What worked in the 1960s does not necessarily work in 2020s. In the 60s University of California Berkeley started the Free Speech Movement. But more recently the same UC Berkeley was in the news for banning the infamous Ann Coulter from speaking on campus.
This is not because young people today are less woke than young people in the 60s. Societal attitudes towards free speech have changed a lot. This is related to technological advancement and the rise of social media. The advent of social media has made it too easy to spread dangerous levels of hate and false information online. Malicious individuals and groups now have the power to reach hundreds of millions instantly, at no cost to themselves. It started off innocently enough, with cat videos uploaded to YouTube, but soon extremists were taking advantage of social media for radicalization purposes, adversarial nations were spreading fake news to influence who gets elected, and others were even live-streaming mass murders.
This has caused an upheaval in attitudes towards free speech. Enough is enough! There needs to be limits. Communities started imposing limits to free speech. Society — as opposed to governments — have decided that some censorship is in order. Some censorship, by private parties such as Twitter, as opposed to absolute free speech, will be the new normal. We live in a new world; the old norms no longer apply.
Social media distorts the marketplace of ideas. Things that seem dumb upon reflection may easily get shared without a thought.
It’s the same effect that dumbs down reality TV. Charters can seemly pull inspiration from nowhere, but the people actually writing a script get time to reflect on what their going to say. Real people simply can’t pull that off, at best they can prepare for a debate with canned responses.
Is it? Instagram is around a decade old and Facebook is only around two decades old. Attitudes them today are quite different from how they were even 5 years ago.
What other major institutional shift would we think was ‘clear’ after so short a time.
> We live in a new world; the old norms no longer apply
This feels a bit defeatist, like accepting a new dictator because the “old norms no longer apply”. Big tech companies are that dictator. They have garnered a critical mass of power due to a lack of regulation and anti-trust enforcement, and are using it to support their predominant ideologies. Members of our federal government recognize this and have regularly started applying pressure to these companies to perform censorship on their behalf. Is that really a new norm that we must accept or a blatant abuse of power and a runaround on the first amendment?
I think what we have really, is a new product landscape where network effects create natural barriers to competition that we need to deal with. Our laws and enforcement of laws haven’t caught up to this reality. This has allowed a powerful tyranny of the technologically powerful to manifest, outside the scope of current law. The rationalizations such as radicalization and so on don’t convince me - those seem like the socially acceptable virtuous justifications that cloak a simple abuse of power.
Agreed. Furthermore there is no limit to free speech here. You can still, in all cases i'm aware of, host your own site, and post your own thoughts.
What extremists are upset about is that private institutions are no longer willing to help them. The same folks who previous applauded private institutions are now impacted by this same decision.
There is a line where, imo - these people should not be limited. We don't prevent some dude from yelling stuff on the corner of the intersection. I believe access to the internet to be the virtual parallel there, "some dude" should also be allowed access to the internet. Which is to say i don't think we should block their freedoms from accessing/posting information online in the same way that we don't prevent them from spreading it in person.
However there's a far line between yelling on the street corner and yelling inside starbucks.
I applaud community/content hosts for recognizing their involvement in whatever data they host.
I understand the argument this guy is making, but the quality of the writing is horrible. A wsj editorial section comment expanded into rambling long form. Why is it here?
>So, when social media platforms put in place rules, or algorithms, to silence all opposing views, the only two choices we bloggers have are either to resign ourselves to continue writing in obscurity or to muzzle ourselves.
Yet another example of someone who can't differentiate "free speech" from "freedom from consequences of speech". Nobody is stopping you from speaking, they just don't want to listen to you. Capitalist profit motive will always guide corporations to the most simple and inoffensive content. The problem isn't "free speech Nazis", it's corporations who want appear safe for everyone so they can address the largest market.
If you want arguments like these to be taken seriously, you really can’t use phrases like “free speech Nazis” to describe forum moderators. This isn’t a cogent argument or a thoughtful essay, this is contentless red meat for an audience that already made a conclusion and is looking to be stroked and told how brave and intelligent they are.
Also, read the room? Not exactly the ideal time for making an ethical argument in favor of distribution of misinformation.
Tech has a lot of consolidation behind it both infrastructure-wise and end-user watering-hole-wise.
The fewer providers, the fewer people that make the rules, the more likely it is you have to play by their rules.
If you're upset that there are more free-speech 'restrictions' on the internet and you're cheering every time there's another tech acquisition, you're boiling the pot you're sitting in.
> My neighbor complemented me for being ahead of the curve with my use of ZeroNet.
And then everyone clapped...
Free speech on the internet has been voluntarily given up by people who don't seem to know how free speech works. You can spin up your own server and host whatever you want (within local laws) cheaper and easier than you've ever been able to.
If you don't like how Facebook, Twitter, and other social media networks are policing speech on their servers... don't use their servers.
There is no right of "free audience." If you want to make the argument that these networks are too big to be without, then make that argument... it's much more salient than twisting the freedom from government censorship (which is a bit of a farce in its own right).
> This articles was "flagged" by Hacker News about 90 minutes after I posted it there, meaning they removed it. Does that surprise anyone? I would be especially interested to see what would happen if a reader were to resubmit this article to Hacker News. Would they flag it a second time?.
We can only guess why users flag things, but presumably they thought it didn't gratify intellectual curiosity and therefore went against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. There have been incredibly many threads and variations on this general theme, and curiosity withers under repetition, so this is not surprising. Lots of past explanations about this:
Social media has been weaponized by people with nefarious intent. This has unfortunate collateral damage.
I have run afoul of the crude tools in place to detect this myself on both Twitter and Facebook. But I have yet to have a day-to-day casual conversation with anyone about their precious freedoms being limited on the Internet - except for some of my friends whom are part of an easy to predict demographic and they are all about it these days.
But you don't have first amendment rights on a company's online forum. And it seems like attempts to create a forum that supports supposed first amendment rights immediately realizes why you can't do that when people hack the crap out of it.
No solution other than waiting for people to become desensitized to all the agitprop the way they are now desensitized to deep fakes despite all the hubbub about them being the end of the world.
18 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 52.2 ms ] threadThis is not because young people today are less woke than young people in the 60s. Societal attitudes towards free speech have changed a lot. This is related to technological advancement and the rise of social media. The advent of social media has made it too easy to spread dangerous levels of hate and false information online. Malicious individuals and groups now have the power to reach hundreds of millions instantly, at no cost to themselves. It started off innocently enough, with cat videos uploaded to YouTube, but soon extremists were taking advantage of social media for radicalization purposes, adversarial nations were spreading fake news to influence who gets elected, and others were even live-streaming mass murders.
This has caused an upheaval in attitudes towards free speech. Enough is enough! There needs to be limits. Communities started imposing limits to free speech. Society — as opposed to governments — have decided that some censorship is in order. Some censorship, by private parties such as Twitter, as opposed to absolute free speech, will be the new normal. We live in a new world; the old norms no longer apply.
It's clear that the "marketplace of ideas" isn't self-regulating, just like the marketplace for healthcare or pork bellies also isn't self-regulating.
It’s the same effect that dumbs down reality TV. Charters can seemly pull inspiration from nowhere, but the people actually writing a script get time to reflect on what their going to say. Real people simply can’t pull that off, at best they can prepare for a debate with canned responses.
What other major institutional shift would we think was ‘clear’ after so short a time.
This feels a bit defeatist, like accepting a new dictator because the “old norms no longer apply”. Big tech companies are that dictator. They have garnered a critical mass of power due to a lack of regulation and anti-trust enforcement, and are using it to support their predominant ideologies. Members of our federal government recognize this and have regularly started applying pressure to these companies to perform censorship on their behalf. Is that really a new norm that we must accept or a blatant abuse of power and a runaround on the first amendment?
I think what we have really, is a new product landscape where network effects create natural barriers to competition that we need to deal with. Our laws and enforcement of laws haven’t caught up to this reality. This has allowed a powerful tyranny of the technologically powerful to manifest, outside the scope of current law. The rationalizations such as radicalization and so on don’t convince me - those seem like the socially acceptable virtuous justifications that cloak a simple abuse of power.
What extremists are upset about is that private institutions are no longer willing to help them. The same folks who previous applauded private institutions are now impacted by this same decision.
There is a line where, imo - these people should not be limited. We don't prevent some dude from yelling stuff on the corner of the intersection. I believe access to the internet to be the virtual parallel there, "some dude" should also be allowed access to the internet. Which is to say i don't think we should block their freedoms from accessing/posting information online in the same way that we don't prevent them from spreading it in person.
However there's a far line between yelling on the street corner and yelling inside starbucks.
I applaud community/content hosts for recognizing their involvement in whatever data they host.
Yet another example of someone who can't differentiate "free speech" from "freedom from consequences of speech". Nobody is stopping you from speaking, they just don't want to listen to you. Capitalist profit motive will always guide corporations to the most simple and inoffensive content. The problem isn't "free speech Nazis", it's corporations who want appear safe for everyone so they can address the largest market.
Also, read the room? Not exactly the ideal time for making an ethical argument in favor of distribution of misinformation.
Tech has a lot of consolidation behind it both infrastructure-wise and end-user watering-hole-wise.
The fewer providers, the fewer people that make the rules, the more likely it is you have to play by their rules.
If you're upset that there are more free-speech 'restrictions' on the internet and you're cheering every time there's another tech acquisition, you're boiling the pot you're sitting in.
And then everyone clapped...
Free speech on the internet has been voluntarily given up by people who don't seem to know how free speech works. You can spin up your own server and host whatever you want (within local laws) cheaper and easier than you've ever been able to.
If you don't like how Facebook, Twitter, and other social media networks are policing speech on their servers... don't use their servers.
There is no right of "free audience." If you want to make the argument that these networks are too big to be without, then make that argument... it's much more salient than twisting the freedom from government censorship (which is a bit of a farce in its own right).
When you see [flagged] on a submission, it means that users flagged it. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
We can only guess why users flag things, but presumably they thought it didn't gratify intellectual curiosity and therefore went against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. There have been incredibly many threads and variations on this general theme, and curiosity withers under repetition, so this is not surprising. Lots of past explanations about this:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
I have run afoul of the crude tools in place to detect this myself on both Twitter and Facebook. But I have yet to have a day-to-day casual conversation with anyone about their precious freedoms being limited on the Internet - except for some of my friends whom are part of an easy to predict demographic and they are all about it these days.
But you don't have first amendment rights on a company's online forum. And it seems like attempts to create a forum that supports supposed first amendment rights immediately realizes why you can't do that when people hack the crap out of it.
No solution other than waiting for people to become desensitized to all the agitprop the way they are now desensitized to deep fakes despite all the hubbub about them being the end of the world.