Yes we should ban everybody who shows open disagreement and doesn't take the party line in the serious manner we see fit.
I am not trolling, I am highlighting the absurd manner in which so many HN commenters have suddenly become champions of Stalinistic censorship by all these multinational corporations.
Yes, it's a great idea for the community to ban people who say things which are unpopular. That will lead to a very healthy community filled with free thought and critical thinking.
The people who think 4chan is some existential threat to society rather than anti-social people and people with autism blowing off steam and being mean to each other are the people who aren't very familiar with 4chan. 99% of it is just shitposts, the other 0.9% is people who aren't doing anything bad, the 0.1% is removed.
Yes they just tried to have a violent coup! They tossed papers on the floor of our leaders. It was the worst thing I ever saw, rioting on steroids. An insurrection!
I will, however, state the fact that many of the people who participated in the insurrection on Wednesday, of which a large cross-section believe in QAnon and wore QAnon paraphernalia, have been fired from their jobs or have been imprisoned.
If you'd like to post some wrongthink on my personal blog, or the ardour.org forums, or even right here on HN, just let me know. I'm sure we can arrange something.
As long as you're honest, philosophically even-keeled, and apply the rules consistently, let's go.
But for some reason, I have this feeling that that's not the case. If you're pro-safetyism, you're anti-truth, anti-facts, pro-illogic, and are against wrongthink.
Well, I admit that the first location was a purely rhetorical ploy, because even I don't post on my personal blog anymore, and we'd prefer not to have a forum site about a digital audio workstation cluttered with unrelated posts.
But I think my point is clear: there are oodles of places you can write and post whatever you want. Even here on HN, you can say a great deal of stuff that others will consider wrong without being "censored".
I'm certainly against "wrongthink" which is just a stupid re-use of a literary trick currently being massively over-referenced online in response to various events today. There's wrong, there's false, there's stupid. There isn't any wrongthink in my conception of the world.
>But I think my point is clear: there are oodles of places you can write and post whatever you want.
Awesome, so we agree there are oodles of places BLM and leftists can protest that are not high traffic roads, freeways, main streets, federal courthouses, etc. They can protest in the Mojave desert, they won't be censored there.
>I'm certainly against "wrongthink" ... There's wrong, there's false, there's stupid. There isn't any wrongthink in my conception of the world.
Awesome, so we both agree with the objective fact that Blacks commit more violent crimes per capita than any other race. That's a fact, that's neither wrong, false, nor stupid.
Conflating arbitrary electronic messaging systems and public protest, despite obvious relationships between the two, doesn't seem very relevant or useful to me.
And sure, your second paragraph states a fact. But facts are fairly useless without context, and as David Byrne sang 3 decades ago (and no doubt many others wrote in centuries before that) "facts all come with points of view". A fact by itself is just a fact, and in many contexts (particularly if the fact is an observation about human behavior/society), not very interesting. The interesting part is: what do you plan to do with it?
>Conflating arbitrary electronic messaging systems and public protest, despite obvious relationships between the two, doesn't seem very relevant or useful to me.
There's no conflation, Twitter and Facebook are the modern day public square.
>But facts are fairly useless without context
False.
>The interesting part is: what do you plan to do with it?
Nothing. That mere fact will most likely get [flagged] and [dead]ed within the next 24 hours specifically because it is "wrongthink". If you don't agree with my above post being flagged and deaded due to being an inconvenient fact, then we are actually in agreeance.
That said, I'm not opposed to them becoming the modern day public square. It just doesn't happen because a bunch of people think it already has. New legislation to make social media a public utility? I'd support appropriately constructed forms of that. But de facto isn't de juris, and for now these are private corporations running their own private messaging systems.
>That said, I'm not opposed to them becoming the modern day public square.
Saying that "you don't need to use FB/Twitter, you can write your own blog" is like saying in 1789 "You don't need to be allowed to distribute your pamphlets in front of Faneuil Hall in Boston, you can exercise your free speech on the top of a mountain in Colorado."
To which you said:
>Being able to speak "only" from one's own blog only makes discovery difficult, it does not limit people's access post-discovery.
This applies to a random mountain in Colorado as well. Discovery is difficult, but after people discover it, they're free to go back ad much as they want.
>But de facto isn't de juris
That's literally how "town square" is defined, de facto, not de jure. You're literally arguing for our position without realizing it.
in 17XX, the mountain top in Colorado (a) wasn't even a part of the country (b) even if it was, remained several thousand miles of arduous cross-country travel from the entire population of the newly emerging state. People would almost certainly die en route to hear your pontifications. There's zero comparison with a browser address bar.
Even if you posit the top of Mt. Washington rather than a peak in the as-yet undiscovered (by northern Europeans) Rockies, the difference remains unchanged in more or less every essential way.
And actually, "town square" isn't defined at all, de facto or de jure. In the USA, there's essentially no standing right to speak in a public place. You can't be stopped based on what you say, but you can routinely be stopped from speaking at all.
This is, perversely, one of the things that makes London's Hyde Park Corner so unique: there is an accepted policy (not law) that you can't be stopped from speaking there unless engaged in incitement. This fallacy of "the public square" is just that - a fallacy. Since independence (and certainly before it), there was no freedom to speak in a public space without being blessed by some authority.
It was only the printing press that was really "free speech" , in the sense that you could print anything and make it available and the 1st amendment could not prevent access to it.
And btw, "kicked your teeth in" as a description of that thread exchange seems like a great reason to avoid further interaction with you. ghaff was supporting my POV, and spoonjim's comment was downvoted (and incidentally wrong). Even if they had both disagreed with me and presented a cogent argument supporting their positions, "kicking teeth in" is a particularly violent metaphor that I prefer to see left unused.
>in 17XX, the mountain top in Colorado (a) wasn't even a part of the country
Which is relevant, since Parlor and other small sites may not have servers on the country due to the big corporation squashing them.
>even if it was, remained several thousand miles of arduous cross-country travel from the entire population of the newly emerging state.
Exactly like how there's no promises now that small blogs will be indexed, will be cancelled with AMP, may outright be banned by ISPs and CDNs, etc.
>People would almost certainly die en route to hear your pontifications.
Packets would almost certainly "die" en route as well due to what's laid out above.
>There's zero comparison with a browser address bar.
Wrong, it's really apt. Thanks for fleshing it out actually.
So bring it forward now like I originally stated: BLM and other leftists can protest in areas that are not high traffic roads, freeways, main streets, federal courthouses, etc. They can protest in the Mojave desert, they won't be censored there. The can all drive there easily, by no means dangerous. Probably safer than the "town square" in many of the Democrat ran cities.
>And btw, "kicked your teeth in" as a description of that thread exchange seems like a great reason to avoid further interaction with you.
You admit defeat and don't have a response, that's fine.
>spoonjim's comment was downvoted
Can't have any wrongthink now can we.
>and incidentally wrong
No it wasn't, it was 100% right, and you didn't have a response.
I made a beautiful app called ShoutFireInACrowdedTheater. With one tap it would shout “fire” in a crowded theater. Great interface. Amazing graphics. Voice activated. ADA compliant. But Google and Apple both banned it. Cancel Culture is real!
I don't see the contradiction or confusion implied by "funny". You cannot yell "fire" in a crowded building when there is no fire. This is why it is a classic example of reasonable limitations to free speech.
Sorry, what's the proposed limitation? It's presumably not a rule against saying "fire" at all, since that what fire alarms are for.
I presume you mean that the limitations on speech take the form of punishments after the fact for saying "fire" when there wasn't one. I agree this is sensible.
But I think it's an important point that we can't (and shouldn't, and don't) ban people entirely from shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre, because if they're right, it's important to know.
I think it's worth discussing this more fleshed-out example, because it shows that in order to limit speech without shutting down useful information, you need to have some sort of trusted fact-finding apparatus to punish false alarms, which then become an important locus of power.
After Holmes' opinions in the Schenck trilogy, the law of the United States was this: you could be convicted and sentenced to prison under the Espionage Act if you criticized the war, or conscription, in a way that "obstructed" conscription, which might mean as little as convincing people to write and march and petition against it. This is the context of the "fire in a theater" quote that people so love to brandish to justify censorship. [0]
Every time this stupid meme reemerges, it serves only to identify people who have no idea what they're talking about.
I've seen enough of these HN threads to at least accept that a lot of people in this community will think this is morally wrong on the part of Google. So in the spirit of understanding, I'm curious, how they see the rights of the product developer?
Is it just at a certain size the product developer no longer has a right to make a product that they are proud of?
That "pride in craft" is how I see it. For many products the content is the product, more so than the actual software features. For Twitter, the product experience is changed more by the presence of Trump than it would be by an Edit button (probably). For Google Play, the experience is defined by which apps are in the store.
These platforms put their thumb on the scales in all sorts of ways. For example they will recruit and cut special deals to bring people on board. For example, Twitter had that NFL deal at one point where you could watch games live.
As a product owner, the motivation to build something I'm proud of is at least as motivating as the desire to make money. And if some person or organization insisted on using my product in a way that was abhorrent to me, to the point that it cut into my pride in the craftsmanship of my product experience, then absolutely I'd toss them out.
The principle is "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone." No matter what my TOS says, there's always a 30 day update clause which means that's how long it would take me to change terms and refuse service. So this really is an underlying principle for services regardless of their TOS or community guidelines.
Then the idea that I could throw someone off of my own product and then get yelled at about it--well it confuses me. Prior to seeing the discussions on HN, my expectation would be that throwing someone off of the platform is the equivalent of removing a feature and thus it might come at the cost of some customers. And that's just the constant calculus of any product changes.
Is it that "private platforms have to protect free speech people" have never considered this? Or that there's a reason that the pride of the product owner doesn't factor in?
That's a fully general argument against any anti-discrimination law.
Compare: "Do I not have the right to live in a country I am proud of, a country without n****s, k***s or g***s?"
No, you don't have the right to make yourself proud in an arbitrary way. You can just put the label "proud" on anything you want that you can't get, so this is already an accepted limitation. There's nothing special about "a product."
I'm not sure I follow. What twitter/google did is legal in the US. Free speech is covered by the First Amendment only as a protection against Government censorship. Private companies can do what they want.
It's basically a property issue. Here's how someone on Twitter explained it (this made sense to me):
"Trump can say what he wishes, and so can Jack Dorsey, each with their own property.
Trump has no right to shout from Dorsey's platform any more than Dorsey has the right to shout from the balcony of Trump tower."
Which law? I looked around but couldn't find the one that said "the press must print anything pushed at them by their readers". I tried to look for the one that said "broadcast media shall carry any and all spoken word essays from their viewers". So which law's spirit has been urinated over here?
>A Florida right of reply law (referring to print media) was overturned by Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo, 418 U.S. 241 (1974), while a FCC policy (referring to broadcast media) was affirmed in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 395 U.S. 367 (1969).
The FCC policy was completely overturned in 1987. It's called the Fairness Doctrine. Some people believe that ending it was a mistake, but it was ended.
As was said: "Twitter is within the letter of the law."
I don't think anyone's saying they don't have the legal right to do what they're doing. But there's such a thing as moral right, and the existence of fairness doctrine and right of reply shows that a moral right to fair access and representation is not a niche view.
You mean the prior existence of the fairness doctrine. The fairness doctrine was abolished with general support.
> Reporters argued that they, not the FCC, should make decisions about balancing the fairness of stories. They believed that the fairness doctrine had a chilling effect by deterring them from tackling controversial issues rather than worrying about whether they could meet the FCC’s fairness standards.
> By the 1980s, the fairness doctrine was losing clout. The deregulatory nature of the Reagan administration and the technological advances that were rendering scarcity arguments moot combined to pressure the FCC to abandon the doctrine. In 1987 the FCC formally abolished it.
The fairness doctrine only ever applied to broadcast media, it never applied to cable or print media, which FB and Twitter are conceptually much closer to. Nobody ever (seriously) argued that a book publisher should be required to print rebuttals to a recent title. Nobody ever (seriously) argued that cable media had to follow the same pre-1987 FCC guidelines.
So, yes, I would say that attempting to apply a policy (and note: policy, not law) that was abandoned more than 30 years ago to internet messaging systems is a niche view.
> The fairness doctrine only ever applied to broadcast media, it never applied to cable or print media, which FB and Twitter are conceptually much closer to. Nobody ever (seriously) argued that a book publisher should be required to print rebuttals to a recent title. Nobody ever (seriously) argued that cable media had to follow the same pre-1987 FCC guidelines.
To be quite forthright - maybe they should have! I mean, I for one will argue that. I don't have evidence how much support that view has, sadly. But it seems to me that there should be a line drawn between an editorial service and a utility service, and a utility service should not be permitted to act in an editorial fashion. (In other words, I am a GPL liberal rather than BSD liberal.)
> The United States has the largest prison population in the world, and the highest per-capita incarceration rate
> the US held 21.0% of the world's prisoners in 2015, even though the US represented only around 4.4 percent of the world's population in 2015
> The U.S. incarceration rate peaked in 2008 when about 1 in 100 US adults was behind bars. This incarceration rate exceeded the average incarceration levels in the Soviet Union during the existence of the Gulag system
> one out of every 27 children in the United States having an incarcerated parent
> Critics have lambasted the United States for incarcerating a large number of non-violent and victimless offenders; half of all persons incarcerated under state jurisdiction are for non-violent offenses
Also interesting is that the question arises from that you can. Imagine all the products that involve printed text. Should monitoring the text depend on capacity or ability to? Whatever the agreed or logical answer to the riddle (if any), at what point should it become a law makers job?
The president for the last 4 years used the leniency of big tech to work up his supporters. Then told them to take over the capitol on his way out of the White House.
Now everyone is surprised to see when big tech says enough is enough.
Where else would these people draw the line if not here?
But many of the legacy telecom laws remain on the books. It's tech that was exempted from these regulations, not legacy telecom. Sadly the privacy protections we had on phone calls were never applied to data. That would have resulted in a very different world than that in which we live today.
That was a scam. Follow the money. Lots of it was invested in 1990s/early 2000s, and every penny ended up in the pockets of ATT, VZN, and their executives and investment bankers. Only now, as sibling observes, common carriage and other requirements are gone.
There is a difference between “can” and “should”. Twitter has every legal right to do what they did, but I feel that the decisions they (and other social media companies) are making are extremely dangerous and misguided.
You're blaming election fraud as the culprit then not trump.
Half the country is mad as hell, because there's 3k+ signed affidavits, 140 congressmen, at least two majority of state congresses, reports from data scientists, cctv footage, voting machine forensic reports in MI and AZ, and a lot of dismissal by courts based on standing not merits. It's unprecedented and it's straight up totalitarian to say "no mention of election fraud is allowed"
Nobody is saying you can’t mention the idea of election fraud. What’s getting rejected are attempts to lie about it and still be taken seriously. It’s true that a large number of people are mad but that’s because people are feeding them propaganda instead of truth.
I don’t know whether you are intentionally repeating claims you know to be untrue or haven’t looked at the details but you should ask yourself what it tells us when the President’s own lawyers keep dropping these cases. They wouldn’t do that if there was any merit to the case – and they’re certainly not out of money. The claims just aren’t true and they know it - once the fundraising dries up they’ll move on to something else.
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.
People care more about tolerance than they do Facebook and Google creating a human attention farms. But as long as these megacorps have a rainbow logo once a year then they're the good guy, right?
absolutely. require age restrictions. anything. its causing mass brain damage and that's not a hyperbole. they should be treated like casinos, not handed to youth on iPads. Trump's real incompetence was not tackling big tech. If you control the minds of the people, you control the democracy.
I just don't see how that is tenable due to the way our society is structured. Also I thought there were already age restrictions in place for a lot of these services? Not that it is enforced.
Unless folks are willing to have some kind of real ID verification to access these services.
One interesting thing to consider is the Paradox of Tolerance[1]. In the case of our society, allowing the norms to be consistently pushed can lead to the rise of intolerance.
Not to mention that the decisions to ban Trump certainly wasn’t taken overnight and he was given a very long leash.
Regardless I’m sure the motives here are not philosophical but mostly profit motivated.
> And YT deletes content mentioning election fraud, and twitter permanent bans the president, all under the historically totalitarian guise of "safety"
Also, really puts a dent into the anti-free speech argument that "you can go to another platform" argument.
I do love watching all these "tech/social media is evil" crowd here suddenly praising tech/social media and wanting them to have even more control over our lives.
Social media is so evil that we need them to control our lives even more. Wonderful logic that.
That's a mistatement of what many of us are saying.
I certainly am not advocating that social media companies should have even more control over our lives. I would like them to have less, which presumably happens either because (a) we stop using social media (at least in the current sense) and/or (b) more options for "social media" platforms emerge.
Since (a) is unlikely in the near term, that probably means (b). I don't how Twitter banning anyone (including POTUS) from their platform does anything but encourage that.
I also don't see how "large corporations that have used psychological manipulation and network effects to become really popular must be consider public utilities, despite no law to that effect" really lines up with free speech. Do you believe that the NY Times should be required to print my op-ed's in their online version? How about my comments on their articles?
> That's a mistatement of what many of us are saying.
Actually I described you to the tee.
> I certainly am not advocating that social media companies should have even more control over our lives
So you are against censorship or for it?
> Since (a) is unlikely in the near term, that probably means (b). I don't how Twitter banning anyone (including POTUS) from their platform does anything but encourage that.
Except that if tech companies collude together to prevent that. Fine, you say go make your own twitter. They do and then it gets banned from google play/apple store/etc. And down the line it goes. That's my point.
> I also don't see how "large corporations that have used psychological manipulation and network effects to become really popular must be consider public utilities, despite no law to that effect" really lines up with free speech.
Who or what are you quoting? You just plucked a quote out of the ether. That's very dishonest and disingenuous. You almost write like a journalist.
> Do you believe that the NY Times should be required to print my op-ed's in their online version?
Of course not. But then again, they are not a platform, they are publishers. But you already knew that.
I'm against censorship but don't consider what private corporations do with platforms that are not legally subject to public utility style regulation to be censorship.
If you can show collusion, please do. Meanwhile, WTF is with the "app store" concept in the first place? You're complaining that it isn't fair that Apple and Google can block apps from their platforms, even though that's what they've actually done since the arrival of smartphones? Free software advocates (look me up) have been warning about this since day one of the app store. There's nothing new here, other than the dispute of the day involves people's ability to type whatever they want in messages to some platform rather than some other feature that Apple/Google think doesn't fit with their intended platform ecosystems.
I wasn't quoting anyone. The double-quotes were an alternative to using hyphens to create a run-on phrase that attempted to describe how I see some people talking about these corporations.
If I understand your last line correctly, you believe there is some category called "platform" which needs to be treated differently. Are you calling for new laws to define what a platform is? If I create my own "dwitter", will your new laws allow me to have to any say over what people can post to it?
Youtube, Google, Apple, FB, Twitter, etc... I've said it before and I'll say it again, we need to look into collusion/cartel behavior of these tech companies. I'm sure I'll be downvoted like before by the suddenly "tech company" worshiping anti-free speech crowd here, but the coordinated nature of censorship really does need looking into.
They are just well known examples. Like stuff you learn in high school. So a lot of people have the same general knowledge. It doesn't seem like any sort of big conspiracy. In fact before reading the comments here both ideas came to mind immediately.
I have upvoted to counter a downvote. I think your opinion would not be downvoted as much if you simply stated your thought without labelling others.
Personally, I don't believe (though I have no evidence in this regard) there was any coordination here. Companies like Twitter and Facebook have been profiting from disinformation and hate speech for years, and Trump is neither the start nor the end of it. They should have banned him and others much earlier, but just didn't feel like the trouble of standing for basic ethics and human rights was worth that sweet stock. Now they can ban the man not only without hurting their bottom line, but also with a nice PR boost all along. And as soon as one makes the first step, the other tech-herd follows. No coordination, just VP herd mentality.
Right? They just spent the last few months talking about how their opponents are radical socialists, and now they want the government to go regulate what speech private companies amplify or don’t.
One has to remember, Apple, Google, and Facebook all have partisan anti-monopoly regulation gaining traction. This is nothing more than an attempt to cozy up to the incoming administration to protect their monopolies and abuse of consumers.
Brass tax. The righteous do not incite violence. The unrighteousness do. They have been for decades. The righteous finally fight back and Big Tech and media convinces those brainwashed by the media, to believe what they say because their indoctrinal tactics have absorbed their individuality for decades. They are mentally ill people siding with big media and big tech because they are like those they follow... they cannot compete on even playing fields wearing the garments of inferiority complexes, embarrassment and low self esteem.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadEvery platform has them. They get reported and removed.
Fortunately we don't have to use company stores. I use Gab in the Web browser.
That's against our community guidelines.
It'd be a service to the community if HN banned you.
I am not trolling, I am highlighting the absurd manner in which so many HN commenters have suddenly become champions of Stalinistic censorship by all these multinational corporations.
Yes, it's a great idea for the community to ban people who say things which are unpopular. That will lead to a very healthy community filled with free thought and critical thinking.
Optimum is probably somewhere between the extremes. But the QAnon conspiracy thrives in the 4chan laissez-faire extreme.
I will, however, state the fact that many of the people who participated in the insurrection on Wednesday, of which a large cross-section believe in QAnon and wore QAnon paraphernalia, have been fired from their jobs or have been imprisoned.
Can you post three Parlor links that supposedly contain "calls to violence" here?
Multiple leftists calls to violence posted on reddit: https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2019/06/29/reddit-ignores...
I'll ask again, since you didn't even follow the instructions: post three links from Parlor that show calls for inciting violence. I'll wait.
But for some reason, I have this feeling that that's not the case. If you're pro-safetyism, you're anti-truth, anti-facts, pro-illogic, and are against wrongthink.
But I think my point is clear: there are oodles of places you can write and post whatever you want. Even here on HN, you can say a great deal of stuff that others will consider wrong without being "censored".
I'm certainly against "wrongthink" which is just a stupid re-use of a literary trick currently being massively over-referenced online in response to various events today. There's wrong, there's false, there's stupid. There isn't any wrongthink in my conception of the world.
Awesome, so we agree there are oodles of places BLM and leftists can protest that are not high traffic roads, freeways, main streets, federal courthouses, etc. They can protest in the Mojave desert, they won't be censored there.
>I'm certainly against "wrongthink" ... There's wrong, there's false, there's stupid. There isn't any wrongthink in my conception of the world.
Awesome, so we both agree with the objective fact that Blacks commit more violent crimes per capita than any other race. That's a fact, that's neither wrong, false, nor stupid.
And sure, your second paragraph states a fact. But facts are fairly useless without context, and as David Byrne sang 3 decades ago (and no doubt many others wrote in centuries before that) "facts all come with points of view". A fact by itself is just a fact, and in many contexts (particularly if the fact is an observation about human behavior/society), not very interesting. The interesting part is: what do you plan to do with it?
There's no conflation, Twitter and Facebook are the modern day public square.
>But facts are fairly useless without context
False.
>The interesting part is: what do you plan to do with it?
Nothing. That mere fact will most likely get [flagged] and [dead]ed within the next 24 hours specifically because it is "wrongthink". If you don't agree with my above post being flagged and deaded due to being an inconvenient fact, then we are actually in agreeance.
I've argued against this POV here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25648997
That said, I'm not opposed to them becoming the modern day public square. It just doesn't happen because a bunch of people think it already has. New legislation to make social media a public utility? I'd support appropriately constructed forms of that. But de facto isn't de juris, and for now these are private corporations running their own private messaging systems.
And spoonjim and ghaff kicked your teeth in.
>That said, I'm not opposed to them becoming the modern day public square.
Saying that "you don't need to use FB/Twitter, you can write your own blog" is like saying in 1789 "You don't need to be allowed to distribute your pamphlets in front of Faneuil Hall in Boston, you can exercise your free speech on the top of a mountain in Colorado."
To which you said: >Being able to speak "only" from one's own blog only makes discovery difficult, it does not limit people's access post-discovery.
This applies to a random mountain in Colorado as well. Discovery is difficult, but after people discover it, they're free to go back ad much as they want.
>But de facto isn't de juris
That's literally how "town square" is defined, de facto, not de jure. You're literally arguing for our position without realizing it.
Even if you posit the top of Mt. Washington rather than a peak in the as-yet undiscovered (by northern Europeans) Rockies, the difference remains unchanged in more or less every essential way.
And actually, "town square" isn't defined at all, de facto or de jure. In the USA, there's essentially no standing right to speak in a public place. You can't be stopped based on what you say, but you can routinely be stopped from speaking at all.
This is, perversely, one of the things that makes London's Hyde Park Corner so unique: there is an accepted policy (not law) that you can't be stopped from speaking there unless engaged in incitement. This fallacy of "the public square" is just that - a fallacy. Since independence (and certainly before it), there was no freedom to speak in a public space without being blessed by some authority.
It was only the printing press that was really "free speech" , in the sense that you could print anything and make it available and the 1st amendment could not prevent access to it.
And btw, "kicked your teeth in" as a description of that thread exchange seems like a great reason to avoid further interaction with you. ghaff was supporting my POV, and spoonjim's comment was downvoted (and incidentally wrong). Even if they had both disagreed with me and presented a cogent argument supporting their positions, "kicking teeth in" is a particularly violent metaphor that I prefer to see left unused.
Which is relevant, since Parlor and other small sites may not have servers on the country due to the big corporation squashing them.
>even if it was, remained several thousand miles of arduous cross-country travel from the entire population of the newly emerging state.
Exactly like how there's no promises now that small blogs will be indexed, will be cancelled with AMP, may outright be banned by ISPs and CDNs, etc.
>People would almost certainly die en route to hear your pontifications.
Packets would almost certainly "die" en route as well due to what's laid out above.
>There's zero comparison with a browser address bar.
Wrong, it's really apt. Thanks for fleshing it out actually.
So bring it forward now like I originally stated: BLM and other leftists can protest in areas that are not high traffic roads, freeways, main streets, federal courthouses, etc. They can protest in the Mojave desert, they won't be censored there. The can all drive there easily, by no means dangerous. Probably safer than the "town square" in many of the Democrat ran cities.
>And btw, "kicked your teeth in" as a description of that thread exchange seems like a great reason to avoid further interaction with you.
You admit defeat and don't have a response, that's fine.
>spoonjim's comment was downvoted
Can't have any wrongthink now can we.
>and incidentally wrong
No it wasn't, it was 100% right, and you didn't have a response.
Is it censorship then?
It funny to me that the standard example of speech that shouldn't be protected is the only one that's required to be protected by building codes.
I presume you mean that the limitations on speech take the form of punishments after the fact for saying "fire" when there wasn't one. I agree this is sensible.
But I think it's an important point that we can't (and shouldn't, and don't) ban people entirely from shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre, because if they're right, it's important to know.
I think it's worth discussing this more fleshed-out example, because it shows that in order to limit speech without shutting down useful information, you need to have some sort of trusted fact-finding apparatus to punish false alarms, which then become an important locus of power.
After Holmes' opinions in the Schenck trilogy, the law of the United States was this: you could be convicted and sentenced to prison under the Espionage Act if you criticized the war, or conscription, in a way that "obstructed" conscription, which might mean as little as convincing people to write and march and petition against it. This is the context of the "fire in a theater" quote that people so love to brandish to justify censorship. [0]
Every time this stupid meme reemerges, it serves only to identify people who have no idea what they're talking about.
[0] https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
and my comment if anyone wants to discuss
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25693943
Is it just at a certain size the product developer no longer has a right to make a product that they are proud of?
That "pride in craft" is how I see it. For many products the content is the product, more so than the actual software features. For Twitter, the product experience is changed more by the presence of Trump than it would be by an Edit button (probably). For Google Play, the experience is defined by which apps are in the store.
These platforms put their thumb on the scales in all sorts of ways. For example they will recruit and cut special deals to bring people on board. For example, Twitter had that NFL deal at one point where you could watch games live.
As a product owner, the motivation to build something I'm proud of is at least as motivating as the desire to make money. And if some person or organization insisted on using my product in a way that was abhorrent to me, to the point that it cut into my pride in the craftsmanship of my product experience, then absolutely I'd toss them out.
The principle is "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone." No matter what my TOS says, there's always a 30 day update clause which means that's how long it would take me to change terms and refuse service. So this really is an underlying principle for services regardless of their TOS or community guidelines.
Then the idea that I could throw someone off of my own product and then get yelled at about it--well it confuses me. Prior to seeing the discussions on HN, my expectation would be that throwing someone off of the platform is the equivalent of removing a feature and thus it might come at the cost of some customers. And that's just the constant calculus of any product changes.
Is it that "private platforms have to protect free speech people" have never considered this? Or that there's a reason that the pride of the product owner doesn't factor in?
Compare: "Do I not have the right to live in a country I am proud of, a country without n****s, k***s or g***s?"
No, you don't have the right to make yourself proud in an arbitrary way. You can just put the label "proud" on anything you want that you can't get, so this is already an accepted limitation. There's nothing special about "a product."
It's basically a property issue. Here's how someone on Twitter explained it (this made sense to me):
"Trump can say what he wishes, and so can Jack Dorsey, each with their own property.
Trump has no right to shout from Dorsey's platform any more than Dorsey has the right to shout from the balcony of Trump tower."
Twitter has also urinated all over the spirit of the law.
Down with Twitter and its monstrous intolerance.
>A Florida right of reply law (referring to print media) was overturned by Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo, 418 U.S. 241 (1974), while a FCC policy (referring to broadcast media) was affirmed in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 395 U.S. 367 (1969).
The FCC policy was completely overturned in 1987. It's called the Fairness Doctrine. Some people believe that ending it was a mistake, but it was ended.
I don't think anyone's saying they don't have the legal right to do what they're doing. But there's such a thing as moral right, and the existence of fairness doctrine and right of reply shows that a moral right to fair access and representation is not a niche view.
> Reporters argued that they, not the FCC, should make decisions about balancing the fairness of stories. They believed that the fairness doctrine had a chilling effect by deterring them from tackling controversial issues rather than worrying about whether they could meet the FCC’s fairness standards.
> By the 1980s, the fairness doctrine was losing clout. The deregulatory nature of the Reagan administration and the technological advances that were rendering scarcity arguments moot combined to pressure the FCC to abandon the doctrine. In 1987 the FCC formally abolished it.
(from https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/955/fairness-doctri...)
The fairness doctrine only ever applied to broadcast media, it never applied to cable or print media, which FB and Twitter are conceptually much closer to. Nobody ever (seriously) argued that a book publisher should be required to print rebuttals to a recent title. Nobody ever (seriously) argued that cable media had to follow the same pre-1987 FCC guidelines.
So, yes, I would say that attempting to apply a policy (and note: policy, not law) that was abandoned more than 30 years ago to internet messaging systems is a niche view.
To be quite forthright - maybe they should have! I mean, I for one will argue that. I don't have evidence how much support that view has, sadly. But it seems to me that there should be a line drawn between an editorial service and a utility service, and a utility service should not be permitted to act in an editorial fashion. (In other words, I am a GPL liberal rather than BSD liberal.)
We're going The Full Orwell, so I guess I had better be about loving me some Big Brother.
Let us do victory laps in the name of tolerance and diversity in all but thought.
This message may mean nothing until some innocuous pursuit of yours has a fatwah pronounced against it, and suddenly Niemöller[1] becomes personal.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
The 'Rona had been a pretext to empty the jails, I thought.
> The United States has the largest prison population in the world, and the highest per-capita incarceration rate
> the US held 21.0% of the world's prisoners in 2015, even though the US represented only around 4.4 percent of the world's population in 2015
> The U.S. incarceration rate peaked in 2008 when about 1 in 100 US adults was behind bars. This incarceration rate exceeded the average incarceration levels in the Soviet Union during the existence of the Gulag system
> one out of every 27 children in the United States having an incarcerated parent
> Critics have lambasted the United States for incarcerating a large number of non-violent and victimless offenders; half of all persons incarcerated under state jurisdiction are for non-violent offenses
Nothing wrong here at all. As Eric Weinstein put it, something went terribly wrong at big tech.
Now everyone is surprised to see when big tech says enough is enough.
Where else would these people draw the line if not here?
Platforms ban bad actors all the time. Anyone taking advantage of a service against its TOS or against the country it is bound to is not welcome.
you can’t shout fire in a crowded theatre and you also can’t use hate speech which can incite riots or cause violence.
i think people forget this too.
This is their platform and they said enough is enough post the attempted coup.
You can think just as much for yourself as you could before.
Serious truth bending for political capital, which has been the DC establishment playbook the entire trump admin.
No, it wasn't legally incitement. It was absolutely stoked by him.
Exactly in the same speech: he repeated his claims that the election was stolen.
Half the country is mad as hell, because there's 3k+ signed affidavits, 140 congressmen, at least two majority of state congresses, reports from data scientists, cctv footage, voting machine forensic reports in MI and AZ, and a lot of dismissal by courts based on standing not merits. It's unprecedented and it's straight up totalitarian to say "no mention of election fraud is allowed"
I don’t know whether you are intentionally repeating claims you know to be untrue or haven’t looked at the details but you should ask yourself what it tells us when the President’s own lawyers keep dropping these cases. They wouldn’t do that if there was any merit to the case – and they’re certainly not out of money. The claims just aren’t true and they know it - once the fundraising dries up they’ll move on to something else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
it is now clear we must all defend our democracy. we can’t take it for granted.
??
Unless folks are willing to have some kind of real ID verification to access these services.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-...
Not to mention that the decisions to ban Trump certainly wasn’t taken overnight and he was given a very long leash.
Regardless I’m sure the motives here are not philosophical but mostly profit motivated.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
Also, really puts a dent into the anti-free speech argument that "you can go to another platform" argument.
I do love watching all these "tech/social media is evil" crowd here suddenly praising tech/social media and wanting them to have even more control over our lives.
Social media is so evil that we need them to control our lives even more. Wonderful logic that.
I certainly am not advocating that social media companies should have even more control over our lives. I would like them to have less, which presumably happens either because (a) we stop using social media (at least in the current sense) and/or (b) more options for "social media" platforms emerge.
Since (a) is unlikely in the near term, that probably means (b). I don't how Twitter banning anyone (including POTUS) from their platform does anything but encourage that.
I also don't see how "large corporations that have used psychological manipulation and network effects to become really popular must be consider public utilities, despite no law to that effect" really lines up with free speech. Do you believe that the NY Times should be required to print my op-ed's in their online version? How about my comments on their articles?
Actually I described you to the tee.
> I certainly am not advocating that social media companies should have even more control over our lives
So you are against censorship or for it?
> Since (a) is unlikely in the near term, that probably means (b). I don't how Twitter banning anyone (including POTUS) from their platform does anything but encourage that.
Except that if tech companies collude together to prevent that. Fine, you say go make your own twitter. They do and then it gets banned from google play/apple store/etc. And down the line it goes. That's my point.
> I also don't see how "large corporations that have used psychological manipulation and network effects to become really popular must be consider public utilities, despite no law to that effect" really lines up with free speech.
Who or what are you quoting? You just plucked a quote out of the ether. That's very dishonest and disingenuous. You almost write like a journalist.
> Do you believe that the NY Times should be required to print my op-ed's in their online version?
Of course not. But then again, they are not a platform, they are publishers. But you already knew that.
If you can show collusion, please do. Meanwhile, WTF is with the "app store" concept in the first place? You're complaining that it isn't fair that Apple and Google can block apps from their platforms, even though that's what they've actually done since the arrival of smartphones? Free software advocates (look me up) have been warning about this since day one of the app store. There's nothing new here, other than the dispute of the day involves people's ability to type whatever they want in messages to some platform rather than some other feature that Apple/Google think doesn't fit with their intended platform ecosystems.
I wasn't quoting anyone. The double-quotes were an alternative to using hyphens to create a run-on phrase that attempted to describe how I see some people talking about these corporations.
If I understand your last line correctly, you believe there is some category called "platform" which needs to be treated differently. Are you calling for new laws to define what a platform is? If I create my own "dwitter", will your new laws allow me to have to any say over what people can post to it?
after the capitol building riot where multiple people died, it’s clear that this falls into the “you can’t shout fire in a crowded theatre” bucket.
Being an absolutist about this means being okay with violence based on those lies, just as we saw in Myanmar.
I don’t know enough about ICANN but I think they only way they could do anything to a single site would be to lean on the registrar.
this isn’t a well established limit to free speech in this country in case you’ve forgotten from hs
Personally, I don't believe (though I have no evidence in this regard) there was any coordination here. Companies like Twitter and Facebook have been profiting from disinformation and hate speech for years, and Trump is neither the start nor the end of it. They should have banned him and others much earlier, but just didn't feel like the trouble of standing for basic ethics and human rights was worth that sweet stock. Now they can ban the man not only without hurting their bottom line, but also with a nice PR boost all along. And as soon as one makes the first step, the other tech-herd follows. No coordination, just VP herd mentality.
I'm pulling for a "hacker" resurgence. I think reddit and big tech made our generation too agreeable.
On topic: comp.lang.c.moderated was created for a reason.
Helps that one of the Biden team was once part of Twitter ;)
Though keep in mind (at least with FB) is that many-most Liberal states joined in the lawsuits; eg California joined against Facebook:
https://www.kdrv.com/content/news/Oregon-joins-multi-state-l...