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An interesting twist on free speech on the internet is that almost all speech on the internet is being done on private companies' websites. No private company

An interesting twist on free speech on the internet is that almost all speech on the internet is being done on private companies' websites. No private company is considered required to promote or protect free speech. Each forum is able to say "don't like our policies, then go somewhere else". This even seems quite reasonable. Why should any particular forum be forced to allow any particular kind of speech? Should Facebook be forced to allow porn as something that is protected by freedom of expression? On the flip side, as more and more of meaningful speech occurs on these not-really-public forums of Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, there exists quite a bit of unease on my part for these global companies to insist on narrowing expression on these platforms to that which they deem acceptable by whatever internal process they desire. Facebook's study that showed they could manipulate people's feelings by altering the feed algorithm indicates this is an awful lot of power handed to a company focused on making profits and staying on the good side of governmental organizations. YouTube recently started changing their policies that has started to create problems for people using their platforms. This would likely be okay if there were real public space on the web, but it currently operates more as a series of visits to other people's private property. The release valve is a persons ability to create their own corner of the internet, but even this must leap through various ISP and web host providers terms of service. Additionally, is it really speech if you're just doing the internet equivalent of talking to yourself on an island in the middle of nowhere? Cases like this photo will only become more apparent as time goes on. I'm not sure how society will negotiate these ideas, but at present, the commercial interests are leading the conversation in their favor.

scrollaway 10y ago
> YouTube recently started changing their policies that has started to create problems for people using their platforms. Not at all recently. But youtube's policies and the community's reactions to them are very much a case of "First they came for the x". Happens very regularly, and only the affected ones speak up, which is just not enough when we're talking about a web giant like google/youtube.
force_reboot 10y ago
you've just expressed a great counterpoint to https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/. Furthermore, it's not just a matter of ISPs. Because of its refusal to censor various kinds of content, sites like 8chan have been refused service from various sites that process donations.
ucaetano 10y ago
"An interesting twist on free speech on the internet is that almost all speech on the internet is being done on private companies' websites." This photo was taken by a photographer employed by a private company, then published by a private company, awarded a prize by a private organization. Not much has changed.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  The alternative is something like socialism or communism. No thanks.
  - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
    Most forms of socialism are entirely compatible with private enterprise. Totalitarian media and production control like the Soviets used, yeah, that's different.
  - Intermernet 10y ago
    I was thinking about this the other day. I'm of the opinion that the main problem with Socialism or Communism is exactly the same problem as with Capitalism or "Free Market" economics. Human greed. They're all viable theories of how to structure a society, but they all fail when the people in power decide to put their own interests in front of the needs of the general populous.
    - ucaetano 10y ago
      Capitalism ends up being better because it usually tries to have a separation of powers between those who control production resources and those who control policy and politics. In real-world Socialism and Communism, they are the same, allowing for greed to have a much harder impact. Sadly, that separation falls apart far too often.
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  There was a while when news services at least paid lip service to the idea that they told people what they needed to know, not just what they wanted to hear. Obviously it wasn't perfect, but a lot of journalists took it very seriously. Facebook just fired the last of its on-staff journalists.
larsiusprime 10y ago
relevant: http://www.jonas-kyratzes.net/2014/04/26/free-speech-and-the-means-of-communication/ http://www.jonas-kyratzes.net/2014/04/26/free-speech-and-the...
- Joeboy 10y ago
  The idea that Freedom of Speech is just a thing from the US constitution is particularly odd if you're not from the US. Freedom of Speech is, surely, a measure of how free you are to communicate your message to other people.
  - cloudjacker 10y ago
    It is particularly odd if you're in the US too though, but yes that is accurate. Freedom of speech is not a measure of those things, it is a concept we, in the US, exported to conform other democracies to our will, with mixed success. It became a meme amongst private persons. And it is still a meme, virally spreading words that have no congruence with the reality the words are used in. Freedom of speech is a limitation of the government retaliating on a person solely on the basis of their speech. It is not a limitation of private persons using the government's courts to create a consequence for someone else's speech, it is not a limitation on private persons for restricting or censoring other people's speech.
  - gwright 10y ago
    The two ideas are certainly related but they are also different in very significant ways. Conflating the two makes discussion of these concepts imprecise and muddled. The notion that the government should have limited power to restrict communication is quite different from the notion that private entities have some legal obligation to publish content (i.e. that individuals can assert the right to publish via platforms that they don't own).
    - kijin 10y ago
      Legal obligation, of course not. I don't think anyone involved in the current incident was arguing for a legal obligation for Facebook to do anything in particular. Moral obligation, now that's a different beast. Assuming that free speech is valuable to society as a whole, one might argue that everyone (including Facebook employees) has a moral obligation to promote it, or at least not inhibit it too much.
eva1984 10y ago
Prior to internet, speeches are controlled by newspapers and televisions. They won't even publish your speech if they don't like it. In that sense, Internet is still a huge step forward.
- bobcostas55 10y ago
  The difference is network effects. There are tons and tons of newspapers (over 1000 in the US alone), and one can plausibly start their own. There's a tiny number of social networks and it's extremely difficult to break into that market. Low barriers + large numbers is at least a nudge in the direction of intellectual diversity.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    Tons and tons of newspapers? Not really. Here in Australia there are precisely two. All major newspapers are owned either by News Limited, a subsidiary of News Corporation, or Fairfax Media.[1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_of_Australia#Newspapers_and_news_websites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_of_Australia#Newspapers_...
    - skissane 10y ago
      Three if you count Perth's local daily, The West Australian, which is owned by Seven West Media. That doesn't really change your point though. But, Australia is a small country (in population terms), and it only has six or so major cities, so I don't think we could expect vastly wider media ownership than we've currently got.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
        One could argue that we could add should, but we don't. We just think 23 million people can only support two news papers. That way we can claim there isn't a monopoly.
    - Synaesthesia 10y ago
idrios 10y ago
I agree with you. To continue your internet-as-a-physical-place analogue, Facebook is basically a mall where you are encouraged to hang out and intermittently enticed to buy things. -No porn on Facebook is the equivalent to no nudity allowed at the mall. -Banning users is the equivalent of kicking a person out of the mall. -Censoring messages is the equivalent of... uh.. gagging a person just before they can say something you didn't want them to say. -Direct messaging people or groups is the equivalent of talking to your friends, while an anonymous person videotapes and listens without really letting you know they're doing that. -Posting a status is the equivalent of shouting what you're feeling or thinking to nobody in particular -Facebook curating newsfeeds is the equivalent of putting you in a room and showing videos of the things your friends are shouting, intermittently throwing in advertisements, and just kind of letting you believe that what you're seeing is real and unadulterated. Point is, if you look at Facebook like a physical establishment, it's a pretty weird place. But as long as people continue to recognize that censorship and surveillance are not cool, they will continue to complain to the groups who engage in it, and constantly be on the lookout for better alternatives. I personally recommend Snapchat for un-surveilled interaction with friends, Hacker News for news with uncensored commentary, and LinkedIn to stay connected with people. And I'm glad that there are reasonable alternatives to all of these
- serge2k 10y ago
  > Hacker News for news with uncensored commentary Except not really. Rules and moderation are censorship. Why would you not recommend whatsapp or another encrypted system?
  - idrios 10y ago
    Would also recommend Whatsapp. But I like the transient nature of Snapchat. Hacker News is moderated but not censored in any sense that I worry about. With zero moderation you get pretty much just spambots. With bare minimum moderation you get trolls, schills, and harassers, so cohesive conversations don't happen because points can't be made in full. Hacker News is the best source I know of for news + discussion because the rules and moderation censor the noisy, unsubstantive comments that would otherwise derail an important conversation. That said, I wish there were more forums like HN because I would like to follow the same quality of conversation that I see here on subjects besides computer science and tech companies.
gjolund 10y ago
It makes me sad that I will be explaining to future generations that the web was once the last bastion of freedom.
skybrian 10y ago
Why are we having this conversation here rather than on Reddit or Twitter? For me it's because I prefer a moderated forum. We don't have pictures at all here (though you can link to them) which makes some issues non-problems. Many people are more interested in avoiding spam and abuse than they are in seeing something outrageous. As long as you have forum-shopping the more highly moderated places have an advantage, at least some of the time. Facebook is in the moderation business. They're going to screw up sometimes but they're not going to stop moderating. On the other side you often have people saying they're not doing enough about abuse.
- baq 10y ago
  Side note: Reddit has lots of heavily moderated subs of excellent quality. HN is perhaps a bit less focused than them. I don't see why r/hackernews couldn't be a thing.
hkmurakami 10y ago
As Washington DC moves its publishing to Medium, I wonder what ramifications we will face in the future.
JoshTriplett 10y ago
> Additionally, is it really speech if you're just doing the internet equivalent of talking to yourself on an island in the middle of nowhere? Yes, absolutely. You have the right to speak. You do not have the right to an audience.
posterboy 10y ago
> No private company is considered required to promote or protect free speech They are liable to offer the service in good faith. If their service to the user is communication, then I don't see how that promises any less than free speech. Publication of pornography to minors is an offense, so it's not covered by free speech to begin with. The picture in question is not pornography.
pmontra 10y ago
Go back 30 years. TV and newspapers were (and are) private companies too. We had free speech when speaking with friends or at a political meeting, and sending mail. Now we're doing more of that kind of communication inside social networks. They can't censor preemptively so they censor after we publish. But it's not different than wanting to write to friends using a newspaper as intermediary. The reason we were not doing that was the extreme inconvenience of the method but censorship would have been the same. What we're doing now is forcing free speech protection on some companies that became a communication medium almost indistinguishable from free air. It's an uphill battle but not an impossible one.
- mirimir 10y ago
  > Well, outside of California and New Jersey, the First Amendment’s strong protection for free expression — particularly speech involving public issues — likely won’t apply in your local mall if it’s privately owned. http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/do-you-have-free-speech-in-a-shopping-mall http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/do-you-have-free-speech-...
zouhair 10y ago
I think we need laws that when a website has a certain number of users it should be considered a public space and not private one anymore.
jimmywanger 10y ago
Well, you can't really have it both ways. Both Twitter and Facebook were trumpeting their dedication to freedom of speech and liberty during Arab Spring. If they had just said, "Look we have all these shareholders we have to appease with money, and right now this is the best way to make more money" I would have no problem with that. Don't pretend to be anti-censorship and then turn around and censor things.

scrollaway 10y ago

> YouTube recently started changing their policies that has started to create problems for people using their platforms. Not at all recently. But youtube's policies and the community's reactions to them are very much a case of "First they came for the x". Happens very regularly, and only the affected ones speak up, which is just not enough when we're talking about a web giant like google/youtube.

force_reboot 10y ago

you've just expressed a great counterpoint to https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/. Furthermore, it's not just a matter of ISPs. Because of its refusal to censor various kinds of content, sites like 8chan have been refused service from various sites that process donations.

ucaetano 10y ago

"An interesting twist on free speech on the internet is that almost all speech on the internet is being done on private companies' websites." This photo was taken by a photographer employed by a private company, then published by a private company, awarded a prize by a private organization. Not much has changed.

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
The alternative is something like socialism or communism. No thanks.
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  Most forms of socialism are entirely compatible with private enterprise. Totalitarian media and production control like the Soviets used, yeah, that's different.
- Intermernet 10y ago
  I was thinking about this the other day. I'm of the opinion that the main problem with Socialism or Communism is exactly the same problem as with Capitalism or "Free Market" economics. Human greed. They're all viable theories of how to structure a society, but they all fail when the people in power decide to put their own interests in front of the needs of the general populous.
  - ucaetano 10y ago
    Capitalism ends up being better because it usually tries to have a separation of powers between those who control production resources and those who control policy and politics. In real-world Socialism and Communism, they are the same, allowing for greed to have a much harder impact. Sadly, that separation falls apart far too often.
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
There was a while when news services at least paid lip service to the idea that they told people what they needed to know, not just what they wanted to hear. Obviously it wasn't perfect, but a lot of journalists took it very seriously. Facebook just fired the last of its on-staff journalists.

larsiusprime 10y ago

relevant: http://www.jonas-kyratzes.net/2014/04/26/free-speech-and-the-means-of-communication/ http://www.jonas-kyratzes.net/2014/04/26/free-speech-and-the...

Joeboy 10y ago
The idea that Freedom of Speech is just a thing from the US constitution is particularly odd if you're not from the US. Freedom of Speech is, surely, a measure of how free you are to communicate your message to other people.
- cloudjacker 10y ago
  It is particularly odd if you're in the US too though, but yes that is accurate. Freedom of speech is not a measure of those things, it is a concept we, in the US, exported to conform other democracies to our will, with mixed success. It became a meme amongst private persons. And it is still a meme, virally spreading words that have no congruence with the reality the words are used in. Freedom of speech is a limitation of the government retaliating on a person solely on the basis of their speech. It is not a limitation of private persons using the government's courts to create a consequence for someone else's speech, it is not a limitation on private persons for restricting or censoring other people's speech.
- gwright 10y ago
  The two ideas are certainly related but they are also different in very significant ways. Conflating the two makes discussion of these concepts imprecise and muddled. The notion that the government should have limited power to restrict communication is quite different from the notion that private entities have some legal obligation to publish content (i.e. that individuals can assert the right to publish via platforms that they don't own).
  - kijin 10y ago
    Legal obligation, of course not. I don't think anyone involved in the current incident was arguing for a legal obligation for Facebook to do anything in particular. Moral obligation, now that's a different beast. Assuming that free speech is valuable to society as a whole, one might argue that everyone (including Facebook employees) has a moral obligation to promote it, or at least not inhibit it too much.

eva1984 10y ago

Prior to internet, speeches are controlled by newspapers and televisions. They won't even publish your speech if they don't like it. In that sense, Internet is still a huge step forward.

bobcostas55 10y ago
The difference is network effects. There are tons and tons of newspapers (over 1000 in the US alone), and one can plausibly start their own. There's a tiny number of social networks and it's extremely difficult to break into that market. Low barriers + large numbers is at least a nudge in the direction of intellectual diversity.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  Tons and tons of newspapers? Not really. Here in Australia there are precisely two. All major newspapers are owned either by News Limited, a subsidiary of News Corporation, or Fairfax Media.[1] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_of_Australia#Newspapers_and_news_websites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_of_Australia#Newspapers_...
  - skissane 10y ago
    Three if you count Perth's local daily, The West Australian, which is owned by Seven West Media. That doesn't really change your point though. But, Australia is a small country (in population terms), and it only has six or so major cities, so I don't think we could expect vastly wider media ownership than we've currently got.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
      One could argue that we could add should, but we don't. We just think 23 million people can only support two news papers. That way we can claim there isn't a monopoly.
  - Synaesthesia 10y ago

idrios 10y ago

I agree with you. To continue your internet-as-a-physical-place analogue, Facebook is basically a mall where you are encouraged to hang out and intermittently enticed to buy things. -No porn on Facebook is the equivalent to no nudity allowed at the mall. -Banning users is the equivalent of kicking a person out of the mall. -Censoring messages is the equivalent of... uh.. gagging a person just before they can say something you didn't want them to say. -Direct messaging people or groups is the equivalent of talking to your friends, while an anonymous person videotapes and listens without really letting you know they're doing that. -Posting a status is the equivalent of shouting what you're feeling or thinking to nobody in particular -Facebook curating newsfeeds is the equivalent of putting you in a room and showing videos of the things your friends are shouting, intermittently throwing in advertisements, and just kind of letting you believe that what you're seeing is real and unadulterated. Point is, if you look at Facebook like a physical establishment, it's a pretty weird place. But as long as people continue to recognize that censorship and surveillance are not cool, they will continue to complain to the groups who engage in it, and constantly be on the lookout for better alternatives. I personally recommend Snapchat for un-surveilled interaction with friends, Hacker News for news with uncensored commentary, and LinkedIn to stay connected with people. And I'm glad that there are reasonable alternatives to all of these

serge2k 10y ago
> Hacker News for news with uncensored commentary Except not really. Rules and moderation are censorship. Why would you not recommend whatsapp or another encrypted system?
- idrios 10y ago
  Would also recommend Whatsapp. But I like the transient nature of Snapchat. Hacker News is moderated but not censored in any sense that I worry about. With zero moderation you get pretty much just spambots. With bare minimum moderation you get trolls, schills, and harassers, so cohesive conversations don't happen because points can't be made in full. Hacker News is the best source I know of for news + discussion because the rules and moderation censor the noisy, unsubstantive comments that would otherwise derail an important conversation. That said, I wish there were more forums like HN because I would like to follow the same quality of conversation that I see here on subjects besides computer science and tech companies.

gjolund 10y ago

It makes me sad that I will be explaining to future generations that the web was once the last bastion of freedom.

skybrian 10y ago

Why are we having this conversation here rather than on Reddit or Twitter? For me it's because I prefer a moderated forum. We don't have pictures at all here (though you can link to them) which makes some issues non-problems. Many people are more interested in avoiding spam and abuse than they are in seeing something outrageous. As long as you have forum-shopping the more highly moderated places have an advantage, at least some of the time. Facebook is in the moderation business. They're going to screw up sometimes but they're not going to stop moderating. On the other side you often have people saying they're not doing enough about abuse.

baq 10y ago
Side note: Reddit has lots of heavily moderated subs of excellent quality. HN is perhaps a bit less focused than them. I don't see why r/hackernews couldn't be a thing.

hkmurakami 10y ago

As Washington DC moves its publishing to Medium, I wonder what ramifications we will face in the future.

JoshTriplett 10y ago

> Additionally, is it really speech if you're just doing the internet equivalent of talking to yourself on an island in the middle of nowhere? Yes, absolutely. You have the right to speak. You do not have the right to an audience.

posterboy 10y ago

> No private company is considered required to promote or protect free speech They are liable to offer the service in good faith. If their service to the user is communication, then I don't see how that promises any less than free speech. Publication of pornography to minors is an offense, so it's not covered by free speech to begin with. The picture in question is not pornography.

pmontra 10y ago

Go back 30 years. TV and newspapers were (and are) private companies too. We had free speech when speaking with friends or at a political meeting, and sending mail. Now we're doing more of that kind of communication inside social networks. They can't censor preemptively so they censor after we publish. But it's not different than wanting to write to friends using a newspaper as intermediary. The reason we were not doing that was the extreme inconvenience of the method but censorship would have been the same. What we're doing now is forcing free speech protection on some companies that became a communication medium almost indistinguishable from free air. It's an uphill battle but not an impossible one.

mirimir 10y ago
> Well, outside of California and New Jersey, the First Amendment’s strong protection for free expression — particularly speech involving public issues — likely won’t apply in your local mall if it’s privately owned. http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/do-you-have-free-speech-in-a-shopping-mall http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/do-you-have-free-speech-...

zouhair 10y ago

I think we need laws that when a website has a certain number of users it should be considered a public space and not private one anymore.

jimmywanger 10y ago

Well, you can't really have it both ways. Both Twitter and Facebook were trumpeting their dedication to freedom of speech and liberty during Arab Spring. If they had just said, "Look we have all these shareholders we have to appease with money, and right now this is the best way to make more money" I would have no problem with that. Don't pretend to be anti-censorship and then turn around and censor things.