share their beliefs, that most minority beliefs are wrong doesn't detract from the value of accessible minority beliefs.
I think there's a pretty clear distinction between ideas that are commonly seen as wrong-as-in-factually-incorrect that need to be protected for the sake of the advancement of ideas, like the earth moving around the sun, and ideas that are commonly seen as wrong-as-in-harmful, like the idea that the parents of the Sandy Hook victims are paid actors and deserve harassment and stalking.
de-platforming emboldens and somewhat substantiates their narrative that they are being persecuted. peripheral followers may view this as a confirmation of what they have said, and draw closer to them, following them to a new platform.
NOT de-platforming them allows their repeated publications to reach a wider audience. gradually, peripheral followers are attracted anyway, and the loyal followers may become more zealous over time.
the real problem here is that both of these possibilities assume that people are 100% passive and 100% fixed in terms of their susceptibility to propaganda or non-mainstream theories.
the sad thing is that alex jones is not remotely persuasive to anyone with a modicum of critical thinking. the debate around whether de-platforming is useful or not is the wrong debate. the debate should be about how we can make the public more critical and more endowed with the ability to think! an intellectually vicious public is not a public that cares much about whether alex jones is allowed to blather because the blathering has little impact even if it is in a public area.
the elitists will jump in and say that the public will never be able to think for themselves. but it's to the advantage of those in power to never try to make the public intelligent and critical. we haven't even tried.
> Booting someone like Jones from Facebook or YouTube altogether could easily turn him into a martyr among his paranoid fans.
This would be significantly less of a problem if he didn't somehow have a legion of paranoid fans ready to consider him a martyr. Wonder how they got there.
This article understates Jones' Sandy Hook activities, by the way: the parents of one of the victims have moved seven times because their address keeps getting published to those paranoid fans, and they now live hundreds of miles from their child's grave. In response to the lawsuit, Jones has claimed that the parents are public figures because of their involvement in gun control politics, so he can say what he likes about them to those paranoid fans.
> This would be significantly less of a problem if he didn't somehow have a legion of paranoid fans ready to consider him a martyr. Wonder how they got there.
So just ban everyone we disagree with before they get enough fans is the suggestion? Sounds like you're implying that here. For every vocal crazy person silenced by such a policy there are plenty of well intentioned people challenging the status quo who would also be silenced.
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.
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 isn't working.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadThe real issue is that Facebook is a publisher only when it benefits them, and a dumb pipe all other times. Either regulate it like a phone company, and force free speech on the platform, or force interoperability so Facebook alternatives can have a level playing field.
In a lot of ways, the broad mainstream seems like and often is bland, feel-good propaganda of its own - a product of both the cold war and media consolidation.
Outrageous and destructive theories like Antivax or climate-change-denial circulate because it's easy for their proponents to point at an apparent group-think in the mainstream. Banning everything controversial out of a concern for self-defense rather than truth just maintains this situation. Now that that crazy and not-that-crazy dissent has a foothold, actually arguing with it is the only way to deal with these problem theories. Of course, that also involves confronting real, serious problems in our society, which might be relegating things to an ever-growing bin is desired by the mainstream.
I mean, Jones' most common rant about "gay frogs" is a bizarro-mirror distorted version of a serious chemical pollution problem, estrogen analogue pollution, see;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenoestrogen
Which users do you think bring in more ad-revenue?
> In a lot of ways, the broad mainstream seems like and often is bland, feel-good propaganda of its own - a product of both the cold war and media consolidation.
It's risk adverse content that goes out of it's way to avoid forming anything close to an opinion or offending anyone.
I agree with your sentiment that banning any controversial discussion they essentially just move it somewhere else they cannot police, but I don't think those discussions are of much value to them because of the nature of advertising.
And you should try hanging out with a bunch of Facebook, Google, or Apple employees on the weekend! Prepare for an exciting and novel conversation.
They literally put children in cages.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In theory, it's 1 year in prison and 45k€ (and it's denial of any recognised crime against humanity), same penalty as provoking racial, religious or ethnic discrimination, hatred or violence; however the maximum penalties (and prison time) are rarely reached e.g. well-known far-right asshole Alain Soral only got a 6k€ fine for publishing and selling a poster ruled denialist, defamatory and inciting religious hatred against jews back in 2014.
MLK was a borderline enemy of the state in the 1950s because he petitioned for equal rights. Who gets to decide who is "dangerous"?
If you give the power to the government to allow or disallow deplatforming, then you end up with "dangerous to the state apparatus".
Giving these people a platform is what created Fox News and a made a clown President.
It's a principle based approach to speech in that it's free unless it incites violence. Like Maxine Waters last week telling her followers to harass Trump supporters.
Some of the places that traffic in Jones kind of craziness are the conspiracy and greatawakening subreddits. The former is absurdly abused by the mods while Holocaust deniers and child abuse accusations run rampant (this is why that's not cool Musk) and you get banned for opposing that and other lunacy.
The latter subreddit is kind of terrifying. It's straight on cult behavior complete with subprophets with obvious mental illness breaking down their supposed communications from Trump and "Q" - and people not only believe it but celebrate it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/greatawakening/comments/9284sg/trum...
I've no doubt this existed before (how did the militant movements organize prior to Waco and OKC?) but I wonder if the spread of some of this lunacy (Q) would be possible if the platform wasn't provided to them. I kind of wait for the day that Reddit has to shut that down because of how bad it looks, but I hope it's not because of some violent and paranoid act fueled by it.
Being banned from prominent platforms in a country which professes to believe in free speech (professes, because there's a bunch of caveats) is only going to boost the signal.
This (in concert with the banning of certain DNS entries) is going to bite us in the ass. Of course, what else are we to do?
Of course, it raises the concern - it's not the platform exercising free speech, it's a couple of individuals acting on behalf of the legal entity that owns the platform. Treating the platform, or the legal entity, as a being capable of expressing themselves - let's be honest with ourselves - is just a shield for the company owners to express themselves without being held accountable.
de-platforming emboldens and somewhat substantiates their narrative that they are being persecuted. peripheral followers may view this as a confirmation of what they have said, and draw closer to them, following them to a new platform.
NOT de-platforming them allows their repeated publications to reach a wider audience. gradually, peripheral followers are attracted anyway, and the loyal followers may become more zealous over time.
the real problem here is that both of these possibilities assume that people are 100% passive and 100% fixed in terms of their susceptibility to propaganda or non-mainstream theories.
the sad thing is that alex jones is not remotely persuasive to anyone with a modicum of critical thinking. the debate around whether de-platforming is useful or not is the wrong debate. the debate should be about how we can make the public more critical and more endowed with the ability to think! an intellectually vicious public is not a public that cares much about whether alex jones is allowed to blather because the blathering has little impact even if it is in a public area.
the elitists will jump in and say that the public will never be able to think for themselves. but it's to the advantage of those in power to never try to make the public intelligent and critical. we haven't even tried.
This would be significantly less of a problem if he didn't somehow have a legion of paranoid fans ready to consider him a martyr. Wonder how they got there.
This article understates Jones' Sandy Hook activities, by the way: the parents of one of the victims have moved seven times because their address keeps getting published to those paranoid fans, and they now live hundreds of miles from their child's grave. In response to the lawsuit, Jones has claimed that the parents are public figures because of their involvement in gun control politics, so he can say what he likes about them to those paranoid fans.
So just ban everyone we disagree with before they get enough fans is the suggestion? Sounds like you're implying that here. For every vocal crazy person silenced by such a policy there are plenty of well intentioned people challenging the status quo who would also be silenced.
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.
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 isn't working.