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I've been thinking about the concept of censorship by tech companies lately, and I've come to a question I'm not sure the answer to. Ethically, why is society o
by AlexB138 8y ago
I've been thinking about the concept of censorship by tech companies lately, and I've come to a question I'm not sure the answer to. Ethically, why is society ok with forcing a company to provide a service they find morally reprehensible, for instance the baker who was sued for refusing to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, and at the same time we argue that YouTube has a right to refuse to provide a service to customers because of the content of their videos?
It strikes me as incompatible. It seems we ought to either believe companies are legally required to provide their service to all comers or they're not.
- sheepmullet 8y agoWe should be applying far stricter standards to Google and Facebook - in many ways they have effective monopolies in a way that a baker doesn't.
- fjsolwmv 8y agoBecause the bakers are discriminating against certain people doing the same behaviors as other people, but content hosts are discriminating against certain content, regardless of who does it. We don't allow Google to censor homosexual content, and we allow bakers to ban gun cakes.
- conanbatt 8y agoI think its a useless difference. The baker could say hey doesnt want to bake cakes for "a type of wedding", not against "gay people that wed". The declared intent is irrelevant.
- GW150914 8y agoHardly. A baker is free to say they won’t bake a giant swastika cake, or a massive ejaculating penis cake. They’re allowed to pick and choose what they’ll bake, but not who they bake for. If a straight couple wants an ejaculating penis cake, and that offends the baker they don’t have to make it, but they can’t ban the straight couple for being straight. If a guy couple wants a typical wedding cake saying, “Jane and Jill 4 Ever” on it, that’s not something they can reasonably refuse. If Jane and Jill want a swastika cake, they’re shit out of luck.
- JumpCrisscross 8y agoWasn’t the case about a gay wedding cake? That makes disentangling the what and for whom very difficult.
- GW150914 8y agoIt wasn’t an unusual or offensive cake, so it really doesn’t. It’s not as though the couple asked for a cake, but “make it extra gay!”
- madeofpalk 8y agoWould "A. Baker" refuse to bake a non-homosexual wedding cake for a homosexual wedding (whatever that is)?
- teawrecks 8y agoIt was a normal cake. The "for whom" was the only differentiating factor.
- Natsu 8y agoThere's been more than one case, actually, so it really depends which case you're talking about.
- conanbatt 8y agoIf you refuse service to a neo-nazi, can you get sued and fined?
- throwawayjava 8y ago> can you get sued and fined? Generally not. I found this blog post pretty helpful: https://takecareblog.com/blog/neo-nazis-wedding-cakes-and-compelled-speech https://takecareblog.com/blog/neo-nazis-wedding-cakes-and-co... (Nit: anyone can be sued/fined for anything. The question is whether the plaintiff/gov't will win the resulting lawsuit.)
- throwawayjava 8y ago> The baker could say hey doesnt want to bake cakes for "a type of wedding", not against "gay people that wed". The declared intent is irrelevant. The courts are endowed with common sense; e.g., you can find many examples of courts rejecting various attempts at "literally equivalent to <insert protected class> but I never said <insert protected class!>".
- Natsu 8y agoYes, but then you end up with a mind-reading exercise, where someone's opinion of your intent matters more than what you actually did or did not do. Your example is obvious enough, sure, but you will surely hit some where many reasonable people strongly disagree after enough such cases. This is bad because we're all biased in various ways and knowing about that bias actually tends to make it worse among the people who don't realize that simply knowing your biases doesn't make you immune to them, leading them to overconfidence.
- throwawayjava 8y ago> Yes, but then you end up with a mind-reading exercise, where someone's opinion of your intent matters more than what you actually did or did not do A sound, centuries-old concept that pre-dates the modern justice system. (Also, in most cases, you're wrong. Intent does not matter more. Which is why actions, not opinions, constitute the illegal activity. You can hate gay people as long as you make them their cakes. You can freely express Nazi ideologies as long as you don't plow your car into people. You can hate your wife as long as you don't murder her. You can hate your boss as long as you don't burn down the office building. Etc.) > but you will surely hit some where many reasonable people strongly disagree after enough such cases. Certainly. SCOTUS often passes down tests, but they can be very open-ended and sometimes even depend upon cultural context (e.g., Tinker). Also, those tests are sometimes updated as new cases are presented and the boundaries drawn by the previous test are judged insufficient (again, e.g., Tinker). > This is bad because we're all biased in various ways and knowing about that bias actually tends to make it worse among the people who don't realize that simply knowing your biases doesn't make you immune to them, leading them to overconfidence. How so? Judges understand that the law is full of grey area. When controversial issues of constitutional law come up, they often spend a great time deliberating. This is one reason why it's imperative to have a high-quality and independent judiciary. Our judges are not perfect, and some are even quite fallible. But this sort of self-assuredness in the outcome of dicey constitutional law cases is far more common from people off the bench than people on the bench. Even on the problem at hand, it's pretty obvious that both of the "no grey area" positions are ridiculously untenable. For the general case, what's your proposed solution? A system of laws with no grey area? I conjecture that this problem is even harder than AI-strong. Way harder. We're just barely learning how to write bug-free device drivers in a formal language. What makes you so confident that we could solve all the problems of politics and philosophy, in a completely unambiguous way, in an informal language?
- otakucode 8y agoWe definitely do allow Google to censor homosexual content. LGBTQ videos and any video coming anywhere near issues that affect those communities were among the very first videos to be censored. Prior to the fictional 'adpocalypse', YouTube wasn't so heavy handed with it, but their Blogger platform always has been.
- anitil 8y agoThe more I think about this question, the more it is stumping me. I wouldn't call creators 'customers' but I think the point still stands. Curious to hear peoples thoughts
- azernik 8y ago> It seems we ought to either believe companies are legally required to provide their service to all comers or they're not. This is a false dichotomy. The law doesn't see "all comers" as equal; specifically, there are what's called "protected classes" in United States civil rights law. Businesses (and individuals while conducting certain kinds of business) are not allowed to discriminate on certain bases (e.g. race, religion, veteran status), but they are allowed to discriminate on others. The issue where the wedding bakers' case was interesting was that it pit two values against each other - in one sense it was discrimination against a protected class (sexual orientation can be a protected class, depending on state law and interpretation of federal law), and in another it was compelling speech (again, depending on your interpretation of "speech") that had religious implications. Reddit, on the other hand, is not acting against a protected class by banning e.g. /r/fatpeoplehate, /r/whiterights, or /r/incels. If the managements' ethics or customer backlash prompts them to, they can ban away. In some cases, if speech might be illegal in some ways (e.g. incitement to violence, harassment, or copyright infringement (yes, the fact that that is on the list is a bit ridiculous)) they are legally obligated to remove it.
- humanrebar 8y ago> The law doesn't see "all comers" as equal AlexB138 was asking whether are laws are ethical, not whether the laws were legal. Describing the laws in more detail doesn't really resolve the tension. In other words, why are some classes protected while others aren't? Is there a principle that we should be applying impartially (as in Rawlsian justice)?
- dbasedweeb 8y agoSure when certain classes aren’t protected, other classes roadhaul them and keep them from integrating into schools and neighborhoods? From the end of slavery through Jim Crow, until the civil rights movement there was a big experiment of not protecting anyone, and it failed. Even after you got explicit redlining, and now redlining through other means. It’s not as though there’s a lack of data for outcomes here, and it’s weighed against slippery slope fallacies and “what if’s.”
- 8y ago
- jasode 8y ago>to all comers Isn't this a category error? The gay couple's cake is a category of _people_ being refused service.[1] The gun assembly video is a category of _topic_ being censored. You can can discriminate against topics and simultaneously not discriminate against people. As an example of juxtapositions... a "gun rights owner" can upload a video of "iphone disassembly" and the video will not be deleted. On the other hand, a gun-control advocate who wants to ban gun ownership can show a video about "gun assembly" and the video will be removed. It's the topic not the people. Businesses have exercised editorial control over topics for hundreds of years. Same as The New York Times or website forums where users "upload" words such as HN. If you submit a topic to HN that goes against the moderator's rules, it will be flagged and deleted. It doesn't matter if the HN user is gay or gun-control or any protected group. [1] https://aclu-co.org/court-rules-bakery-illegally-discriminated-against-gay-couple/ https://aclu-co.org/court-rules-bakery-illegally-discriminat...
- purple-again 8y agoNot a lawyer. I’m guess I’m just really confused because I’m reading all of these comments and still not seeing a distinction. YouTube can ban all homosexual videos from its platform so long as it doesn’t ban unrelated videos from homosexual people? That doesn’t sound right to me but it’s what I’m interpreting from your post. Further are you saying the baker could refuse to sell them the cake they wanted because it had some gay theme ( two girl names I think) so long as they offered to sell them a Superman cake at the same time?
- throwawayjava 8y ago> YouTube can ban all homosexual videos from its platform so long as it doesn’t ban unrelated videos from homosexual people? Yes (at least in states where sexual orientation is a protected class). > Further are you saying the baker could refuse to sell them the cake they wanted because it had some gay theme ( two girl names I think) so long as they offered to sell them a Superman cake at the same time? AFAIK this is not a settled issue. I imagine a reasonable test might boil down to "If you have a policy that you never put names on cakes then you can refuse to write 'Jane and Jill'. But if you will write 'Jack and Jill' when asked, then you also need to write 'Jane and Jill' when asked." In other words, the store may not have a policy that is functionally indistinguishable from refusing service to a protected class. Notice that Google banning videos about homosexuality would definitely not be equivalent to banning homosexuals from using its public service. This gets hairy; e.g., religion is a protected class. Could a Satanist cult compel a cake-making business owner to write down a disavowal of his God (in frosting)? Evaluating hairy edge-cases on a case-by-case basis are why human judges exist. IANAL.
- dane-pgp 8y agoIt might be helpful to highlight the following distinction: In the case of putting a message on a cake, an individual human has to effectively perform a deliberate action which may seem to express an opinion (potentially one which they do not share), whereas in the case of a big tech company, the default state is for their software to allow any customer to express any opinion with their own comment, and it is only the deliberate act of censorship/moderation that involves the conscious decision of an employee. If a baker had an "automatic cake decorating machine", but they checked what messages you had put on your cake before allowing you to leave their bakery with the result, then that would be a closer comparison.
- throwawayjava 8y ago> It seems we ought to either believe companies are legally required to provide their service to all comers or they're not. Both of those positions are completely unworkable. If businesses may always select which people to serve, you can end up with de facto racial segregation. We know what that looks like. The illegality of this sort of discrimination by businesses is a direct outgrowth of that historical moment. If businesses may never select which people to serve, you'll end up with protesters clogging everything from the meat aisle at Wal-Mart to the local church's bible group. So we end up constantly revisiting how to resolve this fundamental tension between the owner's right to free speech and the customer's right to equal protection. The line today, as I understand it, is that businesses may discriminate against people for what they say or believe, but not for explicitly enumerated aspects of their person (such as race, sex, age, and now(?) sexual orientation).
- supercanuck 8y agoI think it has to do with the special ability of a media companies and their ability to agenda set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda-setting_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda-setting_theory
- DSingularity 8y agoImagine it’s the late 16th century. And one company exclusively owned the rights to the printing press. Now imagine that this company was a powerful company involved in all kinds of sectors of public interest. Would you still question the wisdom of ensuring this company was censoring according to the standards the public and not simply in the business interests of the company?
- Clanan 8y agoI think the simplest solution is the correct one: because politics. Consider how many ideologues flip-flop over similar situations when "their" side is the victim. For example, Trump and Cambridge Analytics vs. Obama's campaign and Facebook. At the end of the day, it's people making these decisions and movements, and most people are not well-trained in ethics.
- IIAOPSW 8y agoIt may be incompatible, but the voting public wants to have their cake and eat it too.
- nine_k 8y agoLaw, and especially common law, is not a neat and logical system. It's more an attempt to approximate the idea of justice (as in being fair and just), as people see it at particular time. So it's built out if patches, special cases, and other adaptations to reality at hand. This is likely a rather reasonable system, though: it imitates the way the biological life adapts to the conditions it cannot predict, mostly without breaking previous adaptations. It does make the system complicated and, at tines, contradictory.
- Eridrus 8y agoIt's interesting that you frame the scenarios like this, because as someone who works at a tech company I dislike content takedowns, and the way I see it tech companies are being forced, by journalists, advertisers and the threat of regulatory action, to take down content. So I don't really see these two scenarios as significantly different, but rather popular pressure overriding the preferences of businesses. On one hand the pressure was governmental and on the other it was not explicitly so, but that has more to do with the public's tools than their intentions.
- gadders 8y agoBut this isn't asking them not to censor, it's just asking them to be transparent who and what they do censor.
- matheusmoreira 8y ago>for instance the baker who was sued for refusing to make a wedding cake for a gay couple Anyone can be sued for any reason. What matters is whether the judge found the baker guilty.