7 ms·

Corporate Unpersoning

65 points by vixen99 9y ago

humanrebar 9y ago
I'm starting to wonder if America needs to add basic but explicit free speech protections in a private context the way that it has anti-discrimination ones. In the digital age, "in public" is often part of a digital forum run by a private entity (twitter, facebook, HN, fark, etc.).
- nerdponx 9y ago
  Perhaps? Or just stop using Google. Stop using Gmail, stop using Google Search, stop using Google Docs. It's not that hard.
  - Retr0spectrum 9y ago
    > It's not that hard. For one person maybe, but try getting all of society to do the same. Edit: You do realise we are both using a "digital forum run by a private entity" right now?
    - nerdponx 9y ago
      Yes, and if it turned out that hacker news was doing anything unscrupulous I would have no problem dropping it. I don't care what the rest of society does, start with you and yourself.
      - humanrebar 9y ago
        If you want to make a public statement or have an open discussion, you need to be where the public is.
        nerdponx 9y ago
        How often do you actually need to do that?
        humanrebar 9y ago
        Ask the BLM movement. Why did they feel the need to block traffic? Couldn't they have just posted on facebook? Besides, frequency of something isn't a good measure of its importance. "How often do you feel the need to vote?" is also the wrong question to ask.
  - jimnotgym 9y ago
    DuckDuckGo, Protonmail and ...too many to list. I use Google very rarely, and mostly if I am looking how things appear the the rest of the world. DuckDuckGo is a drop in replacement for search
    - drtillberg 9y ago
      But they all may nudge search results in this direction or that. Google is injecting partisanship in search, like newspapers always have been-- NYT vs WSJ, people just expect different content. Factionalizing search inherently means there cannot be a single dominant player. Google is stronger as a business when people perceive it as nonpartisan like the phone book.
  - indubitable 9y ago
    Consider that the majority of the internet still does not use adblock software. Disable your adblock and go browse for a while. And then imagine that the vast majority of people still browse this way -- 70% according to the first result I found. While I think people are genuinely quite smart on average, I also think most are not particularly well informed. Adblocking is something that directly and immediately provides a vastly better experience. But the majority of people still do not use them and are, for the most part, likely more or less ignorant of their existence or their effect. Now somehow getting people to engage in behavior for an abstract high level change that would, in the short run, result in some negative consequences for themselves (for instance Google search is certainly still the best search engine by shrinking but still wide margin) -- that's something that is going to be very challenging to make happen. [1] - http://www.businessinsider.com/pagefair-2017-ad-blocking-report-2017-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/pagefair-2017-ad-blocking-rep...
- empath75 9y ago
  I don’t think we want to be in the business of forcing companies and people to publish or promote speech that they disagree with for whatever reason.
  - Boothroid 9y ago
    We already force companies and people to take actions that may not be compatible with their beliefs - for example here in the UK it's illegal to refuse to rent to a homosexual couple on the basis of their sexuality a room in a bed and breakfast, despite the fact that some proprietors feel this infringes on their religious beliefs.
    - humanrebar 9y ago
      A better example would be forcing photographers or event planners to sell to homosexual weddings since in those examples, the vendors are selling their partnership in expression.
- notl4wy3r 9y ago
  There are plenty of options in the modern era to promulgate your views without the support of any company. You can host them on ipfs, print them out and paste them as flyers, etc. Companies do not owe it to you to let you promote your views using their infrastructure. Maybe it is in their best interest, or the best interest of their users, or maybe not. But historically, we have valued companies' (and, transitively, company owners') free speech rights too much to force them to promote views as common carriers. There are of course a few exceptions to this where there is a compelling public interest, but you're going to have an uphill battle to prove that in the case of posting certain types of news to Facebook or Google News.
  - Boothroid 9y ago
    Not so sure about that - at least in Europe legislators are taking a pretty good look at the concentration of power in the tech giants. I think it's easy to be relaxed about this when the corporations are apparently aligned with your political interests, but would you still be arguing for a light touch if the opposite were true?
    - notl4wy3r 9y ago
      I would definitely be less comfortable if corporations were generally taking pro-hate or anti-factual stances. But since they're generally taking anti-hate or pro-factual viewpoints, I'm good with it. I think this is one of those cases where it's very hard to separate "my political views" and my epistemic or ethical views. To the extent that the latter two are part of my politics, you could say that they are political views, but I think there is more to it than that. There are other political views I oppose where I would want corporations to allow those views to be expressed on their platforms. For example, I'm opposed to a lot of economic conservativism. But I don't see it as being anti-epistemic, and I don't think corporations should suppress those viewpoints. Fortunately, that's not what is happening. I would be shocked if anyone had ever been banned from Twitter, Facebook, or Google News for promoting these sorts of views. So the problem here is that all views are political in a sense, but views are not merely political. It's not rightist political views generally that are being suppressed. It is other, more specific types of views that tend, at this point in time, to be associated with the right.
- Digory 9y ago
  I can see core search becoming regulated like a public utility. You could have other search providers (RedSearch/BlueSearch) that low-rank based on viewpoint, but there needs to be some option to get info without viewpoint weighting -- and offering actual due process to challenge 'disappearing' like this.
  - smackay 9y ago
    Municipal broadband is probably a useful example here. The technology is sufficiently well developed and there are enough technical skills available that communities with the resources can make this happen - assuming the usual political hurdles can be overcome or worked around. Perhaps there is a solution with large, well-funded libraries or universities where there is a clear mandate for creating an environment that stimulates people's minds. here the value of their brand would be the main attraction. People who we content with mainstream media could still read their personalised content on Google, Facebook, etc. However I think it will be some time before the technology is sufficiently well developed and cheap enough to make this a reality - assuming the usual political hurdles can be overcome or worked around.
- jasode 9y ago
  >wonder if America needs to add basic but explicit free speech protections [...] run by a private entity (twitter, facebook, HN, This really isn't possible to implement in any practical or consistent way without contradictions in usability. If you made such a law, trolls such as Nazi-proponents would use it as a weapon to infect sites such as HackerNews with their walls of hate speech. Moderators couldn't flag nor delete the hate speech as "off topic" because the Nazi group would complain of "censorship". Imagine that scenario: it would be against the law to delete hate speech here even though most us on HN would rather talk about programming languages or tech startups. The way marginal groups have free speech now is at the level of DNS servers by buying a domain name. Instead of trying to get Facebook and HackerNews to host your hate speech by expanding "free speech to private entities", you create a Nazi domain (e.g NaziPartyUSA.com) and put your hate speech at that URL. Same for any ISIS group that wants to infect commercial websites like Facebook/HN with recruitment propoganda to attract followers who are willing to behead infidels. The reason free speech advocates don't like that option is that they don't get an audience -- such as the millions of eyeballs at Facebook. Well, free speech doesn't guarantee an audience. The quantity of the audience is orthogonal to the free speech and the corporate censorship.
  - smackay 9y ago
    I agree and as far as I can squint there is no real solution to this. Commercial platforms put their commercial needs ahead of anything and everything else. For that to work effectively they need mainstream content that the majority will be interested in and, if possible, applying guidance to make sure the value from all that mainstream content and mainstream eyeballs is maximised. Interesting and contrarian viewpoints, which might broaden people's opinions, simply need not apply or if they then they will be accorded the marginal position they deserve. This is a pity. This piece was entertaining and informative as it points to the subtlety of these effects. Nobody necessarily needs to do anything - any algorithm or process that can optimise for any metric and produce this result - humans need not be involved in any way. This problem can only get worse as more automation, i.e. machine learning is applied and where the humans involved in the day to day running of the systems do not have the faintest clue how it works.
  - krakensden 9y ago
- santoshalper 9y ago
  Not without a gross violation of our right to freely associate.
- ci5er 9y ago
  OK. So ... I startup in my garage. And, somehow, I build a platform that people congregate together to use to talk to each other. Then... you think that the government should compel me to allow any and all voices to use my private property as a megaphone? I guess that is no different from making Christian bakers attend in support of a gay wedding or forcing Catholic nuns to fund birth-control - so ... crack on.
  - indubitable 9y ago
    Do you think it might just slightly disingenuous to compare your garage to for profit services with users reaching into the billions, far surpassing an influence and degree of control over a group of people far larger than any individual country? The scope and scale of an issue dramatically changes its societal impact which in turn shapes the necessity of managing it should that societal impact turn negative. Imagine Facebook and Google together decided to go completely partisan and support one candidate or another so much as they possibly could. They could present a huge chunk of the world's population with an entirely false reality. That power is something that should be very disconcerting in a democracy. If this were able to be put into effect, and prove workable, companies like Facebook and Google could effectively silently overthrow any democratic government - replacing them with the puppets of their choosing.
    - ci5er 9y ago
      I grant you that this is new territory. But I hesitate to grant any particular national government to do what I will with my property. I must think on this. Thank you.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    There are a few places where this doesn't analogize that way. Significantly and uniquely, Facebook, Google, etc. are selling forums and mediums for expression. They are common carriers of speech; they are not partnering in creating speech.
    - ci5er 9y ago
nerdponx 9y ago
For those who cringed at the title: I am using the Orwellian verb “unperson” playfully, but I’m also trying to be precise. What’s happening isn’t censorship, technically, at least not in the majority of cases. While there are examples of classic censorship (e.g., in the UK, France, and Germany), apart from so-called “terrorist content,” most governments aren’t formally banning expressions of anti-corporatist dissent. This isn’t Czechoslovakia, after all. This is global capitalism, where the repression of dissent is a little more subtle. The point of Google unpersoning CounterPunch (and probably many other publications) and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists like Hedges is not to prevent them from publishing their work or otherwise render them invisible to readers. The goal is to delegitmize them, and thus decrease traffic to their websites and articles, and ultimately drive them out of business, if possible.
draw_down 9y ago
Jesus. So many people have gone insane over this Russia thing.
1_2__4 9y ago
This website is garbage. Look at their other articles. They’re not supporting free speech, they’re pissed they and their ilk can’t peddle lies as easily anymore.
- YouAreGreat 9y ago
  Found on the masthead: > IMPORTANT NOTE: We do NOT accept paid advertising Yeah, it's like alien territory over there.
- macdust 9y ago
  Agreed. Read UNZ.com to catch up on the latest thought in antisemitic, eugenicist, racist, and elitist circles. Otherwise, don't get upset when dehumanizers get unpersoned.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    The thing I like about Unz.com is that it doesn't seem particularly to favor one side over the other; marginalized voices of all stripes are welcome, would-be neo-Hitlers and would-be neo-Stalins alike. To be sure, I don't have a lot of use for opinions of either stripe, but I'm glad that there's a place left on the Internet where both are suffered to exist in public, for a little while longer at least. Sticking your head under a pillow and your fingers in your ears doesn't make them go away, and all else equal, you're safer being able to keep an eye on them. (Incidentally, the comment to which I'm responding is posted under a name that's 53 days old, with 1 karma, no submissions, 1 comment. It's almost as though someone made this account a while back so the green name would age off and then stuck it in a back pocket for eventual sockpuppeting use, but I'm sure that is merely an unworthy cavil...)
    - macdust 9y ago
      >but I'm sure that is merely an unworthy cavil... 53 days ago I wrote a post but decided not to publish it. Thus am I compelled by you defend my right to publish here. >it doesn't seem particularly to favor one side over the other The non-racist voices, like Michael Hudson, get plenty of exposure elsewhere. They are used at unz.com to lend a civilized context to the sophistic racist writers. >both are suffered to exist in public Sophisticated argumentation leading to racist conclusions offends but does not enlighten and so is best ignored. There aren't two civil sides here, pretenses notwithstanding.
santoshalper 9y ago
What a steaming pile.

65 points by vixen99 9y ago

I'm starting to wonder if America needs to add basic but explicit free speech protections in a private context the way that it has anti-discrimination ones. In the digital age, "in public" is often part of a digital forum run by a private entity (twitter, facebook, HN, fark, etc.).

nerdponx 9y ago
Perhaps? Or just stop using Google. Stop using Gmail, stop using Google Search, stop using Google Docs. It's not that hard.
- Retr0spectrum 9y ago
  > It's not that hard. For one person maybe, but try getting all of society to do the same. Edit: You do realise we are both using a "digital forum run by a private entity" right now?
  - nerdponx 9y ago
    Yes, and if it turned out that hacker news was doing anything unscrupulous I would have no problem dropping it. I don't care what the rest of society does, start with you and yourself.
    - humanrebar 9y ago
      If you want to make a public statement or have an open discussion, you need to be where the public is.
      - nerdponx 9y ago
        How often do you actually need to do that?
        humanrebar 9y ago
        Ask the BLM movement. Why did they feel the need to block traffic? Couldn't they have just posted on facebook? Besides, frequency of something isn't a good measure of its importance. "How often do you feel the need to vote?" is also the wrong question to ask.
- jimnotgym 9y ago
  DuckDuckGo, Protonmail and ...too many to list. I use Google very rarely, and mostly if I am looking how things appear the the rest of the world. DuckDuckGo is a drop in replacement for search
  - drtillberg 9y ago
    But they all may nudge search results in this direction or that. Google is injecting partisanship in search, like newspapers always have been-- NYT vs WSJ, people just expect different content. Factionalizing search inherently means there cannot be a single dominant player. Google is stronger as a business when people perceive it as nonpartisan like the phone book.
- indubitable 9y ago
  Consider that the majority of the internet still does not use adblock software. Disable your adblock and go browse for a while. And then imagine that the vast majority of people still browse this way -- 70% according to the first result I found. While I think people are genuinely quite smart on average, I also think most are not particularly well informed. Adblocking is something that directly and immediately provides a vastly better experience. But the majority of people still do not use them and are, for the most part, likely more or less ignorant of their existence or their effect. Now somehow getting people to engage in behavior for an abstract high level change that would, in the short run, result in some negative consequences for themselves (for instance Google search is certainly still the best search engine by shrinking but still wide margin) -- that's something that is going to be very challenging to make happen. [1] - http://www.businessinsider.com/pagefair-2017-ad-blocking-report-2017-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/pagefair-2017-ad-blocking-rep...
empath75 9y ago
I don’t think we want to be in the business of forcing companies and people to publish or promote speech that they disagree with for whatever reason.
- Boothroid 9y ago
  We already force companies and people to take actions that may not be compatible with their beliefs - for example here in the UK it's illegal to refuse to rent to a homosexual couple on the basis of their sexuality a room in a bed and breakfast, despite the fact that some proprietors feel this infringes on their religious beliefs.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    A better example would be forcing photographers or event planners to sell to homosexual weddings since in those examples, the vendors are selling their partnership in expression.
notl4wy3r 9y ago
There are plenty of options in the modern era to promulgate your views without the support of any company. You can host them on ipfs, print them out and paste them as flyers, etc. Companies do not owe it to you to let you promote your views using their infrastructure. Maybe it is in their best interest, or the best interest of their users, or maybe not. But historically, we have valued companies' (and, transitively, company owners') free speech rights too much to force them to promote views as common carriers. There are of course a few exceptions to this where there is a compelling public interest, but you're going to have an uphill battle to prove that in the case of posting certain types of news to Facebook or Google News.
- Boothroid 9y ago
  Not so sure about that - at least in Europe legislators are taking a pretty good look at the concentration of power in the tech giants. I think it's easy to be relaxed about this when the corporations are apparently aligned with your political interests, but would you still be arguing for a light touch if the opposite were true?
  - notl4wy3r 9y ago
    I would definitely be less comfortable if corporations were generally taking pro-hate or anti-factual stances. But since they're generally taking anti-hate or pro-factual viewpoints, I'm good with it. I think this is one of those cases where it's very hard to separate "my political views" and my epistemic or ethical views. To the extent that the latter two are part of my politics, you could say that they are political views, but I think there is more to it than that. There are other political views I oppose where I would want corporations to allow those views to be expressed on their platforms. For example, I'm opposed to a lot of economic conservativism. But I don't see it as being anti-epistemic, and I don't think corporations should suppress those viewpoints. Fortunately, that's not what is happening. I would be shocked if anyone had ever been banned from Twitter, Facebook, or Google News for promoting these sorts of views. So the problem here is that all views are political in a sense, but views are not merely political. It's not rightist political views generally that are being suppressed. It is other, more specific types of views that tend, at this point in time, to be associated with the right.
Digory 9y ago
I can see core search becoming regulated like a public utility. You could have other search providers (RedSearch/BlueSearch) that low-rank based on viewpoint, but there needs to be some option to get info without viewpoint weighting -- and offering actual due process to challenge 'disappearing' like this.
- smackay 9y ago
  Municipal broadband is probably a useful example here. The technology is sufficiently well developed and there are enough technical skills available that communities with the resources can make this happen - assuming the usual political hurdles can be overcome or worked around. Perhaps there is a solution with large, well-funded libraries or universities where there is a clear mandate for creating an environment that stimulates people's minds. here the value of their brand would be the main attraction. People who we content with mainstream media could still read their personalised content on Google, Facebook, etc. However I think it will be some time before the technology is sufficiently well developed and cheap enough to make this a reality - assuming the usual political hurdles can be overcome or worked around.
jasode 9y ago
>wonder if America needs to add basic but explicit free speech protections [...] run by a private entity (twitter, facebook, HN, This really isn't possible to implement in any practical or consistent way without contradictions in usability. If you made such a law, trolls such as Nazi-proponents would use it as a weapon to infect sites such as HackerNews with their walls of hate speech. Moderators couldn't flag nor delete the hate speech as "off topic" because the Nazi group would complain of "censorship". Imagine that scenario: it would be against the law to delete hate speech here even though most us on HN would rather talk about programming languages or tech startups. The way marginal groups have free speech now is at the level of DNS servers by buying a domain name. Instead of trying to get Facebook and HackerNews to host your hate speech by expanding "free speech to private entities", you create a Nazi domain (e.g NaziPartyUSA.com) and put your hate speech at that URL. Same for any ISIS group that wants to infect commercial websites like Facebook/HN with recruitment propoganda to attract followers who are willing to behead infidels. The reason free speech advocates don't like that option is that they don't get an audience -- such as the millions of eyeballs at Facebook. Well, free speech doesn't guarantee an audience. The quantity of the audience is orthogonal to the free speech and the corporate censorship.
- smackay 9y ago
  I agree and as far as I can squint there is no real solution to this. Commercial platforms put their commercial needs ahead of anything and everything else. For that to work effectively they need mainstream content that the majority will be interested in and, if possible, applying guidance to make sure the value from all that mainstream content and mainstream eyeballs is maximised. Interesting and contrarian viewpoints, which might broaden people's opinions, simply need not apply or if they then they will be accorded the marginal position they deserve. This is a pity. This piece was entertaining and informative as it points to the subtlety of these effects. Nobody necessarily needs to do anything - any algorithm or process that can optimise for any metric and produce this result - humans need not be involved in any way. This problem can only get worse as more automation, i.e. machine learning is applied and where the humans involved in the day to day running of the systems do not have the faintest clue how it works.
- krakensden 9y ago
santoshalper 9y ago
Not without a gross violation of our right to freely associate.
ci5er 9y ago
OK. So ... I startup in my garage. And, somehow, I build a platform that people congregate together to use to talk to each other. Then... you think that the government should compel me to allow any and all voices to use my private property as a megaphone? I guess that is no different from making Christian bakers attend in support of a gay wedding or forcing Catholic nuns to fund birth-control - so ... crack on.
- indubitable 9y ago
  Do you think it might just slightly disingenuous to compare your garage to for profit services with users reaching into the billions, far surpassing an influence and degree of control over a group of people far larger than any individual country? The scope and scale of an issue dramatically changes its societal impact which in turn shapes the necessity of managing it should that societal impact turn negative. Imagine Facebook and Google together decided to go completely partisan and support one candidate or another so much as they possibly could. They could present a huge chunk of the world's population with an entirely false reality. That power is something that should be very disconcerting in a democracy. If this were able to be put into effect, and prove workable, companies like Facebook and Google could effectively silently overthrow any democratic government - replacing them with the puppets of their choosing.
  - ci5er 9y ago
    I grant you that this is new territory. But I hesitate to grant any particular national government to do what I will with my property. I must think on this. Thank you.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  There are a few places where this doesn't analogize that way. Significantly and uniquely, Facebook, Google, etc. are selling forums and mediums for expression. They are common carriers of speech; they are not partnering in creating speech.
  - ci5er 9y ago

nerdponx 9y ago

For those who cringed at the title: I am using the Orwellian verb “unperson” playfully, but I’m also trying to be precise. What’s happening isn’t censorship, technically, at least not in the majority of cases. While there are examples of classic censorship (e.g., in the UK, France, and Germany), apart from so-called “terrorist content,” most governments aren’t formally banning expressions of anti-corporatist dissent. This isn’t Czechoslovakia, after all. This is global capitalism, where the repression of dissent is a little more subtle. The point of Google unpersoning CounterPunch (and probably many other publications) and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists like Hedges is not to prevent them from publishing their work or otherwise render them invisible to readers. The goal is to delegitmize them, and thus decrease traffic to their websites and articles, and ultimately drive them out of business, if possible.

draw_down 9y ago

Jesus. So many people have gone insane over this Russia thing.

1_2__4 9y ago

This website is garbage. Look at their other articles. They’re not supporting free speech, they’re pissed they and their ilk can’t peddle lies as easily anymore.

YouAreGreat 9y ago
Found on the masthead: > IMPORTANT NOTE: We do NOT accept paid advertising Yeah, it's like alien territory over there.
macdust 9y ago
Agreed. Read UNZ.com to catch up on the latest thought in antisemitic, eugenicist, racist, and elitist circles. Otherwise, don't get upset when dehumanizers get unpersoned.
- throwanem 9y ago
  The thing I like about Unz.com is that it doesn't seem particularly to favor one side over the other; marginalized voices of all stripes are welcome, would-be neo-Hitlers and would-be neo-Stalins alike. To be sure, I don't have a lot of use for opinions of either stripe, but I'm glad that there's a place left on the Internet where both are suffered to exist in public, for a little while longer at least. Sticking your head under a pillow and your fingers in your ears doesn't make them go away, and all else equal, you're safer being able to keep an eye on them. (Incidentally, the comment to which I'm responding is posted under a name that's 53 days old, with 1 karma, no submissions, 1 comment. It's almost as though someone made this account a while back so the green name would age off and then stuck it in a back pocket for eventual sockpuppeting use, but I'm sure that is merely an unworthy cavil...)
  - macdust 9y ago
    >but I'm sure that is merely an unworthy cavil... 53 days ago I wrote a post but decided not to publish it. Thus am I compelled by you defend my right to publish here. >it doesn't seem particularly to favor one side over the other The non-racist voices, like Michael Hudson, get plenty of exposure elsewhere. They are used at unz.com to lend a civilized context to the sophistic racist writers. >both are suffered to exist in public Sophisticated argumentation leading to racist conclusions offends but does not enlighten and so is best ignored. There aren't two civil sides here, pretenses notwithstanding.

santoshalper 9y ago

What a steaming pile.