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White House Drafts Order to Probe Google, Facebook Practices

105 points by Jerry2 8y ago

HillaryBriss 8y ago
> The document instructs U.S. antitrust authorities to “thoroughly investigate whether any online platform has acted in violation of the antitrust laws.” It instructs other government agencies to recommend within a month after it’s signed actions that could potentially “protect competition among online platforms and address online platform bias.” Back in 2014, Google outspent Goldman Sachs in campaign donations. https://www.rt.com/usa/197104-google-usa-political-campaign/ https://www.rt.com/usa/197104-google-usa-political-campaign/ I wonder how much Google will spend in 2020.
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  Goldman Sachs's policy opponents don't spend much, so Goldman Sachs itself doesn't need to spend much on lobbying to achieve its policy objectives. Opponents of Net Neutrality were heavy spenders in 2014. http://amp.timeinc.net/time/3677301/google-lobbying-comcast http://amp.timeinc.net/time/3677301/google-lobbying-comcast
mc32 8y ago
This looks like this draft order is pretty wide-ranging. It covers opinion manipulation (speech) as well as the more meaty anti-trust aspect of the above companies. Whether this administration or another has the will, remains to be seen, but it seems clear that these advertising companies up to this point have collected user data with impunity and use it with impunity. I may be mistaken but I think people will eventually wake up from their indifference to this in the US and demand congress pass comprehensive data collection and usage reform.
- tptacek 8y ago
  It can be written as wide-ranging as they want it to be, but the Executive Branch has only the authority to enact laws passed by Congress, so unless there's some "opinion manipulation" statute none of us have heard of, the administration is going to be stuck with stuff like antitrust. I don't know about Facebook, but Google has been preparing for antitrust investigations for over a decade.
  - patrickg_zill 8y ago
    Yes, and the Constitution is very clear that only gold and silver are to be used in payment of debts. But here we are... Edit for the search-deprived: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_Clause https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_Clause
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - glennpratt 8y ago
      Uhh, no, it doesn't. Edit for your edit: still doesn't.
    - Erem 8y ago
      That clause describes the power of the individual states, not the federal government. And unless you've seen Oklahoma trying to pay their debts in OK Bucks I think it holds true today. The federal government is allowed to use whatever means they legislate to pay their debts.
      - patrickg_zill 8y ago
        So do those who win state contracts get paid in gold and silver?
        tptacek 8y ago
        You can literally just Google "gold and silver clause" to see that this is a Wesley Snipesian conspiracy theory. You might just as productively argue about gold-fringed admiralty flags here.
        patrickg_zill 8y ago
        You are completely uninformed on this. Read up on the form of USA currency called the "Continental".
- prolikewh0a 8y ago
  >I may be mistaken but I think people will eventually wake up from their indifference to this in the US and demand congress pass comprehensive data collection and usage reform. Not when those very data collection companies totally control the narrative [1]. [1] http://www.journalism.org/2017/09/07/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2017/ http://www.journalism.org/2017/09/07/news-use-across-social-...
charmides 8y ago
The Trump administration's critical stance on the tech giants is one of the very few things coming from them that I support, even though their actions here appears to be rooted in self-interest and self-preservation only (just like everything else they're doing). I hope that this probe will lead to some antitrust action that will be continued by the next administration.
olliej 8y ago
This sounds like they want the equal representation policies that the Republican Party got rolled back in the 80s (ruled unconstitutional iirc). It’s what allowed the rise of partisan “news”. It seems like any “equal exposure” policies would hit the same issues. That said the primary “imbalanced exposure” seems to be due to evicting people who simply spend their time attacking minorities, attack equal rights, and promoting violence towards anyone that they dislike. For whatever reason the Republican Party seems to have decided that those people represent “conservative” views that private companies should have to support.
- remarkEon 8y ago
  The kind of gross misrepresentation you’re doing right now is part of the reason why Trump has found justification to do this kind of thing in the first place.
  - supernovae 8y ago
    Nonsense.
  - notatoad 8y ago
    Can you give even a single example of how the parent comment is a gross misrepresentation? Who is a conservative personality that's been silenced by a tech company but has never attacked minorities, equal rights, or promoted violence?
    - itbeho 8y ago
      Just today... https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-09-22/james-woods-suspended-twitter-over-satirical-meme-could-impact-election https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-09-22/james-woods-suspen... Contrast this with actor Peter Fonda, who called for Trump's son to be caged with pedophiles and did so with impunity from Twitter.
    - JBReefer 8y ago
      Brendan Eich, for donating to the campaign for a (stupid) law that was later approved by voters.
orev 8y ago
I’m not seeing the connection here between “antitrust” and the alleged discrimination against conservative views. How does alleged discrimination become an antitrust issue, other than as a cudgel/threat by the government to try to punish these companies? While I do think there are probably some monopoly issues with these tech companies, this seems more like a government witch hunt against them because the current administration doesn’t like what they’re doing, not because they are truly concerned about the possible monopolies.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  > How does alleged discrimination become an antitrust issue It doesn't. > other than as a cudgel/threat by the government to try to punish these companies? It's exactly this.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    In fact, the EO appears to be explicit about being retaliation, since it mentions "platform bias" in its reasoning. "Platform bias" isn't an antitrust concern, and, in fact, the President has no authority to "de-bias" private companies.
    - mc32 8y ago
      I think with current law, the platform bias claim is a stretch --unless these platforms are recategorized and regulated as utilities like a telecoms provider. T-Mobile can't just say, we'll ID all atheists and kick them off the service (or anyone who isn't a Mormon, for example) Currently, it looks like Google could simply say, we'll de-emphasize all Atheist or Mormon topics and it would be permissible.
      - craftyguy 8y ago
        > Currently, it looks like Google could simply say, we'll de-emphasize all Atheist or Mormon topics and it would be permissible. Not really. They've de-emphasized topics that promote harassment and violence. "Atheists" or "Mormon" topics rarely, if ever, stoop that low, so I don't think you're comparing the same things here.
velox_io 8y ago
I don't think there's been such powerful organisations since the East India Company.
- romed 8y ago
  I don't think any of our current companies are as powerful as East India Company was, or even Standard Oil.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- ecshafer 8y ago
  When Google and Facebook start having personal armies, navies, and courts then I think it will be fair to compare them to the East India company. It's premature to even use them in the same sentence until then though.
  - presscast 8y ago
    "Power" doesn't necessarily imply "military power".
    - blantonl 8y ago
      Yes it does, because until these organizations have the power to take things by physical force, it's not even in the same league.
      - presscast 8y ago
        There's a main effect such that the entire world has shifted in the direction of soft-power over the past 60-or-so years. It's not clear that the East India Trading Company was less powerful than Google, but the issue of military power doesn't disprove the thesis.
      - rdtsc 8y ago
w_t_payne 8y ago
How would such a probe be carried out? Are they going to start reviewing source code?
tptacek 8y ago
Any order like this --- retaliation for perceived political slights --- is chilling. But try to remember that every administration makes a spectacle of writing "Executive Orders", and they usually mean less than people think they do. In the US system, the President cannot simply make new laws or take arbitrary actions by fiat. With the exception of powers extending from those enumerated to the Executive in the Constitution, the President can only administer laws passed by Congress. In reality, the President is a sort of CEO of a giant conglomeration of federal agencies, all of which are animated by statutes. What you generally see in these EOs is reprioritization and, in some cases, requested changes to rulemaking --- rulemaking being "places where Congress explicitly left it up to the Executive to figure out how to manage a particular law". So: unless there's some "opinion manipulation" statute none of us have heard of (unlikely, because of that pesky 1A), this is really just Trump retaliating against political enemies by threatening antitrust investigations. That squares with what Bloomberg is reporting, and Bloomberg appears to be the only outlet that has seen a copy of the EO.
- chasing 8y ago
  > In reality, the President is a sort of CEO of a giant conglomeration of federal agencies... This is such an awful comparison. I wish people would stop making it. A CEO and the President (should) operate in very different ways with a very different set of constraints with a very different set of desired goals. They might both sit at the top of large organizations, but the Executive Branch of the US government and a company are two very, very, VERY different beasts.
rhapsodic 8y ago
>While I do think there are probably some monopoly issues with these tech companies, this seems more like a government witch hunt against them because the current administration doesn’t like what they’re doing, not because they are truly concerned about the possible monopolies. Which is pretty much how the Democratic party has operated historically. Like Obama said, "punish [your] enemies." He was president of the US when he said that, and the "enemies" he was referring to were not foreign enemies of the US, but rather US citizens that the then-president deemed to be his enemies. Google and Facebook are frighteningly powerful private entities that are actively working on behalf of the Democratic party, which has devolved into a hateful, lunatic religion since Trump took office. I will applaud anything that curtails their power.
- dashundchen 8y ago
  If you look at the quote in context, what Obama was saying it clearly is nothing like you are spinning it. He was asking Latinxs voters to "punish" those who won't stand with them on certain issues, by voting against Republicans Compare this to the current president who calls a free press the "enemy of the people", threatens reporters with violence at his rallies, calls them scum and slime, and wants to quash any and all opposition to him, including wanting to revoke the right to broadcast from media that criticizes him. https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/freedom-press/donald-trump-thinks-freedom-press-disgusting https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/freedom-press/donald-t... Hard to take seriously any feigned concerns of free speech, especially when we're talking about deplatforming white supremacists and violent conspiracy theorists on private networks. I urge you to read the ACLU link above and think critically if Trump sounds like someone who should be leading a free and healthy democracy.
  - rhapsodic 8y ago
    >I urge you to read the ACLU link above and think critically if Trump sounds like someone who should be leading a free and healthy democracy. It's a lot freer and healthier under Trump than Obama. Aside from the roaring economy, the IRS is no longer meddling in elections, actively favoring one party over the other.
prolikewh0a 8y ago
From the article itself: >The document doesn’t name any companies. Poor title, poor article. It's nothing but speculation based on prior Trump tweets, mixed with the main topic of the document: antitrust.
- dguaraglia 8y ago
  You mean based on public-record statements by the President of the United States? Sounds like a pretty solid basis to base "speculation" on.
billfor 8y ago
They should be classified as common carriers. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/202 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/202
nonbel 8y ago
People just need to use other services. 1) DuckDuckGo is great for search. 2) Protonmail is great for email. 3) gab.ai instead of twitter (heard about it but never used it; I guess twitter has some use...). 4) Voat instead of Reddit (it seemed to offer the same capabilities when I visited it a bit). 5) Facebook, nothing like this should even exist but I'm sure there is some alternative out there.
- curuinor 8y ago
  gab.ai and voat are filled with literal actual white supremacists
  - nonbel 8y ago
    >"gab.ai and voat are filled with literal actual white supremacists" Is that because they were the first to be kicked off reddit/twitter? So, reddit/twitter used to be "filled with" them? Just think of it as part of a lifecycle then. If normal people start moving to voat, the bad people will make up a smaller and smaller percentage. Then they move to the next site, and voat becomes taken over by political forces, repeat. Also, I'm thinking if you don't like one of the alternatives for whatever reason, is it really that hard to create one of those sites? I heard somewhere Voat was created by one guy as a hobby. A good search engine seems like it would be the most difficult one.
    - chasing 8y ago
      No. That's not why they're that way. gab.ai used to have a variation on that stupid pepe frog as its logo, for example. They're aiming at a specific crowd.
      - nonbel 8y ago
        Fine, then people should make other ones. Personally, I don't think either reddit or twitter were a positive evolution over the decentralized specialized forums that existed before. You didn't comment on the second part, so I'll assume its correct. If it isnt that difficult to make these sites, what is the need for some sort of regulation? Someone just needs to make a new site and the people complaining about being censored/whatever can go there.
acidburnNSA 8y ago
I have been frequently and respectfully conversing with a relative who's a full-on Breitbart-parotting die-hard Trump supporter for the past year or so. He was throwing around a leaked TGIF video (of Sergey Brin explaining that he finds the election offensive) and saying that this confirms that Google is part a Democratic Party front that's indoctrinating children and teachers against conservative viewpoints. He then went on to spend the next 2 weeks parrotting Breitbart's article after article about how they use foreign workers and that they're building a Chinese government spy system and that the government needs to step in and stop them and on and on. It was fascinating. We discussed the government's role in regulating private companies and it was clear that the philosophy is totally tribal. Break up companies run by liberals, even if there's no demonstrable liberal bias of the service, by any means necessary. Political philosophy be damned. It's quite a time indeed, though I wonder if it's ever really been any different.
- fzeroracer 8y ago
  I've seen similar chilling arguments be made that Alex Jones of all people is a proper conservative voice and deserves to be heard. All of these attacks on google, facebook etc are not attempts to actually fix the huge monopolies they control but a clear partisan attack because they believe they're being persecuted or censored by these tech companies. These are the same people that claim to be anti-regulation and anti-big government, yet this is one of the more obvious examples of overreach yet.
  - nonbel 8y ago
    >"These are the same people that claim to be anti-regulation and anti-big government" Is it? From some other comments in this thread it sounded like "those people" already built alternatives for themselves (voat and gab.ai). Or did you mean "republicans"?
- Grue3 8y ago
  >they're building a Chinese government spy system and that the government needs to step in and stop them I mean the government should stop them. Aiding and abetting human rights abuses either is, or should be criminal.
Mountain_Skies 8y ago
Perhaps companies like Twitter, Google, and Facebook are actively trying to incite regulation. Social media companies have become beholden to a relatively small group of very loud activists who have frightened the companies into compliance with their political goals. They're afraid of standing up to these noise makers and have a legitimate difficulty in deciding how to best moderate the content on their platforms in a way that alienates the fewest users. Government regulation would tie their hands, allowing the companies to claim they're powerless to manipulate content in the way that activists demand it be manipulated. In such an environment where all companies are legally obliged to treat content the same way, boycott threats would be meaningless. Likely tools would arise to allow individual users to have better control over what content they do and do not see instead of insisting on the platform censoring content for them and imposing those standards on everyone else.
jim_bailie 8y ago
It's ironic and tragically funny that all the comments in support of this article's premise and of the successes of the current administration are being grayed out.
- ignoramceisblis 8y ago
  HN is profoundly biased in the comments that appear--and those that are "squelched". It's pathetic. Example: 1 hour ago, user "remarkEon" posted something that was flagged, and then removed entirely, but before it was removed, the children comments gave hint that it included essentially: 'Many people with conservative views in general are being suppressed; it is not limited to people who speak out e.g. against minorities.' I assume this because, the comments replying to it were essentially bashing it as if the onus was on remarkEon to provide examples substantiating his/her claim. As if the concept is so unfathomable. For example, a child comment from user "notatoad" 1 hour stated (in full): > Can you give even a single example of how the parent comment is a gross misrepresentation? > Who is a conservative personality that's been silenced by a tech company but has never attacked minorities, equal rights, or promoted violence? An early reply to that from user "itbeho" stated (in full): > Just today... > https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-09-22/james-woods-suspended-twitter-over-satirical-meme-could-impact-election https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-09-22/james-woods-suspen... "itbeho" was further grayed out. For providing exactly a requested example substantiating the statement that remarkEon was alluding to. And an example from /just today/. All posters who were critical of the parent poster "remarkEon" were "in full view"--with black comments. As with tech in general, we need particular users and/or moderators of HN to stop suppressing true statements of fact. Especially when there is a systemic, clear bias against a specific "political flavor" to the statements. This is precisely the issue discussed in the linked article. Peoples' perspectives of reality are being warped by what is shown to them--and what is hidden from them. Certain facts are being suppressed, which creates an extremely distorted view of reality, e.g. real events and the rate at which they occur.
  - krapp 8y ago
    You can turn showdead on to read remarkEon's comment, it wasn't removed. It said, verbatim, "The kind of gross misrepresentation you’re doing right now is part of the reason why Trump has found justification to do this kind of thing in the first place." It wasn't flagged because it went against HN's political bias, it was flagged because it was tedious, partisan and uncivil, and threads like this are destined to become cesspools anyway.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
curo 8y ago
This seems like rich fodder for a tech debate: Trump's Twitter bans were deemed unconstitutional, how does that apply to the companies themselves? Is Google's discussion to change algos after the immigration ban just? Should antitrust laws protect not just consumer rights & competition, but voter rights & viewpoint diversity? How do you build a better algorithm for political threads? Instead, even on HackerNews, you just see partisan criticism, minor viewpoint suppression, etc. This is ground zero for fixing these problems.

105 points by Jerry2 8y ago

> The document instructs U.S. antitrust authorities to “thoroughly investigate whether any online platform has acted in violation of the antitrust laws.” It instructs other government agencies to recommend within a month after it’s signed actions that could potentially “protect competition among online platforms and address online platform bias.” Back in 2014, Google outspent Goldman Sachs in campaign donations. https://www.rt.com/usa/197104-google-usa-political-campaign/ https://www.rt.com/usa/197104-google-usa-political-campaign/ I wonder how much Google will spend in 2020.

lern_too_spel 8y ago
Goldman Sachs's policy opponents don't spend much, so Goldman Sachs itself doesn't need to spend much on lobbying to achieve its policy objectives. Opponents of Net Neutrality were heavy spenders in 2014. http://amp.timeinc.net/time/3677301/google-lobbying-comcast http://amp.timeinc.net/time/3677301/google-lobbying-comcast

mc32 8y ago

This looks like this draft order is pretty wide-ranging. It covers opinion manipulation (speech) as well as the more meaty anti-trust aspect of the above companies. Whether this administration or another has the will, remains to be seen, but it seems clear that these advertising companies up to this point have collected user data with impunity and use it with impunity. I may be mistaken but I think people will eventually wake up from their indifference to this in the US and demand congress pass comprehensive data collection and usage reform.

tptacek 8y ago
It can be written as wide-ranging as they want it to be, but the Executive Branch has only the authority to enact laws passed by Congress, so unless there's some "opinion manipulation" statute none of us have heard of, the administration is going to be stuck with stuff like antitrust. I don't know about Facebook, but Google has been preparing for antitrust investigations for over a decade.
- patrickg_zill 8y ago
  Yes, and the Constitution is very clear that only gold and silver are to be used in payment of debts. But here we are... Edit for the search-deprived: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_Clause https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_Clause
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - glennpratt 8y ago
    Uhh, no, it doesn't. Edit for your edit: still doesn't.
  - Erem 8y ago
    That clause describes the power of the individual states, not the federal government. And unless you've seen Oklahoma trying to pay their debts in OK Bucks I think it holds true today. The federal government is allowed to use whatever means they legislate to pay their debts.
    - patrickg_zill 8y ago
      So do those who win state contracts get paid in gold and silver?
      - tptacek 8y ago
        You can literally just Google "gold and silver clause" to see that this is a Wesley Snipesian conspiracy theory. You might just as productively argue about gold-fringed admiralty flags here.
        patrickg_zill 8y ago
        You are completely uninformed on this. Read up on the form of USA currency called the "Continental".
prolikewh0a 8y ago
>I may be mistaken but I think people will eventually wake up from their indifference to this in the US and demand congress pass comprehensive data collection and usage reform. Not when those very data collection companies totally control the narrative [1]. [1] http://www.journalism.org/2017/09/07/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2017/ http://www.journalism.org/2017/09/07/news-use-across-social-...

charmides 8y ago

The Trump administration's critical stance on the tech giants is one of the very few things coming from them that I support, even though their actions here appears to be rooted in self-interest and self-preservation only (just like everything else they're doing). I hope that this probe will lead to some antitrust action that will be continued by the next administration.

olliej 8y ago

This sounds like they want the equal representation policies that the Republican Party got rolled back in the 80s (ruled unconstitutional iirc). It’s what allowed the rise of partisan “news”. It seems like any “equal exposure” policies would hit the same issues. That said the primary “imbalanced exposure” seems to be due to evicting people who simply spend their time attacking minorities, attack equal rights, and promoting violence towards anyone that they dislike. For whatever reason the Republican Party seems to have decided that those people represent “conservative” views that private companies should have to support.

remarkEon 8y ago
The kind of gross misrepresentation you’re doing right now is part of the reason why Trump has found justification to do this kind of thing in the first place.
- supernovae 8y ago
  Nonsense.
- notatoad 8y ago
  Can you give even a single example of how the parent comment is a gross misrepresentation? Who is a conservative personality that's been silenced by a tech company but has never attacked minorities, equal rights, or promoted violence?
  - itbeho 8y ago
    Just today... https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-09-22/james-woods-suspended-twitter-over-satirical-meme-could-impact-election https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-09-22/james-woods-suspen... Contrast this with actor Peter Fonda, who called for Trump's son to be caged with pedophiles and did so with impunity from Twitter.
  - JBReefer 8y ago
    Brendan Eich, for donating to the campaign for a (stupid) law that was later approved by voters.

orev 8y ago

I’m not seeing the connection here between “antitrust” and the alleged discrimination against conservative views. How does alleged discrimination become an antitrust issue, other than as a cudgel/threat by the government to try to punish these companies? While I do think there are probably some monopoly issues with these tech companies, this seems more like a government witch hunt against them because the current administration doesn’t like what they’re doing, not because they are truly concerned about the possible monopolies.

craftyguy 8y ago
> How does alleged discrimination become an antitrust issue It doesn't. > other than as a cudgel/threat by the government to try to punish these companies? It's exactly this.
- tptacek 8y ago
  In fact, the EO appears to be explicit about being retaliation, since it mentions "platform bias" in its reasoning. "Platform bias" isn't an antitrust concern, and, in fact, the President has no authority to "de-bias" private companies.
  - mc32 8y ago
    I think with current law, the platform bias claim is a stretch --unless these platforms are recategorized and regulated as utilities like a telecoms provider. T-Mobile can't just say, we'll ID all atheists and kick them off the service (or anyone who isn't a Mormon, for example) Currently, it looks like Google could simply say, we'll de-emphasize all Atheist or Mormon topics and it would be permissible.
    - craftyguy 8y ago
      > Currently, it looks like Google could simply say, we'll de-emphasize all Atheist or Mormon topics and it would be permissible. Not really. They've de-emphasized topics that promote harassment and violence. "Atheists" or "Mormon" topics rarely, if ever, stoop that low, so I don't think you're comparing the same things here.

velox_io 8y ago

I don't think there's been such powerful organisations since the East India Company.

romed 8y ago
I don't think any of our current companies are as powerful as East India Company was, or even Standard Oil.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
ecshafer 8y ago
When Google and Facebook start having personal armies, navies, and courts then I think it will be fair to compare them to the East India company. It's premature to even use them in the same sentence until then though.
- presscast 8y ago
  "Power" doesn't necessarily imply "military power".
  - blantonl 8y ago
    Yes it does, because until these organizations have the power to take things by physical force, it's not even in the same league.
    - presscast 8y ago
      There's a main effect such that the entire world has shifted in the direction of soft-power over the past 60-or-so years. It's not clear that the East India Trading Company was less powerful than Google, but the issue of military power doesn't disprove the thesis.
    - rdtsc 8y ago

w_t_payne 8y ago

How would such a probe be carried out? Are they going to start reviewing source code?

tptacek 8y ago

Any order like this --- retaliation for perceived political slights --- is chilling. But try to remember that every administration makes a spectacle of writing "Executive Orders", and they usually mean less than people think they do. In the US system, the President cannot simply make new laws or take arbitrary actions by fiat. With the exception of powers extending from those enumerated to the Executive in the Constitution, the President can only administer laws passed by Congress. In reality, the President is a sort of CEO of a giant conglomeration of federal agencies, all of which are animated by statutes. What you generally see in these EOs is reprioritization and, in some cases, requested changes to rulemaking --- rulemaking being "places where Congress explicitly left it up to the Executive to figure out how to manage a particular law". So: unless there's some "opinion manipulation" statute none of us have heard of (unlikely, because of that pesky 1A), this is really just Trump retaliating against political enemies by threatening antitrust investigations. That squares with what Bloomberg is reporting, and Bloomberg appears to be the only outlet that has seen a copy of the EO.

chasing 8y ago
> In reality, the President is a sort of CEO of a giant conglomeration of federal agencies... This is such an awful comparison. I wish people would stop making it. A CEO and the President (should) operate in very different ways with a very different set of constraints with a very different set of desired goals. They might both sit at the top of large organizations, but the Executive Branch of the US government and a company are two very, very, VERY different beasts.

rhapsodic 8y ago

>While I do think there are probably some monopoly issues with these tech companies, this seems more like a government witch hunt against them because the current administration doesn’t like what they’re doing, not because they are truly concerned about the possible monopolies. Which is pretty much how the Democratic party has operated historically. Like Obama said, "punish [your] enemies." He was president of the US when he said that, and the "enemies" he was referring to were not foreign enemies of the US, but rather US citizens that the then-president deemed to be his enemies. Google and Facebook are frighteningly powerful private entities that are actively working on behalf of the Democratic party, which has devolved into a hateful, lunatic religion since Trump took office. I will applaud anything that curtails their power.

dashundchen 8y ago
If you look at the quote in context, what Obama was saying it clearly is nothing like you are spinning it. He was asking Latinxs voters to "punish" those who won't stand with them on certain issues, by voting against Republicans Compare this to the current president who calls a free press the "enemy of the people", threatens reporters with violence at his rallies, calls them scum and slime, and wants to quash any and all opposition to him, including wanting to revoke the right to broadcast from media that criticizes him. https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/freedom-press/donald-trump-thinks-freedom-press-disgusting https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/freedom-press/donald-t... Hard to take seriously any feigned concerns of free speech, especially when we're talking about deplatforming white supremacists and violent conspiracy theorists on private networks. I urge you to read the ACLU link above and think critically if Trump sounds like someone who should be leading a free and healthy democracy.
- rhapsodic 8y ago
  >I urge you to read the ACLU link above and think critically if Trump sounds like someone who should be leading a free and healthy democracy. It's a lot freer and healthier under Trump than Obama. Aside from the roaring economy, the IRS is no longer meddling in elections, actively favoring one party over the other.

prolikewh0a 8y ago

From the article itself: >The document doesn’t name any companies. Poor title, poor article. It's nothing but speculation based on prior Trump tweets, mixed with the main topic of the document: antitrust.

dguaraglia 8y ago
You mean based on public-record statements by the President of the United States? Sounds like a pretty solid basis to base "speculation" on.

billfor 8y ago

They should be classified as common carriers. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/202 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/202

nonbel 8y ago

People just need to use other services. 1) DuckDuckGo is great for search. 2) Protonmail is great for email. 3) gab.ai instead of twitter (heard about it but never used it; I guess twitter has some use...). 4) Voat instead of Reddit (it seemed to offer the same capabilities when I visited it a bit). 5) Facebook, nothing like this should even exist but I'm sure there is some alternative out there.

curuinor 8y ago
gab.ai and voat are filled with literal actual white supremacists
- nonbel 8y ago
  >"gab.ai and voat are filled with literal actual white supremacists" Is that because they were the first to be kicked off reddit/twitter? So, reddit/twitter used to be "filled with" them? Just think of it as part of a lifecycle then. If normal people start moving to voat, the bad people will make up a smaller and smaller percentage. Then they move to the next site, and voat becomes taken over by political forces, repeat. Also, I'm thinking if you don't like one of the alternatives for whatever reason, is it really that hard to create one of those sites? I heard somewhere Voat was created by one guy as a hobby. A good search engine seems like it would be the most difficult one.
  - chasing 8y ago
    No. That's not why they're that way. gab.ai used to have a variation on that stupid pepe frog as its logo, for example. They're aiming at a specific crowd.
    - nonbel 8y ago
      Fine, then people should make other ones. Personally, I don't think either reddit or twitter were a positive evolution over the decentralized specialized forums that existed before. You didn't comment on the second part, so I'll assume its correct. If it isnt that difficult to make these sites, what is the need for some sort of regulation? Someone just needs to make a new site and the people complaining about being censored/whatever can go there.

acidburnNSA 8y ago

I have been frequently and respectfully conversing with a relative who's a full-on Breitbart-parotting die-hard Trump supporter for the past year or so. He was throwing around a leaked TGIF video (of Sergey Brin explaining that he finds the election offensive) and saying that this confirms that Google is part a Democratic Party front that's indoctrinating children and teachers against conservative viewpoints. He then went on to spend the next 2 weeks parrotting Breitbart's article after article about how they use foreign workers and that they're building a Chinese government spy system and that the government needs to step in and stop them and on and on. It was fascinating. We discussed the government's role in regulating private companies and it was clear that the philosophy is totally tribal. Break up companies run by liberals, even if there's no demonstrable liberal bias of the service, by any means necessary. Political philosophy be damned. It's quite a time indeed, though I wonder if it's ever really been any different.

fzeroracer 8y ago
I've seen similar chilling arguments be made that Alex Jones of all people is a proper conservative voice and deserves to be heard. All of these attacks on google, facebook etc are not attempts to actually fix the huge monopolies they control but a clear partisan attack because they believe they're being persecuted or censored by these tech companies. These are the same people that claim to be anti-regulation and anti-big government, yet this is one of the more obvious examples of overreach yet.
- nonbel 8y ago
  >"These are the same people that claim to be anti-regulation and anti-big government" Is it? From some other comments in this thread it sounded like "those people" already built alternatives for themselves (voat and gab.ai). Or did you mean "republicans"?
Grue3 8y ago
>they're building a Chinese government spy system and that the government needs to step in and stop them I mean the government should stop them. Aiding and abetting human rights abuses either is, or should be criminal.

Mountain_Skies 8y ago

Perhaps companies like Twitter, Google, and Facebook are actively trying to incite regulation. Social media companies have become beholden to a relatively small group of very loud activists who have frightened the companies into compliance with their political goals. They're afraid of standing up to these noise makers and have a legitimate difficulty in deciding how to best moderate the content on their platforms in a way that alienates the fewest users. Government regulation would tie their hands, allowing the companies to claim they're powerless to manipulate content in the way that activists demand it be manipulated. In such an environment where all companies are legally obliged to treat content the same way, boycott threats would be meaningless. Likely tools would arise to allow individual users to have better control over what content they do and do not see instead of insisting on the platform censoring content for them and imposing those standards on everyone else.

jim_bailie 8y ago

It's ironic and tragically funny that all the comments in support of this article's premise and of the successes of the current administration are being grayed out.

ignoramceisblis 8y ago
HN is profoundly biased in the comments that appear--and those that are "squelched". It's pathetic. Example: 1 hour ago, user "remarkEon" posted something that was flagged, and then removed entirely, but before it was removed, the children comments gave hint that it included essentially: 'Many people with conservative views in general are being suppressed; it is not limited to people who speak out e.g. against minorities.' I assume this because, the comments replying to it were essentially bashing it as if the onus was on remarkEon to provide examples substantiating his/her claim. As if the concept is so unfathomable. For example, a child comment from user "notatoad" 1 hour stated (in full): > Can you give even a single example of how the parent comment is a gross misrepresentation? > Who is a conservative personality that's been silenced by a tech company but has never attacked minorities, equal rights, or promoted violence? An early reply to that from user "itbeho" stated (in full): > Just today... > https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-09-22/james-woods-suspended-twitter-over-satirical-meme-could-impact-election https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-09-22/james-woods-suspen... "itbeho" was further grayed out. For providing exactly a requested example substantiating the statement that remarkEon was alluding to. And an example from /just today/. All posters who were critical of the parent poster "remarkEon" were "in full view"--with black comments. As with tech in general, we need particular users and/or moderators of HN to stop suppressing true statements of fact. Especially when there is a systemic, clear bias against a specific "political flavor" to the statements. This is precisely the issue discussed in the linked article. Peoples' perspectives of reality are being warped by what is shown to them--and what is hidden from them. Certain facts are being suppressed, which creates an extremely distorted view of reality, e.g. real events and the rate at which they occur.
- krapp 8y ago
  You can turn showdead on to read remarkEon's comment, it wasn't removed. It said, verbatim, "The kind of gross misrepresentation you’re doing right now is part of the reason why Trump has found justification to do this kind of thing in the first place." It wasn't flagged because it went against HN's political bias, it was flagged because it was tedious, partisan and uncivil, and threads like this are destined to become cesspools anyway.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

curo 8y ago

This seems like rich fodder for a tech debate: Trump's Twitter bans were deemed unconstitutional, how does that apply to the companies themselves? Is Google's discussion to change algos after the immigration ban just? Should antitrust laws protect not just consumer rights & competition, but voter rights & viewpoint diversity? How do you build a better algorithm for political threads? Instead, even on HackerNews, you just see partisan criticism, minor viewpoint suppression, etc. This is ground zero for fixing these problems.