Can we please discuss Big Tech's suppression of oppressed people?
What I DO think warrants a long, introspective look at ourselves and our employers is the fact that these governments - often with long, documented histories of oppression, murder, rape, censorship, and torture - are successfully pressuring first-world tech companies into silencing people across the world (not just their own citizens). The people who fled these regimes cannot engage in free speech in their new homes, because Big Tech all too easily puts commerce over conscience.
Some examples from the last week:
- YouTube taking down music videos in support of Punjabi farmers' protests [1] The Indian farmers' protests have been well covered (especially since Rihanna tweeted about it). Is taking down music videos supporting protesters what a company that 'Does no evil' do?
- Sri Lanka's 70 years of oppression against it's Tamil minority is well-documented, but recent protests for accountability less so [2]. Is Instagram's censorship of the #eelam and #tamileelam hashtags - which refer to the traditional homeland [2], fitting for a company that has found itself - for better or for worse - the biggest platform for speech in the world? Does Facebook really need to bend to the will of a government that denies it's murder of over 100,000 minority citizens? Should Spotify be removing their music?
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I understand that automated algorithms make a lot of these decisions, but I hope not everyone working with these companies is complacent enough to shift the blame onto some zeros-and-ones. I don't know if this post will bring about "change" but with so many of us tech workers here, I think this is a great platform to discuss these. The best time to discuss this has passed, but now is the next-best time.
I DO NOT WISH TO MAKE THIS A POLITICAL DEBATE, and I trust the great mods here will remove such content here.
India may well be trying to do right by farmers, as they claim. Sri Lanka may have worries about national security, as they claim. Hacker News has not been the place for these discussions.
[1] https://www.india.com/technology/youtube-pulls-down-punjabi-...
[2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/02/09/thousands-march-justice-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eelam
I agree this is an interesting topic and a real issue, but with words like "oppressive regimes", and "Big Tech all too easily puts commerce over conscience.", I don't see how this can be approached from a non-political angle.
edit: Not to throw it on the words that were used, but I think this is an inherently political issue.
In other words, "should big tech do things like this"
Rather than "{thing X} is wrong and big tech is suppressing news of that exact thing. Let's talk about whether thing X is really wrong, or whether it's really newsworthy"
If they want more money, the answer is yes.
If they have a moral and ethical code which values freedom of expression as a human right, then the answer is no.
That being said I do think there is a finer tech ethics issue here:
If a government asks you to censor or remove content, do you do it?
Looking at Google in China and Australia, answer seems to be “yes, in that government’s jurisdiction”.
Examples OP cited are different in that Google and Facebook seem to have censored the content wholesale, across the world.
As far as the "oppressive regimes" statement, it is political - but also the actions of these governments towards their respective minority group have been well studied, and for a lack of better words, oppressive. There are other words, like genocidal, that have also been used to describe these actions, but I hesitated to use them on this forum.
My post should have been clearer in that I do not wish to break Hacker News tradition in discussing the underlying political issues that don't relate to technology, but only the pressuring-tech-companies-into-censorship issue. It's still political, but I think it invites much fewer flame wars.
Completely reasonable discussion to promote yet you are pretty heavily downvoted.
Morally speaking, I do not believe tech should be doing any censoring. There are many that would disagree with my viewpoint, but it is my firm belief that it is everyone's responsibility to be eyes open to every level of atrocity we as a species are capable of. Yes, it makes the world feel a lot less safe, but paradoxically, I think it may actually decrease the overall level of friction created by artificial information propagation barriers.
Hierarchical adversarial systems can only persist in environments of informational asymmetry. Once everyone is exposed to the same deck of cards, the rest, in my experience, tends to sort itself out.
But I guess that’s your point?
He says this while frequently hobnobbing with the likes of MBS at his HQ and overseas.[2]
I guess that whole "being indifferent to bloodshed" rule doesn't apply to censorious industrialist oligarchs like himself and his friends. Sure seems quite indifferent to bloodshed to me. As expected.
The public couldn't ever cancel Tim Cook, though; that would be blasphemy! Ask MBS what he thinks should happen to blasphemers.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvPBZCitHsA [2]: https://i.insider.com/5c63d7f62628984cf0097cd4?width=700
-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
PS, Google: Rihanna Toolkit.
I think this is a good opportunity to mention new federated platforms that are gaining momentum like mastodon, matrix, and peertube that are inherently resistant to the profit motives of one company.