CTH is one place which never puts out any info without hard evidence to the documents which prove their case. Somehow that's not acceptable now a days. And despite this, there will still be people who will claim there's no censorship of conservative voices.
I don't see any data that backs this statement up:
>There is a COVID-19 virus; however, COVID is not more dangerous than all other flu-like viruses that impact the respiratory system. COVID-19 is very manageable and doesn’t carry a higher fatality rate.
The comment you reply to was itself a response to a claim that this site in particular "never puts out any info without hard evidence". The comment you reply to disputes that. The rest of the internet is irrelevant.
Indeed, the doesn’t carry a higher fatality rate part is factually incorrect. It's sad to see people spreading this kind of thing because it causes problems for their ideology.
COVID-19 has a fatality rate between 1 and 10%[1]. The variation is mostly due to testing - the places with the higher rate are under testing.
The flu has a death rate around 0.1% in the US - although that overestimate it because most people who get the flu are never tested and don't report it[2].
The flu is also much less contagious than COVID-19. Influenza has a R0 of between 0.9 and 2.8 (for the 1928 Pandemic stream). COVID-19 is between 3 and 6[3].
There's a whole slew of reasons why even 1% estimate is bullshit. Consider this: median age of COVID death is currently 78 years old. US all-age life expectancy as of 2018 is 78.9 years. That is, approximately half the people who are dying of this would die anyway that same year. Now granted, expectancy is a mean, not a median, but you get my point.
1% CFR means 3.3 million deaths in the US alone if everyone gets it, which everyone eventually will, and which exceeds even the most ridiculous estimates from March of this year by a factor of 1.5, and is quite obviously not going to happen.
It's also ridiculously difficult to track down this median age number for the US, by the way. I wonder why that is.
That's before we even consider how the US has 760 deaths per million, and the likes of Iran or Russia (which have nowhere near the medicine the US has) report one half and one third that correspondingly.
So yes, C19 quite obviously has substantially higher CFR than the flu, but 9 months in nobody has any idea as to how much higher. Anyone who says otherwise is selling you something.
> Consider this: median age of COVID death is currently 78 years old. US life expectancy as of 2018 is 78.9 years. That is, approximately half the people who are dying of this would die anyway that same year.
You are confusing life expectancy at birth of 78.9 for life expectancy at age 78 of 0.9, that's not correct. Life expectancy at age 78 is 9.43 years for males, 10.98 years for females.
Yes, and a lot of those 78.9 year old COVID patients will survive, although of course their probability of death is much higher. The point is not that. The point is it's dumb to pretend that the CFR is going to be uniform, and that just because it's 2.2% in the US at the moment, it can be linearly scaled up to the entire population (which is what would need to happen if we are to compare it to the flu, which easily 60% of people get in any given year), given the underlying demographics of fatalities. Downright dishonest, if you ask me.
Again, it is more dangerous than the flu. But nobody knows by how much, and nobody is even trying to find out as far as I can tell. Seems like a crucial question that needs to be answered, no?
> The point is it's dumb to pretend that the CFR is going to be uniform, and that just because it's 2.2% in the US at the moment, it can be linearly scaled up to the entire population
This argument makes a lot more sense than your previous one.
> nobody is even trying to find out as far as I can tell.
As someone who has friends who have been working on this for months, I can assure you this is absolutely not true. There must be tens of thousands working on it, since the people I know are members of a group approaching 100.
Two of the big problems I hear about are:
Different interventions make modelling the effective reproduction number difficult, since this gets altered so much by the interventions
Different tests have different false positive (and false negative) rates and it is really hard to find out what test is used in which jurisdiction (and even harder to find that out historically).
It's not some big conspiracy. It's more that everyone Excel files are in different formats... sigh.
> median age of COVID death is currently 78 years old. US life expectancy as of 2018 is 78.9 years. That is, approximately half the people who are dying of this would die anyway that same year.
This argument is nonsense.
Say there was a person with a gun, who pulled people out of a crowd, made sure their median age was 78, and then shot all of them. Approximately half the people who are dying of this would die anyway that same year.
The death rate is important.
> and the likes of Iran or Russia (which have nowhere near the medicine the US has) report one half and one third that correspondingly.
I assume you actually do realise why this is, right? Places are doing hard lockdowns and it is working.
> It's also ridiculously difficult to track down this median age number for the US, by the way. I wonder why that is.
> Places are doing hard lockdowns and it is working.
Russia isn't doing "hard" lockdowns. I know because I have relatives there. Schools are open. Airlines are flying. Where there are restrictions, they are pretty mild.
For that matter Sweden, which has _no_ lockdowns still has 150 deaths per million less than the United States. Italy, which had severe lockdowns, has a comparable number of deaths per million (from which it follows lockdowns aren't "working" as well as you imply unless you catch the spread very early and are able to close the borders a-la NZ).
The difference is mostly how deaths are counted, not the CFR per se. If you only count people dying of COVID as a primary cause, you get Russia/Iran number. If you count people run over by a bus who also had COVID, you get the US rate. Which one is better is up for debate, the point is you can't compare if you don't count the same way, nor can you even tell the CFR accurately if you count deaths where COVID was merely present, but did not cause the death per se.
I'm comparing the case fatality rate for COVID and flu, since that is a like-for-like comparison and is about as far from misinformation as you can get!
I don't think you can get infection fatality rates for flu, since it is so low (and so many infected people are never tested) but feel free to provide them
I guess they (or you) will argue they just pass along false rumours and that isn't their fault. But if they claim to be something that deserves any kind of protection against deplatforming then surely they can't just be a spam mill?
People spreading falsehoods deserve limited protection IMHO.
> People spreading falsehoods deserve limited protection IMHO.
Nobody deserves special protection from "deplatforming"[0] from the government; giving the government the ability to say "you must carry this speech" is just as tyrannical as giving them the right to say "you must not carry this speech". If one has the freedom to speak and associate, one must also have the freedom to be silent and disassociate.
[0] It's amazing how many people who've been "cancelled" or "deplatformed" continue to tell me so on the internet. One can't help but wonder how effective this so-called deplatforming really is.
> giving the government the ability to say "you must carry this speech" is just as tyrannical as giving them the right to say "you must not carry this speech"
Don't we do exactly that with the phone company and the post office?
You can go ahead and toss out the post office here, as part of the US Government arguably the first amendment applies directly to it, which isn't going to be true for any private companies.
So the general rule is that the government can override one's right to free association, but that the government needs a compelling reason to do so. This is the basis for very important civil rights rulings, as the courts have overridden one's ability to refuse service based on various protected characteristics. The question is, does speech and speech alone rise to this standard? In a few cases yes, but in general no.
The rationale for phone companies is that they're classified as "Common Carriers", a concept that comes from common law. A common carrier is a regulatory concept that places certain obligations on service providers (typically transit companies) in exchange for the right to sell to the general public. This has never been a mandatory thing, private and contract carriers have always existed in parallel with common carriers, but if you want to sell to the public directly without drawing up a contract per client one has to be a common carrier. Telephone companies fall under this common carrier distinction largely because they must connect with each other; it's pretty much impossible to create the equivalent of a "contract carrier" in the telephone space, since they're only useful when interconnected.
You'll note that your ISP is not actually a common carrier, as the FCC reversed its stance in 2017. Technically speaking there is no legal requirement that your ISP carry any speech disagrees with, even though from a marketing standpoint that would be a disaster. Given that we haven't regulated ISPs as common carriers, despite the relative lack of competition in this area, there is no clear legal rationale for the government to regulate hosting providers as common carriers. They don't sell to the general public, you in fact actually sign a one-off contract to work with them, and the end consumer has a dizzying array of options for hosting providers in the case of bad behavior by one. Any attempt by the government to force a host like Wordpress to carry speech would be both an unnecessary attempted expansion of government power, but would probably crash and burn in the courts almost immediately.
> as part of the US Government arguably the first amendment applies directly to [the Post Office]
Quite fair.
As to the rest of it: I agree with your description of how things work, but I don't think it really addresses the point I was trying to make which (made more explicit and construed narrowly) is that we need to be more precise about the situation before we say "compelling carriage of speech is tyranny".
To re-summarize my point; arguably even common carriers aren’t actually forced by the government to be content neutral. Rather they’re given certain benefits (such as the right to sell to the public without contract) in exchange for meeting certain standards of behavior, including content neutrality and regulations on rates and liability. Companies are free to reject those restrictions, but they lose access to the benefits as well.
I miss the days when you could reliably buy service from a corporation without fear that you might be denied for wrongthink. Business culture has gone down a very bad path when we can't just do business with each other.
There's a difference between a difference in ideology and spreading actual and dangerous misinformation.
Whether or not spreading misinformation on the internet is justification for removing someone might be up for debate, but let's not pretend it was just because they disagreed with the "big tech" company that is wordpress.com
The Conservative Treehouse is not a misinformation site. They are well-known for their meticulous and extensive research. What they say may be contrarian and unpopular, but it's not propaganda or a misinformation campaign.
I'd be curious how uniformly they apply this policy. Is a website that promotes crystals to heal cancer going to be shutdown? Anti-vax? What about Jehovah's witnesses who don't allow blood transfusions?
Honestly, as somebody on the left, I do feel like there are certain topics that people get unusually emotional about (e.g. terrorism, airplanes, covid) and tend make choices that aren't proportional to the measured risk, relative to say smoking.
Usually the rule is that when it only affects the believer, it's ok. There are, however, sensible arguments against it based on the damage those beliefs cause to others, in special children of Jehovah's witnesses as individuals and the collective risk children deliberately not vaccinated going to schools and spreading disease to kids who can't be vaccinated (because of age or allergies or any other medical reason).
The idea of "dangerous misinformation" is an anti-liberal, anti-Enlightenment notion. Information is not dangerous, information is neutral. It's either right, in which case it's not misinformation. Or it's wrong, in which case it's not dangerous, because it can be refuted.
The most dangerous thing is to suppress the free marketplace of ideas.
It’s often applied in problematic ways, but the basic concept seems pretty sound to me even from the most stringent Enlightenment assumptions. Every time someone treats their cancer with juice cleanses rather than chemotherapy, they’ve been harmed by dangerous misinformation.
What to do about dangerous misinformation is of course another question entirely, but the idea that there’s no such thing ignores important challenges.
Misinformation is dangerous to trust. If your opinion is that there should be no arbiter of "wrongthink" you're saying that misinformation is OK, even if it says things like "ebola is made up by white folks" (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/fighting-ebola-hard-...) or "vaccines are fake and cause autism" and people die because of your stupidity.
I miss the days where "common sense" or "simple logic" wasn't labeled as some ideological "wrongthink." We _literally_ can't do business with each other being locked down because people in the US are being stupid about managing COVID-19. Don't blame "business culture."
A private business declining to assist you in your political cause is not “deplatforming”. You were just asked by your own beloved capitalism to go take your business elsewhere.
We've banned this account because using HN for ideological flamewar like this is against the site guidelines, and it's a bad sign when a new account is already doing it repeatedly.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
I took a look at your recent comment history and it seems fine, so we'll try unbanning you. Admittedly I didn't look too far back because https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23979330 won me over.
Rayiner is one of the best commenters on the site. He routinely takes the time to write paragraphs of background to support his views, which are well-informed --- he's an appellate court litigator with an engineering background --- and interesting enough that they're routinely downvoted. I've never seen him complain about that, or about HN moderation. We need 100 more of him (ideally in a variety of ideological flavors).
I have no idea who 's9w is, but I've never seen Rayiner post the three word comment "that's a lie", so I object to the comparison.
I agree. I've also noticed that he has adapted his style over the years to fit the HN guidelines better, which is significant effort for a lot of us, let alone a professional litigator.
There is a COVID-19 virus; however, COVID is not more dangerous than all other flu-like viruses that impact the respiratory system. COVID-19 is very manageable and doesn’t carry a higher fatality rate.
Why is COVID-19 being disproportionately hyped.... The answer is… social changes under the guise of COVID-19 mitigation, are the entry point for the goals and aspirations of the political left on a national and global scale. [0]
I would posit that piss-poor methodology is part of the ideology of the American right. This is part of the problem, by claiming things that used to be frowned upon by everybody (basically lying and misinformation) as part of their political identity they get to claim you're being biased when they get called out for their bullshit.
There's just no way to argue with a group that wants to lie with impunity and support a leader that lies, breaks every norm and is generally showing signs of a being a dictator (I made the mistake of seeing his mental breakdown and tantrum on Twitter today). They'll call it censorship when you point it out, or call you a snowflake if you show that you're bothered by it.
This blog is basically calling for a coup. The "I don't agree with what you say but I'll defend it to the death" crowd are going to be the end of the United States.
I'm lucky enough that being a Canadian in Canada gives me enough separation from this that I can check out. My heart goes out to you folks that have to live it.
> There's just no way to argue with a group that wants to lie with impunity and support a leader that lies, breaks every norm and is generally showing signs of a being a dictator
And it should be pointed out that about 70 million Americans support this.
Fermi's Great Filter may be people advocating for no filtering...
It’s about 0.6% COVID versus 0.1% seasonal influenza in the US. However, note that the latter figure is the IFR for the “typical” flu. The sentence quoted notes “all other flu-like viruses” - of which there are varieties that are less and more dangerous. Given that qualifier, the quoted sentence doesn’t seem obviously false to me.
The first sentence could be true. Probably not, but it's possible. It's certainly closer to the flu than most people realise.
> The answer is… social changes under the guise of COVID-19 mitigation
The Left is playing games. So is the Right of course. But this sentence is too strong.
The Left wants power, they are doing power moves. But there's no underlying plan. They are getting a strong footing. It will allow them to implement social change. But it's not that tied together.
"The left wants power" so they can give you healthcare and make the rich pay taxes. At least that's the US "left", which would not be called left anywhere else in the world.
I've been of the opinion that hosting sites should be agnostic of the posted content. The moment you try to fact-check one person, you open a very large can of worms and become responsible for fact-checking everyone. Information is cheap and people post correct and incorrect facts all the time. Censorship does not scale.
The world is a dangerous place and it's more scalable to teach future generations that they'll run into good and bad information and that they should make decisions for themselves. Trying to censor all of the "bad" stuff is a huge can of worms and is not something huge platforms should even try to be doing. Let the mirror be black, and teach people how to scrub the dirt off.
When in doubt, err on the side of higher user agency.
> Information is cheap and people post correct and incorrect facts all the time. Censorship does not scale.
Censorship on platforms will never be perfect but there's a great deal of space between perfect censorship and a ridiculous free for all. You need moderation/filtering to make the modern web work.
Is this not a strawman argument? The hosting layer should be agnostic (like, say, https://nearlyfreespeech.net), but the site admins can do what they'd like with their site (including removing spam).
No, this is literally what happens on FB. Anything public on the main platform is censored by Facebook. Anything in private groups are moderated by site admins (including removing spam, though users can still report classes of entirely banned things like violence, hate speech, etc -- but until a user reports, Facebook doesn't see).
Consider the alternative: public groups would get spammed by bots. There would be no more public groups.
Agnostic just isn't possible, because now you'll have to ask the question, "well what's spam?" For legal reasons you need to consider things like CSAI (https://protectingchildren.google/intl/en), and then ask yourself questions of morality like "is it OK that the platform I'm building helps to proliferate misinformation that is affecting election outcomes -- potentially damaging democracy, and is causing deaths by way of encouraging people to behave recklessly" ??? There's no way to build the platform and not ask these questions.
I think you're misinterpreting the definition of hosting — I believe the grandparent was referring to web hosting (not a site "being the host of" specific discourse).
Oh you read the OP's comment differently. I don't think they were talking about an actual web host, because given context it sounded much more like they were talking about a platform that is "hosting" users. E.g they say ```Trying to censor all of the "bad" stuff is a huge can of worms and is not something huge platforms should even try to be doing.``` << clearly talking about social media platforms
Yeah obviously a company providing server resources has / should have nothing to do with user moderation. Same with ISPs. They couldn't do anything if they wanted. I guess some webhosts have policies against hosting adult content but it's probably more about avoiding legal issues (e.g with CSAI) than anything else.
>I don't think they were talking about an actual web host
This HN post is about a blog hosted by WordPress.com (but not on the hostname wordpress.com). So given that context I think it's clear this is about blog hosting. I agree that "platform" is a bit confusing, but WordPress.com the company can be called both a host and a platform (Wikipedia calls it both[1]). I would say that WordPress.com is in between a regular web host and a social media platform, but closer to web host, especially when a custom domain is used, as it is here.
>clearly talking about social media platforms
I don't think that's very clear. Especially given the previous debate about Cloudflare taking down Daily Stormer[2].
Spam filters as I know them are different. A good spam filter will just be a bifurcation where you can still see what was considered "spam" by looking at the spam tab. When Wordpress, Facebook, et al. decide to show you certain things based off of what they consider is good, you are being denied the full story entirely.
That's such a broad definition of both "force" and "associate", I'm inclined to call this a bad faith argument. No reasonable definition of "forced to associate" in the context of governmental power has anything to do with happening to live in the same country as someone you dislike.
> You have a right to go to the Town Square and voice your views if people want to listen, you don't have a right to do the same in a Wendy's.
But what about when the town square has moved on-line? Let's say it's not Wendy's IRL, but wendys.com. This is now a public space where people talk. And on top of this, people who don't like what you have to say aren't following you and don't have to listen to you anyway.
Perhaps these websites are rather like a pub. People mostly go there in a group of friends, obviously are more likely to exchange with similar people or people with similar ideas, but there are other people there too having their own fun in a social setting. Occasionally very different people also exchange, sometimes politely, but sometimes not. But until fists are thrown, the publican isn't looking to kick anyone out.
Sometimes the best exchanges are disagreeing people discussing in good faith, if that's what they're in the mood for. Sometimes they're just polite enough to talk about something they do agree on, rather than call for other people to be banned just because they're unpopular.
The town square is defined by being the town square i.e. paid for, operated by and maintained by the government as a public space for the public.
So any example you come up with which doesn't start with "service provided by the government for the public benefit" doesn't apply. And pub's definitely don't apply since they've long been able to eject anyone for pretty much any reason they want.
So no, services provided by private companies, on their privately owned infrastructure, are not "public spaces for discussion".
> The moment you try to fact-check one person, you open a very large can of worms and become responsible for fact-checking everyone.
This is untrue, and a false dichotomy.
An argument of the form "you must (do thing I want anyway) or (do impossible thing)" doesn't actually make any case for why those are the only two options, and in this case, those are not the only two options.
It's entirely possible to deal with things as they arise, on a case-by-case basis as you become aware of them.
> It's entirely possible to deal with things as they arise, on a case-by-case basis as you become aware of them.
Although do not forget that your rate of "dealing with things" may be lower than the rate of "things happening". The admin's bias comes in when they decide who to focus on, etc. If you are famous or have burned the wrong bridges, your chances of being censored are higher.
> The moment you try to fact-check one person, you open a very large can of worms and become responsible for fact-checking everyone.
Says who? This isn't some logical conclusion that can just be said a priori.
This is like saying "we can't have speed limits... if you pull over one speeding car, you have to pull over every speeding car! That would be impossible!"
I believe deplatforming is sometimes worth it (e.g. child porn, presidential candidates incorrectly claiming they won an election on election night). I personally wouldn't feel the need to deplatform this site, but I guess it's wordpress's call/right.
Fortunately for them, it should be fairly easy to migrate to a self-hosted wordpress intallation.
Until the cloud or datacenter operator makes the same call. Or the ISP. Or the software provider. Or the Chrome team.
This trend is bad because it's a declaration of open warfare by leftists on anyone who disagrees with them. The notion of persuading people with better arguments is dead to them; they'd rather win by foul means than fair. And sadly too many people here cheer them on, or shrug and say, well, technically nothing stops them.
But it's a stale, pale argument. Technically the Chinese government are well within their rights to put their citizens behind their firewall, suppress all free speech within their territory and do many other bad things. It's just one country amongst many after all. People can leave. Nonetheless it's right and proper to criticise them for doing so because that sort of behaviour is morally wrong.
I think WordPress as a private company can refuse service to whomever they like. There’s a big difference between a company not selling you something versus the government censoring you.
The complicating issue is that we are ceding more and more control of our public spaces to private companies. So, on one hand, a place like Twitter should be able to ban whomever they want, while on the other hand, at what point does not having access to Twitter represent a de facto censorship of public speech? I don’t think we’re there yet (or really all that close), but we’re headed in that direction.
I don't think we're far from this at all. The Twitter issue is different from the CTH issue covered here; the issue with Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube is that when you're kicked off those platforms, you lose your only real hope of a revenue stream. This has happened to a number of conservative notables, content creators, etc. I think we are already at a point where these companies are so big and powerful that being shunned by one could put you out of business.
But in seriousness, we've all heard this argument. What's interesting about this idea is that we're hearing leftists shill for corporations at levels previously thought impossible. The real question is not, "Is this allowed?" but "Is this good, right, and proper?"
> The real question is not, "Is this allowed?" but "Is this good, right, and proper?"
If leftists thought that way, they wouldn't be leftists. I'm sure a lot of people will find that offensive, but it really is in the left's political DNA, which is why you see bumper stickers like "Well-behaved women seldom make history."
> The real question is not, "Is this allowed?" but "Is this good, right, and proper?”
I guess I’d say that the real question is kind of in-between those two. We need to permit somethings to be allowed, which are not good, right, and proper.
> I think WordPress as a private company can refuse service to whomever they like
I'm perfectly fine to apply this standard. But I think very few people making that point in this content, are willing to bite the bullet and say the same thing when a redneck, homophobic baker refuses service at a gay wedding.
(And yes, in California, political affiliation is a protected class, just like LGBT status.)
Should I be able to enforce a code of conduct in my store? It’s closer to ejecting a patron for shouting racial slurs at the top of their lungs.
Doing a cursory skim, the actual blog content seems alarmist but probably not violating. The comments are a trash fire with lots of blatant calls to violence. I suspect they’re in trouble for that but would likely find the comment moderation Wordpress is asking for to be against their principles.
This incident is a different discussion because while Twitter aggregates an audience, WordPress doesn't---it makes no difference to the readers if the site changes its host.
The discussion that would be germane is what infrastructure do we consider should be available to all, without regards to (legal) content. Colo? IaaS? PaaS? Access to payment networks?
I hear this argument a lot, and I think you are missing a piece of the collective which is that we do already all agree on many things such as anything that can be misconstrued as child porn. I think there is a serious argument to be made for individual cultures and individual groups such as families who would want more choices for control, but I think the slippery slope argument doesn't really hold muster.
Yeahhhhh, given that the platform here is an install of an open-source CMS, which is presumably managed by a site admin, I personally wouldn't compare them to Twitter in the first place. WP straight-up describes the service as hosting in the letter cutting them off.
But what does get problematic is when your service is an auth provider for numerous others, and a major communication hub in itself, and it becomes possible for you to just suddenly get locked out half your life all in one fell swoop.
WP mostly sidesteps this issue, being an open source project that you're free to just host an instance of yourself. But consider Facebook, with a chat service that's more than a decade old and that covers a quarter of the planet -- and the reaction you would have if an equivalent platform were to lock you out of emails spanning that kind of time frame. Particularly given that it's a closed protocol, and as such any ability you do have to export that data is really only useful for archiving.
I agree, I didn’t mean to give Twitter as a completely analogous example, there are definitely differences that arise from the different services offered
Wordpress are a private company and don't have to respect anyone's freedom of speech. Would you require them to host Der Sturmer? This is no different.
How would you feel about Wordpress deleting all the blogs of a specific religion, based on the fact that there is no evidence for God?
Because we're not talking about fringe conspiracy theories here. At least 30% of Americans holds opinions similar to CTH. You may disagree with them, but Wordpress is unilaterally claiming the ability to silence a huge chunk of the American political spectrum. I don't really see how that's any different than them deciding to unilaterally discriminate against, say all Catholics.
Yes, I struggle with what the right response is when very large numbers of people believe things that are obviously both false and damaging. You're proposing complete relativism and the inability for anyone to know anything; if anti-semitism were a popular belief among 30% of the population, you'd defend it and being equal to any other belief?
No, I would not feel the same way... I would likely boycott the company. I don't think there would be a legal issue, though.
I always hate this part of these comment threads; there is always a lot of conflation between legal and moral responsibilities.... I hate that people who think this sort of censorship is ok (and I am actually one of them) try to argue from a legal standpoint.... I am pretty sure almost everyone agrees that Wordpress isn't breaking the law here, so why argue that point?
As for the moral argument, I don't think I am being hypocritical to say it is morally ok to censor some things but not others. Not everything is the same.
In fact, I think even the most die hard free speech absolutists are ok with anti-fraud laws. No one is arguing that is ok to host a typo-squatting website pretending I am amazon and harvest login credentials. No one would say we can't take down that site because of free speech.
So, what we are really arguing about is degree; how fraudulent does something have to be in order for it to be ok to censor?
Personally, I think the decision should be made on a combination of the certainty that the content is false, along with the harm the content can cause. Fake amazon site is clearly false and clearly harmful; automatic censoring.
Flat earth society? Clearly false, but depending on what the site is advocating, it might be mostly harmless.
Part of the harm determination is also going to be based on evidence; how many people have we seen be tricked by the false information?
Basically, I don't think this is one of those issues that you can have a clear rule for, which is probably why programmers have such a hard time with the concept and default to saying we shouldn't even try.
I genuinely don't think there's anything more to discuss on this subject that hasn't been discussed here 100x. I'm beginning to suspect that most of this stuff has more to do with attention seeking behavior more than anything else, and we should probably stop dignifying it with our attention.
Has WordPress.com done this before? If not, that is one new thing. But yeah, overall there's not much new to say. Adding another company to the list is nothing novel.
Look, I’m a very staunch supporter of free speech on the Internet, but this particular site appears to be primarily focused on advocating for a coup. I checked their first 3 pages, and nearly every post is about throwing out the results of the most recent US election. I find it really hard to judge a hosting service for deciding that’s a step too far.
Story damn near old as time at this point. There's nothing new to be said on the abstract of this event. Some say it's a private company, others say we're outsourcing the stewardship of too many of our public fora to private companies, others will insist that it's wrong in principal, others will say they're just being good custodians of the public dialogue. Nobody's mind will change.
Methodologically, I absolutely respect Wordpress's decision to give them advanced warning. If this were to become standard practice, I believe it would constitute a massive deescalation in the culture war/fight against possible misinformation.
Rather than attempting to wipe them from the internet with little notice, WordPress tersely informed them that they were no longer welcome, and gave them an eviction date.
Call me jaded, but at this point I find this to be a refreshingly civil attempt at a divorce.
Couldn’t they have just moved servers in the time it took to write that Conservative victim complex post?
I feel like tech companies should just kick luddites off the internet for being inept. Conservatives keep running these 1990s geocities websites wondering why their civil rights vigilance blogs aren't taken seriously. Lets update the terms of service to support that, it would be hilarious and affected people might learn some modern skills in the process. Maybe they’ll even become proponents of decentralization and actually do it.
I find it hard to believe the author really doesn’t know that they can host their Wordpress site anywhere, yet they say “I don’t know what treehouse 2.0 will look like”, etc. The comments are full of “I donated” messages, so I guess it worked. Wordpress seems to have helped this enterprise’s wallet rather than deplatforming anyone.
Weird, I did a ctrl+f for "dona" and there were 0 matches. So none of the front page of comments mentioned donations and the blog post didn't mention donations. There is a "donate" image on the right, but that's on every post.
The point of the blog post seems to be much more "we're being persecuted" than "we need money" to me.
111 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] thread>There is a COVID-19 virus; however, COVID is not more dangerous than all other flu-like viruses that impact the respiratory system. COVID-19 is very manageable and doesn’t carry a higher fatality rate.
COVID-19 has a fatality rate between 1 and 10%[1]. The variation is mostly due to testing - the places with the higher rate are under testing.
The flu has a death rate around 0.1% in the US - although that overestimate it because most people who get the flu are never tested and don't report it[2].
The flu is also much less contagious than COVID-19. Influenza has a R0 of between 0.9 and 2.8 (for the 1928 Pandemic stream). COVID-19 is between 3 and 6[3].
[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
[2] https://www.livescience.com/new-coronavirus-compare-with-flu...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
There's a whole slew of reasons why even 1% estimate is bullshit. Consider this: median age of COVID death is currently 78 years old. US all-age life expectancy as of 2018 is 78.9 years. That is, approximately half the people who are dying of this would die anyway that same year. Now granted, expectancy is a mean, not a median, but you get my point.
1% CFR means 3.3 million deaths in the US alone if everyone gets it, which everyone eventually will, and which exceeds even the most ridiculous estimates from March of this year by a factor of 1.5, and is quite obviously not going to happen.
It's also ridiculously difficult to track down this median age number for the US, by the way. I wonder why that is.
That's before we even consider how the US has 760 deaths per million, and the likes of Iran or Russia (which have nowhere near the medicine the US has) report one half and one third that correspondingly.
So yes, C19 quite obviously has substantially higher CFR than the flu, but 9 months in nobody has any idea as to how much higher. Anyone who says otherwise is selling you something.
You are confusing life expectancy at birth of 78.9 for life expectancy at age 78 of 0.9, that's not correct. Life expectancy at age 78 is 9.43 years for males, 10.98 years for females.
Again, it is more dangerous than the flu. But nobody knows by how much, and nobody is even trying to find out as far as I can tell. Seems like a crucial question that needs to be answered, no?
This argument makes a lot more sense than your previous one.
> nobody is even trying to find out as far as I can tell.
As someone who has friends who have been working on this for months, I can assure you this is absolutely not true. There must be tens of thousands working on it, since the people I know are members of a group approaching 100.
Two of the big problems I hear about are:
Different interventions make modelling the effective reproduction number difficult, since this gets altered so much by the interventions
Different tests have different false positive (and false negative) rates and it is really hard to find out what test is used in which jurisdiction (and even harder to find that out historically).
It's not some big conspiracy. It's more that everyone Excel files are in different formats... sigh.
This argument is nonsense.
Say there was a person with a gun, who pulled people out of a crowd, made sure their median age was 78, and then shot all of them. Approximately half the people who are dying of this would die anyway that same year.
The death rate is important.
> and the likes of Iran or Russia (which have nowhere near the medicine the US has) report one half and one third that correspondingly.
I assume you actually do realise why this is, right? Places are doing hard lockdowns and it is working.
> It's also ridiculously difficult to track down this median age number for the US, by the way. I wonder why that is.
Do you mean the median COVID death age?
The CDC is publishing this which should help: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Ag...
Not sure what you are implying by "I wonder why that is"
Russia isn't doing "hard" lockdowns. I know because I have relatives there. Schools are open. Airlines are flying. Where there are restrictions, they are pretty mild.
For that matter Sweden, which has _no_ lockdowns still has 150 deaths per million less than the United States. Italy, which had severe lockdowns, has a comparable number of deaths per million (from which it follows lockdowns aren't "working" as well as you imply unless you catch the spread very early and are able to close the borders a-la NZ).
The difference is mostly how deaths are counted, not the CFR per se. If you only count people dying of COVID as a primary cause, you get Russia/Iran number. If you count people run over by a bus who also had COVID, you get the US rate. Which one is better is up for debate, the point is you can't compare if you don't count the same way, nor can you even tell the CFR accurately if you count deaths where COVID was merely present, but did not cause the death per se.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
The link you posted is for case fatality rates. Those are essentially meaningless because so many infections are never counted as official cases.
I don't think you can get infection fatality rates for flu, since it is so low (and so many infected people are never tested) but feel free to provide them
They have whole posts like https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/11/13/steve-cortes.... Of course, this just isn't a thing![1] But people seem to believe it is because it is presented as fact.
I guess they (or you) will argue they just pass along false rumours and that isn't their fault. But if they claim to be something that deserves any kind of protection against deplatforming then surely they can't just be a spam mill?
People spreading falsehoods deserve limited protection IMHO.
[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-there-were-not-9500...
Nobody deserves special protection from "deplatforming"[0] from the government; giving the government the ability to say "you must carry this speech" is just as tyrannical as giving them the right to say "you must not carry this speech". If one has the freedom to speak and associate, one must also have the freedom to be silent and disassociate.
[0] It's amazing how many people who've been "cancelled" or "deplatformed" continue to tell me so on the internet. One can't help but wonder how effective this so-called deplatforming really is.
Don't we do exactly that with the phone company and the post office?
Neither allows you to target millions of gullible targets almost for free.
So the general rule is that the government can override one's right to free association, but that the government needs a compelling reason to do so. This is the basis for very important civil rights rulings, as the courts have overridden one's ability to refuse service based on various protected characteristics. The question is, does speech and speech alone rise to this standard? In a few cases yes, but in general no.
The rationale for phone companies is that they're classified as "Common Carriers", a concept that comes from common law. A common carrier is a regulatory concept that places certain obligations on service providers (typically transit companies) in exchange for the right to sell to the general public. This has never been a mandatory thing, private and contract carriers have always existed in parallel with common carriers, but if you want to sell to the public directly without drawing up a contract per client one has to be a common carrier. Telephone companies fall under this common carrier distinction largely because they must connect with each other; it's pretty much impossible to create the equivalent of a "contract carrier" in the telephone space, since they're only useful when interconnected.
You'll note that your ISP is not actually a common carrier, as the FCC reversed its stance in 2017. Technically speaking there is no legal requirement that your ISP carry any speech disagrees with, even though from a marketing standpoint that would be a disaster. Given that we haven't regulated ISPs as common carriers, despite the relative lack of competition in this area, there is no clear legal rationale for the government to regulate hosting providers as common carriers. They don't sell to the general public, you in fact actually sign a one-off contract to work with them, and the end consumer has a dizzying array of options for hosting providers in the case of bad behavior by one. Any attempt by the government to force a host like Wordpress to carry speech would be both an unnecessary attempted expansion of government power, but would probably crash and burn in the courts almost immediately.
Quite fair.
As to the rest of it: I agree with your description of how things work, but I don't think it really addresses the point I was trying to make which (made more explicit and construed narrowly) is that we need to be more precise about the situation before we say "compelling carriage of speech is tyranny".
Whether or not spreading misinformation on the internet is justification for removing someone might be up for debate, but let's not pretend it was just because they disagreed with the "big tech" company that is wordpress.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25106430
Honestly, as somebody on the left, I do feel like there are certain topics that people get unusually emotional about (e.g. terrorism, airplanes, covid) and tend make choices that aren't proportional to the measured risk, relative to say smoking.
Usually the rule is that when it only affects the believer, it's ok. There are, however, sensible arguments against it based on the damage those beliefs cause to others, in special children of Jehovah's witnesses as individuals and the collective risk children deliberately not vaccinated going to schools and spreading disease to kids who can't be vaccinated (because of age or allergies or any other medical reason).
The idea of "dangerous misinformation" is an anti-liberal, anti-Enlightenment notion. Information is not dangerous, information is neutral. It's either right, in which case it's not misinformation. Or it's wrong, in which case it's not dangerous, because it can be refuted.
The most dangerous thing is to suppress the free marketplace of ideas.
What to do about dangerous misinformation is of course another question entirely, but the idea that there’s no such thing ignores important challenges.
I miss the days where "common sense" or "simple logic" wasn't labeled as some ideological "wrongthink." We _literally_ can't do business with each other being locked down because people in the US are being stupid about managing COVID-19. Don't blame "business culture."
Man up and do so.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
You've banned them and me under that basis, but accounts like s9w and rayiner are given free rein for years.
I took a look at your recent comment history and it seems fine, so we'll try unbanning you. Admittedly I didn't look too far back because https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23979330 won me over.
I have no idea who 's9w is, but I've never seen Rayiner post the three word comment "that's a lie", so I object to the comparison.
There is a COVID-19 virus; however, COVID is not more dangerous than all other flu-like viruses that impact the respiratory system. COVID-19 is very manageable and doesn’t carry a higher fatality rate.
Why is COVID-19 being disproportionately hyped.... The answer is… social changes under the guise of COVID-19 mitigation, are the entry point for the goals and aspirations of the political left on a national and global scale. [0]
[0] https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/11/13/covid-19-is-...
It's gaslighting on a national scale.
This blog is basically calling for a coup. The "I don't agree with what you say but I'll defend it to the death" crowd are going to be the end of the United States.
I'm lucky enough that being a Canadian in Canada gives me enough separation from this that I can check out. My heart goes out to you folks that have to live it.
And it should be pointed out that about 70 million Americans support this.
Fermi's Great Filter may be people advocating for no filtering...
I don't know where my line is for supporting de-platforming but it's somewhere before actively spreading dangerous disinformation.
It's probably below .4% Depends on the population age. But probably reasonably below .4%
"Across 51 locations, the median COVID-19 infection fatality rate was 0.27%" https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf
I suspect it will continue to drop. It seems to hit those it harms the most first and spreads quickly with them. Plus medical is getting better.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122...
> The answer is… social changes under the guise of COVID-19 mitigation
The Left is playing games. So is the Right of course. But this sentence is too strong.
The Left wants power, they are doing power moves. But there's no underlying plan. They are getting a strong footing. It will allow them to implement social change. But it's not that tied together.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/11/15/president-tr...
The world is a dangerous place and it's more scalable to teach future generations that they'll run into good and bad information and that they should make decisions for themselves. Trying to censor all of the "bad" stuff is a huge can of worms and is not something huge platforms should even try to be doing. Let the mirror be black, and teach people how to scrub the dirt off.
When in doubt, err on the side of higher user agency.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/this-is-bob What do you think of this? Would you still use hacker news if such posts littered the site?
> Information is cheap and people post correct and incorrect facts all the time. Censorship does not scale.
Censorship on platforms will never be perfect but there's a great deal of space between perfect censorship and a ridiculous free for all. You need moderation/filtering to make the modern web work.
...do you think it's not allowed?
Consider the alternative: public groups would get spammed by bots. There would be no more public groups.
Agnostic just isn't possible, because now you'll have to ask the question, "well what's spam?" For legal reasons you need to consider things like CSAI (https://protectingchildren.google/intl/en), and then ask yourself questions of morality like "is it OK that the platform I'm building helps to proliferate misinformation that is affecting election outcomes -- potentially damaging democracy, and is causing deaths by way of encouraging people to behave recklessly" ??? There's no way to build the platform and not ask these questions.
Yeah obviously a company providing server resources has / should have nothing to do with user moderation. Same with ISPs. They couldn't do anything if they wanted. I guess some webhosts have policies against hosting adult content but it's probably more about avoiding legal issues (e.g with CSAI) than anything else.
This HN post is about a blog hosted by WordPress.com (but not on the hostname wordpress.com). So given that context I think it's clear this is about blog hosting. I agree that "platform" is a bit confusing, but WordPress.com the company can be called both a host and a platform (Wikipedia calls it both[1]). I would say that WordPress.com is in between a regular web host and a social media platform, but closer to web host, especially when a custom domain is used, as it is here.
>clearly talking about social media platforms
I don't think that's very clear. Especially given the previous debate about Cloudflare taking down Daily Stormer[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress.com
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15031922
You have a right to go to the Town Square and voice your views if people want to listen, you don't have a right to do the same in a Wendy's.
But what about when the town square has moved on-line? Let's say it's not Wendy's IRL, but wendys.com. This is now a public space where people talk. And on top of this, people who don't like what you have to say aren't following you and don't have to listen to you anyway.
Perhaps these websites are rather like a pub. People mostly go there in a group of friends, obviously are more likely to exchange with similar people or people with similar ideas, but there are other people there too having their own fun in a social setting. Occasionally very different people also exchange, sometimes politely, but sometimes not. But until fists are thrown, the publican isn't looking to kick anyone out.
Sometimes the best exchanges are disagreeing people discussing in good faith, if that's what they're in the mood for. Sometimes they're just polite enough to talk about something they do agree on, rather than call for other people to be banned just because they're unpopular.
So any example you come up with which doesn't start with "service provided by the government for the public benefit" doesn't apply. And pub's definitely don't apply since they've long been able to eject anyone for pretty much any reason they want.
So no, services provided by private companies, on their privately owned infrastructure, are not "public spaces for discussion".
This is untrue, and a false dichotomy.
An argument of the form "you must (do thing I want anyway) or (do impossible thing)" doesn't actually make any case for why those are the only two options, and in this case, those are not the only two options.
It's entirely possible to deal with things as they arise, on a case-by-case basis as you become aware of them.
Although do not forget that your rate of "dealing with things" may be lower than the rate of "things happening". The admin's bias comes in when they decide who to focus on, etc. If you are famous or have burned the wrong bridges, your chances of being censored are higher.
Says who? This isn't some logical conclusion that can just be said a priori.
This is like saying "we can't have speed limits... if you pull over one speeding car, you have to pull over every speeding car! That would be impossible!"
Fortunately for them, it should be fairly easy to migrate to a self-hosted wordpress intallation.
This trend is bad because it's a declaration of open warfare by leftists on anyone who disagrees with them. The notion of persuading people with better arguments is dead to them; they'd rather win by foul means than fair. And sadly too many people here cheer them on, or shrug and say, well, technically nothing stops them.
But it's a stale, pale argument. Technically the Chinese government are well within their rights to put their citizens behind their firewall, suppress all free speech within their territory and do many other bad things. It's just one country amongst many after all. People can leave. Nonetheless it's right and proper to criticise them for doing so because that sort of behaviour is morally wrong.
The complicating issue is that we are ceding more and more control of our public spaces to private companies. So, on one hand, a place like Twitter should be able to ban whomever they want, while on the other hand, at what point does not having access to Twitter represent a de facto censorship of public speech? I don’t think we’re there yet (or really all that close), but we’re headed in that direction.
But in seriousness, we've all heard this argument. What's interesting about this idea is that we're hearing leftists shill for corporations at levels previously thought impossible. The real question is not, "Is this allowed?" but "Is this good, right, and proper?"
If leftists thought that way, they wouldn't be leftists. I'm sure a lot of people will find that offensive, but it really is in the left's political DNA, which is why you see bumper stickers like "Well-behaved women seldom make history."
I guess I’d say that the real question is kind of in-between those two. We need to permit somethings to be allowed, which are not good, right, and proper.
This is unnecessarily inflammatory.
I'm perfectly fine to apply this standard. But I think very few people making that point in this content, are willing to bite the bullet and say the same thing when a redneck, homophobic baker refuses service at a gay wedding.
(And yes, in California, political affiliation is a protected class, just like LGBT status.)
Doing a cursory skim, the actual blog content seems alarmist but probably not violating. The comments are a trash fire with lots of blatant calls to violence. I suspect they’re in trouble for that but would likely find the comment moderation Wordpress is asking for to be against their principles.
The discussion that would be germane is what infrastructure do we consider should be available to all, without regards to (legal) content. Colo? IaaS? PaaS? Access to payment networks?
But what does get problematic is when your service is an auth provider for numerous others, and a major communication hub in itself, and it becomes possible for you to just suddenly get locked out half your life all in one fell swoop.
WP mostly sidesteps this issue, being an open source project that you're free to just host an instance of yourself. But consider Facebook, with a chat service that's more than a decade old and that covers a quarter of the planet -- and the reaction you would have if an equivalent platform were to lock you out of emails spanning that kind of time frame. Particularly given that it's a closed protocol, and as such any ability you do have to export that data is really only useful for archiving.
Because we're not talking about fringe conspiracy theories here. At least 30% of Americans holds opinions similar to CTH. You may disagree with them, but Wordpress is unilaterally claiming the ability to silence a huge chunk of the American political spectrum. I don't really see how that's any different than them deciding to unilaterally discriminate against, say all Catholics.
I always hate this part of these comment threads; there is always a lot of conflation between legal and moral responsibilities.... I hate that people who think this sort of censorship is ok (and I am actually one of them) try to argue from a legal standpoint.... I am pretty sure almost everyone agrees that Wordpress isn't breaking the law here, so why argue that point?
As for the moral argument, I don't think I am being hypocritical to say it is morally ok to censor some things but not others. Not everything is the same.
In fact, I think even the most die hard free speech absolutists are ok with anti-fraud laws. No one is arguing that is ok to host a typo-squatting website pretending I am amazon and harvest login credentials. No one would say we can't take down that site because of free speech.
So, what we are really arguing about is degree; how fraudulent does something have to be in order for it to be ok to censor?
Personally, I think the decision should be made on a combination of the certainty that the content is false, along with the harm the content can cause. Fake amazon site is clearly false and clearly harmful; automatic censoring.
Flat earth society? Clearly false, but depending on what the site is advocating, it might be mostly harmless.
Part of the harm determination is also going to be based on evidence; how many people have we seen be tricked by the false information?
Basically, I don't think this is one of those issues that you can have a clear rule for, which is probably why programmers have such a hard time with the concept and default to saying we shouldn't even try.
Methodologically, I absolutely respect Wordpress's decision to give them advanced warning. If this were to become standard practice, I believe it would constitute a massive deescalation in the culture war/fight against possible misinformation.
Rather than attempting to wipe them from the internet with little notice, WordPress tersely informed them that they were no longer welcome, and gave them an eviction date.
Call me jaded, but at this point I find this to be a refreshingly civil attempt at a divorce.
Couldn’t they have just moved servers in the time it took to write that Conservative victim complex post?
I feel like tech companies should just kick luddites off the internet for being inept. Conservatives keep running these 1990s geocities websites wondering why their civil rights vigilance blogs aren't taken seriously. Lets update the terms of service to support that, it would be hilarious and affected people might learn some modern skills in the process. Maybe they’ll even become proponents of decentralization and actually do it.
I find it hard to believe the author really doesn’t know that they can host their Wordpress site anywhere, yet they say “I don’t know what treehouse 2.0 will look like”, etc. The comments are full of “I donated” messages, so I guess it worked. Wordpress seems to have helped this enterprise’s wallet rather than deplatforming anyone.
The point of the blog post seems to be much more "we're being persecuted" than "we need money" to me.