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Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

233 points by barry-cotter 7y ago

rhaksw 7y ago
I'm always surprised when articles like this don't mention reddit. Isn't it a top 10 website that was once top 3? I've read quotes saying one in three americans has visited reddit. Anyway, reddit is a great resource for studying moderation activity.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  That is because it oozes pretense of refusing to accept that their "silent majority" is really a noisy minority. Not recognizing freedom of association is one of the big warning signs along with not realizing the impact of what they want on /themselves/. Personally at that point I mentally mark them as spam. Annoyingly they conflate actual corporate censorship concerns with their persecution complex. DMCA abuse is actual corporate censorship for instance. Same if say Comcast blocked Netflix. The government using a cudgel to make corporations do their censorship when laws would be struck down in an instant is censorship and a messy semantics arguement of corporate vs government origin. These complaints boil down to "they aren't giving me an audience how dare they!". There is a world of difference between not given any attention and cannot publish.
  - rhaksw 7y ago
    I don't see how this relates to leaving reddit out of articles about moderation in social media.
lonelappde 7y ago
This is such an own-goal. Before worrying about censoring unwanted content, companies should spend their time on stopping promoting it (and building client side filtering controls) which is just as huge a problem and not anti-American to fix. The problem is that companies want the flamebait and toxic content to drive enragement engagement ad impressions, but don't want to be accountable for the stuff that's just too edgy for advertisers.
- jcriddle4 7y ago
  "Companies want the flamebait...." The moderation system on reddit seems to heavily promote group think. Actually promoting controversial comments as a default would be interesting.
  - nova22033 7y ago
    * Actually promoting controversial comments as a default would be interesting.* Controversial is subjective. Would you like FB/reddit to promote holocaust denial?
    - zebby 7y ago
      I think he means that showing the comments with the most replies or the comments with the most mixed upvote/downvotes would be more interesting than just showing the most upvoted comment.
    - jcriddle4 7y ago
      Reddit has an option to sort on controversial on a group and also on comments. I suspect the algorithm is probably looking for things with a combination of upvotes and downvotes. Take a look at any reddit group or the comments and sort on controversial if you want to see what it looks like. If you defined controversial as any thing that has a 15% to 55% down vote ratio that would be fairly specific. Maybe over 60% downvote it may be off topic or spam? It would be an interesting experiment, for a few days, to change the default from "hot" to "controversial".
  - buboard 7y ago
    I use reddit precisely because it has topical communities. Moderating away people and posts that distract from the topic is a good thing. It promotes group think exactly because you can belong to any number of groups.
    - zebby 7y ago
      It's perfect for hobby or niche interest subreddits. It's a flawed system for discussing politics or anything remotely controversial. Safespace bubbles, censorship by downvotes, mods that curate their subreddit, mass removed comments... That's all fine if you're discussing your favourite videogame or cooking recipes, but not when there's politics involved. Imageboard style websites where every shit comment has as much visibility as the other is vastly superior for having an interesting discussion. The downside is that you have to wade through the bad comments.
d--b 7y ago
See but that's a libertarian issue here. If you value freedom above all else, Google being an independent entity, should have the freedom to ban / veto whomever they want. You can't have it both ways: let people be free to say whatever they want AND force the owners of communication channels to spread all information.
- dangerface 7y ago
  > If you value freedom above all else Thats not libertarian, its freedom to do whatever you want that doesn't affect other people.
- ch4s3 7y ago
  I don’t think that’s the argument they’re making. I think they would concede that Google has a property right, and may at it’s discretion moderate content. However, they would argue that Google shouldn’t exercise that right because it is harmful to the culture of free speech. This is volunteerism, which is to say they should choose to hold themselves to a standard without being forced to do so. I’m not sure how I feel about it, but I think I’ve summarized the best version of the argument.
- merpnderp 7y ago
  Ironically this is somewhat similar the LGBT cake shop case where the two political sides are flipped. A great example of how many people don’t care about right and wrong, just winning.
- degski 7y ago
  I agree with you that Google or Facebook should be allowed to do what they want. The problem we face is that these companies run major (the dominant) communication channels, that's (IMHO) where the problem lies [it shouldn't be like that, but heck, we cannot trust our governments better than G or FB].
  - buboard 7y ago
    Perversely, the popular press is also communicating to people that G & FB should censor more, instead of calling them out for their manipulation shenanigans.
bkor 7y ago
Not that impressed with this article. It states as it might be a fact that the "right is suppressed" and "left" is "in favor". Then it never really explains why censorship might be bad or not. It doesn't get really concrete, just something vague about "marketplace of ideas". IMO it's bad to have places where only one side is heard, the other is not. Further, there are too many places where people might feel they're a majority in their opinion, while they're not. Usually people would notice they're the odd one out. That's not the case in various places (e.g. subreddits). Note that I'm from the Netherlands and do not agree with freedom of speech above everything is a good thing. There should be some limits to it. These reasonable limits should be in place. Making distinctions between right/left and complaining that more of your stuff is questionable.. yeah.. so? The "left"/Democratic party I consider pretty conservative and not looking out for its people. As such, it's always strange to see the complaints, what is right/left for e.g. US to me is "right wing" vs "even more right wing". I also do not see the restrictions; there should be way more limits on reddit/twitter/facebook. Further, I think the companies should be held responsible for this.
Miner49er 7y ago
So the author wants to protect "the marketplace of ideas" from monopolies caused by a different market. However, they don't want the government to do it. They also don't seem to think it's possible for smaller companies to challenge these monopolies. What then is the author's solution? One is never given.
- ChaosDegenerate 7y ago
  Government should regulate Facebook, Google (Youtube), Twitter, etc. as utilities that they are. The current situation where the corporations aren't responsible for the content but can censor it is the best example of why they should be treated as utilities.
  - whatisthiseven 7y ago
    But what would be the goal of governing them as utilities? This is always said as if it were obvious what would happen once FB gets utility status. Should FB resume its banning of sexually explicit, beheading, animal torture, and ISIS videos when it is a "utility"? And how will the product of FB change as a utility? In what sense is FB a utility other than a very common place people like to go to, like concerts or a sports stadium or something? What is actually meant when we say "regulate technology companies built around communication as a utility"? How large before you become one? Is any app that has chat or public posting a utility now? What classifies? Is the only goal to make them dumb pipes? What other roles and responsibilities would the government hoist onto FB and require it do?
    - ChaosDegenerate 7y ago
      What will happen to New York Times when its running sexually explicit, beheading, animal torture, etc? They will get sued. As soon as we can start suing them for the content they provide the sooner they will find resolution to it. The same way they will get sued if they censor content that might be deemed socially important.
      - 7y ago
nova22033 7y ago
For several years, conservatives have expressed concern that big tech companies, such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, are suppressing right-leaning content in various, more or less direct ways. Even though conservatives often exaggerate it, I think there is no doubt about the anti-conservative bias of these companies, but that is not what I want to discuss in this article. You don't want to discuss it here because you don't have a detailed analysis backed up by solid data. If you did, you'd lead with it. Trust me, most people here can handle an article full of graphs and stuff.
jacquesm 7y ago
Politicized flamebait, flagged. Call it censorship if you want.
woopwoop 7y ago
Replace "censoring conservative viewpoints" with "censoring the nice people who tell me about how I can make $13,000 a week working from home". Which part of this argument changes? I can't find any part that does.
- tomp 7y ago
  The difference is that there's a Spam folder in your GMail where you can see all those "unwelcome" emails... and also, filters adapt to your preferences, not the other way around.
  - jasonlotito 7y ago
    So, the argument is Twitter shouldn't combat spam? That HN shouldn't edit/delete content? That if a website accepts user generated content, they should have to make it viewable?
    - tomp 7y ago
      That's my argument, yes. I'm fine with hiding replies, and users using opt-out-able block-lists (e.g. that's how porn is implemented on Twitter and many other websites)... moderation is OK, censorship & (shadow)banning is the evil.
- jerf 7y ago
  I can't speak for the article, but I can speak for myself. The difference is that I, personally, have control over the blocking of the "make money fast" communication. I think part of the right to free speech is the right to be able to choose what speech you consume, i.e., everyone has the right to free speech but nobody has the right to impose upon you. For me personally, since I run my own incoming mail server, there is no platform censoring those emails. I use my own tools, trained on my own emails and my own choices about what to block, to do the filtering. When a platform entirely blocks some speech, that is not my choice; it is theirs. That is the critical difference. This is still not a bright shining line, because there isn't one. But it's sufficiently clear to be a guiding principle. If you want to lock yourself in some particular filter bubble, that's your choice, but nobody else has the right to force you into one.
jvickers 7y ago
I have a wide view of what 'censorship' is, and I include spam filtering in the definition. For example, a while ago I saw an advert for some kind of erection-causing pill on a forum discussing C++. If the forum moderators remove such a post, they make the forum more efficient by saving other users (who are looking for C++ content) from themselves having to filter out irrelevant information / a sales pitch. I also see far too many 'work from home' adverts in discussions in the Independent newspaper's comment section (on unrelated articles), and if they took a more censorious approach to such comments then the comment section would improve. To an extent I support censorship, and according to what I believe censorship to be, almost everyone else supports it. If this very comment had been about some unrelated topic, such as giving an opinion about who to blame or not blame for problems in the Middle East, it would be right for the comment to be censored from this discussion, and it would be censorship from a private company, censorship of a political viewpoint no less.
- gdulli 7y ago
  I agree. If you broaden the term "censorship" so much as to make it equivalent to any entity trying to enforce quality or relevance control standards in its own venue, you make the term useless. While also subverting conversation about actual censorship, cheapening it.
  - hnal943 7y ago
    I'm not certain there's a strict line between "actual" censorship and OP's definition. Care to give a definition you think is defensible as "actual" censorship?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - gdulli 7y ago
      Sure, it's hard to draw a strict line that will make everyone happy. I'm not going to try. But that doesn't mean that removing ED pill spam should be conflated with the government banning books under threat of imprisonment. We live in a messy world and have to fall back on using our judgment and common sense, flawed as they are. It's obtuse to pretend that it's confusing why one is acceptable and the other isn't. And it's not helpful to say that the lack of an unambiguous, unanimously accepted definition means that certain clearly reasonable actions can't be taken.
root_axis 7y ago
Private companies should be able to censor political speech, period. If it's my desire to build a platform that is favorable to certain types of speech, that's my right and the government shouldn't be forcing me to modify my platform to rebroadcast speech I disagree with. In terms of conservative complaints about leftist censorship, I have to simply roll my eyes. The conservatives complaining about big tech don't care about censorship, they only care about the dominance of their own political messages. This is obvious when you ask them about "democratizing speech" on platforms they already dominate like cable news and talk radio. Remember the fairness doctrine? They hated the idea of having the government dictate the political composition of the airwaves, but when it comes to big tech, suddenly they want to nationalize the platforms to their own benefit. I find the effort extremely disingenuous. Also, something something downvotes something something censorship!!
- Chris_Chambers 7y ago
  Private social media companies that reach a certain size should be forcibly nationalized and transformed into taxpayer funded instruments of the first amendment with zero censorship. The former owners should be compensated with so much money that it’s impossible they’d be upset about the blessing of retiring early and never working again unless their true goal all along was to use their power in a treasonous fashion. Anyone who disagrees with me should be hanged for treason. Anyone still working at the company after it’s nationalized who is found working on or implementing any form of censorship should be hanged for treason.
- Grumbledour 7y ago
  I think you are right. But I would also argue that such censorship should be as transparent as possible. Though the real question is, at a certain size of user base, does a private space not become a public one? Or rather, if there is no alternative of not having censorship, no place else to go, does the censorship not become a problem then? I am not sure what the solution here would be, actually, but while I think if people don't like facebooks/twitters censorship they should just go somewhere else, I would not hold the same view for example on email providers.
  - 7y ago
JediWing 7y ago
Know what else distorts the marketplace of ideas? Money. Money allows for buying advertisements, essentially allowing you to buy a platform to spread your ideas. Having money typically has a pretty clear bias: protecting the money of those who have it. This comes at the expense, many times, of those who do not. That typically equates to conservative policies. I'm not convinced that the market distortion caused by supposed bias in social media moderation is even close to the distortion created by allowing money in politics. In fact in many (not all) cases of purported bias, the true impetus for action was due to hateful or otherwise harmful speech. Nor do I agree that if we disagree with state censorship, we should disagree with Facebook censorship. Being thrown into the legal system with threat of monetary penalty, jailtime, etc. is worthy of much more scrutiny than speech that gets you banned from a social network.
- buboard 7y ago
  You know what else distorts the marketplace of ideas? Guns. Monetary incentives are a lot more voluntary in comparison
  - disintegore 7y ago
    Just go ahead and say it
- brlewis 7y ago
  This is mentioned in the last half of the last paragraph in the article.
- FussyZeus 7y ago
  This was a big part of why I enjoyed Jack Dorsey's comments on Twitter removing political advertising. The Internet was supposed to be a democratizing force, and it was, for awhile. To an extent it still is, but as the convergence of content continues to pull people into the various Platforms™, all of which are supported by advertiser dollars, the content itself is diluted. Some not so much, some so much it's not recognizable, others so much that it's no longer there. YouTube is a great example of this. Once a monument to the power of democratized content, it's slowly but surely pushing out real creators in favor of advertising companies producing advertiser-friendly and oh-so-clickable content, much of which is complete and utter trash. It's not just marketing companies though, a new breed of creator has spawned since roughly 2010, determined to soak as many advertising dollars out of the platform as they can with as much vapid and soulless content as it will suffer. And all of this is sponsored in turn by equally vapid and soulless corporate advertisers, determined to make sure their precious brands are not associated with anything as uncouth as an opinion or a real person. Hell, there's a great argument to be made of how the "pivot to video" and the resulting catacombs full of gutted and destroyed media websites can be laid at the feet of corporate marketers who wanted video ads. Nay it was not any Internet citizen who claimed the future was video, we didn't ask for it, and we certainly didn't like it. The whole thing is gross, and far from isolated to YouTube, it has plagued them all, save perhaps for Twitter and I think the only thing saving Twitter is that it's just not as easily monetized. But, Twitter has a different problem, which I believe Jack is trying to solve; the influx of automated bots, bought and paid for by other marketers, more often trying to sell politics than products. But it's just a different kind of feces from the same anus and indicative of the same core problem: advertisers suck, at everything. And they have more power than ever on the Internet, and so the Internet sucks more than ever.
jon_akimbo 7y ago
It's hard to take this argument seriously when the only companies mentioned are left-leaning tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google. I suspect that the author's concern isn't censorship per se, but censorship of viewpoints he happens to uphold. If Twitter's suppression of conservative content is bad, then so is The Federalist's suppression of liberal content. You're about to argue that one of these is a social media platform, while the other is a news outlet. In that case, what do you think is the essential difference that makes it okay for one to censor certain ideas but not the other?
- eli 7y ago
  What makes a company left-leaning?
- maratd 7y ago
  I can argue that censorship isn't OK on either? Isn't that the appropriate position?
- malvosenior 7y ago
  I think a lot of people do take issue with things that call themselves "news" promoting one side of the ideological spectrum. That being said, social media is just that: something users can post to. Twitter users were not hired to promote a particular point of view, they were invited to share their own point of view. To then go through and cull the people you invited to share based on ideology while still calling yourself a social media platform is where a lot of the complaints (rightfully) come from.
  - jon_akimbo 7y ago
    It sounds like you're saying that what a company calls itself determines which ethical obligations apply to it. I can agree to an extent, but I suspect there's a different point here. Twitter, per its own website, is "what’s happening in the world and what people are talking about right now." Is there any way to revise this sentence—or any other aspect of the Twitter brand—such that Twitter would no longer be subject to these complaints of censorship?
llcoolv 7y ago
How could a private company impose censhorship when none of them are allowed to use violence? They could only ban certain types of behaviour on their premises, right? Which is not really censorship as one could just go to someone else's premises or found their own.
- crooked-v 7y ago
  The real problem here isn't that companies are allowed to control what content goes on their platforms, but that companies are allowed to get so large that they're a de facto monopoly for much of the world (e.g. Facebook).
adrianN 7y ago
There is outright censorship, or rather removing topics that the owner of the platform doesn't like, and then there is the much more serious problem of creating echo chambers for the users where dissenting opinions are not deleted, but hidden.
leshow 7y ago
The article is good, but it could do with a lot less ad hominem and calling people 'idiots'. You can do better than this: > you may think that you’re very sophisticated, but actually you are just being ridiculous. > Sure, you can say that if you want (though I don’t think that’s how the word is actually used by ordinary people), but only idiots think it shows that it’s not a problem. > I know that some people, especially among libertarians, think it makes them smart to believe that, but they clearly have not thought this through.
imgabe 7y ago
Instead of an ideological bias, what if it is just a demographic bias? The author supposes that there are some mustache-twirling masterminds behind the scenes at Google, Twitter, and Facebook, picking and choosing what content is promoted. But the algorithms, at their most basic sense, promote what is popular. Based on voting records, in absolute numbers, there are simply more left-leaning people (at least in the US) than there are right-leaning people. Gerrymandering and the electoral college, etc don't reflect this in the government, but it is the case. The left-leaning viewpoints are more promoted then, simply because there are more people who want to see them. There's no reason to posit a nefarious conspiracy. We could argue that it would be beneficial to promote less popular viewpoints more to expose people to new ideas. It probably would be a good thing. But these companies are in the business of making money and people generally just want to see things that confirm their own biases. Just look at how upset conservatives are that they can't find enough content like that ;)
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  >The author supposes that there are some mustache-twirling masterminds behind the scenes at Google, Twitter, and Facebook, picking and choosing what content is promoted. But the algorithms, at there most basic sense, promote what is popular. Hardly. The algos have programmers thumbs on them heavily. A hilarious example was when Reddit was trying to deal with the_donald successfully spamming reddits hot algorithm. But someone screwed up the new weighting and instead of pushing td posts down it pushed them up, the whole front page was nothing but td posts for a day. They eventually fixed it, but never think that there isn't a human jury rigged mess of if else statements at the core of the algorithms.
  - imgabe 7y ago
    That just proves my point. the_donald had to find an exploit and resort to spamming in order to get the algorithm to push them onto the front page. They couldn't get there on the basis of, you know, actually being popular because a large number of people want to read them.
    - 7y ago
Ajedi32 7y ago
> For instance, if you’re a journalist and you want to promote your work, there is simply no viable alternative to Twitter at the moment. No other microblogging platform comes even close to having the number of users Twitter does, and most of the alternatives are hotbeds of extremism, so that anyone who joins them is thereby disqualified in polite company. IMO if you can't even try to use an alternative microblogging platform for fear of being labeled an extremist by "polite company", that's indicative of a much more serious societal issue. The quote included in this article from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty explains the danger rather eloquently I think: > Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.
- danso 7y ago
  What right do journalists have to have a platform for promotion and advertising? Either before or after the Internet and Twitter.
  - forgottenpass 7y ago
    We're not talking about inalienable rights. That's implied in the title of the linked post. If you don't care about "good"/"bad" decisions and just care about the legal bounds, just say so and dismiss the article out of hand. Your roundabout question just drags discussion down.
    - throwafkdl 7y ago
      The thing is, people rightfully are pointing out an important issue ("corporate tech giants have monopolized the public speaking space and are holding unaccountable power") and but inexplicably ignore the obvious solution (break them up and/or emigrate to federated/decentralized platforms while actively promoting them) in favor of the worst possible one (force Twitter to unban nazis).
tssva 7y ago
The article starts with an unsupported premise that the platforms these companies operate favor liberal over conservative speech so my natural inclination is just to dismiss the rest of it; however, even if true the solution to improving freedom of speech is not suppressing someone else's freedom of speech.
- weci2i 7y ago
  I probably can’t supply data that would convince you liberal speech is favored over conservative speech. However, within the past month my personal Facebook account was curiously disabled within an hour of typing the word “Christian” in a comment. I would not identify as conservative or liberal. I certainly can’t prove that merely using this word was what triggered the permaban, but Facebook absolutely would not reinstate my account, even after I supplied a valid driver’s license as proof of my identity.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> For instance, if you’re a journalist and you want to promote your work, there is simply no viable alternative to Twitter at the moment. No other microblogging platform Microblogging platforms aren't the only venue for journalists to promote their work. But, even if that wasn't the case, that's not an argument that private censorship is bad but that private monopolies are bad, and that censorship by monopolies on essential communications mechanisms (public or private) is bad.
Starkus 7y ago
Censorship is awful, sometimes even worse through large tech corporations, i.e. Google, Facebook, etc.
nullc 7y ago
The problem that arises when you define censorship broadly is that the opposite of censorship is censorship. If no one can restrict what gets published in their venues then as soon as a venue starts discussing stuff I don't like, I can spin up a shill call center or a guy with a thousand accounts and a copy of GPT2 and flood that venue with so much divisive moronicism that the voices that threaten me will be almost completely drowned out. Worse, large open venues being flooded with low quality communications already happens even without any intentional censorship-by-flooding attack. ... providing great cover for these attacks. Especially savvy attackers can leverage the pre-existing populations of well meaning fools by shaping their messages to motivate fools into carrying on the disruption on their own. If you think about it-- the classical view of censorship where someone outright silences you is nearly impossible online today in most of the world. It is extraordinarily hard to completely stop the spread of information that people want to spread. But at the same time, censorship that works by flooding out an idea or discrediting it by association with abusive nutballs has never been easier or more effective. When we worry too much about private parties shutting down conversations in their own venues we risk improving the situation around an outmoded and somewhat ineffectual model of censorship at the expense of making a modern and highly effective model much worse. The best I think we can do is foster an internet structure where everyone can have their own venues which they can operate under whatever rules they think are best, and everyone is free to move among them at the lowest cost possible. That way, effective moderation can shut down flooding attacks and voting-with-your-feet can shut down overly censorious (or overly passive!) moderation. Unfortunately, the highly centralized world created by the popularity and network effects of sites like facebook, twitter, and youtube are the opposite of this. Instead of people being empowered to self-regulate abuse and migration being easy, people are disempowered and migration costs are high.
- leereeves 7y ago
  This is a rather common style of argument often used against civil rights: every person's civil rights should be restrained because criminals abuse those rights. We can't have censorship free platforms because someone might spin up a thousand accounts. We need the NSA to monitor all communications because terrorists use the Internet. We should arrest 12-year olds for making finger guns because of school shooters. But in this case as in so many, it's an off-topic argument, merely a distraction or an excuse for overreaching authority. No one here is arguing that someone who makes a thousand accounts shouldn't be restrained; that's simply not the topic under discussion, even if the word "censorship" can be stretched to include that topic.
ZeroGravitas 7y ago
Regulating private companies for the benefit of society? I didn't think that idea was still within the current Overton window at this point. The phrase "hoist by their own petard" seems appropriate here.
boomlinde 7y ago
The problem I think is that we let these companies grow so big, and let society grow so dependent on them that their policies become a worldwide public issue. If we become dependent on Twitter or Facebook to participate in democracy, regulation should follow.
RickJWagner 7y ago
I've been flabbergasted at the number of universities that have recently stifled speakers. I agree with much of what the author wrote. It's time for change. Classic liberalism may be best.

233 points by barry-cotter 7y ago

I'm always surprised when articles like this don't mention reddit. Isn't it a top 10 website that was once top 3? I've read quotes saying one in three americans has visited reddit. Anyway, reddit is a great resource for studying moderation activity.

Nasrudith 7y ago
That is because it oozes pretense of refusing to accept that their "silent majority" is really a noisy minority. Not recognizing freedom of association is one of the big warning signs along with not realizing the impact of what they want on /themselves/. Personally at that point I mentally mark them as spam. Annoyingly they conflate actual corporate censorship concerns with their persecution complex. DMCA abuse is actual corporate censorship for instance. Same if say Comcast blocked Netflix. The government using a cudgel to make corporations do their censorship when laws would be struck down in an instant is censorship and a messy semantics arguement of corporate vs government origin. These complaints boil down to "they aren't giving me an audience how dare they!". There is a world of difference between not given any attention and cannot publish.
- rhaksw 7y ago
  I don't see how this relates to leaving reddit out of articles about moderation in social media.

lonelappde 7y ago

This is such an own-goal. Before worrying about censoring unwanted content, companies should spend their time on stopping promoting it (and building client side filtering controls) which is just as huge a problem and not anti-American to fix. The problem is that companies want the flamebait and toxic content to drive enragement engagement ad impressions, but don't want to be accountable for the stuff that's just too edgy for advertisers.

jcriddle4 7y ago
"Companies want the flamebait...." The moderation system on reddit seems to heavily promote group think. Actually promoting controversial comments as a default would be interesting.
- nova22033 7y ago
  * Actually promoting controversial comments as a default would be interesting.* Controversial is subjective. Would you like FB/reddit to promote holocaust denial?
  - zebby 7y ago
    I think he means that showing the comments with the most replies or the comments with the most mixed upvote/downvotes would be more interesting than just showing the most upvoted comment.
  - jcriddle4 7y ago
    Reddit has an option to sort on controversial on a group and also on comments. I suspect the algorithm is probably looking for things with a combination of upvotes and downvotes. Take a look at any reddit group or the comments and sort on controversial if you want to see what it looks like. If you defined controversial as any thing that has a 15% to 55% down vote ratio that would be fairly specific. Maybe over 60% downvote it may be off topic or spam? It would be an interesting experiment, for a few days, to change the default from "hot" to "controversial".
- buboard 7y ago
  I use reddit precisely because it has topical communities. Moderating away people and posts that distract from the topic is a good thing. It promotes group think exactly because you can belong to any number of groups.
  - zebby 7y ago
    It's perfect for hobby or niche interest subreddits. It's a flawed system for discussing politics or anything remotely controversial. Safespace bubbles, censorship by downvotes, mods that curate their subreddit, mass removed comments... That's all fine if you're discussing your favourite videogame or cooking recipes, but not when there's politics involved. Imageboard style websites where every shit comment has as much visibility as the other is vastly superior for having an interesting discussion. The downside is that you have to wade through the bad comments.

d--b 7y ago

See but that's a libertarian issue here. If you value freedom above all else, Google being an independent entity, should have the freedom to ban / veto whomever they want. You can't have it both ways: let people be free to say whatever they want AND force the owners of communication channels to spread all information.

dangerface 7y ago
> If you value freedom above all else Thats not libertarian, its freedom to do whatever you want that doesn't affect other people.
ch4s3 7y ago
I don’t think that’s the argument they’re making. I think they would concede that Google has a property right, and may at it’s discretion moderate content. However, they would argue that Google shouldn’t exercise that right because it is harmful to the culture of free speech. This is volunteerism, which is to say they should choose to hold themselves to a standard without being forced to do so. I’m not sure how I feel about it, but I think I’ve summarized the best version of the argument.
merpnderp 7y ago
Ironically this is somewhat similar the LGBT cake shop case where the two political sides are flipped. A great example of how many people don’t care about right and wrong, just winning.
degski 7y ago
I agree with you that Google or Facebook should be allowed to do what they want. The problem we face is that these companies run major (the dominant) communication channels, that's (IMHO) where the problem lies [it shouldn't be like that, but heck, we cannot trust our governments better than G or FB].
- buboard 7y ago
  Perversely, the popular press is also communicating to people that G & FB should censor more, instead of calling them out for their manipulation shenanigans.

bkor 7y ago

Not that impressed with this article. It states as it might be a fact that the "right is suppressed" and "left" is "in favor". Then it never really explains why censorship might be bad or not. It doesn't get really concrete, just something vague about "marketplace of ideas". IMO it's bad to have places where only one side is heard, the other is not. Further, there are too many places where people might feel they're a majority in their opinion, while they're not. Usually people would notice they're the odd one out. That's not the case in various places (e.g. subreddits). Note that I'm from the Netherlands and do not agree with freedom of speech above everything is a good thing. There should be some limits to it. These reasonable limits should be in place. Making distinctions between right/left and complaining that more of your stuff is questionable.. yeah.. so? The "left"/Democratic party I consider pretty conservative and not looking out for its people. As such, it's always strange to see the complaints, what is right/left for e.g. US to me is "right wing" vs "even more right wing". I also do not see the restrictions; there should be way more limits on reddit/twitter/facebook. Further, I think the companies should be held responsible for this.

Miner49er 7y ago

So the author wants to protect "the marketplace of ideas" from monopolies caused by a different market. However, they don't want the government to do it. They also don't seem to think it's possible for smaller companies to challenge these monopolies. What then is the author's solution? One is never given.

ChaosDegenerate 7y ago
Government should regulate Facebook, Google (Youtube), Twitter, etc. as utilities that they are. The current situation where the corporations aren't responsible for the content but can censor it is the best example of why they should be treated as utilities.
- whatisthiseven 7y ago
  But what would be the goal of governing them as utilities? This is always said as if it were obvious what would happen once FB gets utility status. Should FB resume its banning of sexually explicit, beheading, animal torture, and ISIS videos when it is a "utility"? And how will the product of FB change as a utility? In what sense is FB a utility other than a very common place people like to go to, like concerts or a sports stadium or something? What is actually meant when we say "regulate technology companies built around communication as a utility"? How large before you become one? Is any app that has chat or public posting a utility now? What classifies? Is the only goal to make them dumb pipes? What other roles and responsibilities would the government hoist onto FB and require it do?
  - ChaosDegenerate 7y ago
    What will happen to New York Times when its running sexually explicit, beheading, animal torture, etc? They will get sued. As soon as we can start suing them for the content they provide the sooner they will find resolution to it. The same way they will get sued if they censor content that might be deemed socially important.
    - 7y ago

nova22033 7y ago

For several years, conservatives have expressed concern that big tech companies, such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, are suppressing right-leaning content in various, more or less direct ways. Even though conservatives often exaggerate it, I think there is no doubt about the anti-conservative bias of these companies, but that is not what I want to discuss in this article. You don't want to discuss it here because you don't have a detailed analysis backed up by solid data. If you did, you'd lead with it. Trust me, most people here can handle an article full of graphs and stuff.

jacquesm 7y ago

Politicized flamebait, flagged. Call it censorship if you want.

woopwoop 7y ago

Replace "censoring conservative viewpoints" with "censoring the nice people who tell me about how I can make $13,000 a week working from home". Which part of this argument changes? I can't find any part that does.

tomp 7y ago
The difference is that there's a Spam folder in your GMail where you can see all those "unwelcome" emails... and also, filters adapt to your preferences, not the other way around.
- jasonlotito 7y ago
  So, the argument is Twitter shouldn't combat spam? That HN shouldn't edit/delete content? That if a website accepts user generated content, they should have to make it viewable?
  - tomp 7y ago
    That's my argument, yes. I'm fine with hiding replies, and users using opt-out-able block-lists (e.g. that's how porn is implemented on Twitter and many other websites)... moderation is OK, censorship & (shadow)banning is the evil.
jerf 7y ago
I can't speak for the article, but I can speak for myself. The difference is that I, personally, have control over the blocking of the "make money fast" communication. I think part of the right to free speech is the right to be able to choose what speech you consume, i.e., everyone has the right to free speech but nobody has the right to impose upon you. For me personally, since I run my own incoming mail server, there is no platform censoring those emails. I use my own tools, trained on my own emails and my own choices about what to block, to do the filtering. When a platform entirely blocks some speech, that is not my choice; it is theirs. That is the critical difference. This is still not a bright shining line, because there isn't one. But it's sufficiently clear to be a guiding principle. If you want to lock yourself in some particular filter bubble, that's your choice, but nobody else has the right to force you into one.

jvickers 7y ago

I have a wide view of what 'censorship' is, and I include spam filtering in the definition. For example, a while ago I saw an advert for some kind of erection-causing pill on a forum discussing C++. If the forum moderators remove such a post, they make the forum more efficient by saving other users (who are looking for C++ content) from themselves having to filter out irrelevant information / a sales pitch. I also see far too many 'work from home' adverts in discussions in the Independent newspaper's comment section (on unrelated articles), and if they took a more censorious approach to such comments then the comment section would improve. To an extent I support censorship, and according to what I believe censorship to be, almost everyone else supports it. If this very comment had been about some unrelated topic, such as giving an opinion about who to blame or not blame for problems in the Middle East, it would be right for the comment to be censored from this discussion, and it would be censorship from a private company, censorship of a political viewpoint no less.

gdulli 7y ago
I agree. If you broaden the term "censorship" so much as to make it equivalent to any entity trying to enforce quality or relevance control standards in its own venue, you make the term useless. While also subverting conversation about actual censorship, cheapening it.
- hnal943 7y ago
  I'm not certain there's a strict line between "actual" censorship and OP's definition. Care to give a definition you think is defensible as "actual" censorship?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - gdulli 7y ago
    Sure, it's hard to draw a strict line that will make everyone happy. I'm not going to try. But that doesn't mean that removing ED pill spam should be conflated with the government banning books under threat of imprisonment. We live in a messy world and have to fall back on using our judgment and common sense, flawed as they are. It's obtuse to pretend that it's confusing why one is acceptable and the other isn't. And it's not helpful to say that the lack of an unambiguous, unanimously accepted definition means that certain clearly reasonable actions can't be taken.

root_axis 7y ago

Private companies should be able to censor political speech, period. If it's my desire to build a platform that is favorable to certain types of speech, that's my right and the government shouldn't be forcing me to modify my platform to rebroadcast speech I disagree with. In terms of conservative complaints about leftist censorship, I have to simply roll my eyes. The conservatives complaining about big tech don't care about censorship, they only care about the dominance of their own political messages. This is obvious when you ask them about "democratizing speech" on platforms they already dominate like cable news and talk radio. Remember the fairness doctrine? They hated the idea of having the government dictate the political composition of the airwaves, but when it comes to big tech, suddenly they want to nationalize the platforms to their own benefit. I find the effort extremely disingenuous. Also, something something downvotes something something censorship!!

Chris_Chambers 7y ago
Private social media companies that reach a certain size should be forcibly nationalized and transformed into taxpayer funded instruments of the first amendment with zero censorship. The former owners should be compensated with so much money that it’s impossible they’d be upset about the blessing of retiring early and never working again unless their true goal all along was to use their power in a treasonous fashion. Anyone who disagrees with me should be hanged for treason. Anyone still working at the company after it’s nationalized who is found working on or implementing any form of censorship should be hanged for treason.
Grumbledour 7y ago
I think you are right. But I would also argue that such censorship should be as transparent as possible. Though the real question is, at a certain size of user base, does a private space not become a public one? Or rather, if there is no alternative of not having censorship, no place else to go, does the censorship not become a problem then? I am not sure what the solution here would be, actually, but while I think if people don't like facebooks/twitters censorship they should just go somewhere else, I would not hold the same view for example on email providers.
- 7y ago

JediWing 7y ago

Know what else distorts the marketplace of ideas? Money. Money allows for buying advertisements, essentially allowing you to buy a platform to spread your ideas. Having money typically has a pretty clear bias: protecting the money of those who have it. This comes at the expense, many times, of those who do not. That typically equates to conservative policies. I'm not convinced that the market distortion caused by supposed bias in social media moderation is even close to the distortion created by allowing money in politics. In fact in many (not all) cases of purported bias, the true impetus for action was due to hateful or otherwise harmful speech. Nor do I agree that if we disagree with state censorship, we should disagree with Facebook censorship. Being thrown into the legal system with threat of monetary penalty, jailtime, etc. is worthy of much more scrutiny than speech that gets you banned from a social network.

buboard 7y ago
You know what else distorts the marketplace of ideas? Guns. Monetary incentives are a lot more voluntary in comparison
- disintegore 7y ago
  Just go ahead and say it
brlewis 7y ago
This is mentioned in the last half of the last paragraph in the article.
FussyZeus 7y ago
This was a big part of why I enjoyed Jack Dorsey's comments on Twitter removing political advertising. The Internet was supposed to be a democratizing force, and it was, for awhile. To an extent it still is, but as the convergence of content continues to pull people into the various Platforms™, all of which are supported by advertiser dollars, the content itself is diluted. Some not so much, some so much it's not recognizable, others so much that it's no longer there. YouTube is a great example of this. Once a monument to the power of democratized content, it's slowly but surely pushing out real creators in favor of advertising companies producing advertiser-friendly and oh-so-clickable content, much of which is complete and utter trash. It's not just marketing companies though, a new breed of creator has spawned since roughly 2010, determined to soak as many advertising dollars out of the platform as they can with as much vapid and soulless content as it will suffer. And all of this is sponsored in turn by equally vapid and soulless corporate advertisers, determined to make sure their precious brands are not associated with anything as uncouth as an opinion or a real person. Hell, there's a great argument to be made of how the "pivot to video" and the resulting catacombs full of gutted and destroyed media websites can be laid at the feet of corporate marketers who wanted video ads. Nay it was not any Internet citizen who claimed the future was video, we didn't ask for it, and we certainly didn't like it. The whole thing is gross, and far from isolated to YouTube, it has plagued them all, save perhaps for Twitter and I think the only thing saving Twitter is that it's just not as easily monetized. But, Twitter has a different problem, which I believe Jack is trying to solve; the influx of automated bots, bought and paid for by other marketers, more often trying to sell politics than products. But it's just a different kind of feces from the same anus and indicative of the same core problem: advertisers suck, at everything. And they have more power than ever on the Internet, and so the Internet sucks more than ever.

jon_akimbo 7y ago

It's hard to take this argument seriously when the only companies mentioned are left-leaning tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google. I suspect that the author's concern isn't censorship per se, but censorship of viewpoints he happens to uphold. If Twitter's suppression of conservative content is bad, then so is The Federalist's suppression of liberal content. You're about to argue that one of these is a social media platform, while the other is a news outlet. In that case, what do you think is the essential difference that makes it okay for one to censor certain ideas but not the other?

eli 7y ago
What makes a company left-leaning?
maratd 7y ago
I can argue that censorship isn't OK on either? Isn't that the appropriate position?
malvosenior 7y ago
I think a lot of people do take issue with things that call themselves "news" promoting one side of the ideological spectrum. That being said, social media is just that: something users can post to. Twitter users were not hired to promote a particular point of view, they were invited to share their own point of view. To then go through and cull the people you invited to share based on ideology while still calling yourself a social media platform is where a lot of the complaints (rightfully) come from.
- jon_akimbo 7y ago
  It sounds like you're saying that what a company calls itself determines which ethical obligations apply to it. I can agree to an extent, but I suspect there's a different point here. Twitter, per its own website, is "what’s happening in the world and what people are talking about right now." Is there any way to revise this sentence—or any other aspect of the Twitter brand—such that Twitter would no longer be subject to these complaints of censorship?

llcoolv 7y ago

How could a private company impose censhorship when none of them are allowed to use violence? They could only ban certain types of behaviour on their premises, right? Which is not really censorship as one could just go to someone else's premises or found their own.

crooked-v 7y ago
The real problem here isn't that companies are allowed to control what content goes on their platforms, but that companies are allowed to get so large that they're a de facto monopoly for much of the world (e.g. Facebook).

adrianN 7y ago

There is outright censorship, or rather removing topics that the owner of the platform doesn't like, and then there is the much more serious problem of creating echo chambers for the users where dissenting opinions are not deleted, but hidden.

leshow 7y ago

The article is good, but it could do with a lot less ad hominem and calling people 'idiots'. You can do better than this: > you may think that you’re very sophisticated, but actually you are just being ridiculous. > Sure, you can say that if you want (though I don’t think that’s how the word is actually used by ordinary people), but only idiots think it shows that it’s not a problem. > I know that some people, especially among libertarians, think it makes them smart to believe that, but they clearly have not thought this through.

imgabe 7y ago

Instead of an ideological bias, what if it is just a demographic bias? The author supposes that there are some mustache-twirling masterminds behind the scenes at Google, Twitter, and Facebook, picking and choosing what content is promoted. But the algorithms, at their most basic sense, promote what is popular. Based on voting records, in absolute numbers, there are simply more left-leaning people (at least in the US) than there are right-leaning people. Gerrymandering and the electoral college, etc don't reflect this in the government, but it is the case. The left-leaning viewpoints are more promoted then, simply because there are more people who want to see them. There's no reason to posit a nefarious conspiracy. We could argue that it would be beneficial to promote less popular viewpoints more to expose people to new ideas. It probably would be a good thing. But these companies are in the business of making money and people generally just want to see things that confirm their own biases. Just look at how upset conservatives are that they can't find enough content like that ;)

buzzkillington 7y ago
>The author supposes that there are some mustache-twirling masterminds behind the scenes at Google, Twitter, and Facebook, picking and choosing what content is promoted. But the algorithms, at there most basic sense, promote what is popular. Hardly. The algos have programmers thumbs on them heavily. A hilarious example was when Reddit was trying to deal with the_donald successfully spamming reddits hot algorithm. But someone screwed up the new weighting and instead of pushing td posts down it pushed them up, the whole front page was nothing but td posts for a day. They eventually fixed it, but never think that there isn't a human jury rigged mess of if else statements at the core of the algorithms.
- imgabe 7y ago
  That just proves my point. the_donald had to find an exploit and resort to spamming in order to get the algorithm to push them onto the front page. They couldn't get there on the basis of, you know, actually being popular because a large number of people want to read them.
  - 7y ago

Ajedi32 7y ago

> For instance, if you’re a journalist and you want to promote your work, there is simply no viable alternative to Twitter at the moment. No other microblogging platform comes even close to having the number of users Twitter does, and most of the alternatives are hotbeds of extremism, so that anyone who joins them is thereby disqualified in polite company. IMO if you can't even try to use an alternative microblogging platform for fear of being labeled an extremist by "polite company", that's indicative of a much more serious societal issue. The quote included in this article from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty explains the danger rather eloquently I think: > Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

danso 7y ago
What right do journalists have to have a platform for promotion and advertising? Either before or after the Internet and Twitter.
- forgottenpass 7y ago
  We're not talking about inalienable rights. That's implied in the title of the linked post. If you don't care about "good"/"bad" decisions and just care about the legal bounds, just say so and dismiss the article out of hand. Your roundabout question just drags discussion down.
  - throwafkdl 7y ago
    The thing is, people rightfully are pointing out an important issue ("corporate tech giants have monopolized the public speaking space and are holding unaccountable power") and but inexplicably ignore the obvious solution (break them up and/or emigrate to federated/decentralized platforms while actively promoting them) in favor of the worst possible one (force Twitter to unban nazis).

tssva 7y ago

The article starts with an unsupported premise that the platforms these companies operate favor liberal over conservative speech so my natural inclination is just to dismiss the rest of it; however, even if true the solution to improving freedom of speech is not suppressing someone else's freedom of speech.

weci2i 7y ago
I probably can’t supply data that would convince you liberal speech is favored over conservative speech. However, within the past month my personal Facebook account was curiously disabled within an hour of typing the word “Christian” in a comment. I would not identify as conservative or liberal. I certainly can’t prove that merely using this word was what triggered the permaban, but Facebook absolutely would not reinstate my account, even after I supplied a valid driver’s license as proof of my identity.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> For instance, if you’re a journalist and you want to promote your work, there is simply no viable alternative to Twitter at the moment. No other microblogging platform Microblogging platforms aren't the only venue for journalists to promote their work. But, even if that wasn't the case, that's not an argument that private censorship is bad but that private monopolies are bad, and that censorship by monopolies on essential communications mechanisms (public or private) is bad.

Starkus 7y ago

Censorship is awful, sometimes even worse through large tech corporations, i.e. Google, Facebook, etc.

nullc 7y ago

The problem that arises when you define censorship broadly is that the opposite of censorship is censorship. If no one can restrict what gets published in their venues then as soon as a venue starts discussing stuff I don't like, I can spin up a shill call center or a guy with a thousand accounts and a copy of GPT2 and flood that venue with so much divisive moronicism that the voices that threaten me will be almost completely drowned out. Worse, large open venues being flooded with low quality communications already happens even without any intentional censorship-by-flooding attack. ... providing great cover for these attacks. Especially savvy attackers can leverage the pre-existing populations of well meaning fools by shaping their messages to motivate fools into carrying on the disruption on their own. If you think about it-- the classical view of censorship where someone outright silences you is nearly impossible online today in most of the world. It is extraordinarily hard to completely stop the spread of information that people want to spread. But at the same time, censorship that works by flooding out an idea or discrediting it by association with abusive nutballs has never been easier or more effective. When we worry too much about private parties shutting down conversations in their own venues we risk improving the situation around an outmoded and somewhat ineffectual model of censorship at the expense of making a modern and highly effective model much worse. The best I think we can do is foster an internet structure where everyone can have their own venues which they can operate under whatever rules they think are best, and everyone is free to move among them at the lowest cost possible. That way, effective moderation can shut down flooding attacks and voting-with-your-feet can shut down overly censorious (or overly passive!) moderation. Unfortunately, the highly centralized world created by the popularity and network effects of sites like facebook, twitter, and youtube are the opposite of this. Instead of people being empowered to self-regulate abuse and migration being easy, people are disempowered and migration costs are high.

leereeves 7y ago
This is a rather common style of argument often used against civil rights: every person's civil rights should be restrained because criminals abuse those rights. We can't have censorship free platforms because someone might spin up a thousand accounts. We need the NSA to monitor all communications because terrorists use the Internet. We should arrest 12-year olds for making finger guns because of school shooters. But in this case as in so many, it's an off-topic argument, merely a distraction or an excuse for overreaching authority. No one here is arguing that someone who makes a thousand accounts shouldn't be restrained; that's simply not the topic under discussion, even if the word "censorship" can be stretched to include that topic.

ZeroGravitas 7y ago

Regulating private companies for the benefit of society? I didn't think that idea was still within the current Overton window at this point. The phrase "hoist by their own petard" seems appropriate here.

boomlinde 7y ago

The problem I think is that we let these companies grow so big, and let society grow so dependent on them that their policies become a worldwide public issue. If we become dependent on Twitter or Facebook to participate in democracy, regulation should follow.

RickJWagner 7y ago

I've been flabbergasted at the number of universities that have recently stifled speakers. I agree with much of what the author wrote. It's time for change. Classic liberalism may be best.