6 ms·

Something something "it is only censorship if the government does it," something something "deplatforming works," something something "private companies can do

Something something "it is only censorship if the government does it," something something "deplatforming works," something something "private companies can do what they want." I am a bit older than much of the Hacker News crew. I remember the right doing this kind of nonsense and thinking it was lousy. Watching the left take this sort of thing up a few decades later, only to act as if it could never possibly happen to them, has been disheartening. People keep forging shackles and never pause to ask if the manacles might fit their wrists, as well.

loeg 7y ago
> Watching the left take this sort of thing up a few decades later, only to act as if it could never possibly happen to them, has been disheartening. The Modi government is also censoring content like this, and likely would take action against Hotstar if the streaming service hadn't preemptively done so. This is very different from the media landscape in the US, and inferring some relationship between Indian authoritarianism and western leftism is just inaccurate. "The left" does not want Indian-style authoritarianism and purges of minorities.
- at_a_remove 7y ago
  Setting aside "Eliminate Whiteness" and the such, it isn't about racial purges -- it is about creating mechanisms of control, about the machinery of restriction, hence my metaphor. Once that ability exists, once the assembly line is built, once the use of that control and restriction becomes normalized (see "localization"), nobody should be a tiny bit surprised if it happens in a way that they might not like. Perillos of Athens, who invented the instrument of tortue known as the brazen bull, had his own turn in it. The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse was perilously close to being accurate and people just seem to have gone along with it. Decades ago, I truly had thought that the left was too smart to fall for this sort of thing but evidently I was wrong. We ought to be continuously on the lookout for this kind of thing and fighting it at every step, even for people whose views we find disagreeable, if for no other reason than the self-interest of hoping that it will not be our turn later on.
  - loeg 7y ago
    You seem to misunderstand. The Modi government supports purging of Muslims.
  - jackthetab 7y ago
    Yutes, eh?
nullifidian 7y ago
this time it's profit-seeking, risk-minimizing capital, not left or right.
mffnbs 7y ago
Free speech cannot exist with free speech and so a line is drawn. That line is that a person can say whatever they want but they cannot force people to listen. Forcing people to listen to free speech violates free speech. You don't deserve a platform for free speech.
- justincredible 7y ago
  Forcing people to listen to free speech violates freedom of association, not free speech per se. Also, you cannot both claim to be a platform and an authority on what speech is acceptable.
sneak 7y ago
Censorship is censorship, whether it's voluntary and on your own servers or at the behest of the government. Blocking adults from communicating to other adults because you don't like it is not a nice thing to do.
braythwayt 7y ago
Private companies can do what they want, and like everything else, they are subject to criticism for it. If I run a conference and un-invite someone from speaking for whatever reason, of course that is my right. And if members of the public want to criticize me for it, and make their own choices about whether to business with me on that basis, that is also their right. This has nothing to do with this hand-wavey "Left" being hypocritical about anything. It's a company doing what it is legally allowed to do, and various members of the public having opinions about the company's choices. If and when somebody is proposing a law to regulate that Disney has to give anti-authoritarians a voice, and that same somebody also proposed a law barring Disney from giving pro-authoritarians a voice, we can talk about hypocrisy or manacles or double-edged swords.
- dhimes 7y ago
  Private companies can do what they want Not in the US. There are regulations on what you can do. A restaurant cannot refuse to serve a person of color because of their race, for example.
  - balls187 7y ago
    Perhaps a more apt analogy would be companies cannot violate Federal Trade Laws (easily) without facing serious repercussions. While it may be unconstitutional to refuse service because of Race, it does happen. Perhaps not overtly. Speaking from my own experience as a "person of color", it's difficult to prove something happened because of my race. And there are still plenty of examples of people's constitutional rights being violated--such as when Starbucks called the police on two black men, who were then arrested, despite not committing any crimes.
    - erichocean 7y ago
      > While it may be unconstitutional to refuse service because of Race Sadly, it actually is constitutional to refuse service based on race (or any other reason)—it's literally part of the 1st Amendment (aka Freedom of Association). You are presumably referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which bans certain forms of exclusionary behavior and sort of "soft-repeals" that aspect of the 1st Amendment. Like anything else passed by Congress, it can be undone at any time. Unlikely, but in theory it could happen. It's actually astounding (and a little scary) how much of modern American culture and laws are built on top of legislation passed in the 1960s. That legislation and subsequent enhancements almost functions as a parallel legal system today to the one enacted by the original constitution (and the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition more generally). That said…I don't see a reversal coming any time soon and expect the Anglo-Saxon tradition (such as it is) to fade into the dustbin of history while the CRA and friends become more and more the law of the land over time. In a very real sense "the law is whatever is enforced", and it's extremely clear that even things like Freedom of Speech are going to be re-assessed in the name of tolerance in the very near future. Europe already has much stricter rules on speech, and I expect the US to follow suit. (I also expect the 2nd Amendment to be effectively repealed in the next 20-30 years as the baby boomers die off and no one still alive cares about owning a gun—but does care about not getting shot. I can easily imagine using the CRA as the legal vehicle to do so, something like a "right not to be shot" or whatever.)
kelnos 7y ago
Do you have a suggestion as to what to do about all the misinformation and hate out there? Clearly ignoring it or "drowning it out with correct information" is not working. I'm uncomfortable with censorship in any form, but am also not comfortable forcing companies to give a platform to sexist/racist/homophobic/transphobic/etc. drivel. Definitely acknowledge and agree that this deplatforming-by-companies mindset is backfiring in this particular case.
- eanzenberg 7y ago
  Why? History has proven time and time again that more speech is better than less speech. Better it be out in the open and freely attacked, then hidden and locked away so it can dwell and grow in the dark moist corners.
  - kelnos 7y ago
    Events over the past ~5 years seem to put that belief/pattern in doubt. While I'm not so arrogant as to definitively assert that our current time is the grand exception to the rule, I think it's worth examining that perhaps what we're doing to combat disinformation and racist/sexist/etc. speech isn't working.
- cpitman 7y ago
  This only makes any sense if you believe that censorship will _only_ be used for misinformation, as opposed to information people do not like. Otherwise, you could end up raising the density of misinformation as "true" information is filtered out. If YouTube existed a hundred years ago, and censorship of "misinformation" was an accepted practice, would there be any doubt that videos on women's suffrage, black rights, the perils of McCarthyism, that any of those would have stayed up?
  - kelnos 7y ago
    I'm not questioning or debating that here. I'm merely asking what the solution is, then?
petey283 7y ago
You're right.. I've often scoffed at claims that present deplatforming as an ineffective or even dangerous strategy. But seeing these several multi-nationals go along with "self-censorship" whenever a repressive government asks is quite worrying.
TomMckenny 7y ago
This is a government using implicit, extra legal threats to silence it's critics. As opposed to mass pro-democracy, human rights moments to counter pro-regime propaganda. People used to be able to tell the difference. For example, that's why apartheid ended.
gdulli 7y ago
What does "the left" have anything to do with something that's explicitly not about US politics and was done by an Indian company that happens to be owned by a US corporation that, even if involved with the decision, is doing it for financial and not political reasons?

loeg 7y ago

> Watching the left take this sort of thing up a few decades later, only to act as if it could never possibly happen to them, has been disheartening. The Modi government is also censoring content like this, and likely would take action against Hotstar if the streaming service hadn't preemptively done so. This is very different from the media landscape in the US, and inferring some relationship between Indian authoritarianism and western leftism is just inaccurate. "The left" does not want Indian-style authoritarianism and purges of minorities.

at_a_remove 7y ago
Setting aside "Eliminate Whiteness" and the such, it isn't about racial purges -- it is about creating mechanisms of control, about the machinery of restriction, hence my metaphor. Once that ability exists, once the assembly line is built, once the use of that control and restriction becomes normalized (see "localization"), nobody should be a tiny bit surprised if it happens in a way that they might not like. Perillos of Athens, who invented the instrument of tortue known as the brazen bull, had his own turn in it. The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse was perilously close to being accurate and people just seem to have gone along with it. Decades ago, I truly had thought that the left was too smart to fall for this sort of thing but evidently I was wrong. We ought to be continuously on the lookout for this kind of thing and fighting it at every step, even for people whose views we find disagreeable, if for no other reason than the self-interest of hoping that it will not be our turn later on.
- loeg 7y ago
  You seem to misunderstand. The Modi government supports purging of Muslims.
- jackthetab 7y ago
  Yutes, eh?

nullifidian 7y ago

this time it's profit-seeking, risk-minimizing capital, not left or right.

mffnbs 7y ago

Free speech cannot exist with free speech and so a line is drawn. That line is that a person can say whatever they want but they cannot force people to listen. Forcing people to listen to free speech violates free speech. You don't deserve a platform for free speech.

justincredible 7y ago
Forcing people to listen to free speech violates freedom of association, not free speech per se. Also, you cannot both claim to be a platform and an authority on what speech is acceptable.

sneak 7y ago

Censorship is censorship, whether it's voluntary and on your own servers or at the behest of the government. Blocking adults from communicating to other adults because you don't like it is not a nice thing to do.

braythwayt 7y ago

Private companies can do what they want, and like everything else, they are subject to criticism for it. If I run a conference and un-invite someone from speaking for whatever reason, of course that is my right. And if members of the public want to criticize me for it, and make their own choices about whether to business with me on that basis, that is also their right. This has nothing to do with this hand-wavey "Left" being hypocritical about anything. It's a company doing what it is legally allowed to do, and various members of the public having opinions about the company's choices. If and when somebody is proposing a law to regulate that Disney has to give anti-authoritarians a voice, and that same somebody also proposed a law barring Disney from giving pro-authoritarians a voice, we can talk about hypocrisy or manacles or double-edged swords.

dhimes 7y ago
Private companies can do what they want Not in the US. There are regulations on what you can do. A restaurant cannot refuse to serve a person of color because of their race, for example.
- balls187 7y ago
  Perhaps a more apt analogy would be companies cannot violate Federal Trade Laws (easily) without facing serious repercussions. While it may be unconstitutional to refuse service because of Race, it does happen. Perhaps not overtly. Speaking from my own experience as a "person of color", it's difficult to prove something happened because of my race. And there are still plenty of examples of people's constitutional rights being violated--such as when Starbucks called the police on two black men, who were then arrested, despite not committing any crimes.
  - erichocean 7y ago
    > While it may be unconstitutional to refuse service because of Race Sadly, it actually is constitutional to refuse service based on race (or any other reason)—it's literally part of the 1st Amendment (aka Freedom of Association). You are presumably referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which bans certain forms of exclusionary behavior and sort of "soft-repeals" that aspect of the 1st Amendment. Like anything else passed by Congress, it can be undone at any time. Unlikely, but in theory it could happen. It's actually astounding (and a little scary) how much of modern American culture and laws are built on top of legislation passed in the 1960s. That legislation and subsequent enhancements almost functions as a parallel legal system today to the one enacted by the original constitution (and the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition more generally). That said…I don't see a reversal coming any time soon and expect the Anglo-Saxon tradition (such as it is) to fade into the dustbin of history while the CRA and friends become more and more the law of the land over time. In a very real sense "the law is whatever is enforced", and it's extremely clear that even things like Freedom of Speech are going to be re-assessed in the name of tolerance in the very near future. Europe already has much stricter rules on speech, and I expect the US to follow suit. (I also expect the 2nd Amendment to be effectively repealed in the next 20-30 years as the baby boomers die off and no one still alive cares about owning a gun—but does care about not getting shot. I can easily imagine using the CRA as the legal vehicle to do so, something like a "right not to be shot" or whatever.)

kelnos 7y ago

Do you have a suggestion as to what to do about all the misinformation and hate out there? Clearly ignoring it or "drowning it out with correct information" is not working. I'm uncomfortable with censorship in any form, but am also not comfortable forcing companies to give a platform to sexist/racist/homophobic/transphobic/etc. drivel. Definitely acknowledge and agree that this deplatforming-by-companies mindset is backfiring in this particular case.

eanzenberg 7y ago
Why? History has proven time and time again that more speech is better than less speech. Better it be out in the open and freely attacked, then hidden and locked away so it can dwell and grow in the dark moist corners.
- kelnos 7y ago
  Events over the past ~5 years seem to put that belief/pattern in doubt. While I'm not so arrogant as to definitively assert that our current time is the grand exception to the rule, I think it's worth examining that perhaps what we're doing to combat disinformation and racist/sexist/etc. speech isn't working.
cpitman 7y ago
This only makes any sense if you believe that censorship will _only_ be used for misinformation, as opposed to information people do not like. Otherwise, you could end up raising the density of misinformation as "true" information is filtered out. If YouTube existed a hundred years ago, and censorship of "misinformation" was an accepted practice, would there be any doubt that videos on women's suffrage, black rights, the perils of McCarthyism, that any of those would have stayed up?
- kelnos 7y ago
  I'm not questioning or debating that here. I'm merely asking what the solution is, then?

petey283 7y ago

You're right.. I've often scoffed at claims that present deplatforming as an ineffective or even dangerous strategy. But seeing these several multi-nationals go along with "self-censorship" whenever a repressive government asks is quite worrying.

TomMckenny 7y ago

This is a government using implicit, extra legal threats to silence it's critics. As opposed to mass pro-democracy, human rights moments to counter pro-regime propaganda. People used to be able to tell the difference. For example, that's why apartheid ended.

gdulli 7y ago

What does "the left" have anything to do with something that's explicitly not about US politics and was done by an Indian company that happens to be owned by a US corporation that, even if involved with the decision, is doing it for financial and not political reasons?