7 ms·

Cockroaches thrive in the dark corners. Sunlight is antiseptic. And forcing ideas/speech into those dark corners don't keep them from growing, it merely allows

by mrkstu 8y ago

Cockroaches thrive in the dark corners. Sunlight is antiseptic. And forcing ideas/speech into those dark corners don't keep them from growing, it merely allows it to grow unobserved and un-countered. Ideas are the only counter to other ideas and how we communicate those idea is via speech. Suppression only invites martyrdom on the behalf of those suppressed, increasing their credibility.

weregiraffe 8y ago
>Cockroaches thrive in the dark corners Viruses thrive through exposure to new hosts. See, you can prove anything using an analogy.
OmarIsmail 8y ago
There is evidence that deplatforming works (https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-bans-work https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-...)
- gdix 8y ago
  > though it may have some unintended consequences that have not been fully understood yet. I think no one disagrees that it "works" insofar as it stops the bad person from getting their bad ideas out there. Opponents of deplatforming generally argue that the long-term reaction to the deplatforming is worse than the problem the bad person's ideas were causing. Better to counter the bad ideas with good ideas to do long term good.
  - cft 8y ago
    How do you define "bad" person? Ungood? Doubleplus ungood?
    - gdix 8y ago
      The last one. Doubleplus ungood.
  - vertline3 8y ago
    "Opponents of deplatforming generally argue that the long-term reaction to the deplatforming is worse than the problem the bad person's ideas were causing." Not just that the reaction is worse, that the deplatforming erodes the spirit of free speech. I believe free speech is an important part of democracy.
  - erik_seaberg 8y ago
    Even apart from the Streisand effect, conspiring to suppress crappy ideas gives them undeserved credibility. "They didn't want you to hear this."
    - albedoa 8y ago
      That's a reasonable concern and may even be true for some instances, but in the case of Milo Yiannopoulos for example, he practically just went away. Milo himself says he spent all of his savings and lost his friends. Even his most ardent fans stopped speaking out about him. Nobody is listening to his ideas enough to give them underserved credibility.
- tux1968 8y ago
  For some definition of "works" since the analysis doesn't consider unintended effects or potential adverse long-term consequences. This all seems joyful while the technique is being applied to those with whom we disagree, less so once the technique has been turned on you yourself. Defending free speech means defending those we disagree with, and maybe even hate.
  - snowwrestler 8y ago
    Deplatforming is about deciding which ideas are granted resources (pushed above the cultural baseline), not who is punished for speaking (pushed below the cultural baseline). People without platforms are still free to speak. If dang banned me from HN I could still go stand on the corner and read my posts aloud and no one would arrest me. Free speech does not mean I'm entitled to someone else's platform.
    - mistermann 8y ago
      > Free speech does not mean I'm entitled to someone else's platform. You're thinking of the first amendment, there is a nuanced difference between that and the general principle of free speech. I'll assume you happened to not be aware of this, but there are lots of people online who refuse to acknowledge that difference and continue to spout the "entitled to someone else's platform" persuasion meme, which is kind of what this whole discussion is about: power, or altering the course of future events. If one's ideas & principles are sound, disingenuously censoring opposing ideas shouldn't be necessary. I believe many pro-censorship people know this explicitly (but would never speak it out loud) and others "sense" it subconsciously.
      - jshevek 8y ago
        (Edit: I agree with everything else you're saying.) Is the difference between the First Amendment and the moral principle of free speech really that nuanced? It seems to me one has to be thinking strictly in terms of a single country, a single period of human history, a single document in order to conflate the First Amendment with the moral principle of freedom of speech. This is a very narrow view.
- TimJYoung 8y ago
  Only if you assume that everything that a given person says is bad/unwelcome. But, people aren't like that, and hold all kinds of different views on different subjects, some of which they may have extensive background in, and others that they are just pulling out of their nether regions and are subject to all kinds of biases. For example, despite what anyone thinks about what Trump says (I think he's an idiot and a clown), he does occasionally say something that isn't complete BS (please don't make me try to find such an example). You just can't go down that route and expect a good outcome. In fact, I would argue that you're going to end up with the opposite result that you intended because you'll, inadvertently, end up giving more attention to idiotic ideas than the ideas actually deserve.
- halfnibble 8y ago
  Deplatforming works until new "free speech" platforms like Gab arise to replace the old.
  - snerbles 8y ago
    Not without the old taking measures to keep that from happening. Gab itself has been deplatformed to a degree, Google and Apple banned their mobile apps and their DNS registrar threatened to yank their domain over certain user posts.
- jshevek 8y ago
  I would not consider that "evidence that deplatforming works", in the context of the parent comment.
- mrweasel 8y ago
  Has Alex Jones stopped his podcast? Has his sites shutdown? Have people how believes what he believe changed their minds? Sure, fewer random people are exposed to him, so? They'll find someone else to follow that says the things they want to hear. I suppose it depends one what you goal with deplatforming is. If it's convincing people that the ideas that people like Alex Jones and organisations like Black Lives Matter (they're in the article as someone who have similarly been affected) are wrong or hateful then I think it will fail.
- manfredo 8y ago
  I don't think this sort of analysis can measure the impact of deplatforming on people's opinions. While deplatforming may suppress the open dissemination of hateful ideas it's erroneous to assume these ideas become less prevalent as a consequence. This has happened in my workplace, for one. After the company made it clear it would not tolerate things like Damore's memo and Stuart Reges' article on women in computing, I and other people who agreed (or at least, aren't actively adverse to those views) shut up, and joined the chorous of people condemning them. But in private, it didn't change our views. If anything, it's made me even more skeptical of that sort of leftism. Consider the fact that deplatforming (primarily of right wing speakers) in the US became significantly more prevalent around 2014, and 2015. It didn't help in the 2016 election.
ceejayoz 8y ago
Bleach is a better antiseptic than sunlight. There's some evidence deplatforming works: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-bans-work https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-... > “We’ve been running a research project over last year, and when someone relatively famous gets no platformed by Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, there's an initial flashpoint, where some of their audience will move with them” Joan Donovan, Data and Society’s platform accountability research lead, told me on the phone, “but generally the falloff is pretty significant and they don’t gain the same amplification power they had prior to the moment they were taken off these bigger platforms.” > There’s not a ton of research on this, but the work that has been done so far is promising. A study published by researchers at Georgia Tech last year found that banning the platform's most toxic subreddits resulted in less hate speech elsewhere on the site, and especially from the people who were active on those subreddits. https://mashable.com/article/milo-yiannopoulos-deplatforming-alex-jones/ https://mashable.com/article/milo-yiannopoulos-deplatforming...
ilovecaching 8y ago
That's essentially John Stuart Mill's argument in On Liberty. Suppression of bad speech and thought only leads to a tyranny of the majority and can eventually lead to us forgetting what is bad versus good, just as we can't tell what darkness is if we only live in the sun.
- supernovae 8y ago
  Google/facebook/twitter et all should just remove algorithmic approach to timelines and stop allowing them to be gained/bought and go straight up user wall/order/ time-based. The algorithm will always favor manipulation... honestly, i just wish users would go back to small communities and indy publishers... It's easy for me to find a music forum or jeep forum with people i want to hangout with but on facebook those that can game/manipulate get the most views and its ALWAYS selling controversy...
avivo 8y ago
I wish this were true. Sadly, evidence may not bear this out. If it did, then e.g. YouTube wouldn't be in a constant battle to take down ISIS recruiting content...
tzakrajs 8y ago
Cockroaches are also hardy and reproduce at an incredible rate. We've seen some cockroaches like white nationalism, that would've atrophied as demographics change, spread more rapidly. We now have a solution for a problem that we wouldn't need without the solution. Great.
snowwrestler 8y ago
Ideas aren't cockroaches, they're plants. And sunlight helps poison ivy grow just as much as it helps tomatoes and flowers. There's no plausible mechanism by which talking about an idea more and more, makes it disappear. That's all an idea is: something to talk about. Now, if you want to argue that no ideas should ever disappear, go ahead, but don't cloak it in "antiseptic" language. Antiseptic kills things. If you're talking about antiseptic for ideas, you're talking about killing ideas.
criddell 8y ago
> Ideas are the only counter to other ideas and how we communicate those idea is via speech. A lot of holders of bad ideas have no interest in rational debate. For those people, sunlight is an energy source, not an antiseptic. When ISIS posts a video of a beheading, there isn't a lot of reasonable discussion going on in the comment section.
- mrkstu 8y ago
  Those aren't just ideas- those are vicious actions. I don't think giving access to those we are actively at physical odds with is within bounds of debating ideas. I doubt the founding fathers were inviting Quislings to their debating societies during the revolutionary war.
  - criddell 8y ago
    Well, if you don't have a problem with ostracizing groups like ISIS or white supremacists, then maybe we don't disagree that much.
    - mrkstu 8y ago
      Are we at war with white supremacists? ANTFIA? Venezuela? Equating ISIS with supremacists is equating a nuclear bomb with an M80 firecracker.
      - criddell 8y ago
        Well that brings up an interesting question: is the US at war with ISIS? I know Congress authorized action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda and maybe that's all that's needed to go after other groups.
kadendogthing 8y ago
Not only is this analogy bad (sunlight helps plenty of bad things grow, things even detrimental to our survival as a species), but it assumes that you're dealing with rational actors. Stop naively assuming this. It's a bad assumption. There are people out there who will argue in bad faith and have no interest in reasoning or truth. And there are people who will fall victim to those bad ideas. Religion, terrorist factions, general cults, hell we can barely keep our own actions in check while we actively harm the environment. The idea that if you just say the right, True (TM) thing then people will flock to it so not only naive it's so obviously wrong if you look at a laymen's perspective on basically any subject. It's also just a waste of time for the subjects typically in question. The communication of ideas has changed. It's a chaotic free for all. We've over done it. It's time to have a serious and reasonable conversation about the current state we find ourselves in, least we shoot ourselves in the foot with blind, headstrong optimism about ideals that don't much the reality of human nature. In before someone references 1984 blindly and displays the ever-popular dystopia-prediction fetish that's so prevalent in these conversations.
- marknutter 8y ago
  Prove to me that you argue in good faith and are a rational actor.
  - kadendogthing 8y ago
    I thought it'd at least be a few responses before someone went for the typical "got'em" style of response that inevitably relies on Missing the Point, but I guess not. I don't need to prove that to you. Even in your own odd request, you didn't even make the feeble attempt to pretend that you're running a popular media platform. We are talking about extremely popular platforms that inherently give credence to any view points espoused on those platforms, view points that can have far reaching effects. To give you a very specific area that we're touching on, it's internet demagoguery. Editorialization is not censorship, nutter.
    - mrkstu 8y ago
      I don't in any way expect that Twitter has reviewed a tweet for content and approves of the content therein. Equally so for Facebook et al. The platforms ubiquity makes them the Hydes Park / Public Square of the modern age- if anything they should be regulated to be content neutral rather than be encouraged to silence certain viewpoints.
Skrillex 8y ago
The primary issue with this argument is the imbalance of the situation. There is an enormous difference in the amount of effort it takes to make a false claim (that sounds nice enough for people to believe without evidence) and the amount of effort it takes to refute said claim, especially if the refutation hinges upon mechanics that most people do not understand. In the unlikely scenario that most of the people who listened to both arguments happened to accept and understand the right one, there is still another huge hurdle. The fact is, the short, wrong claim is optimized for remembering and regurgitation. It is easier to remember that than to remember the complicated refutation, or even remembering that there was a refutation. Even in the ideal scenario where all other parties accept and remember the good argument, the person espousing the false claim can simply leave and continue to make the claim. When also taking into consideration the fact that most people do not have the knowledge and eloquence to make the good argument in the first place, it seems intuitive that the bad argument would still easily make its rounds.
basch 8y ago
I like to think of facebook type algorithms as amplification, not suppression. Its not what content gets deranked, its what content gets promoted to the top. The question is, should "bad speech" be amplified, promoted, propogated, broadcast, surfaced, and repeated, ON PURPOSE; just so it can get rebuked, debunked, dismissed, and exposed? (I agree with you, the answer is closer to "The Remedy to Bad Speech is More Speech ... Marketplace of Ideas" however, the question being discussed is more akin to "Theres a limited amout of space at the front page, and people have limited amounts of attention to give, WHO gets the megaphone, and for how long". Its the inverse of "the robust debate principle recognizes that sometimes in a crowd of speakers it is necessary to turn down the volume of certain loud and clamorous speakers in order to give others a chance to speak." Facebook and the algorithm DO DECIDE who to turn the volumn up on, who to promote to the top. They already arent neutral, they already exhibit preference and bias for certain ideas.) Others are arguing that this is flipping the argument, BUT we are talking about algorithmic placement moreso than true censorship. If someone is allowed to post something but it NEVER makes it into someone elses Newsfeed, is it as good as censored?

by mrkstu 8y ago

weregiraffe 8y ago

>Cockroaches thrive in the dark corners Viruses thrive through exposure to new hosts. See, you can prove anything using an analogy.

OmarIsmail 8y ago

There is evidence that deplatforming works (https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-bans-work https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-...)

gdix 8y ago
> though it may have some unintended consequences that have not been fully understood yet. I think no one disagrees that it "works" insofar as it stops the bad person from getting their bad ideas out there. Opponents of deplatforming generally argue that the long-term reaction to the deplatforming is worse than the problem the bad person's ideas were causing. Better to counter the bad ideas with good ideas to do long term good.
- cft 8y ago
  How do you define "bad" person? Ungood? Doubleplus ungood?
  - gdix 8y ago
    The last one. Doubleplus ungood.
- vertline3 8y ago
  "Opponents of deplatforming generally argue that the long-term reaction to the deplatforming is worse than the problem the bad person's ideas were causing." Not just that the reaction is worse, that the deplatforming erodes the spirit of free speech. I believe free speech is an important part of democracy.
- erik_seaberg 8y ago
  Even apart from the Streisand effect, conspiring to suppress crappy ideas gives them undeserved credibility. "They didn't want you to hear this."
  - albedoa 8y ago
    That's a reasonable concern and may even be true for some instances, but in the case of Milo Yiannopoulos for example, he practically just went away. Milo himself says he spent all of his savings and lost his friends. Even his most ardent fans stopped speaking out about him. Nobody is listening to his ideas enough to give them underserved credibility.
tux1968 8y ago
For some definition of "works" since the analysis doesn't consider unintended effects or potential adverse long-term consequences. This all seems joyful while the technique is being applied to those with whom we disagree, less so once the technique has been turned on you yourself. Defending free speech means defending those we disagree with, and maybe even hate.
- snowwrestler 8y ago
  Deplatforming is about deciding which ideas are granted resources (pushed above the cultural baseline), not who is punished for speaking (pushed below the cultural baseline). People without platforms are still free to speak. If dang banned me from HN I could still go stand on the corner and read my posts aloud and no one would arrest me. Free speech does not mean I'm entitled to someone else's platform.
  - mistermann 8y ago
    > Free speech does not mean I'm entitled to someone else's platform. You're thinking of the first amendment, there is a nuanced difference between that and the general principle of free speech. I'll assume you happened to not be aware of this, but there are lots of people online who refuse to acknowledge that difference and continue to spout the "entitled to someone else's platform" persuasion meme, which is kind of what this whole discussion is about: power, or altering the course of future events. If one's ideas & principles are sound, disingenuously censoring opposing ideas shouldn't be necessary. I believe many pro-censorship people know this explicitly (but would never speak it out loud) and others "sense" it subconsciously.
    - jshevek 8y ago
      (Edit: I agree with everything else you're saying.) Is the difference between the First Amendment and the moral principle of free speech really that nuanced? It seems to me one has to be thinking strictly in terms of a single country, a single period of human history, a single document in order to conflate the First Amendment with the moral principle of freedom of speech. This is a very narrow view.
TimJYoung 8y ago
Only if you assume that everything that a given person says is bad/unwelcome. But, people aren't like that, and hold all kinds of different views on different subjects, some of which they may have extensive background in, and others that they are just pulling out of their nether regions and are subject to all kinds of biases. For example, despite what anyone thinks about what Trump says (I think he's an idiot and a clown), he does occasionally say something that isn't complete BS (please don't make me try to find such an example). You just can't go down that route and expect a good outcome. In fact, I would argue that you're going to end up with the opposite result that you intended because you'll, inadvertently, end up giving more attention to idiotic ideas than the ideas actually deserve.
halfnibble 8y ago
Deplatforming works until new "free speech" platforms like Gab arise to replace the old.
- snerbles 8y ago
  Not without the old taking measures to keep that from happening. Gab itself has been deplatformed to a degree, Google and Apple banned their mobile apps and their DNS registrar threatened to yank their domain over certain user posts.
jshevek 8y ago
I would not consider that "evidence that deplatforming works", in the context of the parent comment.
mrweasel 8y ago
Has Alex Jones stopped his podcast? Has his sites shutdown? Have people how believes what he believe changed their minds? Sure, fewer random people are exposed to him, so? They'll find someone else to follow that says the things they want to hear. I suppose it depends one what you goal with deplatforming is. If it's convincing people that the ideas that people like Alex Jones and organisations like Black Lives Matter (they're in the article as someone who have similarly been affected) are wrong or hateful then I think it will fail.
manfredo 8y ago
I don't think this sort of analysis can measure the impact of deplatforming on people's opinions. While deplatforming may suppress the open dissemination of hateful ideas it's erroneous to assume these ideas become less prevalent as a consequence. This has happened in my workplace, for one. After the company made it clear it would not tolerate things like Damore's memo and Stuart Reges' article on women in computing, I and other people who agreed (or at least, aren't actively adverse to those views) shut up, and joined the chorous of people condemning them. But in private, it didn't change our views. If anything, it's made me even more skeptical of that sort of leftism. Consider the fact that deplatforming (primarily of right wing speakers) in the US became significantly more prevalent around 2014, and 2015. It didn't help in the 2016 election.

ceejayoz 8y ago

Bleach is a better antiseptic than sunlight. There's some evidence deplatforming works: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-media-bans-work https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjbp9d/do-social-... > “We’ve been running a research project over last year, and when someone relatively famous gets no platformed by Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, there's an initial flashpoint, where some of their audience will move with them” Joan Donovan, Data and Society’s platform accountability research lead, told me on the phone, “but generally the falloff is pretty significant and they don’t gain the same amplification power they had prior to the moment they were taken off these bigger platforms.” > There’s not a ton of research on this, but the work that has been done so far is promising. A study published by researchers at Georgia Tech last year found that banning the platform's most toxic subreddits resulted in less hate speech elsewhere on the site, and especially from the people who were active on those subreddits. https://mashable.com/article/milo-yiannopoulos-deplatforming-alex-jones/ https://mashable.com/article/milo-yiannopoulos-deplatforming...

ilovecaching 8y ago

That's essentially John Stuart Mill's argument in On Liberty. Suppression of bad speech and thought only leads to a tyranny of the majority and can eventually lead to us forgetting what is bad versus good, just as we can't tell what darkness is if we only live in the sun.

supernovae 8y ago
Google/facebook/twitter et all should just remove algorithmic approach to timelines and stop allowing them to be gained/bought and go straight up user wall/order/ time-based. The algorithm will always favor manipulation... honestly, i just wish users would go back to small communities and indy publishers... It's easy for me to find a music forum or jeep forum with people i want to hangout with but on facebook those that can game/manipulate get the most views and its ALWAYS selling controversy...

avivo 8y ago

I wish this were true. Sadly, evidence may not bear this out. If it did, then e.g. YouTube wouldn't be in a constant battle to take down ISIS recruiting content...

tzakrajs 8y ago

Cockroaches are also hardy and reproduce at an incredible rate. We've seen some cockroaches like white nationalism, that would've atrophied as demographics change, spread more rapidly. We now have a solution for a problem that we wouldn't need without the solution. Great.

snowwrestler 8y ago

Ideas aren't cockroaches, they're plants. And sunlight helps poison ivy grow just as much as it helps tomatoes and flowers. There's no plausible mechanism by which talking about an idea more and more, makes it disappear. That's all an idea is: something to talk about. Now, if you want to argue that no ideas should ever disappear, go ahead, but don't cloak it in "antiseptic" language. Antiseptic kills things. If you're talking about antiseptic for ideas, you're talking about killing ideas.

criddell 8y ago

> Ideas are the only counter to other ideas and how we communicate those idea is via speech. A lot of holders of bad ideas have no interest in rational debate. For those people, sunlight is an energy source, not an antiseptic. When ISIS posts a video of a beheading, there isn't a lot of reasonable discussion going on in the comment section.

mrkstu 8y ago
Those aren't just ideas- those are vicious actions. I don't think giving access to those we are actively at physical odds with is within bounds of debating ideas. I doubt the founding fathers were inviting Quislings to their debating societies during the revolutionary war.
- criddell 8y ago
  Well, if you don't have a problem with ostracizing groups like ISIS or white supremacists, then maybe we don't disagree that much.
  - mrkstu 8y ago
    Are we at war with white supremacists? ANTFIA? Venezuela? Equating ISIS with supremacists is equating a nuclear bomb with an M80 firecracker.
    - criddell 8y ago
      Well that brings up an interesting question: is the US at war with ISIS? I know Congress authorized action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda and maybe that's all that's needed to go after other groups.

kadendogthing 8y ago

Not only is this analogy bad (sunlight helps plenty of bad things grow, things even detrimental to our survival as a species), but it assumes that you're dealing with rational actors. Stop naively assuming this. It's a bad assumption. There are people out there who will argue in bad faith and have no interest in reasoning or truth. And there are people who will fall victim to those bad ideas. Religion, terrorist factions, general cults, hell we can barely keep our own actions in check while we actively harm the environment. The idea that if you just say the right, True (TM) thing then people will flock to it so not only naive it's so obviously wrong if you look at a laymen's perspective on basically any subject. It's also just a waste of time for the subjects typically in question. The communication of ideas has changed. It's a chaotic free for all. We've over done it. It's time to have a serious and reasonable conversation about the current state we find ourselves in, least we shoot ourselves in the foot with blind, headstrong optimism about ideals that don't much the reality of human nature. In before someone references 1984 blindly and displays the ever-popular dystopia-prediction fetish that's so prevalent in these conversations.

marknutter 8y ago
Prove to me that you argue in good faith and are a rational actor.
- kadendogthing 8y ago
  I thought it'd at least be a few responses before someone went for the typical "got'em" style of response that inevitably relies on Missing the Point, but I guess not. I don't need to prove that to you. Even in your own odd request, you didn't even make the feeble attempt to pretend that you're running a popular media platform. We are talking about extremely popular platforms that inherently give credence to any view points espoused on those platforms, view points that can have far reaching effects. To give you a very specific area that we're touching on, it's internet demagoguery. Editorialization is not censorship, nutter.
  - mrkstu 8y ago
    I don't in any way expect that Twitter has reviewed a tweet for content and approves of the content therein. Equally so for Facebook et al. The platforms ubiquity makes them the Hydes Park / Public Square of the modern age- if anything they should be regulated to be content neutral rather than be encouraged to silence certain viewpoints.

Skrillex 8y ago

The primary issue with this argument is the imbalance of the situation. There is an enormous difference in the amount of effort it takes to make a false claim (that sounds nice enough for people to believe without evidence) and the amount of effort it takes to refute said claim, especially if the refutation hinges upon mechanics that most people do not understand. In the unlikely scenario that most of the people who listened to both arguments happened to accept and understand the right one, there is still another huge hurdle. The fact is, the short, wrong claim is optimized for remembering and regurgitation. It is easier to remember that than to remember the complicated refutation, or even remembering that there was a refutation. Even in the ideal scenario where all other parties accept and remember the good argument, the person espousing the false claim can simply leave and continue to make the claim. When also taking into consideration the fact that most people do not have the knowledge and eloquence to make the good argument in the first place, it seems intuitive that the bad argument would still easily make its rounds.

basch 8y ago

I like to think of facebook type algorithms as amplification, not suppression. Its not what content gets deranked, its what content gets promoted to the top. The question is, should "bad speech" be amplified, promoted, propogated, broadcast, surfaced, and repeated, ON PURPOSE; just so it can get rebuked, debunked, dismissed, and exposed? (I agree with you, the answer is closer to "The Remedy to Bad Speech is More Speech ... Marketplace of Ideas" however, the question being discussed is more akin to "Theres a limited amout of space at the front page, and people have limited amounts of attention to give, WHO gets the megaphone, and for how long". Its the inverse of "the robust debate principle recognizes that sometimes in a crowd of speakers it is necessary to turn down the volume of certain loud and clamorous speakers in order to give others a chance to speak." Facebook and the algorithm DO DECIDE who to turn the volumn up on, who to promote to the top. They already arent neutral, they already exhibit preference and bias for certain ideas.) Others are arguing that this is flipping the argument, BUT we are talking about algorithmic placement moreso than true censorship. If someone is allowed to post something but it NEVER makes it into someone elses Newsfeed, is it as good as censored?