I think most people would interpret it in this context to mean "the time when smartphones were huge". Smartphones existed before 2008, yes, but they were insignificant compared to what they are today.
Exactly. That should really read "I started using Twitter back in 2008. A decade after Windows CE phones became quite common, and 5 years after the launch of Windows Mobile."
I had an HTC TyTn II back in about 2006. It was flawed but ultimately it was a pretty good device given the limitations of the time. Trying to cram Windows on to a phone without changing things was a mistake obviously, but for some things (email..) it was awesome.
This is silly. The age of the internet started when my uncle asked me if I had "electronic mail" yet, not when it was invented and not several years later when my high tech company went from modems and Usenet to fully connected. Similarly, the "age of the smartphone" started when they became ubiquitous, not when people figured out how to get email on their Blackberry.
It truly was before the _age_ of smart phones though.
Today virtually everyone who's 14+ years old has a one, it wasn't like that at all in 2008. And the definition of "smart" definitely changed too.
Just like the age of tablets started when the average 40yo mom started using ipads, not when Microsoft showed their prototype in 2000. Or the age of electric cars didn't start at the end of the 19th century, but a few years ago.
Though that said, most law enforcement has a statute of limitations on crimes except the very worst of them like killing another human being. If you're going to go after a fossilized tweet, just remove it, locking accounts after that long seems rather silly unless they are posting new content against the rules.
Getting banned for calling someone (a high rank politician!!!) a whore is the state of the internet in 2019.
Thing is, he's suggesting Mastodon as an alternative... there you would not only get banned for calling a woman a whore, you'd probably get doxxed and then swatted too.
> Getting banned for calling someone (a high rank politician!!!) a whore
Also calling them a 'cunt'.
Attitudes like the above are why ordinary men and women don't want to become politicians - it's assumed to be OK to insult them in any way. Why not just call Palin a hypocrite?
You should be able to criticise politicians. However if you want better politicians, screaming that they're cunts and whores instead of communicating like an adult won't make that happen.
Edit: replying to below due to rate limit
> If someone cant handle a verbal insult over the internet, I don't think they are fit for office
But it's not 'a verbal insult'. It's thousands. Most humans can't handle a thousand insults a week. It wears at you - SEAL training involves simulating humiliating experiences because most people don't have the mental strength to not crumble. I'd take a bet that includes both me and you.
Edit 2: replying to Iamthirsty
OK. You don't think being constantly insulted would have a chilling effect on someone becoming a representative because ... people can insult people in other professions?
It seems like you believe I think it's hard to work a job where you may be insulted.
This isn't correct. I think it's hard to work a job where you may be insulted a thousand times a day.
Absolutely not, but raising yourself above the line of visibility for public office (or in fact, any kind of fame) more or less automatically comes with its share of negatives.
That doesn't justify the toxic behavior at all, it is just a statement about reality. And the rude tweets are the lowest form of that, at the higher levels it turns into physical assault and sometimes even murder attempts and the occasional actual murder.
Doesn't mean Twitter needs to host it. HN has its own guidelines. I can't come here insulting you. So while it's perfectly fine to say someone can say something, Twitter has every right to decide that it won't host it. Suggesting otherwise is, in many ways, censorship. And I wouldn't want an HN that wasn't allowed to moderate its discussion.
Toxic behavior happens on every level of society and to every occupation. Being a politician doesn’t automatically make toxic behavior towards you—it was always okay towards you! That’s how the world works.
However, when you become a public figure and especially a political one people may feel more entitled to lash out against you, as you literally hold power over their lives, even if they themselves may disagree with you (as in, voted for someone else or the like.)
> If someone cant handle a verbal insult over the internet, I don't think they are fit for office
Then many people immediately jumped on him and made the assumption that he is justifying insults or "toxic behavior". I do not see how this would be the case. Care to explain?
It is not a justification of insults or toxic behavior. He is merely pointing out the fact that if you cannot deal with insults, then this and that. Toxic behavior is, well, toxic, but you have to be able to handle them in a manner that is, say, not self-destructive, while at the same time you being against said toxic behavior.
I agree with him. If you cannot deal with insults thrown at you on the Internet or in real life and it leads to, say, psychological turmoil or whatever, then you should probably do something to alleviate this negative effect insults have on you. This does not justify insults or toxic behaviors. Do you disagree?
I see this attitude a lot in discussions about online harassment. Somehow we're supposed to believe that offensive behavior is a faceless, unaccountable force of nature, but the reactions of its targets are a matter of personal responsibility and character. I don't see how that adds up.
‘Ordinary’ men and women don’t want to become politicians for many reasons, but because “it’s assumed to be OK to insult them” isn’t on that list.
You can insult anyone, for any reason—and people do all the time, regardless whether the person is a politician or not, a public figure or not, etc..
Sure, morally it might be unjust to insult a politician, or anyone for that matter. Yet the cool part about the United States is: it’s OK!
Although being a politician, and secondarily a public figure, makes the insults as public as the praises so much so that you, the observer, are more aware of them as a result, doesn’t mean that the same thing wouldn’t happen to anyone else.
> Yet the cool part about the United States is: it’s OK!
Dude, no, no it’s not ok. It’s not ok to have a culture where insults are encounter and ok. Insults can quickly lead to threats. Are often lies and manipulation. Are often racial or sexist or homophobic. And we as a society shouldn’t just stand by and allow it. What is gained by allowing insults? Honest question. Why should we be ok with them?
Now i do have to say what consistories and insult is not the easiest to define. But calling a politician a “whore” is clearly an baseless insult and a lie that brings nothing to any discussion.
But the thing is a whore is a compliment - at least they only screw the client for money. Politicians with lobbyists are more like rapists for hire really.
If you mean on a legal level, it's less about what is gained by allowing insults than it is what is lost by disallowing them. That is, it becomes trivial to ban criticism by labeling it an insult.
On a social level, there is something to be gained from insults: authenticity. Perhaps it comes down to personal preference, but I would rather live in a society where people can speak their mind (and potentially face social backlash for it) than a society where everything is artificially sanitized. Empathy is great to strive for on a personal level, but forcing the appearance of empathy just leads to strained smiles.
My father was the Mayor of a medium sized city and stirred controversy from time to time, and was a favorite target of the local press. He loved it- he took some of the cartoons most designed to poke at him and framed them and put them on the wall in his office.
The give and take is part of the vital breath of democracy- thin skin isn't a useful trait to have in the public square.
He is still beloved by many of the same press on a personal level due to his steady persona and good humor, regardless of the level of agreement with his political views, something sadly missing in the modern political firmament.
I don’t think you understood my comment as a whole. Although it may be morally unjust, it is legal, and therefore “OK” to say whatever you want (bar a call-to-action). So, again, while it may be unjust, in the eyes of the law here, it’s OK. You can’t fordably control discourse—that leads to more negatives than positives. :)
I don't think what's keeping "ordinary men and women" from becoming politicians is the toxicity public figures are exposed to, considering a lot of "ordinary men and women" (but particularly women, gender-non-conforming men and PoC, especially if they're trans) get the same or worse on a daily basis on social media.
If you look at the careers and upbringing of most high-ranking politicians, I doubt the most obvious distinction to common folk would be particular thick skin -- heck, the sitting POTUS isn't exactly thick skinned and that's arguably the most publicly exposed office in the world.
Hint: it's wealth. The distinction is coming from wealth and having connections with wealthy people who supply you with funding and influence.
Not disputing the sentiment, but if you're referring to Michael Moore's book, the full title is "Stupid White Men ...And Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!" - ie, he's not being racist or sexist but rather saying that's a very simplistic excuse.
Really I think those in power not only often deserve it but need the abuse actually.
So often they get higher up and think they should be held to a lower standard. There was oil in the ocean from policies she supported - harsh language is warranted.
Look at people like the former judge and current professional piece of shit Mark Civarella who after selling kids to private prisons for kickbacks, for things that weren't even crimes complained that he was described in too harsh of language.
To be frank if it keeps fragile egoed narcissists out of power we should make barrages of harsh language a job requirement as preventative medicine.
Twitter could, of course, have just given a warning. But I also don't see any problem treating the tweet as if it were current. The age of the tweet does not change whether it is acceptable or not, does it?
Well, he was banned for violating the Twitter rules, and those rules didn't exist at the time.
Getting a message saying something like "this message violates the rules today, so we're going to delete it" or "delete this message within a week or we'll have to ban your account" would seem more reasonable to me than immediate ex post facto enforcement.
This isn’t really a punch in the face though, is it? If someone discovered you used racial slurs nine years ago, I think they would be justified in choosing to no longer associate with you or ask you to recant what you had said in the past.
That’s interesting question. Following this principle, should we ban historical books that suggest to e.g. kill self-claimed witches, treat nonbelievers as second-class people and so on?
They blocked the account but as you can see from the bottom of the screenshot in the article the account could be reinstated by deleting the tweet in question. If the author is honestly saying they no longer stand by what they posted 9 years ago they could easily just delete it and move on.
That raises a bunch of different questions about what Twitter are doing to change history, and the way they represent their platform, but those are separate to the banning of users based on their history.
Besides, this might be motivated by Twitter acting on a complaint. It could be that Sarah Palin (or someone representing her) complained about the tweet recently, in which case Twitter need to deal with that now.
Exactly. This is all beyond ridiculous. The harm to the author is minimal. Just remove the tweet, tweet out a link to this very blog post, and be done with it. Twitter has no interest in thought control, nor capability to do it. They just don't like hosting garbage like the Palin tweet that will come back to embarrass them.
There is a very reasonable middle ground here. No one is demanding we all submit to corporate thought police. No one is being shunned from social media access without recourse. Just make a minimal effort to conform to routine societal decorum, and you can shit on Sarah Palin all you want.
I'll go one step further: by forcing them to act upon it, instead of deleting/hiding it and notifying the user, Twitter is engaging in behavioral training, like you would train a dog.
Asking someone to do something is not behavioural training. The sort of training you're talking about only works by repetition of the behaviour and reward interaction, and there's no evidence that Twitter will be repeating this over and over again for each user. That's just nonsense.
>It is definitely an immature tweet, however I think 9 years can change a person a lot.
Absolutely, I have blog posts from 2001 I leave up that are absolutely horrid.
In 2001 I was a 16 year old, who's father had died 12 days before his 13th birthday and was moved to another school a few months later where he had no friends and fell in with the punk/goth crowd. I didn't care about school, all I cared about was music and getting high or running around shows or the mall while tripping. I said stupid shit on livejournal under a username only my friends knew, mostly complaining about my mother and school. I now host those on RyanMercer.com, wholly attributed to me.
That's who I was when I was 16, it's not who I am now.
Now I post about problems we face as a civilization, I post about things that interest me, I post about things that scare me, I post about how we need to come together and put aside foolish things to focus on ensuring a better future for ourselves and our offspring but I'm not going to hide who I was 18 years ago. Now I put thought into my posts, I don't rush to a computer to type "oh my god I hate them all blah blah blah raging against society", I'm not going to try and cover that up as that's part of my experience, who I was is part of who I am, if anything it shows that people can mature.
It’s honestly a very immature tweet. It’s something I wouldn’t say
today. I have personally grown past the hate of the two party system.
I feel like I have a clearer and more mature view on American
elections, as well as seeing past the endless media designed to keep
most people angry. This tweet was from a different era in my life. I’m
not proud of it, yet it is a part of my history. Furthermore, it’s
nearly a decade old.
are you suggesting that this reader is too thoughtful for twitter?
Or that by allowing them to stay on the platform, they provide an example that people can temper their political extremism over time by maturation and introspection, thereby disproving that the flyswatter techniques you seemingly prefer for the moderation of discourse may be ill-suited to actually promoting healthy discourse?
You know, when I read that paragraph I was actually on board with the author. We’ve probably all said stupid things on the internet at one point.
Then I read the actual tweet and lost all sympathy. It’s just so horrible, and, I think the author actually shows a lack of growth by dismissing it as this 9 year old “immature” mistake.
Man I’m glad Twitter didn’t exist when I was young because this sort of tweet had nothing on how me and my friends talked to each other, and talked when we were just hanging out shooting the shit. Every passion was inflamed, everything seemed like a pressing battle. We tried to be as offensive as possible to get a rise out of one another. I’d be banned from everything forever. I’ve learned to not talk like a moron, but when does a person get the chance to learn that skill if everything you’ve ever said follows you forever?
Is calling some one stupid or telling them to fuck themselves all that horrible to you? There wasn't even a threat of violence or attacking based upon "protected characteristics."
Same argument as normal: they don't want to platform that kind of speech, and it truly was horrible speech.
Learn from it, remove the post, and move on. Not sure why this is news. It's a little bit of a narcissistic post, I think (A sentiment of "How dare you call me out, I'm an atheist who calls right-wingers names online") and I'm not sure why this is news except some people feel that more right-wing hatred is being suspended than left.
Unaccountable censorship of expression by our main communication providers is incompatible with Democracy. Communication is often a natural monopoly, and you can't just "start a competitor" to Twitter and have the market fix the problem (see gab.ai).
If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), us normal human beings need the right to appeal, public auditing, bright line rules, and due process rights.
It's not wrong for Twitter to have rules to protect the weak from the strong, and individuals from the mob, but it needs to be accountable and above board about all of it or it will make the problem far worse.
EDIT:
Just to provide an example, here are a few ways this notification could have been so much better.
1) List the specific rules violated. Link to the public process for rule review and adoption.
2) Link to ids and contact information for any human beings who made the decision.
3) Link to code and data sets for any algorithm behind the decision.
4) Provide and link to an appeal procedure instead of just a compliance procedure.
Imagine how much better that openness would be for Twitter's users. (While somewhat onerous for Twitter the company.)
I don't want a Ministry of Truth filtering what I'm allowed to hear. In a functional democracy, education and robust debate are supposed to be the defenses against misinformation.
Most western democracies long since scrapped proper education because it's easier to win the support of the population with propaganda^H public relations than it is to make a reasoned argument.
Unfortunately looks to me that if you do not have a Ministry of Truth, you end up with a society where private actors pump people with soma[1]. Personally, I am willing to accept a restricted version of Ministry of Truth to avoid that outcome.
>Unfortunately looks to me that if you do not have a Ministry of Truth, you end up with a society where private actors pump people with soma
This is not a new phenomenon. There have always been snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves. Societies that have very strict control over what people can and cannot say (think the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea, where you could be jailed for counter-revolutionary speech or misleading the people) still had lots of problems with snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves, but they also had a problem with people going to jail (or worse) for saying "the state is the cause of this famine", "the state killed a bunch of innocent protesters", "I disagree with the current economic system", "I am angry that the state took my land from me and gave it to someone else", "the rent is too damn high", "maybe we shouldn't build so many nuclear weapons", and "I don't support Chairman Mao/Uncle Joe".
I will assume that any Ministry of Truth that you would support would set out to be expressly non-political at its inception, but giving any one organization the power to restrain the expression of ideas is openly inviting those with an agenda to attempt to co-opt it into suppressing opinions and arguments critical of their agenda. This is an inherent drawback to giving anything power - it inherently becomes political even if the original intent is for it to not be political.
I would rather live in a society where snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves are punished after they commit their crimes than have a single person's freedom to say "fuck the government" suppressed because they misquoted a statistic.
How would that work in practice? The Mainstream Media is obviously partisan and serves to protect the strong (e.g. Iraq WMD, Epstein). The government (and associated institutions, e.g. jails, court, FBI, NSA.) as well (e.g. Epstein, Snowden, Assange). Who would you "trust" to pick and choose the information you're allowed to see?
The Ministry of Truth has coercive power. They can arrest you, jail you, torture you, or kill you -- legally -- for the content of your thought and speech.
Sorry, not answering all comments, but we do already have this kind of restricted Ministry of Truth. For example, there are libel laws and you may end up in jail for the content of your speech. And that is in my humble opinion a good thing. (With the painfully obvious disclaimer that I guess needs to anyhow be added in these kind of discussions, no, not all restriction of speech is good, there are really murky waters there when you want to draw the line, And that is why we have a thing called Democracy.)
We do not have a Ministry of Truth that restricts and punishes people before for what the have not yet said. We have the rule of law that gets involved after the fact.
It's a scylla and charibdis problem to be sure - though personally, I'd prefer we err on the side the Soma.
But what's wrong with what we do now, private actors who try to build reputations as having possession of truth and we muddle along with those who sound most plausible to us? Sure, some people choose the wrong sources, but that seems a smaller risk than Everyone choosing the wrong source.
If you want someone to decide what's true because you believe the people aren't capable of doing so for themselves, you've already given up on democracy.
I would like there to be better education and yes, some kind of authority that we can warn people that the information has been reviewed and is likely to be incorrect or lies. Objective reality does exist as does scientific concensus on for example climate change.
Fact checkers and scientists already exist, but in a democracy, the people have the right to choose whether to listen to them or not.
Are you saying you'd prefer that people be forced to follow their decisions? Or that information they declare "incorrect" be banned? That's not democratic, that's authoritarian.
>Most western democracies long since scrapped proper education because it's easier to win the support of the population with propaganda^H public relations than it is to make a reasoned argument.
In my mind, the correct response to the rise of FAKE NEWS (aka: yellow journalism, sensationalism, propaganda, public relations, advertisement) is to focus on teaching critical thinking skills, not to have a censor that says 'You can say this thing but not that thing'.
Will bad people have harmful, self serving opinions? Yes, they will. That's part and parcel of living in a free society.
That point of view works in a perfect world, but there are some ideas that don't deserve a seat at the table.
Drinking bleach will not cure autism, but their are desperate parents out there ready to walk into that bear trap and opportunistic people are ready to spring it.
>there are some ideas that don't deserve a seat at the table
Is it possible to enumerate the set of all ideas that cannot be expressed, and if so, how do you enumerate this set, and who has the power to determine the members of this set?
Advocating that someone should have their child drink bleach to cure their autism is a despicable act, and is likely criminal after the fact, but that's the difference here - it's criminal after someone takes action on it.
Quoting Justice Brandeis from Whitney v. California:
>Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. To justify suppression of free speech, there must be reasonable ground to fear that serious evil will result if free speech is practiced. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the danger apprehended is imminent. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the evil to be prevented is a serious one. [...] If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.
They should still be allowed to be seen but should be heavily caveatted as NOT TRUE if we know they aren't. Another good one is the reporting on vaccines causing autism, but we all know vaccines save millions of lives.
> there are some ideas that don't deserve a seat at the table.
If you don't like an idea you're free to ignore it. Freedom of speech is really about the freedom for each of us to hear. What you're really advocating is that you don't want other people to have access to ideas with which you personally disapprove. This is such an authoritarian notion that I don't understand how it has become a socially acceptable idea to espouse.
Yeah, suppressing free speech is NOT going to help with any of those tragedies. In fact it contributes to them. The reason gay people were able to come out of the closet was because of free speech. Being able to talk about the issue.
You want to cut out the only escape hatch people have. You think we have it all figured out... what is right and wrong. That we are able as a society to correctly label what speech should be allowed, and what shouldn't. But we aren't. We need free speech in order to figure out right-from-wrong. To hash things out verbally and in written form so that we DONT act out horrible ideas.
A lot more will die because you decided amoral corporate entities should have total control over national discourse. My ancestors killed to prevent a situation like that.
Obviously the natural answer is the companies who started first and developed these products that are now super widely used.
I’ve only heard two arguments- let Twitter do what they want (viva Capitalism!) or have government regulate (viva Socialism!).
I wish there was more thought given by Twitter, and others, to just self apply free speech rights and stick to using the current legal system to restricting speech. There’s a ton of law to protect people from damaging speech (harassment, slander/libel, dangerous threats, etc). It’s quite possible that Twitter can just use a more rational standard for their process.
It's not a binary switch. The government frequently regulates entities and restricts them, especially large monopolistic ones - "Hey Spectrum, you can't impose bandwidth caps because you swallowed all the competition". There's no reason the Government can't allow Twitter to still operate as a private, for profit platform (Capitalism) and restrict their limiting or banning of accounts (recognizing that they're used widely for disseminating official policy positions and governmental information among other things and there's no competition).
What the Government can't do is tell Twitter what statements it is or is not allowed to publish (authoritarianism).
Even if one were in favor of unfettered access to information generally, it doesn't logically follow that an individual publisher such as Twitter is obliged to offer or facilitate unfettered access. The WSJ isn't obliged to offer access to fake stock listings alongside the real ones.
And unless you are okay with your bank providing unfettered access to your ID, account number and PIN, I'd imagine that you are not in favor of general unfettered access either.
Democracy may require access to information but civilization requires that information not be universally shared.
That's a straw man to suggest anyone is arguing for divulging all passwords or pins. Likewise no one is arguing twitter should facilitate access to PHI, etc. There's a clear and obvious difference between political statements and passwords and its bad faith to argue otherwise.
The difference between WSJ and Twitter is that the WSJ has competitors (NYT, Politico, even Fox News and crazies like Infowars) whereas Twitter does not. We live in a world (unfortunately) where the President of the United States and his administration heavily relies on Twitter - it's no longer someones backyard social group. For Twitter to play the censor is no longer acceptable, although we still expect twitter to keep its users safe from harassment and mobs.
So yes, it's unacceptable for Twitter to play the censor or ban people from public service announcements or policy statements by their elected officials. If Twitter is going to facilitate administration statements and my local government agencies letting me know critical information, they are no longer an entirely private platform.
I’m not sure what the solution is — it’s possible to identify a problem (that humans don’t seem to be able to properly process the amount of information we currently have access to) without knowing the solution.
I agree that having restrictions on information access and communication is a slippery slope in the non-fallacious sense, at least with the solutions we usually discuss.
But I’m optimistic that the failure conditions might be more specific than they seem to the current state of affairs — self curated social graphs of unlimited size and bandwidth. Perhaps dramatically limiting scope, connectedness, or agency over whose views you have access to (think true random, not AI) would lead to less or different issues. I don’t know, because these experiments would take a lot of investment, but the point is that it may not be as black and white as you make it out to be.
There are hundreds of scientific journal articles and patent applications available for nuclear centrifuges. The US government even publishes some of them. Plans alone are useless without the raw materials, parts, and tools.
Nobody is well informed on all issues. You just can't be. You can't fact check everything.
We live in a world where the authority we defer judgement to has split up, into less balanced partisan entities. Not saying pre-internet news were unbiased, but public sources tended to be better curated. (At least where I live, I'm sure Fox has always been this horrid)
This is why filter bubbles and building psychological profiles for everyone to target them with political messages and free access to all information, correct and incorrect, does not work. It's a net negative to democracy and this neo-greek ideal of the marketplace of ideas is a sham.
I have no idea how to fix this, but it needs fixing.
What comes after we pull ourselves out of the "marketplace of ideas?" With no marketplace where will original thought come from?
The whole point of the marketplace is to sift through all the bad stuff and find the diamonds in the rough. You can't have a market without bad stuff, and the benefit of having a market is that it finds good stuff.
A world with less bad ideas is a world with less good ideas.
It's not impossible to create. It's not necessarily bad. But it would make our society much less dynamic.
A lot of partially informed individuals en masse may act more "informed" on the whole than what you're giving them credit for. It's also a less brittle organizational structure than having a few authorities who are supposedly totally or mostly well informed. If any of the authorities aren't actually as well informed as you'd thought, it has a large impact. It would take a very substantial number of peers in a peer to peer system to create the same sort of miscalibration.
And what is access? Access of parties to shove information down my throat? Access for parties with deeper pockets to drown out real information?
If information would be in a book and I could go to a library and seek it out - don't ban anything!
But if messages are replicated in covert manner with lots of money thrown at news anchors, op-ed writers, sponsoring, bribes, syndication, SEO it is a different story.
And money is not the only problem. Cognitive psychology has progressed a lot and it is possible to engineer "information" that is very likely to spread in a viral manner. Push the right reader gratification buttons and off you go leveraging the social networks.
It is important I believe to distinguish between information and data. Information must be accessible but what is happening is we are flooded with replicated data containing almost no information. It used to be that volume of data was often a reasonable proxy for importance - not anymore so. I think people are catching up to this but unfortunately it also makes it easier to sell crackpot theories.
“You can log off Twitter” is not an argument that is compatible with the idea that Twitter is so important that moderation is tantamount to censorship.
Which in part stems back to anonymity. Information becomes easier to filter and fact check when the purveyors and the sources are not anonymous. People also tend to act more civil when not anonymous.
But, a lack of anonymity brings a whole host of other problems.
Sybil attacks are a consequence of anonymity combined with low cost of identity creation, and inability to distinguish between different identities.
The fix for Sybil attacks generally involves making identity creation more expensive, or providing a means for distinguishing more valuable identities. On HN, for instance, the karma score is one such mechanism.
These systems can work without removing anonymity.
And I never said anonymity was easy or without trade-offs.
Absolutely correct. Incorrect information is a huge problem for democracy.
The best technology that we have right now to fight incorrect information is an educated citizenry of people free to decide the facts for themselves and debate them openly.
We can invest in this proven technology by improving that education, freedom, and open debate.
I think you can start a competitor but the lack of censorship is actually an anti-feature for most people as, at least in the modern internet, it seems to get your site filled with white supremacists. The social space is actually fairly crowded right now with Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Discord, the chans, Twitter, and a ton bunch of smaller ones (like HN) and they almost all fall into similar "censorship" models and I think that just reflects a the market right now (which is an interesting balance because neither side is really happy).
So how do you feel about blog platforms or other service providers that allow posting user-supplied comments on their platform? Should companies and non-profits all be required be to expend resources to keep your hateful comments available to the world?
How do we determine what's spam? What's advertising? What's XSS? You have a first amendment right to type any of these things into an input box. Does that mean the organization receiving your message legally has to post it, even if it fails to meet a basic requirement of not breaking their platform or insulting their user-base?
Are terms-of-service a violation of someone's first amendment? In my case where I am the only employee of my small platform, do I not have a first amendment right to not host content I disagree with on my domain with my own servers?
Seems like a very pertinent distinction to modern democracy / society.
Unlike in the 1800 when everyone could just go the the town square or publish their own pamphlet and have almost equal reach, today most discussion happens in 2-3 outlets: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
Whether those started as private companies, whether those are not public goods, etc, should be irrelevant. They have de facto captured a big chunk of the conversation that shapes the public opinion.
I'd argue the same was true for TV and newspapers in the 1900-2000 -- they had a disproportionate power of shaping public opinion, and a monopoly of control on it. That was bad -- and it was already said that "he who controls the mass media, controls democracy". Even if people still had the "first amendment right" to open their own newspaper (as if that's practical), or whatever.
But at the time, at least, newspapers and tv stations had limited pages and run time, expensive production costs, and it was at least reasonable that they couldn't include everybody's voice.
Today, services like Twitter, Facebook, etc, not only have small marginal costs for including another voice, but they encourage and actively want to add more (all) people in their platform. So there's no excuse (from that point) of censoring people.
There are a lot more than 2-3 outlets some of which have completely different and less restrictive acceptable use policies. For example I understand Reddit is huge, although I don't use it myself.
>There are a lot more than 2-3 outlets some of which have completely different and less restrictive acceptable use policies. For example I understand Reddit is huge, although I don't use it myself.
That's mostly a reason why Reddit (and others) should also be included in the list.
But even if we don't have all outlets, enforcing freedom of speech to say, the top-3 by users, is good enough for a start...
>And there's always email.
Yes, just like one is always free to think what they want inside their head, or tell it like it is, within their home.
I'm not talking about that, nor care about that "freedom".
The most popular websites in the U.S. where users share content are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram (Facebook's subsidiary), Reddit, Twitch, then arguably Imgur which is more a hosting site of images for other services, and maybe even iTunes for podcasts. You can monetize your content on most of these sites but if you get banned from say YouTube, your audience just dropped from the whole country to say half of the country. To compare to the real world, imagine if you were banned from speaking where half of the country lives. Besides the fact you can't get your message out even to those who want to hear it, but that your income is earned from speaking and now you can't reach your audience. These are real concerns for most content creators now that their voice and livelihood relies on these services. There is a point where we can decide these companies have too much control. Whether it be by site visits, % of total internet audience, or number of accounts/reach... YouTube has more accounts than the entire population of the U.S. Maybe that could be the threshold where we consider a company should be a 'public forum' or subject to meet certain free speech standards/regulations with their policies.
I have zero sympathy for entitled content creators who whine about getting demonetized. Earning some money from Youtube or Twitch might be a nice bonus but only a fool would rely upon it to live. If someone needs income then get a real job or start a company.
And for those that just want to get their message out, well it's never been easier or cheaper to start a web site on any number of different hosting services. If they can't manage to gain an audience on their own site then their content is crap. The percentage of traffic on other sites is completely irrelevant; any user can jump to another site with literally a single click.
I think you are underestimating the size of these companies. You say get a "real job" but YouTube pays millions upon millions of people and may be the largest employer by number of people paid. It is already a real job. There are many insanely huge YouTubers who have started their own websites and they have all failed with them. Even being the largest creator on YouTube they couldn't move traffic to their own website.
I'm not underestimating anything: traffic and revenue data is publicly available for most of those sites. Only a tiny fraction of content creators earn any significant income. Everyone else in the long tail are just picking up crumbs.
It seems perfectly reasonable to set a (somewhat subjective) threshold and start treating companies that exceed it (in some way - e.g. number of users, % of coverage, revenue) as "public services" and controlling them more tightly. The precedent is well established (e.g. GDPR, breakup of Standard Oil, ...).
>So how do you feel about blog platforms or other service providers that allow posting user-supplied comments on their platform? Should companies and non-profits all be required be to expend resources to keep your hateful comments available to the world?
Yes.
And "hateful" is a weasel world, assuming in advanced what the comments that would get censored are.
The comments could also be unpleasant but not hateful, unpopular but not hateful, not to the taste of some group (e.g. evangelicals or vegans) but not hateful, stuff societies want to ignore and hide (e.g. past crimes or system injustices) but not hateful, sexually explicit but not hateful, out of the mainstream but not hateful, and several other categories, including hateful, but rightly so (e.g. "let's bring down this fucking oppressive dictatorship and put these bastards in prison" written referring to a country under military control, or the same such against some company's like Monsanto bad practices, etc).
>Are terms-of-service a violation of someone's first amendment?
I could not care less. That's a provincial US issue. We should care what the world should be, not think in the confine's of century old laws.
In the 21st century, some terms-of-service, especially of powerful players, should be considered a restriction on freedom of speech.
Even if one still has the freedom to open their own platform, or take a box, step on it, and say what they like to the crowds in the middle of Central park...
And some if it is plain hateful. Distasteful, and inflammatory. [1]
Not all words need to be respected. Sometimes people need help, and sometimes they ask for it in subliminal ways.
And of course it's a provincial US issue. The entire internet as we know it cannot exist without provincial US law holding it together, and a provincial US economy to keep it online. We own the internet. We own Microsoft. We own Android. We own Google and Apple and Facebook and Twitter and everyone else who matters. There are competitors in these fields, but they're not concentrated enough in any other nation to make a difference. If America fell off Earth tomorrow the internet and all the technology that connects to it would be useless. Full stop.
And that should be a good thing. Healthy for your point. You don't want the internet governed on the world stage, especially if you're American.
Grab your soap box and try that "easing of restrictions on freedom of speech on a global scope" bullshit in China. Even Chinese citizens will laugh at you. They don't care about their freedoms nearly as much as you do.
>And some if it is plain hateful. Distasteful, and inflammatory. [1]
Saying what's "distasteful" is about arbiters of taste, and we shouldn't allow that. John Waters was "distateful" at some point, Rock music was, famous painters were, Henry Miller was, tons of movies, and tons of other things besides. Inflammatory stuff, doxing, etc, should be punishable under common law (libel, privacy laws, etc). Hate on the other hand is one of the basic human sentiments. Why censor it altogether? Besides, usually the case is that some hate is OK (if it's towards our enemies) but other hate is bad (if it's aimed towards our side). Again, arbiters of hate, like arbiters of taste.
>And of course it's a provincial US issue. The entire internet as we know it cannot exist without provincial US law holding it together, and a provincial US economy to keep it online.
Given the state of the modern internet, I'm not sure if that's for the better.
I'd take an old-style, CERN-invented internet back, any day of the week.
>We own Microsoft. We own Android. We own Google and Apple and Facebook and Twitter and everyone else who matters.
You say that as if it's a good thing.
>Grab your soap box and try that "easing of restrictions on freedom of speech on a global scope" bullshit in China. Even Chinese citizens will laugh at you. They don't care about their freedoms nearly as much as you do.
Well, if they don't, then I don't care about their freedoms either. I care about my freedoms, and of those countries that do care about their freedoms.
I don't want to "bring democracy" to places that don't want it (resource-grab style). I want to enjoy democracy (and fuller than today's theater of it) in places that do want it.
From just a practical perspective, if your goal is an increase in unfettered speech on these platforms, or the Internet in general, where would you want them to be besides the United States? Since you're talking about what would and would not, (or should and should not) be allowed, I assume some form of government is enacting and enforcing this as law.
I'm not aware of any nation that takes as close to absolutist of an approach to free speech other than the US. Even in the US we're currently in a relatively anomalous period of expansive free speech protection, historically speaking.
Relevant to this conversation, "hate speech" itself is a particularly common subject of bans in other nations otherwise generally considered equal to or greater than the US where "freedom" is concerned.
I think such platforms should be publicly run, perhaps something like a UN-project, and follow absolutist rules of free speech.
To me, something as crucial as a 2 billion strong method of communication (like FB), or the primary platform for web search for 8 billion people (Google, that is) shouldn't be run from a single country, nor be run for profit, nor be subject to private interests.
Especially regarding e.g. Google search, the global political, economic, public opinion shaping, etc power this gives a single private company, and to the country where it resides, is absurd.
Such services should be more like a "total archive" than a reflection of seasonal/regional/private interests, ideologies, and wills.
> Well, if they don't, then I don't care about their freedoms either.
I was making the comparison because you were comparing the internet to the world. You can't (read: shouldn't) really do that. The internet is an American invention built with selfless American principals and ingenuity. Gifting it to to the world is one thing, but assume it's for the worlds benefit (as you did in your OP) is naive. The internet, as the free world knows it, is an American invention built in an American image using American resources in an American economy with American resources. It isn't compatible with Chinese or Iranian or Russian politics, and they struggle with that. That's their problem.
When I said "they don't care as much as you do" I meant to say "they don't care as much as you do about them." In other words, you're fighting for the rights of a populace that won't fight for it's own rights. Instead they'll stand by and watch you die in vain. There is no martyr-ism in giving the Chinese civil rights. They don't understand it and they don't want it. They want a strong labor market. They want cheap goods. They don't care about being able to call out jews on some insecure gab loaded with technical debt that prevents them from being secure. They simply don't fucking care. So you making any argument on their behalf is wasted. Especially on someone else in the US. Lets talk about the internet we created for ourselves and when the Chinese get off their asses and contribute to it we can worry about them. Banggood and Alibaba doesn't count. They never will. They are B class companies and in the absence of an A class company they would still rather look for another A to shadow than become one themselves. That's their business model and it ensures their survival in an unstable market. We don't worry about those problems because we don't have too.
So worry about us. You're trying to assert your first amendment right as a consumer over mine as a content aggregator. Our rights are equal in the scope of the law. Maybe because Facebook is publicly traded there is recourse for you, but demanding FB "switch off" content moderation for the first amendment is short sighted. You signed a fucking agreement. Period. If you want to post about how jews are awful, do that on your own dime. Not Zuck's, and certainly not mine.
If your shit didn't stink so bad maybe someone with a brain and money would come hang out with you.
If we look at some differences between Twitter (or insert your favorite social media platform here) and email:
* Email providers have zero responsibility for filtering information
* Email users form their own networks dynamically through actual relationships rather than some artificial structure of "followers"/"friends"
* Email users never get banned from sending email (although maybe in some cases an individual service may ban extreme abusers)
* Email's operation is totally independent of irrational mobs/corporate interests/whatever
In short, I think the core problem with this situation is in your first line: social media has become a "main communication provider" and it's fundamentally unfit for purpose. Email and other protocol-based communication independent of platforms (IRC is another good example) is still the best solution for a primary communication provider.
From your last paragraph the term you are looking for is "common carrier".
Email goes over common carrier networks between private hosts and so is pretty close to a common carrier network. Twitter isn't and doesn't. Maybe there should be a way for web services to provide a similar service with similar protections.
Let's avoid the contorted legal definition here, and instead use the real-world definition where "common carrier network" means using an established protocol for routing and delivery, in which many separate entities work together to establish network reach.
Twitter has denied that it is a publisher in court. It is a Common Carrier in effect, and has benefited - to the detriment of its competitors - from common carrier protections.
Any time Twitter has been called to account for what it publishes, it claims it's not a publisher. Give them what they want.
They are a platform distributing UGC protected by the CDA.
Any discussion of “common carrier” is entirely orthogonal, and basically nonsensical in the context of something like Twitter.
“Common carrier” generally arises as a trade-off for a government granted monopolies based on limited access right-of-ways. This was true for railways, and true for telephone wires. Why would this apply to a random service like Twitter?
The answer is much simpler than you are making this appear.
Sending an email is a private communication. Sending a tweet is a public communication.
Your email provider is not a publishing platform any more than the paper store or the USPS is a publishing platform.
Twitter is a publisher, although as an Internet publisher disseminating user generated content, they are protected by law from the typical liability that publishers sometimes face for the communications that they publish.
To say twitter is not for fit for its purpose is bizarre. Twitter is one of the most powerful publishing tools ever created.
A publishing tool that can mimic private communication tools. Not for well thought out letters but for words spoken in a conversation. Which makes it so powerful. Which makes it so problematic.
I believe that's an artificial distinction. Companies like Mailchimp have already started implementing protections like mandatory opt-out mechanisms to protect themselves from liability. If networks of mailing lists around political rather than business interests were more common, I'd expect no less this kind of self-policing.
The OP hits at a fundamental problem. I'm not sure there's a clear path forward.
I think the more relevant distinction here is that email is federated. Once Mailchimp has sent out the emails, there's not much it can do, and it would be pretty unreasonable to force Mailchimp to review filter all their emails.
Twitter, on the other hand, is publishing these messages on their site. It's very easy for them to simply stop publishing those messages. Because Twitter is in charge of Twitter, it also has to be concerned about it's brand. The more public nature of Twitter also help this along, of course.
If something like this was to happen in the ActivityPub or XMPP space, the way of handling it would probably be something in closer to email than twitter.
Do you think Federation will be a distinction the public and politicians will make when the next manifesto is posted on Mastadon instead of 8chan?
It’s common for technologists to assume the underlying technology / implementation is relevant, when in fact it’s really just the user facing functionality that counts.
You have a good point. I suspect if the manifesto was private on mastodon it would be pretty similar to email, but if it was a public post, like public twitter posts, the effect would be the same.
Email, ActivityPub, and Wordpress are decentralized publishing communication standards. Email one-to-many distribution / spam being the thing youre ignoring. Facebook and Twitter are proprietary, centralized, and closed systems.
Shifting the conversation from publishing to the audience, completely glosses over the actual minutia at hand.
Literally no one is censoring email, or even discussing the possibility of censoring emails, unless you’re into totalitarian regimes.
OP meant to say publishing platforms not communication provider because of course there is absolutely no natural monopoly for email providers, but clearly natural monopolies for social networks.
Spam is a nuisance. It’s simply not how someone reaches 100 million followers.
I'm going to play a little bit of devil's advocate here, because I think your comment has the beginning of a good conversation.
>* Email providers have zero responsibility for filtering information
Not necessarily true. Spam filtering is an expected feature nowadays, I would say, bit you're right that e-mail providers aren't required to do that sort of thing. Still, known spam IPs are regularly blacklisted from major e-mail providers.
>* Email users form their own networks dynamically through actual relationships rather than some artificial structure of "followers"/"friends"
Mailing lists and newsletters are more like a social network than typical e-mail. But the fundamental difference isn't how users form their networks, it's how the networks are structured: on Twitter, I take a message and broadcast it to everyone and Twitter puts ads around it, and other people see it even if they don't "know" me. The equivalency is e-mail:Twitter DMs :: massive mailing list:Twitter.
>* Email users never get banned from sending email (although maybe in some cases an individual service may ban extreme abusers)
You can get booted from a mailing list, and other users can block you, but more or less it's true that Microsoft won't ban me from Exchange servers. And that's kind of the thing, e-mail isn't centrally hosted. Mastodon has attempted this with a Twitterlike social media platform.
>* Email's operation is totally independent of irrational mobs/corporate interests/whatever
E-mails killer feature, for sure.
>In short, I think the core problem with this situation is in your first line: social media has become a "main communication provider" and it's fundamentally unfit for purpose. Email and other protocol-based communication independent of platforms (IRC is another good example) is still the best solution for a primary communication provider.
Agree, and I think this is why lots of online communities treat traditional social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat) like little broadcast hubs where you basically show the world your best in little snippits. On Twitter: post a joke or a funny thread; on Instagram: post your outfit, or your view, or your dinner; on Facebook: post your graduation and family photos; on Snapchat(/Instagram Stories): post about the little things you encounter throughout your day. Once you deviate from this framework – e.g. posting "politically incorrect" or intentionally controversial content – then you are subverting and ultimately trying to dismantle the cultural expectations for those platforms. The culturally accepted place for controversial content is in private conversations: Discord, WhatsApp, iMessage, e-mail, phone calls. Because then your victims have a way to defend themselves.
The argument over "free speech" on Twitter is undertaken, almost 100% of the time, in bad faith. Twitter is a bullhorn, P2P messaging is where free speech is truly (and should always be) protected. If you take a megaphone into Union Square, and start hurling slurs and threats at people, you will be removed or arrested the same way you'd be removed from Twitter for the same actions.
On Twitter you're not talking to "somebody", you're talking to "everybody". If you want to be controversial, take it to private conversation. Causing people pain in public isn't related at all to free speech – it's just another form of harassment.
Email as a standard is a neutral vector for mass communication but email in it's real-world form as a service provided by large 3rd-parties is not. Email service providers have monopolized the market for personal emails for two reasons, the first being the difficulty of setting up and maintaining a personal email server, and second being the enormously difficult challenge of filtering "spam". Google's Gmail service has a near monopoly over the personal email market and their highly effective spam filters played a huge role in the early success of that platform (large amounts of free storage was the primary reason but their spam filters were also the best at the time). Yes, that's plausible but the context in which it occured does raise questions. On a more anecdotal note, I have noticed that particular emails (membership renewal reminders, specific call-to-action campaign emails, etc) coming from 2nd Amendment groups wind up in my spam folder whereas other, less activity inducing emails from the same groups pass through without issue.
The manner in which emails are classified as spam is something that will always be highly subjective, leaving room for malevolent manipulation to occur. I'm fact, there may be precedent for this dating back to the 2016 election. There was a brief period where all Trump campaign emails were being flagged as spam by Gmail's filter algorithms. Google had plausible deniability in stating that it was a glitch caused by their algorithm's ability to globally flag senders whose emails are overwhelmingly deleted before being opened by users.
You're missing the obvious solution ... not being authoritarian vile people that censor what others legally say and do in public.
It has been disconcerting to me for a long time now, even back when I was told that I do not know how the internet works when I foresaw the very outcome we are currently in, back about 20 years ago now. What has really happened here, is a kind of fascism (the alignment of state and industry) not by the grass roots so much as it was approached in the past, but through a top down consolidation, concentration, and now ever increasing and tightening control over all aspects and manners of freedom and liberty, under the guise of doing things for others' best interests, which of course always align more closely with the interests of the power seeking than the blissfully unaware recipients of this benevolent good intention of the power hungry.
I do not foresee a positive future at this point, because the very mindset of the trend curve has solidly crossed with the power broker curve, and there is ever weaning realization that the only way to resolve these matters in anything but a violent manner is that everyone be allowed the God given rights that the US Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to the Constitution) prohibits the government from violating.
Those include free speech and assembly (of any kind, regardless of whether you agree with it), freedom to arms to protect yourself from the very government mob that demands to take the right to protect yourself from it (it's a self-fulfilling and self-validating argument that is rather genius), and other inalienable rights that are innate to actual Americans (and anyone who were to adopt the same) and God given (which you presumably should not and do not prescribe to if you do not believe in God from which they are unavoidably and declaratively derived) that are not necessary to be listed here for reasons of brevity and their only tangential relation to the topic.
It has always surprised me, and it is one of the most interesting questions for me, how that a presumably extremely logical and systematic cohort of humans as the ones assembled in this forum, would seemingly lack any semblance of a capacity to understand the consequences of making fundamental changes to a system, in what appears to be some bizarre and inverted assumption that no change to a system will in any way result in negative outcomes. Unless of course the very prime assumption is a desire to sabotage the system, whether you are a knowing and willing participant, or just a placed saboteur ... a rube, not in any way understanding that he was placed to spread his negative impact on the system from within.
The problem that all “We should have unrestricted free speech” (and the more general case of “unrestricted freedom to X”) proposals must always solve, is what to do when a group of individuals acting in bad faith use that freedom to effectively deny other people that freedom.
Lots of fascists demand freedom of speech. And what do they do with that freedom? Assemble mobs online to harass people who say things they disagree with. Or take control and then ban books and “intellectuals” and so forth.
If you don’t like the example of “fascists,” there are plenty of other examples you could pick, like press barons. History abounds with examples of people using democracy to acquire enough power to uninstall democracy.
This is a hard problem. There are no easy or simple or ideologically pure solutions. Absolute freedom of speech leads to people using that freedom to deny other people that freedom. Absolute freedom to own a weapon leads to people using that freedom to deny other people the freedom to live, much less own a weapon of their own. And so on. And so forth.
TL;DR:
There are no simple solutions to problems involving systems where people are prepared to act in bad faith to abuse the simple solutions.
My personal claim: The above does not mean, of course, that there are no solutions, or that the only options are “unrestricted and absolute freedom” versus tyranny. It’s just that there are no simple solutions.
——
Related:
There is a reason that we are having this discussion on a forum that explicitly does NOT grant unrestricted free speech.
Let’s ask ourselves this question: What would Hacker News look like if we turned of spam filtering, moderation, flagging, banning, sorting comments by votes, greying out downvoted messages, &c.?
What value would it have as a community? As a source of information?
Would you find yourself feeling smarter and better educated about an issue after reading the comments on a subject? Or would you feel like you lost 50 points of IQ to toxicity?
Would you consider it a good use of your time to independently verify each and every claim people made? What about disproving known rubbish claims?
How would you feel about logging in every day and having the exact same debate with the exact same people who seem to have an infinite amount of time available to make false claims?
Even the most rational people can get dragged into systems of reactivity and emotion. There are very few truly rational voices left today, since the new description of "rational" is non-religious and liberal.
I’m confused. What technology did twitter replace? Oh it didn’t? This is completely new, the ability to communicate to this many people at once? Okay so what ancient rights are being trampled exactly? If anything we probably need to be censoring people on Twitter right now as it doesn’t seem to convince anyone of anything other than that the people on the other-side of their argument are sub-human.
Edit:
Also, it always riles me up when someone refers to social media as a “main communication” provider. What fraction of the population gets its political discourse off of Twitter?
In Q1 of this year, twitter had 68 million monthly active users in the US [0]. Hard to tell how many of them follow political discourse. But that’s 20% of the population (give or take) and it’s a substantial fraction.
I’m not sure how but I want that fraction to get before appropriate rights are defined and adopted.
The US common carrier rules were only enacted in 1934 [1] so it took a while before phone companies were forced to respect some US rights. Twitter is only 15 years old so it’s likely that this private company (and others) will be regulated just like the private telephone companies were regulated.
I had hoped that technology had advanced enough so respecting human rights would be embedded into the design. But now I think it will take laws and regulations which will inevitably, and sadly I think, also squelch innovation.
I have no idea what the real MAU numbers of actual people are but I would think it's maybe a quarter (5%) of the population. There are so many bots on twitter along with company accounts, meme accounts, IFTT automation, etc. that I can't imagine it's 20% of the US using twitter each month.
If you count the number of people indirectly reading twitter through other media the number is much higher than 20%. And it's not just media directly quoting and crediting twitter; I imagine journalists get a very high percentage of their leads and sources through twitter.
I don't buy those numbers for a second, and I certainly don't buy that everyone on Twitter is following political discourse. I have a Twitter account, but I only follow a very narrow slice of systems programming news.
Twitter does a loose definition of MAU, as most do. If it’s just logged in users in the past month, that’s going to include a boat load of duplicate/2nd/3rd accounts and bots.
Twitter themselves say monetizable active users are around 40% of worldwide monthly active users. Your statista link links to that. That takes your percentage of US down to 8%. Account for Twitter exaggerating or missing out on anything and the number of users who don’t follow political discourse and you’re likely below 5%.
"Everyone gets a platform" is not a right. It's never been a right. If anything, I hope it's a societal anomaly that we fix in the next 10 years. Again, the first amendment gives you exactly fuckall protection on twitter, and that's how it should be.
The New York Times isn't required to host your "Obama was the REAL racist" diatribes and Fox News doesn't need to have you come on every weekend to point out "Trump is probably a rapist" because you're not entitled to this. Same as Twitter.
That said: ToS enforcement is always difficult, always subjective, and always "unfair". There is no good way to fix this. Whatever cool idea someone has for how to fix this doesn't actually fix this. And they don't need to. Twitter gonna ban what Twitter gonna ban.
Large corporations hamstringing reformist politicians rubs some people the wrong way. The major nonhuman players have always participated in politics, but when they prevent others from participating in politics it's seen as another line being crossed.
Twitter has those, too, like having to carve out an exemption in the rules for Trump's account, or accusations of bias that lead to Congressional hearings.
I guess I should have written "Should Mastercard be required..." Typically these debates are about what should be allowed under the law rather than what's actually allowed under the law today.
edit: What I wrote here is wrong. It was not confirmed it was only a narrow ruling.
And as the courts have recently confirmed, even protected classes cannot compel a business into speech that contradicts their own sincerely held moral and ethical beliefs.
The Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling was a narrow one, ruling that Colorado's process explicitly discriminated against the bakers - it showed forbidden anti-religious animus.
> In a 7-2 decision, the Court ruled on narrow grounds that the Commission did not employ religious neutrality, violating Masterpiece owner Jack Phillips' rights to free exercise, and reversed the Commission's decision. The Court did not rule on the broader intersection of anti-discrimination laws, free exercise of religion, and freedom of speech, due to the complications of the Commission's lack of religious neutrality.
It'll probably be a few more years before we get a better test case for the issue that the Court can't as easily dodge.
No they're not. I'm pretty sure, based on comments below, that they're legally allowed to not allow their platform to be used to process payments for thing they don't want. The same way a business can state "Cash Only" in the US. This would be terrible optics, and when you broker in money/payments and not thoughts/words, you're probably hamstringing yourself relative to your competition who don't care.
But what does this have to do with the price of tea in China?
But who gets to decide who gets a platform? What happens when those deciders abuse their power?
The danger in deplatforming is the inevitability of changing social mores. What happens if the pendulum swings the other way and the ones you consider to be on the "right side" of history start getting deplatformed?
If your answer to that is, "oh that won't happen", then you're oh so naive.
>>But who gets to decide who gets a platform? What happens when those deciders abuse their power?
The owners of the platform. As things have always been. Like magazine editors or tv producers. Everyone having a platform is a mixed bag. I don't feel it's needed. If the socialists get McCarthy'd off twitter, they'll survive. If the Alt-right pisses off their web hosts, there's always some lovely libertarian ISP out there who feels that loud anarchy is the best way to support the first amendment.
>>What happens if the pendulum swings the other way and the ones you consider to be on the "right side" of history start getting deplatformed?
They'll find new platforms? Like they always have? I mean, maybe not the best example but as unpopular as Nazis and the KKK are, they still somehow find a way to exist and keep coming back. If your cause is sticky enough, you'll attract people. Also, maybe some ideas should just be allowed to quietly die in private. We don't need "both sides" on every issue.
What if the social pressure to "not give a platform to <x>" means that it becomes practically impossible for certain groups to have their voice heard?
The point I'm getting at, is when you chip away at free speech like that, no matter how laudable the goals, the inevitable result is less free speech for all.
I don't believe in 100% free speech. I don't think it's needed for society to function. That's fine if you do. But slippery slope arguments or "when the tides change" future-scenarios aren't super convincing.
I'm fine with being intolerant of intolerance. I also understand it's personal opinion. That's how the world works. It's a bunch of individuals trying their best to get by in their lives.
I say we ban the Nazis. You say "let the Nazis talk". Then society as a whole fights it out and comes to a conclusion (with inertia favoring inaction). The same will happen for ANTIFA and Communists and the Alt-Right and Libertarians being allowed to have platforms. And American society as a whole will keep moving forward in the same weird twisting way it has for the past ~250 years.
I'm not unaware of the ramifications of my opinions if enacted as policy, I'm just not afraid of the fight when someone seeks to use them against me.
I'm not so much afraid of the fight, as I am cognizant of the fact that once you enact a restriction on something, it's extremely difficult to reverse that restriction. I'm also trying to consider future generations - I see no reason to ignore the effects our current actions could have on them.
It's easy to think "the government will never use these exceptions to silence speech critical of the government" but quite honestly, I don't have faith in my fellow man in that context, or at least not the typical politician. History has proven that governments can and will abuse any tool they are given. Such abuses currently happen, today, in the modern world. I'm a firm believer in a small government that stays as much out of people's lives as possible, at least directly.
I respect your difference of opinion, however. I agree with the idea that "platforms" can control who publishes through their infrastructure. I also feel that everyone should have access to some platform, even if it's not the most popular one. Thus, when it comes to the backbone of the internet, I don't think providers should be able to pick and choose who they host, as long as there is no otherwise illegal content (copyright infringement, child abuse, etc). If any companies should be considered true common carriers, it would be those on the backbone.
Even though Twitter and the like might be new technology, they are still replacing the old. People only have so much time in the day and all the other ways that people engage in politics compete with Twitter and the like. And it seems that Twitter and the like have won that competition. This means that a large chunk of political discourse now happens on services like Twitter.
Yes, but why isn't Twitter allowed to curate political content? They have a 1st amendment right to do so. Just like every newspaper before them got the right to curate who got published in their editorial section.
They are clearly both, just as newspapers were before them (heck they had classifieds and personals while I was alive, that's a platform). The editorial section of a newspaper is a platform, but a highly curated one, because of resource constraints that a platform like Twitter doesn't have.
> As I understand it, whether social media companies are platforms or publishers forms the actual core and substance of this debate about "free speech."
This is wrong. There is no such distinction between platforms and publishers and the opposite is actually true. The law explicitly states that website owners are not responsible for content provided by other parties and are also explicitly permitted to curate their platforms for what they deem to be objectionable content.
I don't think people are arguing that what Twitter is doing is legal or illegal, but whether it's morally good or bad, and whether it will promote a better society. These are understandably much less tangible problems.
There's still no difference between "publisher" and "platform". I see Twitter as a giant expansion of the Op-Ed section of the newspaper, not a telephone party line.
To whom is Twitter responsible? If shareholders/investors then it should do whatever seems most likely to make it the most money. If "users" then it should do whatever seems most likely to make the most users happy.
There are valid moral arguments on both side of the censorship debate, and ultimately it comes down to subjective judgement and a gut call by twitter management. There's a lot of people claiming moral imperatives and "what is right" as if "right" was an absolute and not like, their opinion, man.
>>Even though Twitter and the like might be new technology, they are still replacing the old.
Which "the old" specifically? What did my great grandfather use to directly contact the Henry Ford and get into a flame war with him about how his newfangled "horseless carriage" was killing his equestrian breeding business?
I agree with you except for the last part about dismissing the power of social platforms to influence people through consumption of “news” and current events.
>I’m confused. What technology did twitter replace? Oh it didn’t? This is completely new, the ability to communicate to this many people at once? Okay so what ancient rights are being trampled exactly?
What bizarro ideas people have.
Rights exist outside of technologies, technologies, media, etc are just different spaces to apply them.
Twitter, for example, can't treat people of color differently, just because it's a "new technology" and "thus" they should not have any expectation of equality there.
They have the right to be treated as equals, regardless of whether it's a new technology that does the treatment or an old one.
(Note also that what century/decade old laws based on a 3 centuries old constitution that's held as some holy scripture say, are not the be all, end all, and are not necessarily the same thing as what should be right in 2019. I say this cause Americans have the tendency to view everything under this lens, as if they can't possibly conceive of any improvements there, or as if that's even relevant to a global discussion).
>Also, it always riles me up when someone refers to social media as a “main communication” provider. What fraction of the population gets its political discourse off of Twitter?
A large enough for it to be actively targeted by political figures, political campaign advertising, and polling companies (heck, even foreign agents), and a large enough for it to have a big share in shaping public opinion.
>
If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), us normal human beings need the right to appeal, public auditing, bright line rules, and due process rights.
At least in Germany, people can sue Twitter and Facebook to have their accounts re-opened. Of course, this option reduces the value of due process rights as one has to be able to fund a lawyer and the court fees...
Expression is not public communication. Are you not conflating freedom of speech with freedom to be heard/reach an audience?
Even 2 centuries ago, the US government wouldn't intervene to force newspapers to publish the op-eds of hateful people looking to grow their followers. Why would Youtube or Twitter have to?
No they don't. Those companies can't erase you from the internet, only from their own individual platforms that they own and operate. A "monopoly" would imply that without the use of these sites you could not be heard, but this is obviously false, not only because there are many other similar sites out there, but also because nobody is stopping you from creating your own blog or platform or whatever you like. No, your site won't be as popular as twitter, but so what? Your hyperlinks work just as well as twitter's.
I don't think the monopoly the previous user mentions implies you can't speak but it implies you can't be found. For instance if you don't show up on Google, yes you can tell your friends to visit your website but you can't tell everyone where your website is. If you get banned from one or more of these websites, it is like there is a town square and 99% of people are huddled in one side of the square and you are standing in the far corner where no one can hear you even if you shouted. Maybe you can tell your friend to go walk over to that side and tell people to come over to this side, but no one wants to come over to this side because they want their voices to be heard over where the rest of the town is having a conversation.
> I can’t imagine anyone going through tweets from 2010 and actively reporting them, so it seems more likely that they must be using some algorithm ...
Moderation tools have been weaponized in the troll propaganda war.
Post an insightful and highly liked reply to a controversial topic, watch the likes roll in, and then suddenly go dark after about three minutes.
View the thread incognito, and the popular comment cannot be found.
Trolls brigade-block-and-report views they don't like, and your reply gets memory-holed until a human moderator can review it.
Hours or days later your comment gets restored, but the damage is done.
Of course troll armies are mining old tweets for any violation, so they can remove you from the conversation and manufacture the illusion of consensus.
Comparisons with the old media always neglect to mention the unique protections these platforms enjoy. Unlike the old media, they aren't responsible for the content they publish.
If they'd prefer to be treated like publishers, not platforms, they should also have the responsibility of publishers, not the protections of platforms.
But as long as they remain platforms, they have a unique responsibility to respect the freedom of speech of everyone.
> normal human beings need the right to appeal, public auditing, bright line rules, and due process rights.
Why? Who cares if someone gets banned from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc? It isn't a big deal. I can see it as annoying, but it doesn't truly matter to anyone without some type of social media addiction. If "censorship" is the problem, we should support the establishment of government run internet forums that would be legally obligated to the serve the interest of the people rather than trying to arbitrarily steer certain popular websites into moderation strategies that don't align with their business or political prerogatives.
Twitter is not a democracy. They are a public for profit company first and foremost. They can censor, modify, change anything they want at any point in time. Expect that. Cash is king.
It is not a company operating in a vacuum but a public company in a democracy and is subject to the laws (and in general, political will) of the society. If companies were free to "censor, modify, change anything they want at any point in time", then we would not have anti-trust laws or close scrutiny of dominant companies.
Ultimately, companies don't exist in a vacuum. If they don't adhere to the political will of the society they operate in,
Vacuum has nothing to do with it. Twitter is a platform, you are not compelled to use it. Don’t like it that is fine but popularity doesn’t imply it requires to operate any way other than the way it decides as a company. Why do we expect companies to act like a government we have control over?
If POTUS communicates via Twitter primarily, there’s no option to ‘not use it’. Twitter crossed the line between just a company and a utility a while ago, together with Google and Facebook.
People don't have TV, how did presidents ever give addresses to the people before? There most certainly is an option to not use twitter, I know lots of people in that demographic. What line did twitter cross?
Your question implies you consider Twitter a common carrier. Verizon as a phone company falls under common carrier rules. Twitter (social media) does not and therefore, its not the same.
If we want to reclassify social media as common carrier we need regulation to do so but that is not how the internet or social media companies work today. Sadly the internet in of itself doesn't even fall under common carrier.
I understand I think when you have a monopoly over a communication medium common carrier laws should apply even without legislation.
The problematic case here is that all other common carrier are funded through service chargers where social media is funded through advertising and other revenue streams.
That said it’s not like social media companies aren’t at fault here too they hide behind the notion that they are a common carrier or a publisher when it suits them as in when they don’t want to be directly liable for the content on their platform.
On the other hand they moderate content to appease advertisers even when there is no direct pressure to do so like in this case.
My personal opinion is that Twitter should not ban anyone, if the Twits are sufficiently offensive (not in a personal manner but rather a legal one) then law enforcement should handle it like it would handle any other type of abusive or offensive communication.
If I send you a death threat via the post the postal service won’t ban me the police might come tho if you report me.
Twitter doesn't have a monopoly over communication. Whats app, facebook, gchat, skype, word press blogs, reddit, there are a slew of other communication mechanisms beyond just twitter.
> Why do we expect companies to act like a government we have control over?
Because people always have control over the companies serving them, as it should be. Without people exerting control, we won't have - antitrust regulations, civil rights legislations, ADA, EPA regulations, Clean Water Act, Financial regulations etc. And I believe those regulations were essential towards making a better society.
Mind you, I am not advocating for a communism-style abolishing of private property. But neither do I want to see a libertarian wild west of no government control. That is just other extreme. What we have currently seems to be a good trade-off, where companies have a lot of freedoms but political will can step in occasionally to demand changes to the way they operate.
>It is not a company operating in a vacuum but a public company in a democracy
The US is not a democracy. It is a Constitutional Republic. The Constitution limits the Governmental Powers to make laws restricting speech, the Constitution does not give individuals the right to use corporate places of business or platforms to disseminate their speech.
> The US is not a democracy. It is a Constitutional Republic.
This is facile: it is both, and there is no contradiction.
> the Constitution does not give individuals the right to use corporate places
Certainly it does: the right of free association. But that's not what you meant; you meant that the Constitution does not compel the corporate place to allow individual speech. Which is true but incomplete, since we have other laws currently about a related concept, "common carriers". The debate is much higher level than the Constitution: it's about how far to extend the idea that a private conveyance has become so essential to public use that it is subject to regulation. (Meaning, yes, that some of the private entity's rights are curtailed.)
It is basic 7th grade civics, Section 4 of the Constitution:
>The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government
Founding Father John Adams:
>"No determinations are carried, it is true, in a simple representative democracy, but by consent of the majority or their representatives."
The word "democracy" appearing in the Constitution: 0
Extra fun fact, the US is not the first Constitutional Republic, it is the 2nd behind San Marino.
> there is no contradiction
If you used democratic republic there is not, where the people vote and elect the representative leaders, then there is no contradiction. But democracy comes from Ancient Greece where all citizens with a right to vote directly decided the issues with votes, issues were not decided by elected representative. Its a significantly different form of government not just a typical HN pedantic point.
>the right of free association
The right to associate has nothing to do with accessing corporate property to disseminate your speech.
Lies. Governments and critical institutions publish information, and court feedback, on Twitter.
Everyone is compelled to use Twitter. Its success, influence, and profit, derive largely from its semi-official adoption by so many corporations and government actors.
It isn't private, and if it wants to be, it can't be used for public business.
The comment was made specifically with that in mind. The parent was saying that therefore, given their influence and ability to manipulate participation and discussion, that's a problem for democracy.
I don't know what your comment added to the discussion. Does anyone know?
Twitter do not seem like a firm motivated primarily by profit. There are lots of things they could have done in the last decade that would have had nothing to do with censorship but which would have resulted in far higher revenues.
If there were no alternatives to twitbooktubeit perhaps you would have a point. However, if you don't like the policies of twitter, go to reddit. If you don't like the policies of reddit go to voat. If you don't like all the terrible people on voat, host a forum on a VPC instance.
Your position is basically "I think platforms should be compelled to host every bit of nonsense emitted by every user." The freedom is provided by the multitude of choices!
I think the idea you can make rules for speech that are impartial and universally accepted is an insane idea which shows no signs of being tractable [1]. Despite attempts to quantify speech, every moderation decision is arbitrary at some level, and preserving choice of moderators seems much more important than arguing over rules.
Gab is trying that, and keeps getting shut down by hosting providers and payment processors that are believing outright lies.
The most recent one I'm aware of was Apple removing them from the app store, which here was a worthless virtue signal because Gab is now entirely on the Fediverse - the app was a clone of a common github repo, of which there are dozens not being removed.
So it really does seem like any real competition is not allowed anymore.
"The market", however, is not some magic entity than can fix things. The market is you, me and him and her. The market is people. If people would be talking about gab.ai as free-speech alternative to censorious Twitter, it would work as such. If people would insist that gab.ai is a neo-Nazi site where only violent psychopaths about to commit mass shooting are visiting, and should be banned everywhere, then "the market" would not fix any problems. The market is us, so if we want less censorship, we should be actively supporting platforms that have less censorship, and actively fighting platforms that have more of it.
> If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms
We're not "going" to have it. We already have it. Well, maybe not ISPs, but definitely "Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc."
> It's not wrong for Twitter to have rules to protect the weak from the strong, and individuals from the mob
When Gandhi was asked "what do you think about Western civilization", he reportedly said "I think it'd be a good idea". In the same vein, it might be a good idea (not sure, but maybe) for Twitter to have rules to protect individuals from the mob and weak from the strong, but whatever Twitter has now definitely does nothing of the sort. I am not sure if it is possible at all to have such rules, but even if it were, Twitter does not seem to be interested in the least.
It seems like the simplest approach for Twitter to make would be to remove specific posts, rather than accounts, for tweets made over a year ago (say). It's not fair to hold someone to account for the actions of a very different person, even if they happen to be a continuation of that person.
(Edit: And to be clear, I would have been a-okay with Twitter having banned the user at the time, for the content in question!)
Honest question: is the source of the problem the hateful intent of the message, or the use of "bad words"? My reading on culture these days is that one can usually get away with spouting horrendous, hateful ideas so long as they do so without using a short list of offensive words.
If the truly are trying to scrub hate from their platform, I applaud their effort, but they'll never succeed. Hate is too hard to define and so subtle you can't actually remove it all.
If they just want to remove bad words, why not use literal black-text censoring in situations like this, like TV has done for years? Give this user the option of preserving their moronic comment, hate and all, without the bad words that I'm sure advertisers are asking to be removed.
The bad words certainly - it is the banality of "moralistic enforcers" where you can teach young men to drop fire from above but they can't write "fuck" on their bombs because it is obscene.
That sort of mindless focus on bad words that might make people uncomfortable instead of you know - actual problems has been with us for centuriea unfortunately and has gotten better compared to regularly enforced obscenity laws - which are fucking obscene to anyone who stops to use their fucking brain for once.
So we were spending all of this money and oppressing with violence because a bunch of people are offended because they were told to be offended?
That said use of resources could be used on /anything fucking else/ like patroling, doing reviews of random ceiminal sentences is actual fucking obscenity.
There are plenty of recent tweets from active accounts that use the same language and display the same hate towards present-day politicians. It's hard to imagine that Twitter is only selecting tweets like this based on language.
Twitter uses third-party contractors for human moderation. If the tweet was reported/flagged and made its way into manual review for a human, whoever looked at it probably didn't take more than 30 seconds to decide. Even if Twitter's moderator workforce is U.S. based (and thus, attune to cultural norms), they probably are optimized to issue suspensions for low-hanging fruit. Vulgarity is going to be more of an obvious signal to the average person, than obfuscated hateful messages.
I'm not talking about obfuscated messages. If one were to post "I love you no matter where you fucking come from", they're not being hateful, but they are being vulgar. Is that allows?
On the other hand, if one were to post "I truly believe that all people who are not white are inferior beings that should leave my country", then there's zero vulgarity here but clearly a hateful horrible person I'd like to avoid at all costs.
If the problem is vulgarity, then the solution is well-understood: censor the bad words, let the rest of the message stay. If the problem is hate, then the problem is that it's impossible to ever really get rid of it.
I suspect in the author's case, the problem is that they used vulgarity 9 years ago and the system finally picked up on it.
It seems somewhat unrealistic for a user to not be able to express opinions about the politics of another country. Elections more often than not have international implications. For example, as an American I have varying levels of interest in Chinese, Russian, and EU politics. Coordinated interference by foreign governments is a completely different problem.
"foreign interference" is bullshit. Anybody can express their opinion about US politicians, and if US electorate is too stupid to decide for themselves what they want without excluding any outside information, like Soviet Union did and North Korea still does - it's not a democracy anyway, it's idiocracy and thus would not have any value to preserve. Fortunately, it's just a lie - US people are just fine and capable of independent reasoning, and there's no threat of "foreign influence", it's a canard invented by political operators to mask their failures and provide excuses for censorship.
> My reading on culture these days is that one can usually get away with spouting horrendous, hateful ideas
That depends whether you are in-group with the censors or out-group. If you're in, you could get away with a lot - from very base and crude language (excluding the taboo words, yes) to graphically describing and encouraging grave bodily harm, murder, rape, etc. If you're out, then you better be extra super vanilla squeaky nice.
I am mostly amazed that Twitter's rule is not simply, "don't harass people". I guess this tweet is an offense specifically because it uses gendered harassment? Is there a list of gender-neutral insults that we can refer to for compliance reasons?
The thing is that this was 9 years ago. The landscape of what was acceptable back then is completely different from what it is now. Going back in time and banning people for this sort of thing is essentially the same as banning movies from the 60's because they don't show enough women driving cars or men helping out in the kitchen.
I don't think that tweet was ever acceptable - calling someone a "cunt", "whore", "idiot" and telling her to "go fuck yourself" all in 140 characters is really going out of your way to be unpleasant.
I agree, was referring to the following more than the original tweet:
> Is there a list of gender-neutral insults that we can refer to for compliance reasons?
The thing is that even if there is a list like this now, in 9 years saying 'woman' might not even be acceptable because it has 'man' in it. If 'woman' isn't something we say in 9 years, I don't think twitter, in 9 years, should start banning everyone who every tweeted it now.
It's always been acceptable so long as it's directed at the right person. What's changed in the last 9 years is simply who can be targeted with such language. Twitter supports and publishes language like this on a mass scale today.
Given today’s culture I would think Twitter is doing you a favor. It’s better that you silently delete the post than have it be dug up by angry X and get you fired and ostracized.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten,
every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building
has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is
continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is
always right.”
Coming here to say just this. We had a college senior intern who had talked about drinking and drugs during his freshman year and left them up. Someone who didn't like him dug it up and sent to HR, and his full time offer got rescinded.
I am still puzzled why my Twitter account was locked a few years ago. I tried to ask the people at Twitter to show me the problematic Tweet for 2 times, but never got a response. I did post some kind-of right wing stuff regarding immigration and such, but none of it offensive. And certainly not using rude language as the person in the link did in his nine year old Tweet.
In the end I just gave up on Twitter. Sad, cause I liked to use it mainly for myself, to follow some people that interest me and to keep a kind of "bookmarks on my thoughts".
facepalm I have blog posts from 2001 that make me cringe that I keep up purely to show that I've changed considerably in 18 years.
When James Gunn was fired from Guardians for something he said in a tweet years before I was dumbfounded. Now Twitter is actively policing old posts?!
People change, nations change. Violent criminals can become bastions of peace and philanthropy. Why is society, or a company, persecuting people for tweets that are years old. If someone says something awful today, deal with it, but 9 years ago?! If there's an offensive 9 year old tweet, delete it and send the user an email saying their tweet was deleted for violating such and such policy but locking an account 9 years after the fact?!
Boy I’m glad my Xanga is long gone. I recall reading what I wrote at 16 at 22 and being mortified. I imagine today I’d die of embarrassment if I so much as glanced at it.
I think Twitter should delete everything older than XX days old, where XX is a number on the order of 15 or 30. The kind of heavily context-dependent short form throwaway expression the site is built for and actively encourages does not age well, and an auto-delete policy that emphasizes that would make the site better and cheaper to operate.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten,
every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building
has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is
continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is
always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984
I'm not justifying what Twitter did in this case, but I significantly disagree with the idea of removing old posts.
The big issue, which I have received significant consternation of "ownership", is that these mega-corps are creating their own dictatorships online. And they are how "speech" is conducted, given their monopoly on where the people are.
The obvious and most consistent counterclaim is that these are "private entities who can choose whom to deal with".
That statement is predicated on the facetious assertion that a corporation is a human, and should be treated as such and provided latitude as one. It obviously is not. And with their clout in personnel, money, lawyers, and more - they are a uberhuman.
The path forward seems clear. Corporations should not be treated the same as real humans. And their powers should be limited to prevent these formations of super-countries with draconian and arbitrary laws, just because technology allows them so.
I have a problem with this whole concept that you don't get to have ideas and test them, but that the ideation and words themselves make you something or means you are or have become something.
It's dishonest, lacks any legitimacy, and it is the root of the culture war. Words only have the consequences the reader or listener gives them, they do not have intrinsic consequences in themselves. The fantasy that mere belief is transformative or redeeming is a seductive deception.
Platforms should demonstrate they are principled before merely driving certain interests, even (especially) if they are convinced those interests are the right ones.
Key insight. Very closely related. In the secularized instance of it we're encountering now, people could be said to be substituting demonstrations of belief for mercy, etc. I'd argue the particular choice of symbols in a religious war is really secondary and not meaningful to how predictable its progress is, sadly.
This is why so many people are deleting old posts, whether it;s Facebook, Instagram , YouTube, or Twitter. Users are at the mercy of algorithms and content moderators, and appeal is often impossible for violating these arbitrary rules.
It seems that the answer is not simply to switch to other corporate website that does twitter like things, but rather change to a federated tool that people can run themselves. This would by it's nature prevent censorship.
Meanwhile twitter is promoting sponsored tweets from Xinhua. Travel to Xinjiang - Everything is great! Come visit the temples in Lhasa, but be sure to make your reservation in advance!
Not on twitter by about 8 or 9 years go my
Adwords account was banned. I ran ads that were against the TOS (I admit, I didn't read it but since the ads were approved - not sure it's still the case but at the time each ad was manually approved - I thought it was OK). The ads run for a total of about 30 - 40 minutes then I stopped them (I was playing with affiliate marketing links). Next day my adwords account was banned and there was no way of getting it reinstated. I tried contacting the Adwords support again about a year ago, but to no avail. The bad thing is that the infringing ads are still in my account, I can't delete them, so even if some soul reviews my account (and I'm sorry for my prejudice against the average support person, it's just experience) they'll probably think I'm still at it.
One of the dangers about doing business with these behemoths.
One of the reasons that this feels so novel is that this is an example of ex post facto enforcement. In this case, Twitter is punishing the user for an action performed at a point in time before such an action was punishable. (In fact, I haven't checked - it may have been punishable, but the punishment was not usually enforced, which is a separate issue of selective enforcement.) The US Constitution prevents both Congress and the individual States from passing ex post facto laws that punish individuals for actions committed before such action was illegal. Obviously, private corporations are not bound by the same laws as the government. So, as platforms like Twitter continue to update their policies and enforcement mechanisms in response to issues such as hate, and as these definitions are broadened, cases such as this are likely to become more common.
Thanks for this description -- yes the tweet was stupid, yes the person could eventually get fired after someone digs it up so twitter was doing them a favor, blahblah none of those other threads are why this is an interesting post this morning. "Ex post facto" is a bit jargoney, but you explained the issue right: the interesting question is how should we feel about retroactive punishments for something that wasn't illegal/against private ToS at the time.
A lot of people my age love The Office, but some of the earlier episodes... well, they haven't really aged well. The show was great at the time, but the first few seasons today would be a giant #MeToo fiasco. Culture changes and moves on, and what was acceptable then probably isn't acceptable now, but that doesn't (shouldn't?) mean Steve Carrel gets blackballed for the comedy he did at the time.
Early Disney cartoons were flat-out racist, but they're still available with a historical context disclaimer that basically says "We disavow everything in here, but it's a greater shame to pretend that this never happened so here it is for the historical record."
One of the most interesting conversations about social media right now I think is how does someone apologize for what they've done, and do it in a genuine and authentic way that can be accepted. When you serve prison time, the idea is you pay your debt to society and move on. With social media, I don't think we've yet figured out how to say "yes, I was a stupid angry person back then but that's not who I am now". Part of the reason is it's really difficult to figure out who's being authentic and who's trying to half-heartedly weasel themselves out of something.
And I don't think you CAN do that on social media because the only way to really make that decision is to know someone in more depth than some multiple of 140 characters. It's a decision that can't be made with the small bite-sized serotonin pings that we've started to define our relationships and judgements around. We've become jacks of all relationships, masters of none.
Twitter rules are not law, so by law they can do whatever they damn well please. Including banning your account randomly, deleting any tweet they like, or anything in between. Legally, they owe you or any of their users exactly nothing. However, you also owe them nothing - you can stop using Twitter any second. Which I wholeheartedly recommend to everybody. I did it years ago and it's not hard. If you don't like what they're doing - just walk away.
Of course, that doesn't mean we still can't criticize Twitter - but walking away should be the first step.
Their notification was fine. The tweet was vile and full of expletives. You'll have trouble finding any business or institution that tolerates speech like that. This isn't the censorship hill anyone should want to die on.
I don't agree. Wartime cartoons are vile yet we rarely censor them because of the historical value.
I do think that going back a decade with an algorithm and getting people to clean up tweets that likely match a regex filter is whitewashing and it does make twitter a less valuable historical resource. It's a totally different argument from the normal you should be able to say what you want - because I would support censorship of such tweets in the present.
The problem is that Twitter probably sees a lot of complaints to the tune of "but the other guy said the same kind of thing and he didn't get banned!"
If they want to enforce a policy consistently and not have to face constant complaints, then I don't think grandfathering in old violations after some arbitrary date is going to work.
From a self-interested standpoint, I don’t think Twitter cares that much about being a historical resource and this sort of curating / censorship is really about improving Twitter’s bottom line - not some grander notion of creating a totally comprehensive historical archive of every tweet.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadTalk about erasing the past. I dearly hope knowledge of what came before iPhone and Android isn't washed over like all the non-Apple 8-bit computers.
Today virtually everyone who's 14+ years old has a one, it wasn't like that at all in 2008. And the definition of "smart" definitely changed too.
Just like the age of tablets started when the average 40yo mom started using ipads, not when Microsoft showed their prototype in 2000. Or the age of electric cars didn't start at the end of the 19th century, but a few years ago.
According to the screenshot, the author is free to have his account unlocked after the tweet is removed.
Thing is, he's suggesting Mastodon as an alternative... there you would not only get banned for calling a woman a whore, you'd probably get doxxed and then swatted too.
Also calling them a 'cunt'.
Attitudes like the above are why ordinary men and women don't want to become politicians - it's assumed to be OK to insult them in any way. Why not just call Palin a hypocrite?
You should be able to criticise politicians. However if you want better politicians, screaming that they're cunts and whores instead of communicating like an adult won't make that happen.
Edit: replying to below due to rate limit
> If someone cant handle a verbal insult over the internet, I don't think they are fit for office
But it's not 'a verbal insult'. It's thousands. Most humans can't handle a thousand insults a week. It wears at you - SEAL training involves simulating humiliating experiences because most people don't have the mental strength to not crumble. I'd take a bet that includes both me and you.
Edit 2: replying to Iamthirsty
OK. You don't think being constantly insulted would have a chilling effect on someone becoming a representative because ... people can insult people in other professions?
It seems like you believe I think it's hard to work a job where you may be insulted.
This isn't correct. I think it's hard to work a job where you may be insulted a thousand times a day.
That doesn't justify the toxic behavior at all, it is just a statement about reality. And the rude tweets are the lowest form of that, at the higher levels it turns into physical assault and sometimes even murder attempts and the occasional actual murder.
However, when you become a public figure and especially a political one people may feel more entitled to lash out against you, as you literally hold power over their lives, even if they themselves may disagree with you (as in, voted for someone else or the like.)
> If someone cant handle a verbal insult over the internet, I don't think they are fit for office
Then many people immediately jumped on him and made the assumption that he is justifying insults or "toxic behavior". I do not see how this would be the case. Care to explain?
It is not a justification of insults or toxic behavior. He is merely pointing out the fact that if you cannot deal with insults, then this and that. Toxic behavior is, well, toxic, but you have to be able to handle them in a manner that is, say, not self-destructive, while at the same time you being against said toxic behavior.
I agree with him. If you cannot deal with insults thrown at you on the Internet or in real life and it leads to, say, psychological turmoil or whatever, then you should probably do something to alleviate this negative effect insults have on you. This does not justify insults or toxic behaviors. Do you disagree?
You can insult anyone, for any reason—and people do all the time, regardless whether the person is a politician or not, a public figure or not, etc..
Sure, morally it might be unjust to insult a politician, or anyone for that matter. Yet the cool part about the United States is: it’s OK!
Although being a politician, and secondarily a public figure, makes the insults as public as the praises so much so that you, the observer, are more aware of them as a result, doesn’t mean that the same thing wouldn’t happen to anyone else.
Dude, no, no it’s not ok. It’s not ok to have a culture where insults are encounter and ok. Insults can quickly lead to threats. Are often lies and manipulation. Are often racial or sexist or homophobic. And we as a society shouldn’t just stand by and allow it. What is gained by allowing insults? Honest question. Why should we be ok with them?
Now i do have to say what consistories and insult is not the easiest to define. But calling a politician a “whore” is clearly an baseless insult and a lie that brings nothing to any discussion.
On a social level, there is something to be gained from insults: authenticity. Perhaps it comes down to personal preference, but I would rather live in a society where people can speak their mind (and potentially face social backlash for it) than a society where everything is artificially sanitized. Empathy is great to strive for on a personal level, but forcing the appearance of empathy just leads to strained smiles.
My father was the Mayor of a medium sized city and stirred controversy from time to time, and was a favorite target of the local press. He loved it- he took some of the cartoons most designed to poke at him and framed them and put them on the wall in his office.
The give and take is part of the vital breath of democracy- thin skin isn't a useful trait to have in the public square.
He is still beloved by many of the same press on a personal level due to his steady persona and good humor, regardless of the level of agreement with his political views, something sadly missing in the modern political firmament.
I don’t think you understood my comment as a whole. Although it may be morally unjust, it is legal, and therefore “OK” to say whatever you want (bar a call-to-action). So, again, while it may be unjust, in the eyes of the law here, it’s OK. You can’t fordably control discourse—that leads to more negatives than positives. :)
If you look at the careers and upbringing of most high-ranking politicians, I doubt the most obvious distinction to common folk would be particular thick skin -- heck, the sitting POTUS isn't exactly thick skinned and that's arguably the most publicly exposed office in the world.
Hint: it's wealth. The distinction is coming from wealth and having connections with wealthy people who supply you with funding and influence.
White male politicians don’t get much flak for being white or male.
Black women politician would get so much for both her race and gender.
As a women I’d never want to be in the public eye for this reason.
"Stupid white men" was a huge success a few years back.
Obviously you've never had an account on Twitter
So often they get higher up and think they should be held to a lower standard. There was oil in the ocean from policies she supported - harsh language is warranted.
Look at people like the former judge and current professional piece of shit Mark Civarella who after selling kids to private prisons for kickbacks, for things that weren't even crimes complained that he was described in too harsh of language.
To be frank if it keeps fragile egoed narcissists out of power we should make barrages of harsh language a job requirement as preventative medicine.
Maybe twitter could have given him a warning about his tweet and ask if he would like to delete it before the instaban algorithm hit
Getting a message saying something like "this message violates the rules today, so we're going to delete it" or "delete this message within a week or we'll have to ban your account" would seem more reasonable to me than immediate ex post facto enforcement.
That raises a bunch of different questions about what Twitter are doing to change history, and the way they represent their platform, but those are separate to the banning of users based on their history.
Besides, this might be motivated by Twitter acting on a complaint. It could be that Sarah Palin (or someone representing her) complained about the tweet recently, in which case Twitter need to deal with that now.
There is a very reasonable middle ground here. No one is demanding we all submit to corporate thought police. No one is being shunned from social media access without recourse. Just make a minimal effort to conform to routine societal decorum, and you can shit on Sarah Palin all you want.
Absolutely, I have blog posts from 2001 I leave up that are absolutely horrid.
In 2001 I was a 16 year old, who's father had died 12 days before his 13th birthday and was moved to another school a few months later where he had no friends and fell in with the punk/goth crowd. I didn't care about school, all I cared about was music and getting high or running around shows or the mall while tripping. I said stupid shit on livejournal under a username only my friends knew, mostly complaining about my mother and school. I now host those on RyanMercer.com, wholly attributed to me.
That's who I was when I was 16, it's not who I am now.
Now I post about problems we face as a civilization, I post about things that interest me, I post about things that scare me, I post about how we need to come together and put aside foolish things to focus on ensuring a better future for ourselves and our offspring but I'm not going to hide who I was 18 years ago. Now I put thought into my posts, I don't rush to a computer to type "oh my god I hate them all blah blah blah raging against society", I'm not going to try and cover that up as that's part of my experience, who I was is part of who I am, if anything it shows that people can mature.
Or that by allowing them to stay on the platform, they provide an example that people can temper their political extremism over time by maturation and introspection, thereby disproving that the flyswatter techniques you seemingly prefer for the moderation of discourse may be ill-suited to actually promoting healthy discourse?
I'm not following the logic.
Then I read the actual tweet and lost all sympathy. It’s just so horrible, and, I think the author actually shows a lack of growth by dismissing it as this 9 year old “immature” mistake.
The tweet is hateful.
I do find someone old enough to attend a university, calling an elected official stupid cunt and a whore, horrible.
Learn from it, remove the post, and move on. Not sure why this is news. It's a little bit of a narcissistic post, I think (A sentiment of "How dare you call me out, I'm an atheist who calls right-wingers names online") and I'm not sure why this is news except some people feel that more right-wing hatred is being suspended than left.
If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), us normal human beings need the right to appeal, public auditing, bright line rules, and due process rights.
It's not wrong for Twitter to have rules to protect the weak from the strong, and individuals from the mob, but it needs to be accountable and above board about all of it or it will make the problem far worse.
EDIT:
Just to provide an example, here are a few ways this notification could have been so much better.
1) List the specific rules violated. Link to the public process for rule review and adoption.
2) Link to ids and contact information for any human beings who made the decision.
3) Link to code and data sets for any algorithm behind the decision.
4) Provide and link to an appeal procedure instead of just a compliance procedure.
Imagine how much better that openness would be for Twitter's users. (While somewhat onerous for Twitter the company.)
Most western democracies long since scrapped proper education because it's easier to win the support of the population with propaganda^H public relations than it is to make a reasoned argument.
[1]See Huxley, Brave new world.
This is not a new phenomenon. There have always been snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves. Societies that have very strict control over what people can and cannot say (think the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea, where you could be jailed for counter-revolutionary speech or misleading the people) still had lots of problems with snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves, but they also had a problem with people going to jail (or worse) for saying "the state is the cause of this famine", "the state killed a bunch of innocent protesters", "I disagree with the current economic system", "I am angry that the state took my land from me and gave it to someone else", "the rent is too damn high", "maybe we shouldn't build so many nuclear weapons", and "I don't support Chairman Mao/Uncle Joe".
I will assume that any Ministry of Truth that you would support would set out to be expressly non-political at its inception, but giving any one organization the power to restrain the expression of ideas is openly inviting those with an agenda to attempt to co-opt it into suppressing opinions and arguments critical of their agenda. This is an inherent drawback to giving anything power - it inherently becomes political even if the original intent is for it to not be political.
I would rather live in a society where snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves are punished after they commit their crimes than have a single person's freedom to say "fuck the government" suppressed because they misquoted a statistic.
Every loves this idea right up until the point they realize that their own and the Ministry's opinions do not align.
Private sector actors cannot do that.
But what's wrong with what we do now, private actors who try to build reputations as having possession of truth and we muddle along with those who sound most plausible to us? Sure, some people choose the wrong sources, but that seems a smaller risk than Everyone choosing the wrong source.
Are you saying you'd prefer that people be forced to follow their decisions? Or that information they declare "incorrect" be banned? That's not democratic, that's authoritarian.
>Most western democracies long since scrapped proper education because it's easier to win the support of the population with propaganda^H public relations than it is to make a reasoned argument.
In my mind, the correct response to the rise of FAKE NEWS (aka: yellow journalism, sensationalism, propaganda, public relations, advertisement) is to focus on teaching critical thinking skills, not to have a censor that says 'You can say this thing but not that thing'.
Will bad people have harmful, self serving opinions? Yes, they will. That's part and parcel of living in a free society.
Drinking bleach will not cure autism, but their are desperate parents out there ready to walk into that bear trap and opportunistic people are ready to spring it.
Is it possible to enumerate the set of all ideas that cannot be expressed, and if so, how do you enumerate this set, and who has the power to determine the members of this set?
Advocating that someone should have their child drink bleach to cure their autism is a despicable act, and is likely criminal after the fact, but that's the difference here - it's criminal after someone takes action on it.
Quoting Justice Brandeis from Whitney v. California:
>Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. To justify suppression of free speech, there must be reasonable ground to fear that serious evil will result if free speech is practiced. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the danger apprehended is imminent. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the evil to be prevented is a serious one. [...] If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.
I can’t imagine the flack that would come when some robot labels trans people’s gender identity as NOT TRUE based on biological grounds.
I think that any group labeling things TRUE and NOT TRUE will only make things worse.
If you don't like an idea you're free to ignore it. Freedom of speech is really about the freedom for each of us to hear. What you're really advocating is that you don't want other people to have access to ideas with which you personally disapprove. This is such an authoritarian notion that I don't understand how it has become a socially acceptable idea to espouse.
We got fed up of people being murdered because they're black, Jewish, gay, trans, female, etc etc.
You want to cut out the only escape hatch people have. You think we have it all figured out... what is right and wrong. That we are able as a society to correctly label what speech should be allowed, and what shouldn't. But we aren't. We need free speech in order to figure out right-from-wrong. To hash things out verbally and in written form so that we DONT act out horrible ideas.
The power to decide what's "correct" will be abused to block correct information that damages someone powerful.
Clearly the mods should remove andy_ppp’s comment immediately, if not be held liable for hosting it in the first place. </s>
That is a terrifying argument.
I’ve only heard two arguments- let Twitter do what they want (viva Capitalism!) or have government regulate (viva Socialism!).
I wish there was more thought given by Twitter, and others, to just self apply free speech rights and stick to using the current legal system to restricting speech. There’s a ton of law to protect people from damaging speech (harassment, slander/libel, dangerous threats, etc). It’s quite possible that Twitter can just use a more rational standard for their process.
What the Government can't do is tell Twitter what statements it is or is not allowed to publish (authoritarianism).
And unless you are okay with your bank providing unfettered access to your ID, account number and PIN, I'd imagine that you are not in favor of general unfettered access either.
Democracy may require access to information but civilization requires that information not be universally shared.
The difference between WSJ and Twitter is that the WSJ has competitors (NYT, Politico, even Fox News and crazies like Infowars) whereas Twitter does not. We live in a world (unfortunately) where the President of the United States and his administration heavily relies on Twitter - it's no longer someones backyard social group. For Twitter to play the censor is no longer acceptable, although we still expect twitter to keep its users safe from harassment and mobs.
So yes, it's unacceptable for Twitter to play the censor or ban people from public service announcements or policy statements by their elected officials. If Twitter is going to facilitate administration statements and my local government agencies letting me know critical information, they are no longer an entirely private platform.
I agree that having restrictions on information access and communication is a slippery slope in the non-fallacious sense, at least with the solutions we usually discuss.
But I’m optimistic that the failure conditions might be more specific than they seem to the current state of affairs — self curated social graphs of unlimited size and bandwidth. Perhaps dramatically limiting scope, connectedness, or agency over whose views you have access to (think true random, not AI) would lead to less or different issues. I don’t know, because these experiments would take a lot of investment, but the point is that it may not be as black and white as you make it out to be.
We live in a world where the authority we defer judgement to has split up, into less balanced partisan entities. Not saying pre-internet news were unbiased, but public sources tended to be better curated. (At least where I live, I'm sure Fox has always been this horrid)
This is why filter bubbles and building psychological profiles for everyone to target them with political messages and free access to all information, correct and incorrect, does not work. It's a net negative to democracy and this neo-greek ideal of the marketplace of ideas is a sham.
I have no idea how to fix this, but it needs fixing.
The whole point of the marketplace is to sift through all the bad stuff and find the diamonds in the rough. You can't have a market without bad stuff, and the benefit of having a market is that it finds good stuff.
A world with less bad ideas is a world with less good ideas.
It's not impossible to create. It's not necessarily bad. But it would make our society much less dynamic.
And don't start with "but how do we tell them apart" - sometimes it is very clear cut.
This might work if you leave the system undisturbed, but there are other forces involved in this process your model doesn't account for.
It's the equivalent of buying out EC2 instances for an hour or so and "recalibrating" your P2P mesh. And it wouldn't fix itself.
If information would be in a book and I could go to a library and seek it out - don't ban anything!
But if messages are replicated in covert manner with lots of money thrown at news anchors, op-ed writers, sponsoring, bribes, syndication, SEO it is a different story.
And money is not the only problem. Cognitive psychology has progressed a lot and it is possible to engineer "information" that is very likely to spread in a viral manner. Push the right reader gratification buttons and off you go leveraging the social networks.
It is important I believe to distinguish between information and data. Information must be accessible but what is happening is we are flooded with replicated data containing almost no information. It used to be that volume of data was often a reasonable proxy for importance - not anymore so. I think people are catching up to this but unfortunately it also makes it easier to sell crackpot theories.
This is easy for "world is flat vs round". There is much more nuance to, for example, "this is discriminatory vs not".
But, a lack of anonymity brings a whole host of other problems.
Sybil attacks are a consequence of anonymity combined with low cost of identity creation, and inability to distinguish between different identities.
The fix for Sybil attacks generally involves making identity creation more expensive, or providing a means for distinguishing more valuable identities. On HN, for instance, the karma score is one such mechanism.
These systems can work without removing anonymity.
And I never said anonymity was easy or without trade-offs.
Preserving anonymity is essential for whistle blowers and other vulnerable people.
The best technology that we have right now to fight incorrect information is an educated citizenry of people free to decide the facts for themselves and debate them openly.
We can invest in this proven technology by improving that education, freedom, and open debate.
How do we determine what's spam? What's advertising? What's XSS? You have a first amendment right to type any of these things into an input box. Does that mean the organization receiving your message legally has to post it, even if it fails to meet a basic requirement of not breaking their platform or insulting their user-base?
Are terms-of-service a violation of someone's first amendment? In my case where I am the only employee of my small platform, do I not have a first amendment right to not host content I disagree with on my domain with my own servers?
People with private blogs needs to be absolutely free to control commenting however they would like.
I believe that we can respect both of these positions easily, 99% of the time, with our court systems deciding on some of the grey in the middle.
What counts as a "private" blog? That seems like an arbitrary distinction.
Unlike in the 1800 when everyone could just go the the town square or publish their own pamphlet and have almost equal reach, today most discussion happens in 2-3 outlets: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
Whether those started as private companies, whether those are not public goods, etc, should be irrelevant. They have de facto captured a big chunk of the conversation that shapes the public opinion.
I'd argue the same was true for TV and newspapers in the 1900-2000 -- they had a disproportionate power of shaping public opinion, and a monopoly of control on it. That was bad -- and it was already said that "he who controls the mass media, controls democracy". Even if people still had the "first amendment right" to open their own newspaper (as if that's practical), or whatever.
But at the time, at least, newspapers and tv stations had limited pages and run time, expensive production costs, and it was at least reasonable that they couldn't include everybody's voice.
Today, services like Twitter, Facebook, etc, not only have small marginal costs for including another voice, but they encourage and actively want to add more (all) people in their platform. So there's no excuse (from that point) of censoring people.
And there's always email.
That's mostly a reason why Reddit (and others) should also be included in the list.
But even if we don't have all outlets, enforcing freedom of speech to say, the top-3 by users, is good enough for a start...
>And there's always email.
Yes, just like one is always free to think what they want inside their head, or tell it like it is, within their home.
I'm not talking about that, nor care about that "freedom".
And for those that just want to get their message out, well it's never been easier or cheaper to start a web site on any number of different hosting services. If they can't manage to gain an audience on their own site then their content is crap. The percentage of traffic on other sites is completely irrelevant; any user can jump to another site with literally a single click.
Yes.
And "hateful" is a weasel world, assuming in advanced what the comments that would get censored are.
The comments could also be unpleasant but not hateful, unpopular but not hateful, not to the taste of some group (e.g. evangelicals or vegans) but not hateful, stuff societies want to ignore and hide (e.g. past crimes or system injustices) but not hateful, sexually explicit but not hateful, out of the mainstream but not hateful, and several other categories, including hateful, but rightly so (e.g. "let's bring down this fucking oppressive dictatorship and put these bastards in prison" written referring to a country under military control, or the same such against some company's like Monsanto bad practices, etc).
>Are terms-of-service a violation of someone's first amendment?
I could not care less. That's a provincial US issue. We should care what the world should be, not think in the confine's of century old laws.
In the 21st century, some terms-of-service, especially of powerful players, should be considered a restriction on freedom of speech.
Even if one still has the freedom to open their own platform, or take a box, step on it, and say what they like to the crowds in the middle of Central park...
Not all words need to be respected. Sometimes people need help, and sometimes they ask for it in subliminal ways.
And of course it's a provincial US issue. The entire internet as we know it cannot exist without provincial US law holding it together, and a provincial US economy to keep it online. We own the internet. We own Microsoft. We own Android. We own Google and Apple and Facebook and Twitter and everyone else who matters. There are competitors in these fields, but they're not concentrated enough in any other nation to make a difference. If America fell off Earth tomorrow the internet and all the technology that connects to it would be useless. Full stop.
And that should be a good thing. Healthy for your point. You don't want the internet governed on the world stage, especially if you're American.
Grab your soap box and try that "easing of restrictions on freedom of speech on a global scope" bullshit in China. Even Chinese citizens will laugh at you. They don't care about their freedoms nearly as much as you do.
[1] https://cdn.hillreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/gab-...
Saying what's "distasteful" is about arbiters of taste, and we shouldn't allow that. John Waters was "distateful" at some point, Rock music was, famous painters were, Henry Miller was, tons of movies, and tons of other things besides. Inflammatory stuff, doxing, etc, should be punishable under common law (libel, privacy laws, etc). Hate on the other hand is one of the basic human sentiments. Why censor it altogether? Besides, usually the case is that some hate is OK (if it's towards our enemies) but other hate is bad (if it's aimed towards our side). Again, arbiters of hate, like arbiters of taste.
>And of course it's a provincial US issue. The entire internet as we know it cannot exist without provincial US law holding it together, and a provincial US economy to keep it online.
Given the state of the modern internet, I'm not sure if that's for the better.
I'd take an old-style, CERN-invented internet back, any day of the week.
>We own Microsoft. We own Android. We own Google and Apple and Facebook and Twitter and everyone else who matters.
You say that as if it's a good thing.
>Grab your soap box and try that "easing of restrictions on freedom of speech on a global scope" bullshit in China. Even Chinese citizens will laugh at you. They don't care about their freedoms nearly as much as you do.
Well, if they don't, then I don't care about their freedoms either. I care about my freedoms, and of those countries that do care about their freedoms.
I don't want to "bring democracy" to places that don't want it (resource-grab style). I want to enjoy democracy (and fuller than today's theater of it) in places that do want it.
From just a practical perspective, if your goal is an increase in unfettered speech on these platforms, or the Internet in general, where would you want them to be besides the United States? Since you're talking about what would and would not, (or should and should not) be allowed, I assume some form of government is enacting and enforcing this as law.
I'm not aware of any nation that takes as close to absolutist of an approach to free speech other than the US. Even in the US we're currently in a relatively anomalous period of expansive free speech protection, historically speaking.
Relevant to this conversation, "hate speech" itself is a particularly common subject of bans in other nations otherwise generally considered equal to or greater than the US where "freedom" is concerned.
I think such platforms should be publicly run, perhaps something like a UN-project, and follow absolutist rules of free speech.
To me, something as crucial as a 2 billion strong method of communication (like FB), or the primary platform for web search for 8 billion people (Google, that is) shouldn't be run from a single country, nor be run for profit, nor be subject to private interests.
Especially regarding e.g. Google search, the global political, economic, public opinion shaping, etc power this gives a single private company, and to the country where it resides, is absurd.
Such services should be more like a "total archive" than a reflection of seasonal/regional/private interests, ideologies, and wills.
I was making the comparison because you were comparing the internet to the world. You can't (read: shouldn't) really do that. The internet is an American invention built with selfless American principals and ingenuity. Gifting it to to the world is one thing, but assume it's for the worlds benefit (as you did in your OP) is naive. The internet, as the free world knows it, is an American invention built in an American image using American resources in an American economy with American resources. It isn't compatible with Chinese or Iranian or Russian politics, and they struggle with that. That's their problem.
When I said "they don't care as much as you do" I meant to say "they don't care as much as you do about them." In other words, you're fighting for the rights of a populace that won't fight for it's own rights. Instead they'll stand by and watch you die in vain. There is no martyr-ism in giving the Chinese civil rights. They don't understand it and they don't want it. They want a strong labor market. They want cheap goods. They don't care about being able to call out jews on some insecure gab loaded with technical debt that prevents them from being secure. They simply don't fucking care. So you making any argument on their behalf is wasted. Especially on someone else in the US. Lets talk about the internet we created for ourselves and when the Chinese get off their asses and contribute to it we can worry about them. Banggood and Alibaba doesn't count. They never will. They are B class companies and in the absence of an A class company they would still rather look for another A to shadow than become one themselves. That's their business model and it ensures their survival in an unstable market. We don't worry about those problems because we don't have too.
So worry about us. You're trying to assert your first amendment right as a consumer over mine as a content aggregator. Our rights are equal in the scope of the law. Maybe because Facebook is publicly traded there is recourse for you, but demanding FB "switch off" content moderation for the first amendment is short sighted. You signed a fucking agreement. Period. If you want to post about how jews are awful, do that on your own dime. Not Zuck's, and certainly not mine.
If your shit didn't stink so bad maybe someone with a brain and money would come hang out with you.
* Email providers have zero responsibility for filtering information
* Email users form their own networks dynamically through actual relationships rather than some artificial structure of "followers"/"friends"
* Email users never get banned from sending email (although maybe in some cases an individual service may ban extreme abusers)
* Email's operation is totally independent of irrational mobs/corporate interests/whatever
In short, I think the core problem with this situation is in your first line: social media has become a "main communication provider" and it's fundamentally unfit for purpose. Email and other protocol-based communication independent of platforms (IRC is another good example) is still the best solution for a primary communication provider.
Email goes over common carrier networks between private hosts and so is pretty close to a common carrier network. Twitter isn't and doesn't. Maybe there should be a way for web services to provide a similar service with similar protections.
If it were true, it would be true for both Twitter and email. Messages from both systems hop between neutral providers in the exact same manner.
Any time Twitter has been called to account for what it publishes, it claims it's not a publisher. Give them what they want.
Any discussion of “common carrier” is entirely orthogonal, and basically nonsensical in the context of something like Twitter.
“Common carrier” generally arises as a trade-off for a government granted monopolies based on limited access right-of-ways. This was true for railways, and true for telephone wires. Why would this apply to a random service like Twitter?
Sending an email is a private communication. Sending a tweet is a public communication.
Your email provider is not a publishing platform any more than the paper store or the USPS is a publishing platform.
Twitter is a publisher, although as an Internet publisher disseminating user generated content, they are protected by law from the typical liability that publishers sometimes face for the communications that they publish.
To say twitter is not for fit for its purpose is bizarre. Twitter is one of the most powerful publishing tools ever created.
The OP hits at a fundamental problem. I'm not sure there's a clear path forward.
Twitter, on the other hand, is publishing these messages on their site. It's very easy for them to simply stop publishing those messages. Because Twitter is in charge of Twitter, it also has to be concerned about it's brand. The more public nature of Twitter also help this along, of course.
If something like this was to happen in the ActivityPub or XMPP space, the way of handling it would probably be something in closer to email than twitter.
It’s common for technologists to assume the underlying technology / implementation is relevant, when in fact it’s really just the user facing functionality that counts.
Shifting the conversation from publishing to the audience, completely glosses over the actual minutia at hand.
OP meant to say publishing platforms not communication provider because of course there is absolutely no natural monopoly for email providers, but clearly natural monopolies for social networks.
Spam is a nuisance. It’s simply not how someone reaches 100 million followers.
ActivityPub let's you build federated interconnected social networks, an interoperable solution like email.
>* Email providers have zero responsibility for filtering information
Not necessarily true. Spam filtering is an expected feature nowadays, I would say, bit you're right that e-mail providers aren't required to do that sort of thing. Still, known spam IPs are regularly blacklisted from major e-mail providers.
>* Email users form their own networks dynamically through actual relationships rather than some artificial structure of "followers"/"friends"
Mailing lists and newsletters are more like a social network than typical e-mail. But the fundamental difference isn't how users form their networks, it's how the networks are structured: on Twitter, I take a message and broadcast it to everyone and Twitter puts ads around it, and other people see it even if they don't "know" me. The equivalency is e-mail:Twitter DMs :: massive mailing list:Twitter.
>* Email users never get banned from sending email (although maybe in some cases an individual service may ban extreme abusers)
You can get booted from a mailing list, and other users can block you, but more or less it's true that Microsoft won't ban me from Exchange servers. And that's kind of the thing, e-mail isn't centrally hosted. Mastodon has attempted this with a Twitterlike social media platform.
>* Email's operation is totally independent of irrational mobs/corporate interests/whatever
E-mails killer feature, for sure.
>In short, I think the core problem with this situation is in your first line: social media has become a "main communication provider" and it's fundamentally unfit for purpose. Email and other protocol-based communication independent of platforms (IRC is another good example) is still the best solution for a primary communication provider.
Agree, and I think this is why lots of online communities treat traditional social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat) like little broadcast hubs where you basically show the world your best in little snippits. On Twitter: post a joke or a funny thread; on Instagram: post your outfit, or your view, or your dinner; on Facebook: post your graduation and family photos; on Snapchat(/Instagram Stories): post about the little things you encounter throughout your day. Once you deviate from this framework – e.g. posting "politically incorrect" or intentionally controversial content – then you are subverting and ultimately trying to dismantle the cultural expectations for those platforms. The culturally accepted place for controversial content is in private conversations: Discord, WhatsApp, iMessage, e-mail, phone calls. Because then your victims have a way to defend themselves.
The argument over "free speech" on Twitter is undertaken, almost 100% of the time, in bad faith. Twitter is a bullhorn, P2P messaging is where free speech is truly (and should always be) protected. If you take a megaphone into Union Square, and start hurling slurs and threats at people, you will be removed or arrested the same way you'd be removed from Twitter for the same actions.
On Twitter you're not talking to "somebody", you're talking to "everybody". If you want to be controversial, take it to private conversation. Causing people pain in public isn't related at all to free speech – it's just another form of harassment.
The manner in which emails are classified as spam is something that will always be highly subjective, leaving room for malevolent manipulation to occur. I'm fact, there may be precedent for this dating back to the 2016 election. There was a brief period where all Trump campaign emails were being flagged as spam by Gmail's filter algorithms. Google had plausible deniability in stating that it was a glitch caused by their algorithm's ability to globally flag senders whose emails are overwhelmingly deleted before being opened by users.
Oh wait.
(They aren't quite directly comparable, but they are for the point you are making, where one side of the equation is popular attention...)
I already know people in security who get death threats. I can't even imagine what it'd be like for people in moderation.
It has been disconcerting to me for a long time now, even back when I was told that I do not know how the internet works when I foresaw the very outcome we are currently in, back about 20 years ago now. What has really happened here, is a kind of fascism (the alignment of state and industry) not by the grass roots so much as it was approached in the past, but through a top down consolidation, concentration, and now ever increasing and tightening control over all aspects and manners of freedom and liberty, under the guise of doing things for others' best interests, which of course always align more closely with the interests of the power seeking than the blissfully unaware recipients of this benevolent good intention of the power hungry.
I do not foresee a positive future at this point, because the very mindset of the trend curve has solidly crossed with the power broker curve, and there is ever weaning realization that the only way to resolve these matters in anything but a violent manner is that everyone be allowed the God given rights that the US Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to the Constitution) prohibits the government from violating.
Those include free speech and assembly (of any kind, regardless of whether you agree with it), freedom to arms to protect yourself from the very government mob that demands to take the right to protect yourself from it (it's a self-fulfilling and self-validating argument that is rather genius), and other inalienable rights that are innate to actual Americans (and anyone who were to adopt the same) and God given (which you presumably should not and do not prescribe to if you do not believe in God from which they are unavoidably and declaratively derived) that are not necessary to be listed here for reasons of brevity and their only tangential relation to the topic.
It has always surprised me, and it is one of the most interesting questions for me, how that a presumably extremely logical and systematic cohort of humans as the ones assembled in this forum, would seemingly lack any semblance of a capacity to understand the consequences of making fundamental changes to a system, in what appears to be some bizarre and inverted assumption that no change to a system will in any way result in negative outcomes. Unless of course the very prime assumption is a desire to sabotage the system, whether you are a knowing and willing participant, or just a placed saboteur ... a rube, not in any way understanding that he was placed to spread his negative impact on the system from within.
Lots of fascists demand freedom of speech. And what do they do with that freedom? Assemble mobs online to harass people who say things they disagree with. Or take control and then ban books and “intellectuals” and so forth.
If you don’t like the example of “fascists,” there are plenty of other examples you could pick, like press barons. History abounds with examples of people using democracy to acquire enough power to uninstall democracy.
This is a hard problem. There are no easy or simple or ideologically pure solutions. Absolute freedom of speech leads to people using that freedom to deny other people that freedom. Absolute freedom to own a weapon leads to people using that freedom to deny other people the freedom to live, much less own a weapon of their own. And so on. And so forth.
TL;DR:
There are no simple solutions to problems involving systems where people are prepared to act in bad faith to abuse the simple solutions.
My personal claim: The above does not mean, of course, that there are no solutions, or that the only options are “unrestricted and absolute freedom” versus tyranny. It’s just that there are no simple solutions.
——
Related:
There is a reason that we are having this discussion on a forum that explicitly does NOT grant unrestricted free speech.
Let’s ask ourselves this question: What would Hacker News look like if we turned of spam filtering, moderation, flagging, banning, sorting comments by votes, greying out downvoted messages, &c.?
What value would it have as a community? As a source of information?
Would you find yourself feeling smarter and better educated about an issue after reading the comments on a subject? Or would you feel like you lost 50 points of IQ to toxicity?
Would you consider it a good use of your time to independently verify each and every claim people made? What about disproving known rubbish claims?
How would you feel about logging in every day and having the exact same debate with the exact same people who seem to have an infinite amount of time available to make false claims?
Edit:
Also, it always riles me up when someone refers to social media as a “main communication” provider. What fraction of the population gets its political discourse off of Twitter?
I’m not sure how but I want that fraction to get before appropriate rights are defined and adopted.
The US common carrier rules were only enacted in 1934 [1] so it took a while before phone companies were forced to respect some US rights. Twitter is only 15 years old so it’s likely that this private company (and others) will be regulated just like the private telephone companies were regulated.
I had hoped that technology had advanced enough so respecting human rights would be embedded into the design. But now I think it will take laws and regulations which will inevitably, and sadly I think, also squelch innovation.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274564/monthly-active-tw...
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/201
Twitter themselves say monetizable active users are around 40% of worldwide monthly active users. Your statista link links to that. That takes your percentage of US down to 8%. Account for Twitter exaggerating or missing out on anything and the number of users who don’t follow political discourse and you’re likely below 5%.
"Everyone gets a platform" is not a right. It's never been a right. If anything, I hope it's a societal anomaly that we fix in the next 10 years. Again, the first amendment gives you exactly fuckall protection on twitter, and that's how it should be.
The New York Times isn't required to host your "Obama was the REAL racist" diatribes and Fox News doesn't need to have you come on every weekend to point out "Trump is probably a rapist" because you're not entitled to this. Same as Twitter.
That said: ToS enforcement is always difficult, always subjective, and always "unfair". There is no good way to fix this. Whatever cool idea someone has for how to fix this doesn't actually fix this. And they don't need to. Twitter gonna ban what Twitter gonna ban.
Twitter has those, too, like having to carve out an exemption in the rules for Trump's account, or accusations of bias that lead to Congressional hearings.
And as the courts have recently confirmed, even protected classes cannot compel a business into speech that contradicts their own sincerely held moral and ethical beliefs.
The Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling was a narrow one, ruling that Colorado's process explicitly discriminated against the bakers - it showed forbidden anti-religious animus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
> In a 7-2 decision, the Court ruled on narrow grounds that the Commission did not employ religious neutrality, violating Masterpiece owner Jack Phillips' rights to free exercise, and reversed the Commission's decision. The Court did not rule on the broader intersection of anti-discrimination laws, free exercise of religion, and freedom of speech, due to the complications of the Commission's lack of religious neutrality.
It'll probably be a few more years before we get a better test case for the issue that the Court can't as easily dodge.
But what does this have to do with the price of tea in China?
If "reasonable points" aren't furthering discussion, what are we even doing here?
The danger in deplatforming is the inevitability of changing social mores. What happens if the pendulum swings the other way and the ones you consider to be on the "right side" of history start getting deplatformed?
If your answer to that is, "oh that won't happen", then you're oh so naive.
The owners of the platform. As things have always been. Like magazine editors or tv producers. Everyone having a platform is a mixed bag. I don't feel it's needed. If the socialists get McCarthy'd off twitter, they'll survive. If the Alt-right pisses off their web hosts, there's always some lovely libertarian ISP out there who feels that loud anarchy is the best way to support the first amendment.
>>What happens if the pendulum swings the other way and the ones you consider to be on the "right side" of history start getting deplatformed?
They'll find new platforms? Like they always have? I mean, maybe not the best example but as unpopular as Nazis and the KKK are, they still somehow find a way to exist and keep coming back. If your cause is sticky enough, you'll attract people. Also, maybe some ideas should just be allowed to quietly die in private. We don't need "both sides" on every issue.
The point I'm getting at, is when you chip away at free speech like that, no matter how laudable the goals, the inevitable result is less free speech for all.
I don't believe in 100% free speech. I don't think it's needed for society to function. That's fine if you do. But slippery slope arguments or "when the tides change" future-scenarios aren't super convincing.
I'm fine with being intolerant of intolerance. I also understand it's personal opinion. That's how the world works. It's a bunch of individuals trying their best to get by in their lives.
I say we ban the Nazis. You say "let the Nazis talk". Then society as a whole fights it out and comes to a conclusion (with inertia favoring inaction). The same will happen for ANTIFA and Communists and the Alt-Right and Libertarians being allowed to have platforms. And American society as a whole will keep moving forward in the same weird twisting way it has for the past ~250 years.
I'm not unaware of the ramifications of my opinions if enacted as policy, I'm just not afraid of the fight when someone seeks to use them against me.
It's easy to think "the government will never use these exceptions to silence speech critical of the government" but quite honestly, I don't have faith in my fellow man in that context, or at least not the typical politician. History has proven that governments can and will abuse any tool they are given. Such abuses currently happen, today, in the modern world. I'm a firm believer in a small government that stays as much out of people's lives as possible, at least directly.
I respect your difference of opinion, however. I agree with the idea that "platforms" can control who publishes through their infrastructure. I also feel that everyone should have access to some platform, even if it's not the most popular one. Thus, when it comes to the backbone of the internet, I don't think providers should be able to pick and choose who they host, as long as there is no otherwise illegal content (copyright infringement, child abuse, etc). If any companies should be considered true common carriers, it would be those on the backbone.
As I understand it, whether social media companies are platforms or publishers forms the actual core and substance of this debate about "free speech."
edit Apparently there is no legal distinction between a platform and a publisher? It looks like this article may explain the confusion that I myself had. => https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190613/03172142391/once-...
This is wrong. There is no such distinction between platforms and publishers and the opposite is actually true. The law explicitly states that website owners are not responsible for content provided by other parties and are also explicitly permitted to curate their platforms for what they deem to be objectionable content.
To whom is Twitter responsible? If shareholders/investors then it should do whatever seems most likely to make it the most money. If "users" then it should do whatever seems most likely to make the most users happy.
There are valid moral arguments on both side of the censorship debate, and ultimately it comes down to subjective judgement and a gut call by twitter management. There's a lot of people claiming moral imperatives and "what is right" as if "right" was an absolute and not like, their opinion, man.
Which "the old" specifically? What did my great grandfather use to directly contact the Henry Ford and get into a flame war with him about how his newfangled "horseless carriage" was killing his equestrian breeding business?
What bizarro ideas people have.
Rights exist outside of technologies, technologies, media, etc are just different spaces to apply them.
Twitter, for example, can't treat people of color differently, just because it's a "new technology" and "thus" they should not have any expectation of equality there.
They have the right to be treated as equals, regardless of whether it's a new technology that does the treatment or an old one.
(Note also that what century/decade old laws based on a 3 centuries old constitution that's held as some holy scripture say, are not the be all, end all, and are not necessarily the same thing as what should be right in 2019. I say this cause Americans have the tendency to view everything under this lens, as if they can't possibly conceive of any improvements there, or as if that's even relevant to a global discussion).
>Also, it always riles me up when someone refers to social media as a “main communication” provider. What fraction of the population gets its political discourse off of Twitter?
A large enough for it to be actively targeted by political figures, political campaign advertising, and polling companies (heck, even foreign agents), and a large enough for it to have a big share in shaping public opinion.
So there's that.
At least in Germany, people can sue Twitter and Facebook to have their accounts re-opened. Of course, this option reduces the value of due process rights as one has to be able to fund a lawyer and the court fees...
Because combined, Google, Twitter, and Facebook have an effective monopoly on modern public discourse.
which extensively quotes Twitter and gets much of their leads and sources from Twitter.
Moderation tools have been weaponized in the troll propaganda war.
Post an insightful and highly liked reply to a controversial topic, watch the likes roll in, and then suddenly go dark after about three minutes.
View the thread incognito, and the popular comment cannot be found.
Trolls brigade-block-and-report views they don't like, and your reply gets memory-holed until a human moderator can review it.
Hours or days later your comment gets restored, but the damage is done.
Of course troll armies are mining old tweets for any violation, so they can remove you from the conversation and manufacture the illusion of consensus.
Comparisons with the old media always neglect to mention the unique protections these platforms enjoy. Unlike the old media, they aren't responsible for the content they publish.
If they'd prefer to be treated like publishers, not platforms, they should also have the responsibility of publishers, not the protections of platforms.
But as long as they remain platforms, they have a unique responsibility to respect the freedom of speech of everyone.
As always, the question becomes: who decides which people are to be silenced?
Why? Who cares if someone gets banned from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc? It isn't a big deal. I can see it as annoying, but it doesn't truly matter to anyone without some type of social media addiction. If "censorship" is the problem, we should support the establishment of government run internet forums that would be legally obligated to the serve the interest of the people rather than trying to arbitrarily steer certain popular websites into moderation strategies that don't align with their business or political prerogatives.
Ultimately, companies don't exist in a vacuum. If they don't adhere to the political will of the society they operate in,
There's no reason that those whims must be executed through market instead of through government.
If we want to reclassify social media as common carrier we need regulation to do so but that is not how the internet or social media companies work today. Sadly the internet in of itself doesn't even fall under common carrier.
The problematic case here is that all other common carrier are funded through service chargers where social media is funded through advertising and other revenue streams.
That said it’s not like social media companies aren’t at fault here too they hide behind the notion that they are a common carrier or a publisher when it suits them as in when they don’t want to be directly liable for the content on their platform.
On the other hand they moderate content to appease advertisers even when there is no direct pressure to do so like in this case.
My personal opinion is that Twitter should not ban anyone, if the Twits are sufficiently offensive (not in a personal manner but rather a legal one) then law enforcement should handle it like it would handle any other type of abusive or offensive communication.
If I send you a death threat via the post the postal service won’t ban me the police might come tho if you report me.
Twitter does not have a monopoly over internet communication.
Twitter is a crucial social communications platform for large enough portion of some societies to treat them as a monopoly.
Twitter is not a monopoly or a common carrier. They are a website with a complimentary app that will show you website data.
Because people always have control over the companies serving them, as it should be. Without people exerting control, we won't have - antitrust regulations, civil rights legislations, ADA, EPA regulations, Clean Water Act, Financial regulations etc. And I believe those regulations were essential towards making a better society.
Mind you, I am not advocating for a communism-style abolishing of private property. But neither do I want to see a libertarian wild west of no government control. That is just other extreme. What we have currently seems to be a good trade-off, where companies have a lot of freedoms but political will can step in occasionally to demand changes to the way they operate.
The US is not a democracy. It is a Constitutional Republic. The Constitution limits the Governmental Powers to make laws restricting speech, the Constitution does not give individuals the right to use corporate places of business or platforms to disseminate their speech.
Twitter shouldn't be able to, either.
This is facile: it is both, and there is no contradiction.
> the Constitution does not give individuals the right to use corporate places
Certainly it does: the right of free association. But that's not what you meant; you meant that the Constitution does not compel the corporate place to allow individual speech. Which is true but incomplete, since we have other laws currently about a related concept, "common carriers". The debate is much higher level than the Constitution: it's about how far to extend the idea that a private conveyance has become so essential to public use that it is subject to regulation. (Meaning, yes, that some of the private entity's rights are curtailed.)
It is basic 7th grade civics, Section 4 of the Constitution:
>The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government
Founding Father John Adams:
>"No determinations are carried, it is true, in a simple representative democracy, but by consent of the majority or their representatives."
The word "democracy" appearing in the Constitution: 0
Extra fun fact, the US is not the first Constitutional Republic, it is the 2nd behind San Marino.
> there is no contradiction
If you used democratic republic there is not, where the people vote and elect the representative leaders, then there is no contradiction. But democracy comes from Ancient Greece where all citizens with a right to vote directly decided the issues with votes, issues were not decided by elected representative. Its a significantly different form of government not just a typical HN pedantic point.
>the right of free association
The right to associate has nothing to do with accessing corporate property to disseminate your speech.
Everyone is compelled to use Twitter. Its success, influence, and profit, derive largely from its semi-official adoption by so many corporations and government actors.
It isn't private, and if it wants to be, it can't be used for public business.
I don't know what your comment added to the discussion. Does anyone know?
Your position is basically "I think platforms should be compelled to host every bit of nonsense emitted by every user." The freedom is provided by the multitude of choices!
I think the idea you can make rules for speech that are impartial and universally accepted is an insane idea which shows no signs of being tractable [1]. Despite attempts to quantify speech, every moderation decision is arbitrary at some level, and preserving choice of moderators seems much more important than arguing over rules.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/world/facebook-moderators...
The most recent one I'm aware of was Apple removing them from the app store, which here was a worthless virtue signal because Gab is now entirely on the Fediverse - the app was a clone of a common github repo, of which there are dozens not being removed.
So it really does seem like any real competition is not allowed anymore.
> If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms
We're not "going" to have it. We already have it. Well, maybe not ISPs, but definitely "Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc."
> It's not wrong for Twitter to have rules to protect the weak from the strong, and individuals from the mob
When Gandhi was asked "what do you think about Western civilization", he reportedly said "I think it'd be a good idea". In the same vein, it might be a good idea (not sure, but maybe) for Twitter to have rules to protect individuals from the mob and weak from the strong, but whatever Twitter has now definitely does nothing of the sort. I am not sure if it is possible at all to have such rules, but even if it were, Twitter does not seem to be interested in the least.
(Edit: And to be clear, I would have been a-okay with Twitter having banned the user at the time, for the content in question!)
If the truly are trying to scrub hate from their platform, I applaud their effort, but they'll never succeed. Hate is too hard to define and so subtle you can't actually remove it all.
If they just want to remove bad words, why not use literal black-text censoring in situations like this, like TV has done for years? Give this user the option of preserving their moronic comment, hate and all, without the bad words that I'm sure advertisers are asking to be removed.
That sort of mindless focus on bad words that might make people uncomfortable instead of you know - actual problems has been with us for centuriea unfortunately and has gotten better compared to regularly enforced obscenity laws - which are fucking obscene to anyone who stops to use their fucking brain for once.
So we were spending all of this money and oppressing with violence because a bunch of people are offended because they were told to be offended? That said use of resources could be used on /anything fucking else/ like patroling, doing reviews of random ceiminal sentences is actual fucking obscenity.
I'm not talking about obfuscated messages. If one were to post "I love you no matter where you fucking come from", they're not being hateful, but they are being vulgar. Is that allows?
On the other hand, if one were to post "I truly believe that all people who are not white are inferior beings that should leave my country", then there's zero vulgarity here but clearly a hateful horrible person I'd like to avoid at all costs.
If the problem is vulgarity, then the solution is well-understood: censor the bad words, let the rest of the message stay. If the problem is hate, then the problem is that it's impossible to ever really get rid of it.
I suspect in the author's case, the problem is that they used vulgarity 9 years ago and the system finally picked up on it.
> Fuck my fucking face I’m about to get skinny as fuck
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/09/dont-worr...
Throwing HATE at a US politician during a US election in public is foreign interference and should be removed on that basis.
That depends whether you are in-group with the censors or out-group. If you're in, you could get away with a lot - from very base and crude language (excluding the taboo words, yes) to graphically describing and encouraging grave bodily harm, murder, rape, etc. If you're out, then you better be extra super vanilla squeaky nice.
> Is there a list of gender-neutral insults that we can refer to for compliance reasons?
The thing is that even if there is a list like this now, in 9 years saying 'woman' might not even be acceptable because it has 'man' in it. If 'woman' isn't something we say in 9 years, I don't think twitter, in 9 years, should start banning everyone who every tweeted it now.
In the end I just gave up on Twitter. Sad, cause I liked to use it mainly for myself, to follow some people that interest me and to keep a kind of "bookmarks on my thoughts".
When James Gunn was fired from Guardians for something he said in a tweet years before I was dumbfounded. Now Twitter is actively policing old posts?!
People change, nations change. Violent criminals can become bastions of peace and philanthropy. Why is society, or a company, persecuting people for tweets that are years old. If someone says something awful today, deal with it, but 9 years ago?! If there's an offensive 9 year old tweet, delete it and send the user an email saying their tweet was deleted for violating such and such policy but locking an account 9 years after the fact?!
The obvious and most consistent counterclaim is that these are "private entities who can choose whom to deal with".
That statement is predicated on the facetious assertion that a corporation is a human, and should be treated as such and provided latitude as one. It obviously is not. And with their clout in personnel, money, lawyers, and more - they are a uberhuman.
The path forward seems clear. Corporations should not be treated the same as real humans. And their powers should be limited to prevent these formations of super-countries with draconian and arbitrary laws, just because technology allows them so.
Many of us identify with the author and most content created on social media years ago have no reason to stay around.
It's dishonest, lacks any legitimacy, and it is the root of the culture war. Words only have the consequences the reader or listener gives them, they do not have intrinsic consequences in themselves. The fantasy that mere belief is transformative or redeeming is a seductive deception.
Platforms should demonstrate they are principled before merely driving certain interests, even (especially) if they are convinced those interests are the right ones.
They have you in three ways:
1) It is a private service with with broader discretion to censor than non-private services.
2) They consider all of your tweets as one body of current content, without grandfathering old posts.
3) Twitter fears tighter regulation if they don't self-police their content.
One of the dangers about doing business with these behemoths.
One of the reasons that this feels so novel is that this is an example of ex post facto enforcement. In this case, Twitter is punishing the user for an action performed at a point in time before such an action was punishable. (In fact, I haven't checked - it may have been punishable, but the punishment was not usually enforced, which is a separate issue of selective enforcement.) The US Constitution prevents both Congress and the individual States from passing ex post facto laws that punish individuals for actions committed before such action was illegal. Obviously, private corporations are not bound by the same laws as the government. So, as platforms like Twitter continue to update their policies and enforcement mechanisms in response to issues such as hate, and as these definitions are broadened, cases such as this are likely to become more common.
A lot of people my age love The Office, but some of the earlier episodes... well, they haven't really aged well. The show was great at the time, but the first few seasons today would be a giant #MeToo fiasco. Culture changes and moves on, and what was acceptable then probably isn't acceptable now, but that doesn't (shouldn't?) mean Steve Carrel gets blackballed for the comedy he did at the time.
Early Disney cartoons were flat-out racist, but they're still available with a historical context disclaimer that basically says "We disavow everything in here, but it's a greater shame to pretend that this never happened so here it is for the historical record."
One of the most interesting conversations about social media right now I think is how does someone apologize for what they've done, and do it in a genuine and authentic way that can be accepted. When you serve prison time, the idea is you pay your debt to society and move on. With social media, I don't think we've yet figured out how to say "yes, I was a stupid angry person back then but that's not who I am now". Part of the reason is it's really difficult to figure out who's being authentic and who's trying to half-heartedly weasel themselves out of something.
And I don't think you CAN do that on social media because the only way to really make that decision is to know someone in more depth than some multiple of 140 characters. It's a decision that can't be made with the small bite-sized serotonin pings that we've started to define our relationships and judgements around. We've become jacks of all relationships, masters of none.
Of course, that doesn't mean we still can't criticize Twitter - but walking away should be the first step.
I do think that going back a decade with an algorithm and getting people to clean up tweets that likely match a regex filter is whitewashing and it does make twitter a less valuable historical resource. It's a totally different argument from the normal you should be able to say what you want - because I would support censorship of such tweets in the present.
If they want to enforce a policy consistently and not have to face constant complaints, then I don't think grandfathering in old violations after some arbitrary date is going to work.