Just like shop owner shouldn't refuse to sell you something, because he doesn't like your hair color, social media company shouldn't refuse to broadcast your speech.
Note that this is different from tv or radio, because then the broadcasting company has to do additional work to broadcast your speech, but with social media the company has to do additional work to block it.
Edit: can't -> should't (sorry english is not my first language)
This is a good example too. A baker cannot be forced to do unusual or creative work he doesn't like, but refusing to sell pre-made cake, or refusing to do routine customizations (like selecting colour or text if these are always done for other customers), is wrong. So as far as i can tell from wikipedia article the decision of US court was wrong, and the situation republicans find themselves in, is in a way deserved.
I am not from US, and I think it's really sad that most people think, that by opinion on one issue it is possible to infer opinions on all the other issues. Social media makes it too easy to create echo chambers, and see only strawman versions of other sides arguments, freedom of speech and tolerance is the only way to heal the society.
Businesses can refuse service to any person for any reason, unless the business is specifically discriminating against a person for being part of a protected class. Hair color is not a legally protected class last time I checked.
Please stop posting ideological flamebait to HN. Comments that take threads, and the site, further into hell are just what we're trying to avoid here. You've been doing this a lot lately, and we ban such accounts, regardless of which politics you favor or disfavor.
> Just like shop owner can't refuse to sell you something, because he doesn't like your hair color, social media company can't refuse to broadcast your speech.
Might want to do research before arguing. This is incredibly inaccurate. Only discriminating against protected classes is illegal, shop owners can refuse to serve you for any other reason.
I am not talking about laws in any particular country, but the way things would work in practice.
If you see a shop owner refuse service to a girl because of green hair, would you say "that's ok, not a protected class so she had it coming" or would you refuse to do business with that shop owner, and demand fair treatment?
I've heard this argument a lot lately. What other amendments should we allow corporations to break?
You are also only saying this because your side is the one doing the censoring. If Republicans had control of all tech and media and you were almost completely censored, I think your opinion would change.
So you’re saying it’s fine for only certain ideas to be able to be broadcast to the world? Forget the government’s role in it, I’m not talking about that whatsoever. I mean, philosophically, are you okay with a small number of companies controlling what can or can’t be broadcast?
Is Twitter, at this point, another country's affairs? They are as global as it gets. Twitter going after a politician in America is a threat to every politician in the world. The American tech companies are not just one nations concern,unfortunately.
Twitter didn't go after him for no reason, he called for violence and consistently misinforms everyone. They have rules and he broke them, he finally gets the same treatment as everyone else.
No, his argument is that such things can't be decided by arbitrary whims of unknown group of people, there must be clear, consistent rules, and a way to appeal.
> "When do we beat Mexico at the border? They're laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me."
As I became aware of at the time that Goya was in the news, it isn't actually a Mexican company. It's a New Jersey company founded by immigrants from Spain.
Am I the only one being very smug about all this? Not only am I glad the president is gone, but watching everyone who otherwise defends free markets tooth and nail get mad when the free market does what it's supposed to do is very gratifying also.
Sure it does. They made this decision based on what they thought would be best for their company, by both satisfying advertisers and buying favor with the new administration. They balanced those benefits against the users they'll lose based on this decision and decided it was worth it.
Maybe we'll get lucky and find that they were wrong, and that this move causes enough public backlash to give other social networks a chance to thrive (if we're really lucky, maybe even decentralized ones!)
Why is the choice between government control and supporting censorship by tech companies?
One can be against government control out of fear that government will use that to do something unintended, and at the same time condemn the destructive behaviour of these business owners.
The situation with freedom of speech is remarkably similar to the situation with religious freedom in England of 1600s. Like they have learned to not bring their sacral beliefs into everyday life, because that causes the society to fail, we need to learn that escalating the political fight too much is dangerous, and universal freedom of speech is game theoretically the right strategy.
There are plenty of left wing voices that have been kicked off twitter and reddit for making calls for violence, but mainstream democrats have not caused that liability for platforms they use.
The mirror opposite of a hypocritical set of positions is another set of equally hypocritical positions.
We’ll see how fond the left is when a new set of “counter terrorism” laws, corporate censorship, and the free market when it gets used on the next round of BLM protestors, to pick an example at random.
Not to mention how suddenly the far left is suddenly concerned about Twitter’s civil rights — something reaffirmed by their least favorite opinion: Citizen’s United.
Nobody should fool themselves: neither party has a consistent set of principles.
> We’ll see how fond the left is when a new set of “counter terrorism” laws, corporate censorship, and the free market when it gets used on the next round of BLM protestors, to pick an example at random.
Pretty much has been happening forever too. Many voices "on the left" have always been under surveillance since we started surveiling our citizens, and were often economically blackballed on the free market as well.
Also this seems like false equivalences between people saying we should change how policing works vs we should overturn the results of our election through force.
We have actual armed insurrectionists on one hand storming the capitol with zip cuffs and illegally carried firearms. You are asking how we would feel if we treated BLM, the people who want their tax dollars to go to alternatives to policing, like we treated those people inciting the capitol riot. Honestly it would probably be an improvement.
> “BLM, the people who want their tax dollars to go to alternatives to policing”
You’re coloring one ideology all good and another all bad. Not all MAGA people stormed the capital any more than all BLM supporters burned down a police precinct, took over city hall in Seattle and literally seceded from the union.
We have a lot of problems. The primary one is our inability to see that they are spread evenly across the ideological spectrum.
The OP used them as an example of how “the left” would feel if a cause they cared about was censored. I meant it only to show how silly the comparisons was to me. There simply isn’t a comparion to storming the capitol to try to stop the democratic process. The CHAZ was not BLM “ceding from the union,” they tried some poorly thought out experiment in no policing.
I’m not judging the entirety of a Maga movement, or the right, or even a “stop the steal” crowd. I am judging those who stormed the capitol and those who directly egged them on, who are being deplatformed in the article.
> We have a lot of problems. The primary one is our inability to see that they are spread evenly across the ideological spectrum.
Another contender for primary problem is the widespread use of false equivalencies and “both sides” to excuse whatever is inconvenient without nuance.
1) Storming the capital is far more concerning than some hippies setting up shop in Seattle. But I would contend that that these two extremes are pushing each other to more extremes and there is a distortion that whoever acts last is the current problem. Prior to the capitol incident, the fringe left had a monopoly on disgraceful behavior and unchecked violence in the streets. What would have happened had Trump actually won?
2) I think that rejecting the "both sides" argument _is_ the removal of the nuance.
The positions are hypocritical because they're post-hoc. The starting point is a visceral hatred of the opposing tribe, e.g. Trump/MAGA, and a desire to beat them - not a desire to be rationally consistent or fair.
I want to be fair. I think this /is/ fair. It’s hard for me to see how giving a platform and amplification ability to avowed racists and insurrections is a good idea. They can always start their own platforms. The only point I disagree is taking apps out of app stores. Otherwise, most of what had been happening seems well principled to me. And not a post-hoc partisan beat down.
Political disagreement in some contexts is illegal.
I've seen some real gems from ParlerWatch, people wanting to roast the wives and children of liberals on open spits to teach them the danger of liberalness.
Yes, but higher density with the GOP and other nationalism-focused groups.
It's just a natural outcome of the different ideologies. One is bound by hate over decrease in privilege, the other is a broad coalition to make lives better for folks who then get frustrated and vent online (and sometimes in the streets).
Do you think the East India company should have been able to arrest and murder who ever it wanted because it wasn't the state?
Power is power and it needs to be held accountable.
HN censorship doesn't matter because it's a tiny fish in a very large pond. Reddit censorship does matter because they are basically a monopoly when it comes to online forums. Same for twitter/facebook when it comes to social media and google search results.
USA hasn't had free markets in a while. And monopoly platforms are not free markets. DoJ won't go after monopolies for violation of century-old anti-trust laws.
I was just saying to someone I know, there is literally no amount of internet censorship that would upset me for the simple reason that I grew up before social media was a thing, so shutting it all down in a worst case scenario does not seem apocalyptic or totalitarian.
I'm not sure I want to eliminate all freedom on the public internet, but I just have been thinking that people are really exaggerating the stakes here.
And it seems especially weird for the right to be so frightened, because surely when "America was great" was before this era of Facebook and Twitter? Weren't we free then?
I try pretty hard not to take joy in others' frustrations because it's a sure-tail sign of tribalism, but it sure seems like there are a lot of these discussions popping up on HN and if anything the tone-deafness of it all certainly isn't helping me find some middle ground.
That's an anarcho-capitalist, free market purist position. Most people agree some regulation is needed to prevent bad actors. Social media keeps changing their policies, while not really adhering to it, not to mention it is intrusive to begin with. It is only consistent to regulate them like we do other large sectors like food, and energy, plus there is precedent for breaking up big tech from a couple decades ago.
There's also something not mentioned very often, these apps are "free" and lose money at first, but they sell your information and now they control the conversation, something most people are not in a position to decide or even know about, of course until it's too late and you have your life in their servers. Imho, this is a conflict of interest similar to private healthcare insurance, where the profit and the wellbeing of the human involved (sometimes the customer, sometimes the product) is not the #1 priority, and as a result a large enough company has the scale to damage a large number of people.
The rhetoric throughout society is getting hotter, thens no way some of that isn't going to spill here. Especially when big tech are right dash in the middle of these political slap fights.
I will say this it's a good sing, that twitter did the right call.
I'm from Mexico, and the current president it's the definition of a demagogue. All word days, he spends 2 hours of his time in a press conference to his achievements and attacking opponents (not only other politicians, but the press that speaks about scandals of his party).
Despite presenting himself as a "leftist", AMLO it's closer to Trump or Bolsonaro, that to Trudeau or Jacinda Ardern. To them freedom of speech, it's "talking without facing the consequences of their words".
The real dilemma to me sounds like what we define as freedom of speech in the first place?
If we say let anyone say anything, we end up with someone encouraging discrimination or even genocide.
From the other side if we introduce restrictions on what's allowed to say and what's not, who decides black and white?
Even if we build a trustworthy system for decisions, what about gray areas? E.g. antivaxxers. Their efforts might make people die. Indirectly. But it can happen. If antivaxxers are banned, should we do the same for flatearthers?
I've often heard people claiming that twitter/facebook/etc. can be considered public forums .. and as much of a stretch as it is, I'm inclined to agree. This is where people get their news. It is kind of like to taking a TV station off the air due to their political leanings. Tbh I've tuned out the news in the last few months for my own sanity so I might not have all the info to hold a strong opinion. Always good to default to freedom of speech though, the most sacred thing we have.
Looking back on the last few years, the most disappointing thing in society is the intolerance and tribalism. I bet if people were to state their own opinions, without any outside influence, we would all be at each other's throats given the current state of affairs. You don't agree with me on X so fuck you, where X >= petty. I have friends with varying political leanings but we seem to be the exception -- when did the slightest differences in political opinion become devastating deal breakers? You don't support BLM? You're an awful person. You want to ban guns? Burn in hell. These could otherwise be nice people that you could be friendly with. Has it always been this bad or has the internet underscored the black-and-white nature of politics?
"ALL censorship is bad, free speech is good. Counter bad arguments with good arguments" has long been the consensus, but when applied it has fundamentally failed. You don't have reasoned debates with people that have been brainwashed into cults, and who cannot tell the difference between truth and fiction. There are demonstrated dangers, recently and throughout history, of allowing certain people (particularly violent and powerful people) to have unlimited, unrestrained free speech.
Saying that Twitter should not be allowed to ban Trump is taking away Twitter's free speech rights to decide who they want to have in their community and on their private, non governmental platform. If you disagree with that, you are proposing to regulate Twitter as a public utility that will be able to censor Twitter's right to do that. But even without that, inciting riots and threatening people was never considered protected speech anyways, and that's exactly what he was doing with his account.
What's happened on Twitter instead, is that instead of banning him long ago for violating their policies multiple times over, they've in fact protected him unduly as he does things that would have gotten other people removed from the platform and probably sued or arrested a long time ago. He has in fact gotten more free speech rights than other people have.
This shouldn't surprise anyone that has studied American history. Free speech laws disproportionately empower people of means of using them, and much less people like their victims. The flavor of free speech in this country I'm told to unconditionally believe in was conceived by landholders and plantation owners. How much freedom of speech did Thomas Jefferson's slaves have? Unconditional "free speech", which thanks to Citizens United now includes money, still principally serves the Masters: the rich and powerful, the owners, far more than it will ever serve their victims. We don't do free speech or it's victims any favors by whitewashing the history of free speech, who disproportionately benefits from it, and who are the victims of it.
I'm not opposed to "free speech", but the tech crowd needs to get a lot better about understanding that there are nuances and complexities to it, and stop treating it like a religious edict that has to be worshiped unconditionally. They need to understand that applying it in a pure form can lead to outcomes that are dangerous to our safety and our society. If 2020 hasn't made this crystal clear, I really don't know what else I can do to convince people of this. I can't even eat at restaurants anymore.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadNote that this is different from tv or radio, because then the broadcasting company has to do additional work to broadcast your speech, but with social media the company has to do additional work to block it.
Edit: can't -> should't (sorry english is not my first language)
No, they don't. You might think that they should have to, but as things are today, they don't.
I am not from US, and I think it's really sad that most people think, that by opinion on one issue it is possible to infer opinions on all the other issues. Social media makes it too easy to create echo chambers, and see only strawman versions of other sides arguments, freedom of speech and tolerance is the only way to heal the society.
The official broadcasting channels of the us gov remain fully open at Mr Trump’s disposal.
A citizen is a citizen is a citizen. Everyone has the same rights and protections.
How the same people who complained about apartheid can then reinvent it in under 20 years is beyond me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Might want to do research before arguing. This is incredibly inaccurate. Only discriminating against protected classes is illegal, shop owners can refuse to serve you for any other reason.
If you see a shop owner refuse service to a girl because of green hair, would you say "that's ok, not a protected class so she had it coming" or would you refuse to do business with that shop owner, and demand fair treatment?
You are also only saying this because your side is the one doing the censoring. If Republicans had control of all tech and media and you were almost completely censored, I think your opinion would change.
The left is pro-free market when big companies are anti-conservative.
So his opinion doesn't matter.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Probably going to be like Liberty vs Security after 9/11
- Donald Trump, during his presidential bid [1]
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/06...
Funnily enough, China also promised Trump some magic beans if he would legitimize Kim Jong-un.
In your view, how so?
Seems very unlikely to me. Trump draws massive traffic to Twitter.
It has nothing to do with any market.
Maybe we'll get lucky and find that they were wrong, and that this move causes enough public backlash to give other social networks a chance to thrive (if we're really lucky, maybe even decentralized ones!)
The only information we have is that it was internal pressure too be a "better company."
Get down to brass tacks so we can see if the argument holds up.
It's shocking that hackernews has turned so far astray.
One can be against government control out of fear that government will use that to do something unintended, and at the same time condemn the destructive behaviour of these business owners.
The situation with freedom of speech is remarkably similar to the situation with religious freedom in England of 1600s. Like they have learned to not bring their sacral beliefs into everyday life, because that causes the society to fail, we need to learn that escalating the political fight too much is dangerous, and universal freedom of speech is game theoretically the right strategy.
There are plenty of left wing voices that have been kicked off twitter and reddit for making calls for violence, but mainstream democrats have not caused that liability for platforms they use.
We’ll see how fond the left is when a new set of “counter terrorism” laws, corporate censorship, and the free market when it gets used on the next round of BLM protestors, to pick an example at random.
Not to mention how suddenly the far left is suddenly concerned about Twitter’s civil rights — something reaffirmed by their least favorite opinion: Citizen’s United.
Nobody should fool themselves: neither party has a consistent set of principles.
That has been happening? https://theintercept.com/2018/03/19/black-lives-matter-fbi-s...
Pretty much has been happening forever too. Many voices "on the left" have always been under surveillance since we started surveiling our citizens, and were often economically blackballed on the free market as well.
Also this seems like false equivalences between people saying we should change how policing works vs we should overturn the results of our election through force.
We have actual armed insurrectionists on one hand storming the capitol with zip cuffs and illegally carried firearms. You are asking how we would feel if we treated BLM, the people who want their tax dollars to go to alternatives to policing, like we treated those people inciting the capitol riot. Honestly it would probably be an improvement.
You’re coloring one ideology all good and another all bad. Not all MAGA people stormed the capital any more than all BLM supporters burned down a police precinct, took over city hall in Seattle and literally seceded from the union.
We have a lot of problems. The primary one is our inability to see that they are spread evenly across the ideological spectrum.
I’m not judging the entirety of a Maga movement, or the right, or even a “stop the steal” crowd. I am judging those who stormed the capitol and those who directly egged them on, who are being deplatformed in the article.
> We have a lot of problems. The primary one is our inability to see that they are spread evenly across the ideological spectrum.
Another contender for primary problem is the widespread use of false equivalencies and “both sides” to excuse whatever is inconvenient without nuance.
1) Storming the capital is far more concerning than some hippies setting up shop in Seattle. But I would contend that that these two extremes are pushing each other to more extremes and there is a distortion that whoever acts last is the current problem. Prior to the capitol incident, the fringe left had a monopoly on disgraceful behavior and unchecked violence in the streets. What would have happened had Trump actually won?
2) I think that rejecting the "both sides" argument _is_ the removal of the nuance.
The sheer number of people who can’t grasp this basic point is staggering.
My issue is with “moderation” where you just remove content you disagree with politically.
I've seen some real gems from ParlerWatch, people wanting to roast the wives and children of liberals on open spits to teach them the danger of liberalness.
Liberal means free, btw.
It's just a natural outcome of the different ideologies. One is bound by hate over decrease in privilege, the other is a broad coalition to make lives better for folks who then get frustrated and vent online (and sometimes in the streets).
Edit: I wonder why I got down-voted. My comment was not "off-topic or illegal", perhaps someone disagrees with me politically. =P
There is a massive agreement that he went over the line and he had to be banned.
Power is power and it needs to be held accountable.
HN censorship doesn't matter because it's a tiny fish in a very large pond. Reddit censorship does matter because they are basically a monopoly when it comes to online forums. Same for twitter/facebook when it comes to social media and google search results.
You'll be in for a wild ride.
Reddit? No central moderation beyond court orders. They were a lot better when they let each community decide their own standards pre-2017.
If you don't pay for the service, you are the product.
USA hasn't had free markets in a while. And monopoly platforms are not free markets. DoJ won't go after monopolies for violation of century-old anti-trust laws.
I give USA about ten years until it splits up.
I'm not sure I want to eliminate all freedom on the public internet, but I just have been thinking that people are really exaggerating the stakes here.
And it seems especially weird for the right to be so frightened, because surely when "America was great" was before this era of Facebook and Twitter? Weren't we free then?
There's also something not mentioned very often, these apps are "free" and lose money at first, but they sell your information and now they control the conversation, something most people are not in a position to decide or even know about, of course until it's too late and you have your life in their servers. Imho, this is a conflict of interest similar to private healthcare insurance, where the profit and the wellbeing of the human involved (sometimes the customer, sometimes the product) is not the #1 priority, and as a result a large enough company has the scale to damage a large number of people.
I'm from Mexico, and the current president it's the definition of a demagogue. All word days, he spends 2 hours of his time in a press conference to his achievements and attacking opponents (not only other politicians, but the press that speaks about scandals of his party).
Despite presenting himself as a "leftist", AMLO it's closer to Trump or Bolsonaro, that to Trudeau or Jacinda Ardern. To them freedom of speech, it's "talking without facing the consequences of their words".
Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1357/
If we say let anyone say anything, we end up with someone encouraging discrimination or even genocide.
From the other side if we introduce restrictions on what's allowed to say and what's not, who decides black and white?
Even if we build a trustworthy system for decisions, what about gray areas? E.g. antivaxxers. Their efforts might make people die. Indirectly. But it can happen. If antivaxxers are banned, should we do the same for flatearthers?
Looking back on the last few years, the most disappointing thing in society is the intolerance and tribalism. I bet if people were to state their own opinions, without any outside influence, we would all be at each other's throats given the current state of affairs. You don't agree with me on X so fuck you, where X >= petty. I have friends with varying political leanings but we seem to be the exception -- when did the slightest differences in political opinion become devastating deal breakers? You don't support BLM? You're an awful person. You want to ban guns? Burn in hell. These could otherwise be nice people that you could be friendly with. Has it always been this bad or has the internet underscored the black-and-white nature of politics?
If they are public forums, let them be run by the government.
Saying that Twitter should not be allowed to ban Trump is taking away Twitter's free speech rights to decide who they want to have in their community and on their private, non governmental platform. If you disagree with that, you are proposing to regulate Twitter as a public utility that will be able to censor Twitter's right to do that. But even without that, inciting riots and threatening people was never considered protected speech anyways, and that's exactly what he was doing with his account.
What's happened on Twitter instead, is that instead of banning him long ago for violating their policies multiple times over, they've in fact protected him unduly as he does things that would have gotten other people removed from the platform and probably sued or arrested a long time ago. He has in fact gotten more free speech rights than other people have.
This shouldn't surprise anyone that has studied American history. Free speech laws disproportionately empower people of means of using them, and much less people like their victims. The flavor of free speech in this country I'm told to unconditionally believe in was conceived by landholders and plantation owners. How much freedom of speech did Thomas Jefferson's slaves have? Unconditional "free speech", which thanks to Citizens United now includes money, still principally serves the Masters: the rich and powerful, the owners, far more than it will ever serve their victims. We don't do free speech or it's victims any favors by whitewashing the history of free speech, who disproportionately benefits from it, and who are the victims of it.
I'm not opposed to "free speech", but the tech crowd needs to get a lot better about understanding that there are nuances and complexities to it, and stop treating it like a religious edict that has to be worshiped unconditionally. They need to understand that applying it in a pure form can lead to outcomes that are dangerous to our safety and our society. If 2020 hasn't made this crystal clear, I really don't know what else I can do to convince people of this. I can't even eat at restaurants anymore.