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Unaccountable censorship of expression by our main communication providers is incompatible with Democracy. Communication is often a natural monopoly, and you ca

Unaccountable censorship of expression by our main communication providers is incompatible with Democracy. Communication is often a natural monopoly, and you can't just "start a competitor" to Twitter and have the market fix the problem (see gab.ai). If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), us normal human beings need the right to appeal, public auditing, bright line rules, and due process rights. It's not wrong for Twitter to have rules to protect the weak from the strong, and individuals from the mob, but it needs to be accountable and above board about all of it or it will make the problem far worse. EDIT: Just to provide an example, here are a few ways this notification could have been so much better. 1) List the specific rules violated. Link to the public process for rule review and adoption. 2) Link to ids and contact information for any human beings who made the decision. 3) Link to code and data sets for any algorithm behind the decision. 4) Provide and link to an appeal procedure instead of just a compliance procedure. Imagine how much better that openness would be for Twitter's users. (While somewhat onerous for Twitter the company.)

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andy_ppp 7y ago
I would also argue that unfettered access to incorrect information is also a massive problem for democracy.
- ohithereyou 7y ago
  I don't want a Ministry of Truth filtering what I'm allowed to hear. In a functional democracy, education and robust debate are supposed to be the defenses against misinformation. Most western democracies long since scrapped proper education because it's easier to win the support of the population with propaganda^H public relations than it is to make a reasoned argument.
  - beefield 7y ago
    Unfortunately looks to me that if you do not have a Ministry of Truth, you end up with a society where private actors pump people with soma[1]. Personally, I am willing to accept a restricted version of Ministry of Truth to avoid that outcome. [1]See Huxley, Brave new world.
    - ohithereyou 7y ago
      >Unfortunately looks to me that if you do not have a Ministry of Truth, you end up with a society where private actors pump people with soma This is not a new phenomenon. There have always been snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves. Societies that have very strict control over what people can and cannot say (think the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea, where you could be jailed for counter-revolutionary speech or misleading the people) still had lots of problems with snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves, but they also had a problem with people going to jail (or worse) for saying "the state is the cause of this famine", "the state killed a bunch of innocent protesters", "I disagree with the current economic system", "I am angry that the state took my land from me and gave it to someone else", "the rent is too damn high", "maybe we shouldn't build so many nuclear weapons", and "I don't support Chairman Mao/Uncle Joe". I will assume that any Ministry of Truth that you would support would set out to be expressly non-political at its inception, but giving any one organization the power to restrain the expression of ideas is openly inviting those with an agenda to attempt to co-opt it into suppressing opinions and arguments critical of their agenda. This is an inherent drawback to giving anything power - it inherently becomes political even if the original intent is for it to not be political. I would rather live in a society where snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves are punished after they commit their crimes than have a single person's freedom to say "fuck the government" suppressed because they misquoted a statistic.
    - navigatesol 7y ago
      >Personally, I am willing to accept a restricted version of Ministry of Truth to avoid that outcome. Every loves this idea right up until the point they realize that their own and the Ministry's opinions do not align.
    - deleted 7y ago
- leereeves 7y ago
  Unfettered access to information requires unfettered access to incorrect information. The power to decide what's "correct" will be abused to block correct information that damages someone powerful.
  - zaroth 7y ago
    Exactly this. Therefore it logically follows that democracy depends on access to incorrect information. Clearly the mods should remove andy_ppp’s comment immediately, if not be held liable for hosting it in the first place. </s>
  - jacksnipe 7y ago
    Right, so the hypothesis is that we can’t have unfettered access to information.
    - vorpalhex 7y ago
      So who do you propose gets to spoonfeed the masses with their okayed content? That is a terrifying argument.
      - damontal 7y ago
        pre internet weren't the masses spoonfed okayed information by network tv and newspapers?
      - prepend 7y ago
        Obviously the natural answer is the companies who started first and developed these products that are now super widely used. I’ve only heard two arguments- let Twitter do what they want (viva Capitalism!) or have government regulate (viva Socialism!). I wish there was more thought given by Twitter, and others, to just self apply free speech rights and stick to using the current legal system to restricting speech. There’s a ton of law to protect people from damaging speech (harassment, slander/libel, dangerous threats, etc). It’s quite possible that Twitter can just use a more rational standard for their process.
- deleted 7y ago
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- navigatesol 7y ago
  >incorrect information This is easy for "world is flat vs round". There is much more nuance to, for example, "this is discriminatory vs not".
- matwood 7y ago
  Which in part stems back to anonymity. Information becomes easier to filter and fact check when the purveyors and the sources are not anonymous. People also tend to act more civil when not anonymous. But, a lack of anonymity brings a whole host of other problems.
  - zaroth 7y ago
    Anonymity is the keystone of free speech. There is no freedom of speech without the freedom to speak anonymously.
    - mrhappyunhappy 7y ago
      And if I run a 10,000 bot network - should my speech be free?
      - zaroth 7y ago
        Have you heard of the Federalist papers? Sybil attacks are a consequence of anonymity combined with low cost of identity creation, and inability to distinguish between different identities. The fix for Sybil attacks generally involves making identity creation more expensive, or providing a means for distinguishing more valuable identities. On HN, for instance, the karma score is one such mechanism. These systems can work without removing anonymity. And I never said anonymity was easy or without trade-offs.
  - nradov 7y ago
    Removing anonymity doesn't solve anything. People post and share all sorts of lies and fake news under their real names. They just don't care. Preserving anonymity is essential for whistle blowers and other vulnerable people.
- romaaeterna 7y ago
  Absolutely correct. Incorrect information is a huge problem for democracy. The best technology that we have right now to fight incorrect information is an educated citizenry of people free to decide the facts for themselves and debate them openly. We can invest in this proven technology by improving that education, freedom, and open debate.
tdb7893 7y ago
I think you can start a competitor but the lack of censorship is actually an anti-feature for most people as, at least in the modern internet, it seems to get your site filled with white supremacists. The social space is actually fairly crowded right now with Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Discord, the chans, Twitter, and a ton bunch of smaller ones (like HN) and they almost all fall into similar "censorship" models and I think that just reflects a the market right now (which is an interesting balance because neither side is really happy).
zelon88 7y ago
So how do you feel about blog platforms or other service providers that allow posting user-supplied comments on their platform? Should companies and non-profits all be required be to expend resources to keep your hateful comments available to the world? How do we determine what's spam? What's advertising? What's XSS? You have a first amendment right to type any of these things into an input box. Does that mean the organization receiving your message legally has to post it, even if it fails to meet a basic requirement of not breaking their platform or insulting their user-base? Are terms-of-service a violation of someone's first amendment? In my case where I am the only employee of my small platform, do I not have a first amendment right to not host content I disagree with on my domain with my own servers?
- romaaeterna 7y ago
  The big, ostensibly neutral, communications monopolies need their censorship practices heavily regulated. People with private blogs needs to be absolutely free to control commenting however they would like. I believe that we can respect both of these positions easily, 99% of the time, with our court systems deciding on some of the grey in the middle.
  - nradov 7y ago
    Twitter doesn't even remotely have a monopoly on political communications. What counts as a "private" blog? That seems like an arbitrary distinction.
    - 12thsie34 7y ago
      I dont think you know what a monopoly actually is.
      - nradov 7y ago
        Actually I am very familiar with what monopolies are. But if you disagree then please enlighten us rather than posting low-effort comments.
    - 7y ago
indigochill 7y ago
If we look at some differences between Twitter (or insert your favorite social media platform here) and email: * Email providers have zero responsibility for filtering information * Email users form their own networks dynamically through actual relationships rather than some artificial structure of "followers"/"friends" * Email users never get banned from sending email (although maybe in some cases an individual service may ban extreme abusers) * Email's operation is totally independent of irrational mobs/corporate interests/whatever In short, I think the core problem with this situation is in your first line: social media has become a "main communication provider" and it's fundamentally unfit for purpose. Email and other protocol-based communication independent of platforms (IRC is another good example) is still the best solution for a primary communication provider.
- taneq 7y ago
  From your last paragraph the term you are looking for is "common carrier". Email goes over common carrier networks between private hosts and so is pretty close to a common carrier network. Twitter isn't and doesn't. Maybe there should be a way for web services to provide a similar service with similar protections.
  - zenexer 7y ago
    In the US, at least, this isn't true. ISPs aren't considered common carriers--you can thank Ajit Pai for that. If it were true, it would be true for both Twitter and email. Messages from both systems hop between neutral providers in the exact same manner.
    - tremon 7y ago
      Let's avoid the contorted legal definition here, and instead use the real-world definition where "common carrier network" means using an established protocol for routing and delivery, in which many separate entities work together to establish network reach.
      - 7y ago
maxerickson 7y ago
It's like how the New York Times has always published everything anyone sent them. Oh wait. (They aren't quite directly comparable, but they are for the point you are making, where one side of the equation is popular attention...)
- 12thsie34 7y ago
  Asinine comment, you fail to show how they are remotely similar.
UncleMeat 7y ago
Linking to the people behind the design is a recipe for violence. I already know people in security who get death threats. I can't even imagine what it'd be like for people in moderation.
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RonaldSchleifer 7y ago
You're missing the obvious solution ... not being authoritarian vile people that censor what others legally say and do in public. It has been disconcerting to me for a long time now, even back when I was told that I do not know how the internet works when I foresaw the very outcome we are currently in, back about 20 years ago now. What has really happened here, is a kind of fascism (the alignment of state and industry) not by the grass roots so much as it was approached in the past, but through a top down consolidation, concentration, and now ever increasing and tightening control over all aspects and manners of freedom and liberty, under the guise of doing things for others' best interests, which of course always align more closely with the interests of the power seeking than the blissfully unaware recipients of this benevolent good intention of the power hungry. I do not foresee a positive future at this point, because the very mindset of the trend curve has solidly crossed with the power broker curve, and there is ever weaning realization that the only way to resolve these matters in anything but a violent manner is that everyone be allowed the God given rights that the US Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to the Constitution) prohibits the government from violating. Those include free speech and assembly (of any kind, regardless of whether you agree with it), freedom to arms to protect yourself from the very government mob that demands to take the right to protect yourself from it (it's a self-fulfilling and self-validating argument that is rather genius), and other inalienable rights that are innate to actual Americans (and anyone who were to adopt the same) and God given (which you presumably should not and do not prescribe to if you do not believe in God from which they are unavoidably and declaratively derived) that are not necessary to be listed here for reasons of brevity and their only tangential relation to the topic. It has always surprised me, and it is one of the most interesting questions for me, how that a presumably extremely logical and systematic cohort of humans as the ones assembled in this forum, would seemingly lack any semblance of a capacity to understand the consequences of making fundamental changes to a system, in what appears to be some bizarre and inverted assumption that no change to a system will in any way result in negative outcomes. Unless of course the very prime assumption is a desire to sabotage the system, whether you are a knowing and willing participant, or just a placed saboteur ... a rube, not in any way understanding that he was placed to spread his negative impact on the system from within.
- braythwayt 7y ago
hacknat 7y ago
I’m confused. What technology did twitter replace? Oh it didn’t? This is completely new, the ability to communicate to this many people at once? Okay so what ancient rights are being trampled exactly? If anything we probably need to be censoring people on Twitter right now as it doesn’t seem to convince anyone of anything other than that the people on the other-side of their argument are sub-human. Edit: Also, it always riles me up when someone refers to social media as a “main communication” provider. What fraction of the population gets its political discourse off of Twitter?
- prepend 7y ago
  In Q1 of this year, twitter had 68 million monthly active users in the US [0]. Hard to tell how many of them follow political discourse. But that’s 20% of the population (give or take) and it’s a substantial fraction. I’m not sure how but I want that fraction to get before appropriate rights are defined and adopted. The US common carrier rules were only enacted in 1934 [1] so it took a while before phone companies were forced to respect some US rights. Twitter is only 15 years old so it’s likely that this private company (and others) will be regulated just like the private telephone companies were regulated. I had hoped that technology had advanced enough so respecting human rights would be embedded into the design. But now I think it will take laws and regulations which will inevitably, and sadly I think, also squelch innovation. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274564/monthly-active-twitter-users-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/274564/monthly-active-tw... [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/201
  - lancesells 7y ago
    I have no idea what the real MAU numbers of actual people are but I would think it's maybe a quarter (5%) of the population. There are so many bots on twitter along with company accounts, meme accounts, IFTT automation, etc. that I can't imagine it's 20% of the US using twitter each month.
    - bryanlarsen 7y ago
mschuster91 7y ago
> If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), us normal human beings need the right to appeal, public auditing, bright line rules, and due process rights. At least in Germany, people can sue Twitter and Facebook to have their accounts re-opened. Of course, this option reduces the value of due process rights as one has to be able to fund a lawyer and the court fees...
alwayseasy 7y ago
Expression is not public communication. Are you not conflating freedom of speech with freedom to be heard/reach an audience? Even 2 centuries ago, the US government wouldn't intervene to force newspapers to publish the op-eds of hateful people looking to grow their followers. Why would Youtube or Twitter have to?
- sb057 7y ago
  >Why would Youtube or Twitter have to? Because combined, Google, Twitter, and Facebook have an effective monopoly on modern public discourse.
  - hacknat 7y ago
    No they don't. A huge section of the population is not on Twitter and gets their news from old media.
    - deleted 7y ago
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    - bryanlarsen 7y ago
      "gets their news from old media." which extensively quotes Twitter and gets much of their leads and sources from Twitter.
  - root_axis 7y ago
    No they don't. Those companies can't erase you from the internet, only from their own individual platforms that they own and operate. A "monopoly" would imply that without the use of these sites you could not be heard, but this is obviously false, not only because there are many other similar sites out there, but also because nobody is stopping you from creating your own blog or platform or whatever you like. No, your site won't be as popular as twitter, but so what? Your hyperlinks work just as well as twitter's.
    - SmartJerry 7y ago
root_axis 7y ago
> normal human beings need the right to appeal, public auditing, bright line rules, and due process rights. Why? Who cares if someone gets banned from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc? It isn't a big deal. I can see it as annoying, but it doesn't truly matter to anyone without some type of social media addiction. If "censorship" is the problem, we should support the establishment of government run internet forums that would be legally obligated to the serve the interest of the people rather than trying to arbitrarily steer certain popular websites into moderation strategies that don't align with their business or political prerogatives.
- prepend 7y ago
  It matters to me.
ProAm 7y ago
Twitter is not a democracy. They are a public for profit company first and foremost. They can censor, modify, change anything they want at any point in time. Expect that. Cash is king.
- RestlessMind 7y ago
  It is not a company operating in a vacuum but a public company in a democracy and is subject to the laws (and in general, political will) of the society. If companies were free to "censor, modify, change anything they want at any point in time", then we would not have anti-trust laws or close scrutiny of dominant companies. Ultimately, companies don't exist in a vacuum. If they don't adhere to the political will of the society they operate in,
  - notyourwork 7y ago
    Vacuum has nothing to do with it. Twitter is a platform, you are not compelled to use it. Don’t like it that is fine but popularity doesn’t imply it requires to operate any way other than the way it decides as a company. Why do we expect companies to act like a government we have control over?
    - anonymousab 7y ago
      If they have become the de facto public square, an integral location to participate in public society, then they should be subject to society's whims. There's no reason that those whims must be executed through market instead of through government.
    - baq 7y ago
      If POTUS communicates via Twitter primarily, there’s no option to ‘not use it’. Twitter crossed the line between just a company and a utility a while ago, together with Google and Facebook.
      - notyourwork 7y ago
        People don't have TV, how did presidents ever give addresses to the people before? There most certainly is an option to not use twitter, I know lots of people in that demographic. What line did twitter cross?
jeanvalmarc 7y ago
If there were no alternatives to twitbooktubeit perhaps you would have a point. However, if you don't like the policies of twitter, go to reddit. If you don't like the policies of reddit go to voat. If you don't like all the terrible people on voat, host a forum on a VPC instance. Your position is basically "I think platforms should be compelled to host every bit of nonsense emitted by every user." The freedom is provided by the multitude of choices! I think the idea you can make rules for speech that are impartial and universally accepted is an insane idea which shows no signs of being tractable [1]. Despite attempts to quantify speech, every moderation decision is arbitrary at some level, and preserving choice of moderators seems much more important than arguing over rules. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/world/facebook-moderators.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/world/facebook-moderators...
- Izkata 7y ago
  Gab is trying that, and keeps getting shut down by hosting providers and payment processors that are believing outright lies. The most recent one I'm aware of was Apple removing them from the app store, which here was a worthless virtue signal because Gab is now entirely on the Fediverse - the app was a clone of a common github repo, of which there are dozens not being removed. So it really does seem like any real competition is not allowed anymore.
mmcnl 7y ago
This is a great comment, I never could've worded it so perfectly as you did.
smsm42 7y ago
"The market", however, is not some magic entity than can fix things. The market is you, me and him and her. The market is people. If people would be talking about gab.ai as free-speech alternative to censorious Twitter, it would work as such. If people would insist that gab.ai is a neo-Nazi site where only violent psychopaths about to commit mass shooting are visiting, and should be banned everywhere, then "the market" would not fix any problems. The market is us, so if we want less censorship, we should be actively supporting platforms that have less censorship, and actively fighting platforms that have more of it. > If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms We're not "going" to have it. We already have it. Well, maybe not ISPs, but definitely "Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc." > It's not wrong for Twitter to have rules to protect the weak from the strong, and individuals from the mob When Gandhi was asked "what do you think about Western civilization", he reportedly said "I think it'd be a good idea". In the same vein, it might be a good idea (not sure, but maybe) for Twitter to have rules to protect individuals from the mob and weak from the strong, but whatever Twitter has now definitely does nothing of the sort. I am not sure if it is possible at all to have such rules, but even if it were, Twitter does not seem to be interested in the least.

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andy_ppp 7y ago

I would also argue that unfettered access to incorrect information is also a massive problem for democracy.

ohithereyou 7y ago
I don't want a Ministry of Truth filtering what I'm allowed to hear. In a functional democracy, education and robust debate are supposed to be the defenses against misinformation. Most western democracies long since scrapped proper education because it's easier to win the support of the population with propaganda^H public relations than it is to make a reasoned argument.
- beefield 7y ago
  Unfortunately looks to me that if you do not have a Ministry of Truth, you end up with a society where private actors pump people with soma[1]. Personally, I am willing to accept a restricted version of Ministry of Truth to avoid that outcome. [1]See Huxley, Brave new world.
  - ohithereyou 7y ago
    >Unfortunately looks to me that if you do not have a Ministry of Truth, you end up with a society where private actors pump people with soma This is not a new phenomenon. There have always been snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves. Societies that have very strict control over what people can and cannot say (think the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea, where you could be jailed for counter-revolutionary speech or misleading the people) still had lots of problems with snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves, but they also had a problem with people going to jail (or worse) for saying "the state is the cause of this famine", "the state killed a bunch of innocent protesters", "I disagree with the current economic system", "I am angry that the state took my land from me and gave it to someone else", "the rent is too damn high", "maybe we shouldn't build so many nuclear weapons", and "I don't support Chairman Mao/Uncle Joe". I will assume that any Ministry of Truth that you would support would set out to be expressly non-political at its inception, but giving any one organization the power to restrain the expression of ideas is openly inviting those with an agenda to attempt to co-opt it into suppressing opinions and arguments critical of their agenda. This is an inherent drawback to giving anything power - it inherently becomes political even if the original intent is for it to not be political. I would rather live in a society where snake oil salesmen, con men, liars, and thieves are punished after they commit their crimes than have a single person's freedom to say "fuck the government" suppressed because they misquoted a statistic.
  - navigatesol 7y ago
    >Personally, I am willing to accept a restricted version of Ministry of Truth to avoid that outcome. Every loves this idea right up until the point they realize that their own and the Ministry's opinions do not align.
  - deleted 7y ago
leereeves 7y ago
Unfettered access to information requires unfettered access to incorrect information. The power to decide what's "correct" will be abused to block correct information that damages someone powerful.
- zaroth 7y ago
  Exactly this. Therefore it logically follows that democracy depends on access to incorrect information. Clearly the mods should remove andy_ppp’s comment immediately, if not be held liable for hosting it in the first place. </s>
- jacksnipe 7y ago
  Right, so the hypothesis is that we can’t have unfettered access to information.
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    So who do you propose gets to spoonfeed the masses with their okayed content? That is a terrifying argument.
    - damontal 7y ago
      pre internet weren't the masses spoonfed okayed information by network tv and newspapers?
    - prepend 7y ago
      Obviously the natural answer is the companies who started first and developed these products that are now super widely used. I’ve only heard two arguments- let Twitter do what they want (viva Capitalism!) or have government regulate (viva Socialism!). I wish there was more thought given by Twitter, and others, to just self apply free speech rights and stick to using the current legal system to restricting speech. There’s a ton of law to protect people from damaging speech (harassment, slander/libel, dangerous threats, etc). It’s quite possible that Twitter can just use a more rational standard for their process.
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navigatesol 7y ago
>incorrect information This is easy for "world is flat vs round". There is much more nuance to, for example, "this is discriminatory vs not".
matwood 7y ago
Which in part stems back to anonymity. Information becomes easier to filter and fact check when the purveyors and the sources are not anonymous. People also tend to act more civil when not anonymous. But, a lack of anonymity brings a whole host of other problems.
- zaroth 7y ago
  Anonymity is the keystone of free speech. There is no freedom of speech without the freedom to speak anonymously.
  - mrhappyunhappy 7y ago
    And if I run a 10,000 bot network - should my speech be free?
    - zaroth 7y ago
      Have you heard of the Federalist papers? Sybil attacks are a consequence of anonymity combined with low cost of identity creation, and inability to distinguish between different identities. The fix for Sybil attacks generally involves making identity creation more expensive, or providing a means for distinguishing more valuable identities. On HN, for instance, the karma score is one such mechanism. These systems can work without removing anonymity. And I never said anonymity was easy or without trade-offs.
- nradov 7y ago
  Removing anonymity doesn't solve anything. People post and share all sorts of lies and fake news under their real names. They just don't care. Preserving anonymity is essential for whistle blowers and other vulnerable people.
romaaeterna 7y ago
Absolutely correct. Incorrect information is a huge problem for democracy. The best technology that we have right now to fight incorrect information is an educated citizenry of people free to decide the facts for themselves and debate them openly. We can invest in this proven technology by improving that education, freedom, and open debate.

tdb7893 7y ago

I think you can start a competitor but the lack of censorship is actually an anti-feature for most people as, at least in the modern internet, it seems to get your site filled with white supremacists. The social space is actually fairly crowded right now with Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Discord, the chans, Twitter, and a ton bunch of smaller ones (like HN) and they almost all fall into similar "censorship" models and I think that just reflects a the market right now (which is an interesting balance because neither side is really happy).

zelon88 7y ago

So how do you feel about blog platforms or other service providers that allow posting user-supplied comments on their platform? Should companies and non-profits all be required be to expend resources to keep your hateful comments available to the world? How do we determine what's spam? What's advertising? What's XSS? You have a first amendment right to type any of these things into an input box. Does that mean the organization receiving your message legally has to post it, even if it fails to meet a basic requirement of not breaking their platform or insulting their user-base? Are terms-of-service a violation of someone's first amendment? In my case where I am the only employee of my small platform, do I not have a first amendment right to not host content I disagree with on my domain with my own servers?

romaaeterna 7y ago
The big, ostensibly neutral, communications monopolies need their censorship practices heavily regulated. People with private blogs needs to be absolutely free to control commenting however they would like. I believe that we can respect both of these positions easily, 99% of the time, with our court systems deciding on some of the grey in the middle.
- nradov 7y ago
  Twitter doesn't even remotely have a monopoly on political communications. What counts as a "private" blog? That seems like an arbitrary distinction.
  - 12thsie34 7y ago
    I dont think you know what a monopoly actually is.
    - nradov 7y ago
      Actually I am very familiar with what monopolies are. But if you disagree then please enlighten us rather than posting low-effort comments.
  - 7y ago

indigochill 7y ago

If we look at some differences between Twitter (or insert your favorite social media platform here) and email: * Email providers have zero responsibility for filtering information * Email users form their own networks dynamically through actual relationships rather than some artificial structure of "followers"/"friends" * Email users never get banned from sending email (although maybe in some cases an individual service may ban extreme abusers) * Email's operation is totally independent of irrational mobs/corporate interests/whatever In short, I think the core problem with this situation is in your first line: social media has become a "main communication provider" and it's fundamentally unfit for purpose. Email and other protocol-based communication independent of platforms (IRC is another good example) is still the best solution for a primary communication provider.

taneq 7y ago
From your last paragraph the term you are looking for is "common carrier". Email goes over common carrier networks between private hosts and so is pretty close to a common carrier network. Twitter isn't and doesn't. Maybe there should be a way for web services to provide a similar service with similar protections.
- zenexer 7y ago
  In the US, at least, this isn't true. ISPs aren't considered common carriers--you can thank Ajit Pai for that. If it were true, it would be true for both Twitter and email. Messages from both systems hop between neutral providers in the exact same manner.
  - tremon 7y ago
    Let's avoid the contorted legal definition here, and instead use the real-world definition where "common carrier network" means using an established protocol for routing and delivery, in which many separate entities work together to establish network reach.
    - 7y ago

maxerickson 7y ago

It's like how the New York Times has always published everything anyone sent them. Oh wait. (They aren't quite directly comparable, but they are for the point you are making, where one side of the equation is popular attention...)

12thsie34 7y ago
Asinine comment, you fail to show how they are remotely similar.

UncleMeat 7y ago

Linking to the people behind the design is a recipe for violence. I already know people in security who get death threats. I can't even imagine what it'd be like for people in moderation.

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RonaldSchleifer 7y ago

You're missing the obvious solution ... not being authoritarian vile people that censor what others legally say and do in public. It has been disconcerting to me for a long time now, even back when I was told that I do not know how the internet works when I foresaw the very outcome we are currently in, back about 20 years ago now. What has really happened here, is a kind of fascism (the alignment of state and industry) not by the grass roots so much as it was approached in the past, but through a top down consolidation, concentration, and now ever increasing and tightening control over all aspects and manners of freedom and liberty, under the guise of doing things for others' best interests, which of course always align more closely with the interests of the power seeking than the blissfully unaware recipients of this benevolent good intention of the power hungry. I do not foresee a positive future at this point, because the very mindset of the trend curve has solidly crossed with the power broker curve, and there is ever weaning realization that the only way to resolve these matters in anything but a violent manner is that everyone be allowed the God given rights that the US Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments to the Constitution) prohibits the government from violating. Those include free speech and assembly (of any kind, regardless of whether you agree with it), freedom to arms to protect yourself from the very government mob that demands to take the right to protect yourself from it (it's a self-fulfilling and self-validating argument that is rather genius), and other inalienable rights that are innate to actual Americans (and anyone who were to adopt the same) and God given (which you presumably should not and do not prescribe to if you do not believe in God from which they are unavoidably and declaratively derived) that are not necessary to be listed here for reasons of brevity and their only tangential relation to the topic. It has always surprised me, and it is one of the most interesting questions for me, how that a presumably extremely logical and systematic cohort of humans as the ones assembled in this forum, would seemingly lack any semblance of a capacity to understand the consequences of making fundamental changes to a system, in what appears to be some bizarre and inverted assumption that no change to a system will in any way result in negative outcomes. Unless of course the very prime assumption is a desire to sabotage the system, whether you are a knowing and willing participant, or just a placed saboteur ... a rube, not in any way understanding that he was placed to spread his negative impact on the system from within.

braythwayt 7y ago

hacknat 7y ago

I’m confused. What technology did twitter replace? Oh it didn’t? This is completely new, the ability to communicate to this many people at once? Okay so what ancient rights are being trampled exactly? If anything we probably need to be censoring people on Twitter right now as it doesn’t seem to convince anyone of anything other than that the people on the other-side of their argument are sub-human. Edit: Also, it always riles me up when someone refers to social media as a “main communication” provider. What fraction of the population gets its political discourse off of Twitter?

prepend 7y ago
In Q1 of this year, twitter had 68 million monthly active users in the US [0]. Hard to tell how many of them follow political discourse. But that’s 20% of the population (give or take) and it’s a substantial fraction. I’m not sure how but I want that fraction to get before appropriate rights are defined and adopted. The US common carrier rules were only enacted in 1934 [1] so it took a while before phone companies were forced to respect some US rights. Twitter is only 15 years old so it’s likely that this private company (and others) will be regulated just like the private telephone companies were regulated. I had hoped that technology had advanced enough so respecting human rights would be embedded into the design. But now I think it will take laws and regulations which will inevitably, and sadly I think, also squelch innovation. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274564/monthly-active-twitter-users-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/274564/monthly-active-tw... [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/201
- lancesells 7y ago
  I have no idea what the real MAU numbers of actual people are but I would think it's maybe a quarter (5%) of the population. There are so many bots on twitter along with company accounts, meme accounts, IFTT automation, etc. that I can't imagine it's 20% of the US using twitter each month.
  - bryanlarsen 7y ago

mschuster91 7y ago

> If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and backbone providers (ISPs, Cloudfront), us normal human beings need the right to appeal, public auditing, bright line rules, and due process rights. At least in Germany, people can sue Twitter and Facebook to have their accounts re-opened. Of course, this option reduces the value of due process rights as one has to be able to fund a lawyer and the court fees...

alwayseasy 7y ago

Expression is not public communication. Are you not conflating freedom of speech with freedom to be heard/reach an audience? Even 2 centuries ago, the US government wouldn't intervene to force newspapers to publish the op-eds of hateful people looking to grow their followers. Why would Youtube or Twitter have to?

sb057 7y ago
>Why would Youtube or Twitter have to? Because combined, Google, Twitter, and Facebook have an effective monopoly on modern public discourse.
- hacknat 7y ago
  No they don't. A huge section of the population is not on Twitter and gets their news from old media.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - bryanlarsen 7y ago
    "gets their news from old media." which extensively quotes Twitter and gets much of their leads and sources from Twitter.
- root_axis 7y ago
  No they don't. Those companies can't erase you from the internet, only from their own individual platforms that they own and operate. A "monopoly" would imply that without the use of these sites you could not be heard, but this is obviously false, not only because there are many other similar sites out there, but also because nobody is stopping you from creating your own blog or platform or whatever you like. No, your site won't be as popular as twitter, but so what? Your hyperlinks work just as well as twitter's.
  - SmartJerry 7y ago

root_axis 7y ago

> normal human beings need the right to appeal, public auditing, bright line rules, and due process rights. Why? Who cares if someone gets banned from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc? It isn't a big deal. I can see it as annoying, but it doesn't truly matter to anyone without some type of social media addiction. If "censorship" is the problem, we should support the establishment of government run internet forums that would be legally obligated to the serve the interest of the people rather than trying to arbitrarily steer certain popular websites into moderation strategies that don't align with their business or political prerogatives.

prepend 7y ago
It matters to me.

ProAm 7y ago

Twitter is not a democracy. They are a public for profit company first and foremost. They can censor, modify, change anything they want at any point in time. Expect that. Cash is king.

RestlessMind 7y ago
It is not a company operating in a vacuum but a public company in a democracy and is subject to the laws (and in general, political will) of the society. If companies were free to "censor, modify, change anything they want at any point in time", then we would not have anti-trust laws or close scrutiny of dominant companies. Ultimately, companies don't exist in a vacuum. If they don't adhere to the political will of the society they operate in,
- notyourwork 7y ago
  Vacuum has nothing to do with it. Twitter is a platform, you are not compelled to use it. Don’t like it that is fine but popularity doesn’t imply it requires to operate any way other than the way it decides as a company. Why do we expect companies to act like a government we have control over?
  - anonymousab 7y ago
    If they have become the de facto public square, an integral location to participate in public society, then they should be subject to society's whims. There's no reason that those whims must be executed through market instead of through government.
  - baq 7y ago
    If POTUS communicates via Twitter primarily, there’s no option to ‘not use it’. Twitter crossed the line between just a company and a utility a while ago, together with Google and Facebook.
    - notyourwork 7y ago
      People don't have TV, how did presidents ever give addresses to the people before? There most certainly is an option to not use twitter, I know lots of people in that demographic. What line did twitter cross?

jeanvalmarc 7y ago

If there were no alternatives to twitbooktubeit perhaps you would have a point. However, if you don't like the policies of twitter, go to reddit. If you don't like the policies of reddit go to voat. If you don't like all the terrible people on voat, host a forum on a VPC instance. Your position is basically "I think platforms should be compelled to host every bit of nonsense emitted by every user." The freedom is provided by the multitude of choices! I think the idea you can make rules for speech that are impartial and universally accepted is an insane idea which shows no signs of being tractable [1]. Despite attempts to quantify speech, every moderation decision is arbitrary at some level, and preserving choice of moderators seems much more important than arguing over rules. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/world/facebook-moderators.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/27/world/facebook-moderators...

Izkata 7y ago
Gab is trying that, and keeps getting shut down by hosting providers and payment processors that are believing outright lies. The most recent one I'm aware of was Apple removing them from the app store, which here was a worthless virtue signal because Gab is now entirely on the Fediverse - the app was a clone of a common github repo, of which there are dozens not being removed. So it really does seem like any real competition is not allowed anymore.

mmcnl 7y ago

This is a great comment, I never could've worded it so perfectly as you did.

smsm42 7y ago

"The market", however, is not some magic entity than can fix things. The market is you, me and him and her. The market is people. If people would be talking about gab.ai as free-speech alternative to censorious Twitter, it would work as such. If people would insist that gab.ai is a neo-Nazi site where only violent psychopaths about to commit mass shooting are visiting, and should be banned everywhere, then "the market" would not fix any problems. The market is us, so if we want less censorship, we should be actively supporting platforms that have less censorship, and actively fighting platforms that have more of it. > If we're going to have censorship on the big platforms We're not "going" to have it. We already have it. Well, maybe not ISPs, but definitely "Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc." > It's not wrong for Twitter to have rules to protect the weak from the strong, and individuals from the mob When Gandhi was asked "what do you think about Western civilization", he reportedly said "I think it'd be a good idea". In the same vein, it might be a good idea (not sure, but maybe) for Twitter to have rules to protect individuals from the mob and weak from the strong, but whatever Twitter has now definitely does nothing of the sort. I am not sure if it is possible at all to have such rules, but even if it were, Twitter does not seem to be interested in the least.