6 ms·

Everyone talking about free speech and censorship needs to hold the fuck on for a second... because context is about to play a huge part in this: If I was sell

• RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
  There is a well-developed legal system in the US and other countries for dealing with dangerous and fraudulent medical advice. The fact that this book can be legally sold is evidence that it either falls on the right side of the law or else nobody has pursued these legal claims. This is attempting to bypass this system by going straight to centralized censorship.
  • code_duck 8y ago
    An action by Amazon is not centralized to anything. They’re a private company and not a monopoly. They can choose to sell or not sell anything they please. Centralized censorship would be the government or an unavoidable private monopoly decreeing that this book shall be unavailable.
    • reader5000 8y ago
      What if Amazon began censoring authors of color?
      • mcphage 8y ago
        What if Amazon gave every new baby chocolate eclairs?
      • eclipxe 8y ago
        They can do that. And people can choose to not shop there if they do.
        • reader5000 8y ago
          They could not refuse business based on race in the US.
          • code_duck 8y ago
            Yes, but believing in chemtrails or the danger of vaccines is quite different than race, legally and essentially.
  • amerkhalid 8y ago
    This is not censorship, books are still legal to buy in the US. It is one (biggest) merchant refusing to sell these books. They are putting people's safety ahead of their profit margins too. Perhaps they fear lawsuits arising from selling these book. But it is their choice, and right choice.
    • intopieces 8y ago
      Yep, the publisher can set up their own little shop and sell through on a website. The right to free speech is not the right to rent someone else’s megaphone.
      • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
        Hmm, up to a point, but Amazon own the biggest marketplace; Facebook own the biggest forum; etc.. They have unique positions, with far greater powers than single governments. I don't think arguments such as yours work for supranational organisations. It's like saying people have the right to protest, but then saying they're not allowed to use a vehicle to get to a protest, in theory you're not interfering but in practice you prevent exercise of their rights.
        • intopieces 8y ago
          In the U.S., false statements of fact are not protected under the First Amendment. [0] [0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_statements_of_fact https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_statements_of_fact So, even if you consider Amazon liable for the protection of free speech (I don’t), this doesn’t really qualify.
    • ameister14 8y ago
      This is definitely censorship, it just isn't censorship by the government.
    • Mikhail_Edoshin 8y ago
      The action of Amazon is censorship. That the book is available from other venues is irrelevant. E.g. in Soviet Union certain banned books were distributed outside of official channels (shipped from abroad or re-typed on typewriters); they were thus somewhat available, but would you say they were not censored out in general?
  • bluGill 8y ago
    The problem is it is really hard to have standing. The victims are children: their parents are supposed to protect them in this case, but the parents are being mislead... Teenagers could perhaps sue, but I suspect austic kids are less likely to attempt this even if they could.
  • wrycoder 8y ago
    Yes, it appears that Amazon preemptively removed the book, after weighing the brand damage potentially caused by a social media attack or other pressure versus the expected profit from its sales. Or, they considered the possibility of being made a party to a court action. In other words, it's likely simply a business decision based on the tenor of the times.
• tengbretson 8y ago
  I don't hate the outcome, I just wish this was being done the "right way." The author and publisher should be held liable for the content and be made to pay for the damages they've caused. We have a court system for determining when someone is peddling lies and harming people. Is it too much to ask that we lean on our agreed upon institutions instead of making corporations elevate themselves to a less transparent, less democratic, worse version of our courts? Is it too much to ask a company that provides a platform for commerce to just be a platform for commerce?
  • _cs2017_ 8y ago
    Suppose you have 1000 such books today. Suppose each court case takes 1 year to resolve with 100% success probability (far, far too optimistic of an assumption). Suppose Amazon goes to court, and 1 year from now, all these books are taken down. In the meantime, within that year, 1000 more authors create books like this. By the end of the year you have 1000 resolved cases and 1000 new cases. This can continue forever, with the result that 1000 books are always available for sale. You might say, the authors could be penalized so as to scare new authors away from this. However, the probability that a court will impose sufficiently large fines on the authors is close to zero. Even if they did, many authors could be (or claim to be) based abroad and therefore (in practice) cannot be fined by the US court system. Do you have any solution to this problem that doesn't involve Amazon acting without a court decision? If someone sees a problem with my example, please let me know. I am not trying to impose my views on anyone, I'm genuinely trying to understand the mechanisms at play, the concerns, and the possible solutions.
    • reader5000 8y ago
      Words cannot cause physical harm.
      • simple_phrases 8y ago
        If your doctor gives you advice, which if followed, caused you physical harm, not only have they opened themselves up to a malpractice lawsuit, their advice caused harm.
• identity-haver 8y ago
  You can't claim that Mentos cure or treat cancer and market them. You could sell Mentos as a "dietary supplement" and even say that it "supports system health" if you have any data about it, no matter how bad. If you are a doctor, you can actually treat people with cancer using Mentos, but you can't market it without approval (good luck with those lawsuits, though!). Books don't cure, prevent, diagnose, or treat disease, so they aren't under the purview of the FDA. The real problem here is the dominant market position Amazon has. People figure if Amazon bans something, the book will be completely inaccessible. This is sometimes true. Nobody freaked out when their local indie bookstore didn't have "Mein Kampf" and "Middle Eastern Terrorist Bomb Designs" (it's real!) in stock because they figured they could just get it somewhere else if they really wanted to. Whatever you think about this, one company having over 60% market share in books (higher in some categories) is concerning. I have been using https://www.alibris.com https://www.alibris.com lately.
  • _cs2017_ 8y ago
    Could you clarify your point a bit? When you (correctly) say that the books aren't under the purview of the FDA, do you imply that you would prefer if they remained available on Amazon? If so, how would you respond to the concern that such books cause a lot of suffering to a lot of people?
    • identity-haver 8y ago
      The parent comment seems to believe that the FDA would have some jurisdiction over the content. It's not up to me what people read and write, or what Amazon puts on their website. Amazon has the right to choose what they sell, just as the author has the right to publish their book. In this particular case, besides Amazon's action, there could be civil suits against the author (look up Paladin Press), and even FTC actions depending on the exact claims made by the book. How would you respond to the concern that this is not the only book that people believe has caused suffering? For example, how about Aquinas, or Marx, or Hume, or Foucault, or the Anarchist Cookbook or hell, Hugh Hefner? Books don't leap off of shelves and hit people, causing them injuries. A person, subject to the law and with their pre-existing moral system, must, having read the contents of the book, perform some action to their self or others to cause suffering.
• babyslothzoo 8y ago
  Lots of cussing in your comments, you must be passionate about this topic for a particular reason. Passion is good, but the word choice degrades the discourse and implies emotion over reason. Anyway, perhaps a better approach is to label such books as 'unproven', 'pseudoscience', or even fiction, but continue to sell them. The idea of banning books because of their subject is a very slippery slope. FWIW there are tons of other inaccurate, unproven, pseudoscience, or fiction books out there that are also damaging to public health. For example, any dieting book that promotes anything aside from caloric reduction for fat loss is basically fiction, and obesity is by far the largest public health crisis to face the USA with 80% of adults impacted. Would you recommend banning those books as well?
  • _red 8y ago
    So true. Further Das Kapital is still for sale on Amazon, even though when put into practice it routinely kills millions.
• temptemptemp111 8y ago
  I would appreciate if you read and reply to my comment. Please look at the original so-called "controversy." The doctor in England we're publicly calling a charlatan merely produced documented GI trouble in his autistic patients. Furthermore, any parent or caretaker of autistic people realize their gut problems. Many of these banned books describe therapies that definitely decrease autistic people's gut problems. For example, GFCF has thousands of peer-reviewed journals to support that it can alter 1) mucous production 2) gut inflammation 3) autism. This is merely censorship. This is not "protecting the people." Look at Roosh V's banned book... It was his first book promoting men to be more interested in making family than increasing promiscuity. There is a very clear agenda behind which books are banned and which are not... And what about the books promoting opioid use in medicine? That's killing millions of people! No, of course they don't care about that.
• andonisus 8y ago
  I am confused, because free speech/freedom from censorship only applies to that which is oppressed by the Government, not private companies.
  • some_random 8y ago
    Legally in the US, yeah. But should that be the case?
  • ameister14 8y ago
    That's not true. Free speech as a concept is speech free from censorship, period, not just censorship by government fiat. Look, you can disagree with that, but I'm not sure why you would. The entire concept is that two ideas, presented before a reasoning audience, can be examined and the one that is better will be likely to be adopted. This is impossible to do if one of the ideas is never presented as it is censored.
  • Mikhail_Edoshin 8y ago
    If I operate my own public library and remove a book from there because of its contents it is censorship. It doesn't matter whether I'm totally within my rights to do that (I am) and what exactly the book contents are.
• ffn 8y ago
  Free speech v. public safety is a touchy subject that pits the moral pillars of liberty/oppression against care/harm. However, before we lose ourselves to moral outrage for one side or the other, consider that, with Judea Pearl's (somewhat) recently work on causality, there might actually be a "correct" solution to when the government (or government-like entity) should intervene to "protect the public interest" or do nothing and "encourage free speech" Namely, we can use the idea of calculating the "probably of necessity" v. "probably of sufficiency" from Pearl's section on counterfactuals to calculate causation. Taking your arsenic merchant example, for instance, if you publicly release information that "arsenic in large doses is good for you" to the public, we would consider the counterfactual statements - "would large portions of public have taken arsenic had you NOT released such a statement" - "would large portions of the public refrained from taking arsenic had you released such a statement" Notice that, in both statements, we require a model of public behavior that is contextually dependent on things like "how educated the general public is", "how common is it to take arsenic", "how much harm does arsenic actually do" etc., most of which can be determined and agreed to beforehand. Given that we, as a society, can come to agree on a model of ourselves (lol probably not easy), we can directly calculate the necessity and sufficiency values, which would allow authority to make "just" feeling decisions
• m0zg 8y ago
  The right outcome here is for the author to get sued, not a unilateral ban of books where Amazon is judge, jury, and executioner. Before you know it, Amazon will be banning books that Jeff Bezos doesn't like, and while it is within its rights to do so (unfortunately), that would not be a good outcome at all, for anybody.
  • dragonwriter 8y ago
    A retailer deciding not to buy and sell particular books is not a ban any more than a consumer choosing not to buy the book is. (If Amazon is so intractably dominant in book sales that it needs utility-like regulation, that's a different issue, but when it isn't subject to such regulation it is irrational to expect it to act like a utility.)
  • anigbrowl 8y ago
    No it isn't. Litigation in slow and expensive, and the targets of such litigation would just turn around and whine they're being oppressed by the courts were they to lose.
• dman 8y ago
  I think you are conflating two unrelated distinct things in a very dangerous way. A book is at best a tool to influence your decision making. A physical object (like arsenic) is something that is acquired after you have gone through a decision making process. Misrepresentation in physical space causes people to misexecute possibly sound plans. Misrepresentations in idea space cause unsound plans to be made. I think regulations that prevent bad executions of sound ideas are OK (and desirable), this rules out things like people busing mislabeled arsenic. Regulations that try to protect people from bad ideas are misplaced idealism and tend to end very very poorly for the societies involved.
• yason 8y ago
  But this was a book, not arsenic being sold to cure a disease. Telling whatever bogus claims in a book doesn't do any harm per se: surely harm can only happen if someone is stupid enough to actually believe the claims. And the people who don't happen to think about cross-checking information with a couple of other sources before digesting it will surely suffer from the lack of that very habit eventually. If the same did apply to everything we'd have to shut down most of internet and reduce the selection of non-fiction books only to cover academic publications to be on the safe side.