Unfortunately the truth is, way too.many people use Facebook and Instagram way too much, and oftentimes you need to cast a wide net so you can reach people where they are.
It's a combination of ignorance and indifference. One of my social groups is around a sport, no necessity for knowledge around technology, and they will never ever leave Facebook. Those roots got laid down 15+ years ago and I would guess about 40% use FB as their sole social media, and another 50% use 1-2 other sites e.g. Instagram or Tiktok. The rest are savvy enough to explore more widely.
That is the main issue. I am on mastodon but following someone on another instance of mastodon is not easy for "regular people". Until that is solved people will stick to items like twitter and meta.
AFAIK, most people on Bluesky are on the "main" instance, so that tends to end up being a centralized community which can suffer from the same issues.
I don't use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok. I feel like people at least need to go on strike once in a while. Stop using those shitty services for a few days or a week so the landlords will make them slightly less shitty.
That's what it started out as, for sure. However, is it really "staying in touch" these days or is it simply reacting to and maybe adding a response to whatever status or content was placed in your feed.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not some anti-Facebook snob looking down on everyone else. But I have greatly reduced my use of the platform and only really use it for some groups I'm part of. While I do interact with family and friends, saying I use Facebook to "stay in touch" these days is a bit of a reach in most cases.
I think a lot of people feel like social media scratches the social itch they are feeling.
I think that is simply an illusion though. I have high social needs, and no amount of social media ever fed them in a healthy way.
Just because you are hungry, doesn't mean you should immediately reach for the bag of chips. It's important to reflect how often you do so, and whether that is getting you where you want to be in life. It's hard but really really important.
A lot of people say they are very lonely despite spending all their time on social media. They then change nothing.
Frankly this kind of premature excuse making won't get us anywhere. People say they're concerned about the rise of fascism or oligarchy but when it comes to pushing back, even the smallest bit of inconvenience is too much.
The Montgomery bus boycott lasted 381 days. People walked miles and organized carpools to work for over a year.
Now we can't even imagine making the sacrifice to send our friends and family an SMS, let alone getting them to download Signal when they kinda don't want to.
My comment, "For many people, those shitty services are the only way they stay in touch with friends and family," is an observation, not an "excuse" (in your words). The fact is that most people don't even know someone who understands how bad social media is. Moreover, even if they did, as you suggest, download Signal, and even if they use it with the one person in their life who insists on it, they'll still be using Facebook for everyone else. Ingrained habits are hard to change, especially when they are carefully formulated addictions.
In what sense are they shitty? They are actually usable by normal people. This is a big reason they are popular.
I don't like (most of) the content on those sites. This is not surprising. The content is aimed at people who can't use Signal. Such a person is different from me in many ways.
Facebook is cluttered with ads and distracting posts (not from your friends and family). If you use it often enough, you probably stop seeing how terrible it is. Try looking at it with fresh eyes sometime.
Twitter boosts Elon Musk and the things he is interested in.
Widespread algorithmic control and corporate spam spreads architecture?
>They are actually usable by normal people.
Usability is just one dimension. If your site is perfectly usable, yet steals your credit card number and sells it to the highest bidder, it is still a shitty site, just not in usability.
>This is a big reason they are popular.
Really FB/Meta became popular long before they were at their current level of shittiness. Really FB wrote the modern book on new levels of shittiness like selling social graphs and tracking people along with connecting all kinds of other data and stealing information from your phone with overly huge permissions and data gathering.
Hey metabagel! It's me, Mark Zuckerberg, please come back! Our Q4 earnings report will be due before you know it and our board will have my feet to the literal FIRE if you're not on our platform(s). Please reconsider!
Seriously, Mark Zuckerburg doesn't really care that one person left his platform, but he actually would prefer you stay...because if enough do it will affect earnings. But you should leave Facebook not to upset Zuck, but to stop upsetting yourself with what's on there.
even if they were despicable, kiwifarms is case study for this, you can't give yourself a platform, they were DDOSed into oblivion when cloudflare dropped them, donations were blocked by payments processors, etc.
> But there is a better solution: build tools that are open, decentralized, and user controlled. And then actually use them instead of just giving more power to Mark Zuckerberg to shut down a protest organization’s account in the middle of one of its big protests.
The problem that are people are "lazy": they're typically not going to expend extra effort that's not needed to solve the problem in front of them. It's pervasive, and it's one of the big reasons "friction" reducing technology can be really problematic: it turns necessary behaviors into issues of self-discipline (e.g. exercise becomes forcing yourself to haul yourself to the gym regularly in your spare time, instead having to walk everywhere in order to go about your day).
So, IMHO, if you want people to use "open, decentralized, and user controlled" in 2026, you have to ban the centralized alternatives. Otherwise you're telling at clouds.
I tried to get a family member to use Signal, and she eventually gave up on it, because she couldn't handle switching back and forth between Messages and Signal. It's very difficult to get people to migrate to better platforms when they have that mindset.
> If you want people to adopt your thing, it's got to make their life easier, right now, full stop.
But somewhat counterintuitively, you can do that by making their life a little harder first.
For example: leave Facebook/WhatsApp, refuse to communicate over SMS. Have good reasons for each, so you don't come off as unnecessarily difficult. Explain that Signal is far more secure and private than either and just as easy to use. Then using Signal is making it easier to communicate with you. It worked for me.
I left the whole Facebook ecosystem about 10 years ago, but never deleted my account. I left it up as a tombstone that makes it very clear I'm not there and tells people how to contact me.
I don't understand why having more than one chat app is too much for some people. I use signal, whatsapp, discord, irc, google chat, email and messenger without complaint. I can't force people to use my platform of choice so I have to compromise and use what they do with little to no notice on my end. Sure, I am not happy with this situation but I accept it and move on while keeping an eye out for alternatives.
And what if you want to contact someone? Are they on signal or WhatsApp or telegram? Or is it discord? Which server? How can I find that thing someone sent? Let me just open all those apps and start searching
I think you underestimate how little tolerance the average person has for this kind of friction. These huge platforms win because everyone is on them and it all just works.
You are speaking as someone who gives a shit about technology. Many people don't. "Just another account" is a big ask for many, as lots of people don't have password managers. There are a whole shit ton of people who want to use as few apps as they can. Even lots of tech-savvy people, myself included, feel this way.
> After that you forget it exists until someone messages you.
Until you get a random notification asking you to take steps to keep your account active or whatever. You may not care about this, but many people get stressed out about this kind of thing.
Every app you add to your phone is another potential vulnerability. I'm not installing a random discord or irc app just because that's someone's preferred platform. In fact I haven't installed any chat/message apps at all, I use the Messages app from Apple.
The network effect is powerful. But we also need to be honest with ourselves. Signal is an objectively worse client than Messages, especially when the average person does not value privacy.
Apparently, activists need something that is "open, decentralized, and user controlled". Those activists choose to use facebook. That tells me they are at least one of two things:
1. Too stupid to make a plan that could possibly work
2. Too lazy to execute on a plan that could possibly work
Knowing this is a useful signal. It tells me their judgment is terrible, and I should not listen to them ;)
This is overly harsh; it starts with the (flawed IMO) perspective that people are dedicated "professional" activists rather than amateurs from many different backgrounds who come together around something they care about and grow/evolve/deppen over time. It makes complete sense that they use tools in front of them AND don't necessarily get -what are quite subtle angles to most - all the issues with their use. It doesn't make them lazy or stupid, but if you have the skills & talents to help with this yet do nothing you might be projecting...
It's because the corporations were all banding together to censor their opponents a few years ago, so they got used to the idea that large corporations are your friends. The left took an opportunistic stance on this instead of a principled one, despite the fact that they're the side that on paper is supposedly opposed to letting corporations turn into pseudo-governments.
More likely these activists chose the most convenient platform for getting their message out. IG is popular and that makes it an obvious choice. Also keep in mind that activists will generally use what they are already familiar with, and Facebook runs three of the most popular platforms i.e. platforms that activists were probably already using before they became activists.
The only reason activists would switch to something else is if Facebook gives them a reason to do so. I doubt this one incident is enough of a reason.
Repeal section 230. If they want to shape speech for their own agenda then they should be liable.
Right now they have it both ways. They have the users, money, and data and they speak through their moderation decisions while being legally immune from consequences.
And they literally exercise more editorial control and reach than any magazine or newspaper editorial board ever did.
Section 230 was a Trojan Horse.
If they want to be treated like an innocent carrier (i.e., telco), they must kill their algorithms.
No news media company writes or says the reports of the journalists they publish or broadcast, but they are nevertheless responsible for that content.
If social media wants to control the algorithmic feed for profit, they must be like any media, "fully responsible for their content", and must be held accountable for it.
I've never had a phone company disconnect a phone call because they didn't like what I was saying
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54552101
Twitter was stopping people from tweeting or sending direct messages containing links to the New York Post article about Hunter Bidens Laptop in October of 2020. They put their thumb on the scale.
I've thought about this a lot. Section 230 essentially differentiates content sites into two categories, which I refer to as:
1. Publishers. Think CNN, NYT, WaPo, etc. These are first-party sites;
2. Platforms. Think any social media site. They host user generated content ("UGC").
Section 230 doesn't use this exact language. But what it does is remove the strict liability from UGC for (2). So if I post something defamatory on Facebook, Meta isn't liable as long as they satisfy their obligations for moderation, takedowns, etc.
My opinion is that social media sites are essentially cheating. They're now a third category. They enjoy the benefits of being a platform while acting like a publisher.
Think about it this way: let's say a group of users make 1000 posts supporting Ukraine and 1000 posts supporting Russia in the current war. Posts from some of each might make defamatory of erroneous or intentionally false claims. But I, as the platform, use algorithms to surface certain posts and suppress others through a newsfeed, a recommendation panel or whatever. I can tweak that algorithm to surface the pro-Ukrainian posts or the pro-Russian posts. I am essentially taking a position and acting like a first-party publisher but I don't have strict liability issues.
So I don't think we need to repeal Section 230. I think we need to treat content suppression and promotion as being a publisher because that's what you are.
> So, IMHO, if you want people to use "open, decentralized, and user controlled" tools in 2026, you have to ban the centralized alternatives. Otherwise you're yelling at clouds, as most people will default to the lowest friction alternative they have access to.
I disagree. You don't have to ban the centralized alternatives (which is problematic) -- but you do have to make the alternative as frictionless as possible.
can't even take this shit seriously anymore. for years when the left controlled twitter they ruled with an iron fist. twitter, meta (then FB), instagram, youtube, would somehow "completely randomly" come to the same conclusions to deplatform people all at once. even now, britain arrests people for wrong think social media posts. people like james damore lost his job for saying the most innocuous milk toast shit you could imagine. and everyone was fine with it, so long as they were the ones calling the shots.
all the bullshitting about complaining about centralization, third party this and that, freedom of speech, can't take that shit seriously. somehow they uniquely find only violations of these from people in the "other" side of the aisle. it's just so exhausting and obviously bad faith engagement. and the right isn't really any better, they do the same thing, just flipped. i think it's about time we mostly just admit: libertarians are fools (that used to be me LOL), and nobody in western culture genuinely cares about "free speech". everything they support is free speech, everything they dislike is "hate speech" (notice how the narrative changed). it's all so obvious to anyone who zooms out and looks at the larger trends. just get over it and embrace authoritarianism. just be honest about who you are.
A strong culture of free speech is the clear solution to the problem you're describing. I.e. when both political factions censor, the only solution is a strong preference for free speech regardless of who is in power.
And now you're likely on some kind of watch-list or database, and accomplished approximately nothing except making yourself feel morally superior to others. Congratulations! Much winning.
I spread the words of Michael Sandel to hundreds of left wing people, so they might come back towards the center. That they might acknowledge their complicity in creating the situation we find ourselves in. The constituents of NoKings is far more diverse than you know. Try joining us next time to see with your own eyes.
Please reflect on how this comment of yours relates to your prior comment to which I replied, and how others might perceive to to be equally applicable there. I do not understand where I said anything about your politics, can you tell me where or how? I thought I was replying to your perspectives on NoKings
There are a lot of heated comments here today, we all need to chill a bit
At least you didn’t organize on BlueSky, where nobody would show up but you’d be villainized by 100 people for some minor transgression they found in your post.
Amazingly, the top replies to their post about targeted harassment are from accounts trying to redirect anger at several accounts that are common targets for dogpiling. It's deeply baked into the BlueSky culture and I don't know how it came to be like that.
I've tried to prune my feed to keep it out, but now the problem is that journalists I follow eventually find themselves targeted by a BlueSky dogpiling campaign and leave the platform.
It was really jut the people least agreeable to Twitter's new ownership. Whether you view like or dislike of Elon as toxic is more down to personal taste. I find the culture there perfectly pleasant.
Someone dubbed "the running of Will Stancil" which I think describes a particular phenomenon of anti-engagement. I think there are some of anti- derangements about.
But generally these things cluster very strongly around specific people.
Alas Journalists I think are high value targets. Ideally they'd use tools like blocklists to help each other defend against dog piling. Ideally we'd have more automated response systems to detect and manage problems, which we could build, because of how Bluesky data is (so far, "spaces" incoming which change the gane) all public data. Blocking posts etc. The ability to handle this problems is much higher on Bluesky than elsewhere.
This can happen on Bluesky. It sucks. But for most people it's not an issue at all. It does unfortunately drive off some higher profile people though.
It's intrinsic to the medium. The Twitter-like format is inherently toxic and irredeemable. It can't be fixed.
The microblogging format with likes and reposts selects for short highly viral stuff that pokes at the brain stem. Rage bait, trolling, lynch mobs, and stupid brain rot stuff are all ideal forms of content for this medium. Nuanced and genuinely insightful ideas are too long.
I think short form content in general is bad. Short form video seems to be less actively toxic but more brainless and attention-destroying. Short form content is the refined sugar (or in some cases the crack or the fentanyl) of discourse.
Reddit-style sites (like this one) are better but still suffer from these problems. HN avoids the worst of it by having a culture and mod policy of downvoting trolling and low-effort crap.
I am reminded about the effort and patience it required to have long-form conversations on fidonet with people 2-3 states away due to the bbs hop delay. While the topics weren't necessarily particularly serious, the effort required to have any communication at all meant both sides spent time and effort.
I often think back to this early networked communication as stark contrast to the ease and rapidity we communicate today and how that same easy and rapidity has driven the quality into the ground.
I think one reason why HN is somewhat saner, is that computer nerds are one of the few demographics who still largely post from a real computer and keyboard. Smartphones with their small screens and keyboards discourage longform text no matter how much people claim to be proficient writers on them, but people on HN don't have the same obstacle to typing a couple of substantial paragraphs with actual depth and nuances.
No public votes, and mods that aren't insane is what keeps HN quality reasonable.
I was active on Reddit up to 2018 or so, and at that point it was already sliding full speed towards the cesspit it is today. Public votes destroy dissenting views, and moderators treat the site as their personal fiefdom. There aren't a lot of danish communities left on the internet, but r/denmark was getting unbearable because of constant tone policing, finger wagging and micro management by the mods. That, and constant low effort meme spam. And that subreddit was far from being the worst case.
It would be interesting to figure out if these that do the dogpiling are real users or not. It does not reflect my experience on BlueSky. But I am just a single datapoint.
> It's deeply baked into the BlueSky culture and I don't know how it came to be like that.
Bluesky was the refuge for Blue MAGA after Elon came out for Trump. That group (myself included at the time), comprised the majority of the user base and growth. Most have since returned to X, I stopped using Big Social media altogether. Bluesky leadership had a number of fumbles along the way that I suspects puts them post peak forever.
bsky is primarily seeded with a culturally anti-AI, human-centric artist (illustrators, gamedevs, hobby coders, writers) core — these are the first folks who wanted to leave twitter/X but continue to share their art. Rick's og dogpiled post is now deleted so I don't know the exact drama, but I'd bet good money that he was either introducing AI features to paint.net, or trying to ship some vibecoded stuff no one asked for that is obviously vibecoded, and advertising them to the core hater-group as something they would be excited about.
I'm not defending the dogpiling behaviour or even anti-AI sentiments in general. However, no one is entitled to saying things to people who don't want to hear it and receive only positive feedback for it. Sometimes even if you're excited about a thing, you have to keep it to yourself until you're in a room with others who would actually share your excitement. AKA maybe bsky isn't the place for him to share that excitement, and IMO that's neither good nor bad, but it's important to know that when you're cultivated a large-ish audience.
I haven't either. I don't use any of the general algorithmic feeds, only my following feed and algorithmic feeds for particular technical topics of interest. The ability to do that is exactly why I'm using BlueSky rather than LinkedIn or Twitter for this sort of information.
On Twitter, you can't get away from some random offensive racism, e.g. against Indian students at football games, or whatever the 2 minutes hate is ranting about on a certain day. In BlueSky, I get all signal and pretty much zero noise.
BlueSky also has far better tools for stopping dogpiling than Twitter, by stopping the quote-tweet phenomenon. All around a much much healthier place if one chooses the healthy direction.
Brad Lander is posting on BlueSky about him and a bunch of other American Jews and Israelis who were assisting with a olive harvest and essentially acting as human shields against settlers.
IDF detained the Americans but let him go because he's a public figure. The rabbis are still detained. Go figure.
Maybe it's because Brad Lander "proudly" invested New York City's money in Israeli weapons company Elbit Systems during the midst of the Gaza genocide. That should count for something.
Don’t worry No Kings day is a joke organized by a Never Trumper and with the goal of making sure nobody protests like France and instead protest in a way where it’s just a humiliation ritual.
To each their own, but I would not like to be in France during those riots. (Also, does the outburst of violence actually result in more changes being done? If no, then what’s the point; if yes, then the most violent organiser policy wins; does not seem like a winning strategy)
Did you miss the little ripple that grew into a tsunami called TikTok?
Although it didn't aim to replace "traditional" social media, it became enough of a threat to US homogeneity.
Even though TikTok doesn't even try to improve its messaging and friend UX etc, a lot of young people in Asia (outside China) use it as their primary platform.
It’s absolutely a real thing. The people in my life use WhatsApp because that’s what everyone else they know uses.
I don’t use WhatsApp, which just means I’m not on the group chat. Nobody uses my preferred option because nobody but me is on it, which means not much actual chatting is happening.
This is a real problem but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Zuckerberg or Meta in particular. The article admits it's unlikely that this hour-long ban was a top-down decision. People get banned with no recourse on all the big platforms.
But yes, a solution is for people to host their own content/sites. Or "protocols not platforms"
The media is mostly MAGA owned. Here's a short list:
- TikTok is controlled by Larry Ellison
- CBS news is controlled by Ellison's son
- The Ellisons will soon own CNN as well
- Twitter is controlled by Musk
- Facebook, Instagram and Threads are under Zuck
- WaPo and Amazon Prime by Bezos
- Old time favourites like Fox and WSJ owned by Murdoch
The owners of this media are also very explicitly involved in pro-Trump editorial content. In short, the playing field is wildly lopsided and unreliable and no tech (decentralized social media, lol) solution will work. Ultimately people will have to elect politicians to explicitly break up and clamp down on this hive of scum and villainy, but people aren't there yet, mentally. Such a solution seems wildly inappropriate today, but my guess is that another 10 years of the last two years will change a lot of minds.
Not everyone thinks we should be free to spread hate. Germany has good historical reasons to ban holocaust denial. Rawanda has good reasons to ban genocidal speech. No more going on the radio to say, "Cut down the tall trees".
The reason to not platform hate speech is the same reason you're not allowed to yell fire in a theater or bomb in an airport without their being one. Or say you're going to kill the president. Even the US has limits on what can be said, including liability laws. You can't just defame your neighbor and not face legal repercussions if they take you to court.
One can imagine this argument during the Salem Witch trials. "She's a witch" wasn't just a joke back then. It could get someone burned at the stake.
The US has good historical reasons to ban the promotion of socialist/communist ideology, yet I don't think many people on the left would be down with that.
Good that I do not live in a shithole of a country that sees it this way. Good that there are rules that I can sue one to hell if they publicly spew their hate against me.
Because allowing people to tell any lie about anybody is not free speech it is "the strongest fucker wins" - like Musk. They are allowed to say anything on their shit platform, but tell him to suck his little tiny dick and you get banned. So that is not free speech - this is the bully making the rules.
Andy anyone saying that this is okay really only wants to bully others in my book. Say it to my face, because then you at least have the guts to feel the consequences. But being an anonymous troll on the internet - poor little guy. Nothing else.
Maybe. Except "organizing a peaceful protest" is a question of intent, not of consequences. The total destruction of Paris and the curious case of Jewish stores being targeted while muslim owned stores being protected by the following mobs is a great example. The people who started the protests? Naive students. The people who actually showed up? Different people. Very different.
I think I understand why people make this connection but I don't actually think there is one. Freedom of speech is possibly the #1 thing people get confused over, due to the similarities between "I don't like your speech" and "I want your speech to stop" and "I want the government to stop your speech."
What I'm seeing is an argument for, "I don't like Facebook's speech. I think you shouldn't like it either. So I think we should all walk away."
That is true. I remember the second of the two inventors on the early mRNA patents had some concerns, and suddenly his interviews got taken down. And everyone seemed happy about it. The first inventor was all in, and had many interviews posted.
Which is one of many reasons why social media, along with the internet in general, ought to be treated as a public utility rather than a private for-profit business.
It is very delicious poetic justice. Some liberals warned repeatedly that deplatforming would backfire but were shouted down and ridiculed by illiberal activists hellbent on silencing their foes.
I think the main reaction (at least in tech circles) is that companies like Meta have the power, the legal protection, the political cover, and the indifference to shut down anyone on their platform. So making them the sole provider for your tech and communication is a huge risk.
And this incident (negligent takedown of a community on an important day) demonstrates the point perfectly.
I think there is still consistency between these two things.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean that I have to tolerate a business platforming hate speech. Any platform that stands behind the "free speech" of neo-nazi groups, white supremacists, and violent nationalists deserves criticism for turning a blind eye to what they are enabling. The First Amendment wasn't built to protect citizens' speech from each other; it was built to protect us from government censorship. Facebook doesn't have a legal responsibility to protect that, and I as a consumer can expect them to take an ethical stand against things like ethnic cleansing.
And that is exactly the point the author here is making. Facebook, X (Twitter), even places like Fediverse instances and Bluesky/AtProto sites are privately run spaces with no obligation to respect your freedom of speech.
If you choose these spaces to organize your political cause, you put your movement into another person's hands. Stop doing that. Host your own infrastructure, make it easy to recover and migrate, and start organizing outside of corporate-controlled areas.
Turning to Facebook for political organizing "because everyone is there" is like doing your town-hall meetings at Walmart "because everyone shops there", and then wondering why small businesses don't feel represented in your town anymore.
It's easy to blame big tech, but you can also ask your local bar why they only advertise events through Mark Zuckerberg, and ask why their website is mostly just links to Mark Zuckerberg's websites. Ask them if they have considered that Mark Zuckerberg might not a good obligatory middleman between them and their customers. The core problem is that people have accepted the lie that these corporate-controlled spaces are "the public square", when they are the exact opposite.
You might as well be hosting your own infrastructure by posting a sign in your living room for all the reach you will have. If you want to talk to yourself you don’t need infrastructure.
And barring people from "labeling things" is censorship, so I don't understand your point.
Speech that is hateful towards people because of their identities is hate speech. That is the widely accepted definition. It is not even a legal designation, nor does it need to be to concretely exist.
Denying the existence of hate speech isn't logical, because there are many unambiguous examples of it, and individuals and businesses have plenty of valid reasons not to tolerate it from the company they keep.
But then by your definition, nobody could ever debate immigration or trans or gay issues, because you can label it "hate speeech" and get debate shut down.
Businesses operate in a world as it is now, not as we wish it to be. Facebook has a lot of people there, and also lot of businesses have it as their only webpage. If we want to change the world we start with this version that we currently have. You will have hard time convincing bar owner start renting server or paying web dev if current facebook-page is good enough already now. (Disclaimer: I do not use facebook and I’m quite frustrated when the only webpage for the business is on facebook :( )
In unrelated topic, each person decides how much to spend spend/borrow/save as it is private decision to make, but to control inflation government manipulates bond interest rates which force public to change their behaviour.
You've erected a strawman. The argument was not "free speech doesn't apply to companies", it was the exact opposite, i.e. a company's prerogative to control speech on their platform is granted by the company's free speech righta. This still remains true, and the article does not argue otherwise.
No, the argument is definitely "you have no expectation of free speech if you're using e.g. facebook to deliver that speech". Which is certainly an opinion to have, but in my view a silly one. You might as well say that if you chose to send mail using a "private company", it's that's company's "free speech right" to inspect your mail and throw it away if they don't agree with the contents.
> if you chose to send mail using a "private company", it's that's company's "free speech right" to inspect your mail and throw it away if they don't agree with the contents.
That's somewhat true currently.
If you ship mail or packages with UPS, FedEx, Etc they are allowed to open and inspect what you send. The USPS is not allowed to do that, not without a warrant. When people ship drugs via mail they use the USPS for that reason, that it's more difficult for them to obtain warrants to discover suspected drug shipments while a UPS or FedEx will happily open any package they suspect may not be legal to send.
First of all, there's a massive difference between transporting a private package from point A to point B vs hosting someone's speech on a privately owned platform and broadcasting that speech through a privately owned network, with wider consequences that do not come into play when dealing with private correspondences between parties.
Next, paying a fee to a private company to ship your package confers certain obligations about what you are entitled to, when you are utilizing a privately owned platform for free, you are not entitled to anything.
Finally, a private company is certainly within their rights to refuse to ship your package based on an any legal criteria they choose.
> when you are utilizing a privately owned platform for free, you are not entitled to anything.
Factually wrong. Both when paying, and when using something "for free", there's a contract in place (terms & conditions, etc.), and that contract also needs to obey local laws. I don't know if you've ever heard of GDPR, but that's one example of things you are entitled to when using a "privately owned platform for free". Even the USA has laws regarding this, though less strong than GDPR (look it up).
> refuse to ship your package based on an any legal criteria they choose
The question here is what is a "legal criteria". And just because the law is a certain way today, doesn't mean that's the way it should be. It used to be legal to kick people out of restaurants because you didn't like the color of their skin, it's not today. It used to be legal to fire people because they were members of a union or other political group, it's not today. (All depending on your country's laws of course.)
Also, the point of an analogy, is to illustrate a point through a comparable situation. Pointing out that there's a "massive difference" but never explaining what the difference is and how it affects the validity of the comparison, is just a (very common) misunderstanding of what an analogy even is.
> if you've ever heard of GDPR, but that's one example of things you are entitled to when using a "privately owned platform for free"
GDPR is not an "entitlement", its regulation governing how sites can operate with your data, it doesn't entitle you to service.
> The question here is what is a "legal criteria"
You don't have to agree with the legal criteria, but there is no question as to whether it's legal to arbitrarily ban users based on the content of their posts.
> Pointing out that there's a "massive difference" but never explaining what the difference is and how it affects the validity of the comparison
I went into great detail to explain why the analogy is bad, it's up to you if you want to acknowledge it. This isn't 2016, the absurd framing that tries to pretend that you are entitled access to social media platforms on the basis of free speech is tired and obviously wrong.
Do you really want to get into the semantics of "entitlement" vs "right". Are you not entitled to a copy of "your" data according to GDPR? https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/
What's even "your data"? Are the posts you write not "your data"?
The semantics doesn't matter because GDPR is just an example of the LAW regulating YOUR USAGE of a FREE PLATFORM. It's an EXAMPLE that disproves your false statement "when you are utilizing a privately owned platform for free, you are not entitled to anything"
> there is no question as to whether it's legal to arbitrarily ban users based on the content of their posts
I already told you: "just because the law is a certain way today, doesn't mean that's the way it should be. It used to be legal to kick people out of restaurants because you didn't like the color of their skin, it's not today. It used to be legal to fire people because they were members of a union or other political group, it's not today."
The differences are listed in detail in my first reply to you, plain as day for anyone to see. The rhetorical tactic of repeating "what differences" doesn't change that. I suggest you actually read what I wrote or work on your reading comprehension.
> Do you really want to get into the semantics of "entitlement" vs "right"
You're the one focusing on semantics in order to avoid acknowledging the substantive differences between personal data rights and guaranteed access to social media platforms.
> What's even "your data"? Are the posts you write not "your data
Correct. The posts you write are your data, but GDPR doesn't confer access to a social media platform, only control over your data. You are deliberately conflating data rights with impunity from being banned
> just because the law is a certain way today, doesn't mean that's the way it should be
Your personal opinion about what the law should be is irrelevant.
> there's a massive difference between transporting a private package from point A to point B vs hosting someone's speech on a privately owned platform and broadcasting that speech through a privately owned network, with wider consequences that do not come into play when dealing with private correspondences between parties.
If you think that this states what the difference and what the consequences are (in your mind), I don't know what to tell you except you have a vivid imagination. Sorry I'm not a mind reader. A tip for the future is actually stating what you mean, instead of some vague suggestion at it.
> but GDPR doesn't confer access
GDPR was given AS AN EXAMPLE. I never suggested it "confers access". That interpretation comes from your own inability to read what I have written three times now. I don't know how to be more clear with you. Perhaps you can give my comments to a LLM that can translate them into something more comprehensible for you, it seems English is neither your first nor second language.
> is irrelevant
For what? You know laws can change, don't you? Or do you just accept each and every law, in every country, as the way things should be?
I already told you: "just because the law is a certain way today, doesn't mean that's the way it should be. It used to be legal to kick people out of restaurants because you didn't like the color of their skin, it's not today. It used to be legal to fire people because they were members of a union or other political group, it's not today."
> If you think that this states what the difference and what the consequences are (in your mind), I don't know what to tell you
I'm satisfied with the reasoning as stated. If you can't grasp
why a social media ban and refusing to ship a letter are two completely different scenarios with respect to free speech, I can't elucidate it any further. Perhaps you should take your own advice about using an LLM to understand the point.
> "GDPR was given AS AN EXAMPLE. I never suggested it "confers access
You gave it as an example of entitlements, but I pointed out that it doesn't entitle you to anything that you don't already own. Unlike your own data, you don't own a voice on a social media platform, hence why the example doesn't work.
> For what? You know laws can change, don't you?
It doesn't matter that the laws can change. You have no idea if or how they might change, so that observation does not contribute anything to the discussion.
While you're right in a literal sense, I think it's pretty hard to dispute that Zuckerberg can operate unabated due to his majority ownership of voting shares.
That's actually a pretty good illustration of my point. Because Facebook has many of the rights that people have (own property, enter contracts etc.) but very few of the liabilities (can't be imprisoned, rarely ever pays any fines in practice), Zuch can use it as a proxy to do a bunch of shady stuff, that he wouldn't do if he risked being held personally liable for it.
If companies as a legal concept didn't exist in their current form, then we wouldn't have this problem of one person, or more commonly many people, using them as a proxy to get away with a bunch of unethical stuff. Often way more unethical that whatever Facebook / Zuck is doing, such as destroying ecosystems, prioritizing profits over worker safety, etc.
There are obvious reasons why it's expedient to grant the same rights to a collective organization as to its constituents. If you're getting confused by the abstraction, you're welcome to pretend that the board of Facebook (which is comprised of humans) are exercising their individual rights to free speech.
I'm not the one being confused here, though it's fun to see you're already resorting to ad hominem. It reveals a lack of actual arguments, as does your appeal to obviousness.
But yes, I'd like to see the board of Facebook and the boards of many other companies being held liable for the actions of those companies. But for some reason, it's only ever "expedient" to grant companies the rights rightfully belonging to people, and never "expedient" to impose the same sorts of liabilities on them as on people. (Not that a non-physical entity such as a company could ever practically face the same penalties as a physical person anyway, which is another ("obvious" in your parlance) reason not to grant them those rights.)
If I was interested in going down the ad-hominem route I'd claim that you simply see the status quo as "obvious" because you lack the power of imagination to consider a more sensible alternative.
"Facebook is not a person. Facebook should not have "rights" nor "political views"."
In the USA, the supreme court has ruled a corporation DOES in fact have rights. Like the lawsuit of advertising medicine that a state banned-- the SC ruled that was infringing the rights of corporations to "express" their speech.
As someone from UK, I find this whole "Corporations have more rights than I do" very disturbing but thats how it is
That's why I write "should" and not "does". And in the UK and the EU, corporations also have more rights than they should (according to my worldview anyway). I think you should find the UK and EU laws disturbing in the same way as the USA's. Corporations also have way less liabilities and face way less penalties for their misdeeds than you do, which a bigger problem.
they understand, the problem is that they agree with Meta.
They are happy with the outcome but have no courage to say it directly so they hide it behind these "questions"
Yeah but what GP is commenting on is that you can't make the argument "deplatforming is okay because free speech doesn't apply to companies" and then complain about deplatforming in this instance.
I agree with GP that the arguments one makes should reflect one's actual reasoning, e.g. "I believe it's wrong to say thing X and therefore I support deplatforming in that instace".
But because "I support deplatforming in every instace" sounds stronger many people falsely claimed that to be their reasoning.
And now they're forced to deal with the consequences, i.e. being called hypocrites.
> Yeah but what GP is commenting on is that you can't make the argument "deplatforming is okay because free speech doesn't apply to companies" and then complain about deplatforming in this instance.
I suspect that the argument you're referring to is more like "free speech does not imply that all deplatforming is unacceptable." Again, it is not the case that the only 2 consistent views are "all deplatforming is unacceptable" or "all deplatforming is acceptable."
There's an old old idea here, the Paradox of Tolerance, that might help alleviate your confusion:
> But we should claim the right to suppress them [intolerant ideologies] if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
It came from Karl Popper, the guy better known for philosophy of science and using "falsifiability" as a primary criteria for what's science/not-science.
That the "free speech" crowd that said "we must allow all hateful and intolerant speech" sure does seem to quiet up when those advocating for open societies get silenced!
We've heard it all now for a decade +, from both sides. All the arguments are selective, nothing is principled and it's all for the express purpose of silencing unwanted speech and amplifying wanted speech.
The only solution that makes sense to me is rewriting section 230 since these platforms are now publishers making editorial decisions. They are using algorithms to publish instead of humans but are publishers never the less.
thank you for the attempt to enlighten me, but how could someone not have heard this quote when internet commies resort to using it like some unquestionable gospel whenever they rush to defend trillion dollar corporations suppressing dissent of the working class?
3) it's not an unquestionable gospel, it's something to be considered and carefully see it it applies, or is valid
4) I have literally never seen another person cite the Paradox of Tolerance, something that I learned about decades ago, so imagine my surprise at your sarcastic response.
If this is such a common response in your experience, why don't you have any critique of it, other than strawmen?
I can't be sure what you're trying to imply, but it certainly doesn't imply that anybody else should have encountered this topic in HN. I'm on here a lot, but only see a tiny fraction of the site, and it only comes up at most every couple of days across the entire site.
But even if somebody had encounters it a lot, it certainly doesn't excuse illogical behavior if only attacking straw men, refusing to engage at all, and make up weird insults about communism.
I notice that you too have no counter to it!
In a society that wants to minimize violence in daily interactions, we still allow it to happen. Claiming that the desire to minimize something means a total ban is just a childish and simple way to approach the issue. The residual of others to engage with the idea further proves how little they have thought about it.
>Unfortunately, most of the “solutions” to this problem that people are suggesting are some form of “force Mark Zuckerberg to be better and not shut off the account we like.” But that’s no way to build a better world. It is, also, the exact same response that MAGA folks had when Donald Trump was banned from social media in the wake of the January 6th insurrection. Their response was to try to force platforms to host the content of people MAGA supported. That cannot be a workable solution, because as political fortunes shift, forcing platforms to host the worst people’s accounts is unworkable for basically everyone.
The bit about "the worst people's accounts" just sounds like a refutation of everything else in the article. The problem was always that it was up to interpretation who "the worst people" are.
IDK why so many people want to die on this hill of not forcing social media companies to extend free-speech rights to their userbase. Facebook didn't accidentally wind up in this position where their TOS can effectively censor entire political movements on the Zuck's whim. They spent decades purposefully angling for this by acquiring competitors and encouraging people to use their platform for any and all communication. They own the audience.
>But there is a better solution: build tools that are open, decentralized, and user controlled. And then actually use them instead of just giving more power to Mark Zuckerberg to shut down a protest organization’s account in the middle of one of its big protests.
Not happening LOL. The decentralized platforms have been there for 10-20 years, hardly anybody uses them.
Back when the shoe was on the other foot, the right tried to make *several* alternative platforms and there was widespread collusion amongst all levels of infrastructure providers to push them off the internet. The same will happen to any platform which seeks to effect political change and attains enough critical mass that it could plausibly do so.
>The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter planned and coordinated his efforts on Gab, and when Gab was repeatedly warned about it, refused to do anything.
Conveniently ignoring the fact that he livestreamed it on Facebook and their moderators refused to delete it.
Of course thats far from the only time that somebody planning an act of terrorism has a history of concerning posts but somehow other social networks are hardly ever held to this standard.
>Parler? AWS said that they'd reported over 100 posts to Parler that were active and specific plans for violence and incitement, and been ignored. Following the FBI investigating Parler for its role in coordinating violence on Jan 6, AWS pulled the plug.
Well if they were really that "active and specific" they should have called the FBI too. But once again, this sort of standard should have sank every other social network decades ago if it was actually applied equally. Social media is always used to incite riots. Why are you acting like this is unheard of? We have entire social movements with hashtags in their names.
It's the Right wing politicians too. Look at Texas and pornography laws or the IRL book bans. We live in a politics of Win At All Costs, Dominate Those Who Think Differently, i.e utterly broken and anti-democratic.
The problem is the Oligarchy, the are thick from money, power, and hubris
The internet has always had moderation, WTH are you talking about?
It was the right who wanted to repeal Section 230 and have the government take over all social media platforms and regulate them, and make it illegal to ban their speech. The left never wanted anything of the sort.
If Facebook is really a "utility" then it should not arbitrarily pull the plug on accounts with no recourse. Other utilities have due process for cutting off access: written notice with a clear reason, a chance to dispute, etc.
When people want moderation they cry at Zuck, when people get moderated they cry at Zuck. When people are given free and open systems they cry that it’s icky and weird.
I think people in the West have little experience living under totalitarian regime.
Typical ways of overcoming censorship is creating own lingo, so that it goes past censors or distribution of physical leaflets, underground press and organising resistance offline.
Stupidity is when I bulk post my back catalogue of TikToks. Malice is when a protest that attracted 9 million Americans last time they organized one gets taken down. Notable accounts get special treatment.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 13.8 ms ] threadThat is the main issue. I am on mastodon but following someone on another instance of mastodon is not easy for "regular people". Until that is solved people will stick to items like twitter and meta.
AFAIK, most people on Bluesky are on the "main" instance, so that tends to end up being a centralized community which can suffer from the same issues.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not some anti-Facebook snob looking down on everyone else. But I have greatly reduced my use of the platform and only really use it for some groups I'm part of. While I do interact with family and friends, saying I use Facebook to "stay in touch" these days is a bit of a reach in most cases.
I think that is simply an illusion though. I have high social needs, and no amount of social media ever fed them in a healthy way.
Just because you are hungry, doesn't mean you should immediately reach for the bag of chips. It's important to reflect how often you do so, and whether that is getting you where you want to be in life. It's hard but really really important.
A lot of people say they are very lonely despite spending all their time on social media. They then change nothing.
It doesn't work
The Montgomery bus boycott lasted 381 days. People walked miles and organized carpools to work for over a year.
Now we can't even imagine making the sacrifice to send our friends and family an SMS, let alone getting them to download Signal when they kinda don't want to.
I don't like (most of) the content on those sites. This is not surprising. The content is aimed at people who can't use Signal. Such a person is different from me in many ways.
Twitter boosts Elon Musk and the things he is interested in.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/15/elon-musk...
I don't have specific complaints about Instagram or TikTok, other than the algorithm is controlled by oligarchs.
Widespread algorithmic control and corporate spam spreads architecture?
>They are actually usable by normal people.
Usability is just one dimension. If your site is perfectly usable, yet steals your credit card number and sells it to the highest bidder, it is still a shitty site, just not in usability.
>This is a big reason they are popular.
Really FB/Meta became popular long before they were at their current level of shittiness. Really FB wrote the modern book on new levels of shittiness like selling social graphs and tracking people along with connecting all kinds of other data and stealing information from your phone with overly huge permissions and data gathering.
Seriously, Mark Zuckerburg doesn't really care that one person left his platform, but he actually would prefer you stay...because if enough do it will affect earnings. But you should leave Facebook not to upset Zuck, but to stop upsetting yourself with what's on there.
even OAI and Ant are better options
Kind of hurts/helps the point, but yeah generally, you should run your own website? Is this the return of the old web?
https://www.nokings.org
The problem that are people are "lazy": they're typically not going to expend extra effort that's not needed to solve the problem in front of them. It's pervasive, and it's one of the big reasons "friction" reducing technology can be really problematic: it turns necessary behaviors into issues of self-discipline (e.g. exercise becomes forcing yourself to haul yourself to the gym regularly in your spare time, instead having to walk everywhere in order to go about your day).
So, IMHO, if you want people to use "open, decentralized, and user controlled" in 2026, you have to ban the centralized alternatives. Otherwise you're telling at clouds.
If you want people to adopt your thing, it's got to make their life easier, right now, full stop.
But somewhat counterintuitively, you can do that by making their life a little harder first.
For example: leave Facebook/WhatsApp, refuse to communicate over SMS. Have good reasons for each, so you don't come off as unnecessarily difficult. Explain that Signal is far more secure and private than either and just as easy to use. Then using Signal is making it easier to communicate with you. It worked for me.
I left the whole Facebook ecosystem about 10 years ago, but never deleted my account. I left it up as a tombstone that makes it very clear I'm not there and tells people how to contact me.
There are certainly parts of my life that would be more optimized if that weren't a constraint.
I think you underestimate how little tolerance the average person has for this kind of friction. These huge platforms win because everyone is on them and it all just works.
> After that you forget it exists until someone messages you.
Until you get a random notification asking you to take steps to keep your account active or whatever. You may not care about this, but many people get stressed out about this kind of thing.
1. Too stupid to make a plan that could possibly work
2. Too lazy to execute on a plan that could possibly work
Knowing this is a useful signal. It tells me their judgment is terrible, and I should not listen to them ;)
The only reason activists would switch to something else is if Facebook gives them a reason to do so. I doubt this one incident is enough of a reason.
Right now they have it both ways. They have the users, money, and data and they speak through their moderation decisions while being legally immune from consequences.
Section 230 was a Trojan Horse.
If they want to be treated like an innocent carrier (i.e., telco), they must kill their algorithms.
No news media company writes or says the reports of the journalists they publish or broadcast, but they are nevertheless responsible for that content.
If social media wants to control the algorithmic feed for profit, they must be like any media, "fully responsible for their content", and must be held accountable for it.
1. Publishers. Think CNN, NYT, WaPo, etc. These are first-party sites;
2. Platforms. Think any social media site. They host user generated content ("UGC").
Section 230 doesn't use this exact language. But what it does is remove the strict liability from UGC for (2). So if I post something defamatory on Facebook, Meta isn't liable as long as they satisfy their obligations for moderation, takedowns, etc.
My opinion is that social media sites are essentially cheating. They're now a third category. They enjoy the benefits of being a platform while acting like a publisher.
Think about it this way: let's say a group of users make 1000 posts supporting Ukraine and 1000 posts supporting Russia in the current war. Posts from some of each might make defamatory of erroneous or intentionally false claims. But I, as the platform, use algorithms to surface certain posts and suppress others through a newsfeed, a recommendation panel or whatever. I can tweak that algorithm to surface the pro-Ukrainian posts or the pro-Russian posts. I am essentially taking a position and acting like a first-party publisher but I don't have strict liability issues.
So I don't think we need to repeal Section 230. I think we need to treat content suppression and promotion as being a publisher because that's what you are.
I disagree. You don't have to ban the centralized alternatives (which is problematic) -- but you do have to make the alternative as frictionless as possible.
all the bullshitting about complaining about centralization, third party this and that, freedom of speech, can't take that shit seriously. somehow they uniquely find only violations of these from people in the "other" side of the aisle. it's just so exhausting and obviously bad faith engagement. and the right isn't really any better, they do the same thing, just flipped. i think it's about time we mostly just admit: libertarians are fools (that used to be me LOL), and nobody in western culture genuinely cares about "free speech". everything they support is free speech, everything they dislike is "hate speech" (notice how the narrative changed). it's all so obvious to anyone who zooms out and looks at the larger trends. just get over it and embrace authoritarianism. just be honest about who you are.
I spread the words of Michael Sandel to hundreds of left wing people, so they might come back towards the center. That they might acknowledge their complicity in creating the situation we find ourselves in. The constituents of NoKings is far more diverse than you know. Try joining us next time to see with your own eyes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp5qsEuUOWo
> making yourself feel morally superior to others
One might wonder if your comment here falls into this category.
There are a lot of heated comments here today, we all need to chill a bit
https://bsky.app/profile/safety.bsky.app/post/3mukm26duos2c
Amazingly, the top replies to their post about targeted harassment are from accounts trying to redirect anger at several accounts that are common targets for dogpiling. It's deeply baked into the BlueSky culture and I don't know how it came to be like that.
I've tried to prune my feed to keep it out, but now the problem is that journalists I follow eventually find themselves targeted by a BlueSky dogpiling campaign and leave the platform.
The earliest bluesky users tended to be the most toxic users of old Twitter, it's not too surprising
But generally these things cluster very strongly around specific people.
Alas Journalists I think are high value targets. Ideally they'd use tools like blocklists to help each other defend against dog piling. Ideally we'd have more automated response systems to detect and manage problems, which we could build, because of how Bluesky data is (so far, "spaces" incoming which change the gane) all public data. Blocking posts etc. The ability to handle this problems is much higher on Bluesky than elsewhere.
This can happen on Bluesky. It sucks. But for most people it's not an issue at all. It does unfortunately drive off some higher profile people though.
It's intrinsic to the medium. The Twitter-like format is inherently toxic and irredeemable. It can't be fixed.
The microblogging format with likes and reposts selects for short highly viral stuff that pokes at the brain stem. Rage bait, trolling, lynch mobs, and stupid brain rot stuff are all ideal forms of content for this medium. Nuanced and genuinely insightful ideas are too long.
I think short form content in general is bad. Short form video seems to be less actively toxic but more brainless and attention-destroying. Short form content is the refined sugar (or in some cases the crack or the fentanyl) of discourse.
Reddit-style sites (like this one) are better but still suffer from these problems. HN avoids the worst of it by having a culture and mod policy of downvoting trolling and low-effort crap.
I often think back to this early networked communication as stark contrast to the ease and rapidity we communicate today and how that same easy and rapidity has driven the quality into the ground.
I was active on Reddit up to 2018 or so, and at that point it was already sliding full speed towards the cesspit it is today. Public votes destroy dissenting views, and moderators treat the site as their personal fiefdom. There aren't a lot of danish communities left on the internet, but r/denmark was getting unbearable because of constant tone policing, finger wagging and micro management by the mods. That, and constant low effort meme spam. And that subreddit was far from being the worst case.
I miss the dk.* Usenet days.
Bluesky was the refuge for Blue MAGA after Elon came out for Trump. That group (myself included at the time), comprised the majority of the user base and growth. Most have since returned to X, I stopped using Big Social media altogether. Bluesky leadership had a number of fumbles along the way that I suspects puts them post peak forever.
I'm not defending the dogpiling behaviour or even anti-AI sentiments in general. However, no one is entitled to saying things to people who don't want to hear it and receive only positive feedback for it. Sometimes even if you're excited about a thing, you have to keep it to yourself until you're in a room with others who would actually share your excitement. AKA maybe bsky isn't the place for him to share that excitement, and IMO that's neither good nor bad, but it's important to know that when you're cultivated a large-ish audience.
On Twitter, you can't get away from some random offensive racism, e.g. against Indian students at football games, or whatever the 2 minutes hate is ranting about on a certain day. In BlueSky, I get all signal and pretty much zero noise.
BlueSky also has far better tools for stopping dogpiling than Twitter, by stopping the quote-tweet phenomenon. All around a much much healthier place if one chooses the healthy direction.
IDF detained the Americans but let him go because he's a public figure. The rabbis are still detained. Go figure.
Also a reminder that Mastodon isn't one place. It's a network of instances. Bluesky is one and only one.
You go and open an account and post anything even remotely positive about LLMs and AI. You'll also get a harassment campaign against you as well.
Doesn't matter if you're localLLM, green energy, etc. AI = evil and there is no middle ground.
And Mastodon is a federation of disparate servers. But they are by and large extraordinarily ai-hostile nearly everywhere.
There's no reason why Emperor Zuck's court can't be disrupted by some monkey king yet to appear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
Although it didn't aim to replace "traditional" social media, it became enough of a threat to US homogeneity.
Even though TikTok doesn't even try to improve its messaging and friend UX etc, a lot of young people in Asia (outside China) use it as their primary platform.
I don’t use WhatsApp, which just means I’m not on the group chat. Nobody uses my preferred option because nobody but me is on it, which means not much actual chatting is happening.
Reach the people, but make clear that there is an authoritative source that is ~not~ less rented.
But yes, a solution is for people to host their own content/sites. Or "protocols not platforms"
Meta Takes Down No Kings Instagram During Protest Day
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50136881
- TikTok is controlled by Larry Ellison
- CBS news is controlled by Ellison's son
- The Ellisons will soon own CNN as well
- Twitter is controlled by Musk
- Facebook, Instagram and Threads are under Zuck
- WaPo and Amazon Prime by Bezos
- Old time favourites like Fox and WSJ owned by Murdoch
The owners of this media are also very explicitly involved in pro-Trump editorial content. In short, the playing field is wildly lopsided and unreliable and no tech (decentralized social media, lol) solution will work. Ultimately people will have to elect politicians to explicitly break up and clamp down on this hive of scum and villainy, but people aren't there yet, mentally. Such a solution seems wildly inappropriate today, but my guess is that another 10 years of the last two years will change a lot of minds.
The reason to not platform hate speech is the same reason you're not allowed to yell fire in a theater or bomb in an airport without their being one. Or say you're going to kill the president. Even the US has limits on what can be said, including liability laws. You can't just defame your neighbor and not face legal repercussions if they take you to court.
One can imagine this argument during the Salem Witch trials. "She's a witch" wasn't just a joke back then. It could get someone burned at the stake.
Because allowing people to tell any lie about anybody is not free speech it is "the strongest fucker wins" - like Musk. They are allowed to say anything on their shit platform, but tell him to suck his little tiny dick and you get banned. So that is not free speech - this is the bully making the rules.
Andy anyone saying that this is okay really only wants to bully others in my book. Say it to my face, because then you at least have the guts to feel the consequences. But being an anonymous troll on the internet - poor little guy. Nothing else.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18764523
What I'm seeing is an argument for, "I don't like Facebook's speech. I think you shouldn't like it either. So I think we should all walk away."
And this incident (negligent takedown of a community on an important day) demonstrates the point perfectly.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean that I have to tolerate a business platforming hate speech. Any platform that stands behind the "free speech" of neo-nazi groups, white supremacists, and violent nationalists deserves criticism for turning a blind eye to what they are enabling. The First Amendment wasn't built to protect citizens' speech from each other; it was built to protect us from government censorship. Facebook doesn't have a legal responsibility to protect that, and I as a consumer can expect them to take an ethical stand against things like ethnic cleansing.
And that is exactly the point the author here is making. Facebook, X (Twitter), even places like Fediverse instances and Bluesky/AtProto sites are privately run spaces with no obligation to respect your freedom of speech.
If you choose these spaces to organize your political cause, you put your movement into another person's hands. Stop doing that. Host your own infrastructure, make it easy to recover and migrate, and start organizing outside of corporate-controlled areas.
Turning to Facebook for political organizing "because everyone is there" is like doing your town-hall meetings at Walmart "because everyone shops there", and then wondering why small businesses don't feel represented in your town anymore.
It's easy to blame big tech, but you can also ask your local bar why they only advertise events through Mark Zuckerberg, and ask why their website is mostly just links to Mark Zuckerberg's websites. Ask them if they have considered that Mark Zuckerberg might not a good obligatory middleman between them and their customers. The core problem is that people have accepted the lie that these corporate-controlled spaces are "the public square", when they are the exact opposite.
Speech that is hateful towards people because of their identities is hate speech. That is the widely accepted definition. It is not even a legal designation, nor does it need to be to concretely exist.
Denying the existence of hate speech isn't logical, because there are many unambiguous examples of it, and individuals and businesses have plenty of valid reasons not to tolerate it from the company they keep.
In unrelated topic, each person decides how much to spend spend/borrow/save as it is private decision to make, but to control inflation government manipulates bond interest rates which force public to change their behaviour.
That's somewhat true currently.
If you ship mail or packages with UPS, FedEx, Etc they are allowed to open and inspect what you send. The USPS is not allowed to do that, not without a warrant. When people ship drugs via mail they use the USPS for that reason, that it's more difficult for them to obtain warrants to discover suspected drug shipments while a UPS or FedEx will happily open any package they suspect may not be legal to send.
First of all, there's a massive difference between transporting a private package from point A to point B vs hosting someone's speech on a privately owned platform and broadcasting that speech through a privately owned network, with wider consequences that do not come into play when dealing with private correspondences between parties.
Next, paying a fee to a private company to ship your package confers certain obligations about what you are entitled to, when you are utilizing a privately owned platform for free, you are not entitled to anything.
Finally, a private company is certainly within their rights to refuse to ship your package based on an any legal criteria they choose.
Factually wrong. Both when paying, and when using something "for free", there's a contract in place (terms & conditions, etc.), and that contract also needs to obey local laws. I don't know if you've ever heard of GDPR, but that's one example of things you are entitled to when using a "privately owned platform for free". Even the USA has laws regarding this, though less strong than GDPR (look it up).
> refuse to ship your package based on an any legal criteria they choose
The question here is what is a "legal criteria". And just because the law is a certain way today, doesn't mean that's the way it should be. It used to be legal to kick people out of restaurants because you didn't like the color of their skin, it's not today. It used to be legal to fire people because they were members of a union or other political group, it's not today. (All depending on your country's laws of course.)
Also, the point of an analogy, is to illustrate a point through a comparable situation. Pointing out that there's a "massive difference" but never explaining what the difference is and how it affects the validity of the comparison, is just a (very common) misunderstanding of what an analogy even is.
GDPR is not an "entitlement", its regulation governing how sites can operate with your data, it doesn't entitle you to service.
> The question here is what is a "legal criteria"
You don't have to agree with the legal criteria, but there is no question as to whether it's legal to arbitrarily ban users based on the content of their posts.
> Pointing out that there's a "massive difference" but never explaining what the difference is and how it affects the validity of the comparison
I went into great detail to explain why the analogy is bad, it's up to you if you want to acknowledge it. This isn't 2016, the absurd framing that tries to pretend that you are entitled access to social media platforms on the basis of free speech is tired and obviously wrong.
> a massive difference [what difference?]
> wider consequences [which consequences?]
> certain obligations [which ones?]
Okay dude. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
> This isn't 2016
https://knowyourmeme.com/sensitive/memes/come-on-its-2015-cu...
> GDPR is not an "entitlement"
Do you really want to get into the semantics of "entitlement" vs "right". Are you not entitled to a copy of "your" data according to GDPR? https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/
What's even "your data"? Are the posts you write not "your data"?
The semantics doesn't matter because GDPR is just an example of the LAW regulating YOUR USAGE of a FREE PLATFORM. It's an EXAMPLE that disproves your false statement "when you are utilizing a privately owned platform for free, you are not entitled to anything"
> there is no question as to whether it's legal to arbitrarily ban users based on the content of their posts
I already told you: "just because the law is a certain way today, doesn't mean that's the way it should be. It used to be legal to kick people out of restaurants because you didn't like the color of their skin, it's not today. It used to be legal to fire people because they were members of a union or other political group, it's not today."
The differences are listed in detail in my first reply to you, plain as day for anyone to see. The rhetorical tactic of repeating "what differences" doesn't change that. I suggest you actually read what I wrote or work on your reading comprehension.
> Do you really want to get into the semantics of "entitlement" vs "right"
You're the one focusing on semantics in order to avoid acknowledging the substantive differences between personal data rights and guaranteed access to social media platforms.
> What's even "your data"? Are the posts you write not "your data
Correct. The posts you write are your data, but GDPR doesn't confer access to a social media platform, only control over your data. You are deliberately conflating data rights with impunity from being banned
> just because the law is a certain way today, doesn't mean that's the way it should be
Your personal opinion about what the law should be is irrelevant.
> there's a massive difference between transporting a private package from point A to point B vs hosting someone's speech on a privately owned platform and broadcasting that speech through a privately owned network, with wider consequences that do not come into play when dealing with private correspondences between parties.
If you think that this states what the difference and what the consequences are (in your mind), I don't know what to tell you except you have a vivid imagination. Sorry I'm not a mind reader. A tip for the future is actually stating what you mean, instead of some vague suggestion at it.
> but GDPR doesn't confer access
GDPR was given AS AN EXAMPLE. I never suggested it "confers access". That interpretation comes from your own inability to read what I have written three times now. I don't know how to be more clear with you. Perhaps you can give my comments to a LLM that can translate them into something more comprehensible for you, it seems English is neither your first nor second language.
> is irrelevant
For what? You know laws can change, don't you? Or do you just accept each and every law, in every country, as the way things should be?
I already told you: "just because the law is a certain way today, doesn't mean that's the way it should be. It used to be legal to kick people out of restaurants because you didn't like the color of their skin, it's not today. It used to be legal to fire people because they were members of a union or other political group, it's not today."
I'm satisfied with the reasoning as stated. If you can't grasp why a social media ban and refusing to ship a letter are two completely different scenarios with respect to free speech, I can't elucidate it any further. Perhaps you should take your own advice about using an LLM to understand the point.
> "GDPR was given AS AN EXAMPLE. I never suggested it "confers access
You gave it as an example of entitlements, but I pointed out that it doesn't entitle you to anything that you don't already own. Unlike your own data, you don't own a voice on a social media platform, hence why the example doesn't work.
> For what? You know laws can change, don't you?
It doesn't matter that the laws can change. You have no idea if or how they might change, so that observation does not contribute anything to the discussion.
It's urging/educating people to rely on Facebook as little as possible, since it is not committed to being a neutral platform.
If you support free speech, you should support facebook's right to express their own political views.
But that does not mean you have to support facebook's political views, or the way they exercise them!
When I see comments like this, I despair at how poorly people understand the basic concept of free speech. Hopefully you're just trolling.
Facebook is not a person. Facebook should not have "rights" nor "political views".
The silly idea of treating companies like persons and giving them any "rights" at all is what got us into this mess in the first place.
If companies as a legal concept didn't exist in their current form, then we wouldn't have this problem of one person, or more commonly many people, using them as a proxy to get away with a bunch of unethical stuff. Often way more unethical that whatever Facebook / Zuck is doing, such as destroying ecosystems, prioritizing profits over worker safety, etc.
But yes, I'd like to see the board of Facebook and the boards of many other companies being held liable for the actions of those companies. But for some reason, it's only ever "expedient" to grant companies the rights rightfully belonging to people, and never "expedient" to impose the same sorts of liabilities on them as on people. (Not that a non-physical entity such as a company could ever practically face the same penalties as a physical person anyway, which is another ("obvious" in your parlance) reason not to grant them those rights.)
If I was interested in going down the ad-hominem route I'd claim that you simply see the status quo as "obvious" because you lack the power of imagination to consider a more sensible alternative.
In the USA, the supreme court has ruled a corporation DOES in fact have rights. Like the lawsuit of advertising medicine that a state banned-- the SC ruled that was infringing the rights of corporations to "express" their speech.
As someone from UK, I find this whole "Corporations have more rights than I do" very disturbing but thats how it is
I agree with GP that the arguments one makes should reflect one's actual reasoning, e.g. "I believe it's wrong to say thing X and therefore I support deplatforming in that instace". But because "I support deplatforming in every instace" sounds stronger many people falsely claimed that to be their reasoning. And now they're forced to deal with the consequences, i.e. being called hypocrites.
I suspect that the argument you're referring to is more like "free speech does not imply that all deplatforming is unacceptable." Again, it is not the case that the only 2 consistent views are "all deplatforming is unacceptable" or "all deplatforming is acceptable."
> But we should claim the right to suppress them [intolerant ideologies] if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
It came from Karl Popper, the guy better known for philosophy of science and using "falsifiability" as a primary criteria for what's science/not-science.
That the "free speech" crowd that said "we must allow all hateful and intolerant speech" sure does seem to quiet up when those advocating for open societies get silenced!
The only solution that makes sense to me is rewriting section 230 since these platforms are now publishers making editorial decisions. They are using algorithms to publish instead of humans but are publishers never the less.
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1) popper was not a communist, quite the opposite
2) I am not a communist, quite the opposite
3) it's not an unquestionable gospel, it's something to be considered and carefully see it it applies, or is valid
4) I have literally never seen another person cite the Paradox of Tolerance, something that I learned about decades ago, so imagine my surprise at your sarcastic response.
If this is such a common response in your experience, why don't you have any critique of it, other than strawmen?
But even if somebody had encounters it a lot, it certainly doesn't excuse illogical behavior if only attacking straw men, refusing to engage at all, and make up weird insults about communism.
I notice that you too have no counter to it!
In a society that wants to minimize violence in daily interactions, we still allow it to happen. Claiming that the desire to minimize something means a total ban is just a childish and simple way to approach the issue. The residual of others to engage with the idea further proves how little they have thought about it.
Popper was a serious philosopher, such a trivial and unserious engagement with the idea doesn't pass muster.
The bit about "the worst people's accounts" just sounds like a refutation of everything else in the article. The problem was always that it was up to interpretation who "the worst people" are.
IDK why so many people want to die on this hill of not forcing social media companies to extend free-speech rights to their userbase. Facebook didn't accidentally wind up in this position where their TOS can effectively censor entire political movements on the Zuck's whim. They spent decades purposefully angling for this by acquiring competitors and encouraging people to use their platform for any and all communication. They own the audience.
>But there is a better solution: build tools that are open, decentralized, and user controlled. And then actually use them instead of just giving more power to Mark Zuckerberg to shut down a protest organization’s account in the middle of one of its big protests.
Not happening LOL. The decentralized platforms have been there for 10-20 years, hardly anybody uses them.
Back when the shoe was on the other foot, the right tried to make *several* alternative platforms and there was widespread collusion amongst all levels of infrastructure providers to push them off the internet. The same will happen to any platform which seeks to effect political change and attains enough critical mass that it could plausibly do so.
Conveniently ignoring the fact that he livestreamed it on Facebook and their moderators refused to delete it.
Of course thats far from the only time that somebody planning an act of terrorism has a history of concerning posts but somehow other social networks are hardly ever held to this standard.
>Parler? AWS said that they'd reported over 100 posts to Parler that were active and specific plans for violence and incitement, and been ignored. Following the FBI investigating Parler for its role in coordinating violence on Jan 6, AWS pulled the plug.
Well if they were really that "active and specific" they should have called the FBI too. But once again, this sort of standard should have sank every other social network decades ago if it was actually applied equally. Social media is always used to incite riots. Why are you acting like this is unheard of? We have entire social movements with hashtags in their names.
We got Internet moderation.
Watch out what you wish for.
It's the Right wing politicians too. Look at Texas and pornography laws or the IRL book bans. We live in a politics of Win At All Costs, Dominate Those Who Think Differently, i.e utterly broken and anti-democratic.
The problem is the Oligarchy, the are thick from money, power, and hubris
It was the right who wanted to repeal Section 230 and have the government take over all social media platforms and regulate them, and make it illegal to ban their speech. The left never wanted anything of the sort.
Typical ways of overcoming censorship is creating own lingo, so that it goes past censors or distribution of physical leaflets, underground press and organising resistance offline.