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The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis

127 points by AndrewBissell 7y ago

rpiguy 7y ago
Although I disagree with it completely, I would defend the right of private platforms, like Google and Twitter to take down whatever content they like. When the government starts to mandate what information can and cannot be shared, that is where I draw the line. What confuses the issue is that the government and big corporations appear to be slowly merging into one elite, ruling body. Not sure how to solve the issue when the lines become more and more blurred.
- gshdg 7y ago
  Perhaps by putting our concern into preventing the lines from blurring more than into worrying about private platform censorship in and of itself?
- ksk 7y ago
  There aren't any public platforms to voice opinions, so if you are cancelled from private platforms, then you are essentially silenced into submission. In my opinion, it's worse if the government is not involved, you can at-least vote the current government out.
  - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 7y ago
    There are certainly public platforms to voice opinions, but they are just as certainly drowned out by or hidden from the rest of the platforms. Independent, peer to peer social media, for example, “dark web”, or just plain old WWW / Gopher /forums discovered without the private search platforms. On one level, it isn’t that there aren’t public platforms, it’s that the market for public speech is a niche market that isn’t really bought into by the public.
    - netsharc 7y ago
      I wonder if there's money to be made in selling a search engine to a government (of a country that cares about free speech, obviously). Or to look it the other way, if there is a job to be had by marketing the idea/yourself to a government agency. And the government might do it to sell goodwill to the users, imagine having "This search engine is provided to you by Elbonia. Click here to learn more about Elbonia. Click here to find flights to Elbonia" at the bottom of every search result page.
    - ksk 7y ago
      >Independent, peer to peer social media, for example, “dark web”, or just plain old WWW / Gopher /forums discovered without the private search platforms. Those are still private platforms. With enough pressure you can get an ISP to cancel someones service, or get a domain service/hosting provider to cancel them, etc, etc.
      - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 7y ago
        Electricity is a private platform too, so by your argument, with enough pressure you could get a utility to cancel the power for a public platform.
        ksk 7y ago
        No that is not my argument at all.
- tomohawk 7y ago
  Youtube is Google's video monopoly. If there was an actual market with many providers, then you might make a case. However, a monopolist doesn't get to make these kinds of decisions. Would we stand for it if the local electric monopoly started pulling the plug on abortion clinics? On churches? A monopoly gets limited discretion in exchange for the monopoly.
  - didgeoridoo 7y ago
    You’re talking about government-granted monopolies, like your electric company example. YouTube is merely limited in its ability to use its pricing power to squeeze its customers without attracting regulatory attention. And we aren’t the customer — the advertisers are. I don’t think they’re bothered one bit by all this.
    - vl 7y ago
      YouTube became possible because Google funneled billions of dollars from other divisions for many years until competition was completely napalmed out and finally it became profitable. No other company or private investors can do this kind of investment for so many years. Google should be split up.
- pnako 7y ago
  I would defend the right of private platforms to hunt and execute opponents. When the governments starts doing it, that is where I draw the line.
- apatters 7y ago
  The solution to this, or at least the first step, is simple. It's to recognize that Google is an illegal monopoly, contact your representatives and demand enforcement of the antitrust laws on the books. This is already in process, 48 states are investigating Google today. Support it. Support lawmakers who support it. More broadly a very large wave of antitrust reform is badly needed in the United States and this is a good place to start. The United States needs free and competitive markets that aren't controlled by illegal monopolies. One of the benefits of free and competitive markets will be that there will be more companies promoting more platforms, but these companies will be less powerful. Then it won't be such a big deal if one of them decides to censor a certain type of content. The answer is to support and elect representatives who will enforce the law against these lawbreaking companies.
  - arvinsim 7y ago
    So why only Google? Why not Facebook, Twitter, Apple?
- baryphonic 7y ago
  The common law has treated many monopoly platforms as common carriers for quite a long time. In the US, this has been explicitly enacted via statute for certain types of carriers (indeed, this is what the FCC Title I vs Title II issue was about for ISPs). While I agree that ordinary private companies that are basically competitive should have few if any restrictions, it seems quite suboptimal to permit monopolies (including Google, Facebook or Amazon) to make extremely arbitrary decisions on a whim with no review.
- nomel 7y ago
  Related, I noticed what looked like coronavirus censorship, from Google, when I tried to search for any constitutional analysis of the shelter at home orders back in March. I was curious and just wanted to know. I assumed I would find posts from UCLA, Harvard, anything, but there was almost nothing. Bing/DuckDuckGo gave a full page of results, the top few being reputable sources. Searching now, everything looks normal. I assume it was the result of an automated filter seeing a bunch of bad actors posting about the topic, rather than a conscious action, but it was interesting seeing how inaccessible the information became, at the time.
mikedilger 7y ago
Censorship "theory" is sound. And that's what is so pernicious and dangerous about the idea. The idea of removing content that could cause harm makes total sense. If the people making the censorship decisions were widely respected experts in the field and ideologically neutral, and used extensive and rigorous processes to determine what should be and what shouldn't be censored based on actual harm not political leanings, and were also accountable, then it could in theory be a useful tool. But censorship practice is utterly corrupt. It's based on ideological goal-driven thinking, a form of thinking most of us use most of the time (unfortunately). The decisions are made by non-experts who are nameless, faceless and unaccountable. The result is dangerous and divisive.
- tomohawk 7y ago
  Today's expert is tomorrow's outcast or loser. Experts have a vested interest in protecting the prestige of the knowledge they are expert in. If an upstart comes along with information the obsoletes their ideas - just look at what happened to Galileo or any number of other people. And note, that an expert doesn't even have to be wrong to be wrong. What I mean by this is that an expert in epidemiology may be completely correct from that point of view, but that viewpoint does not include all of the other fields of expertise that might be relevant when making decisions at a national level. Tunnel vision is a crazy thing, and causes normally smart people to do silly things.
  - ashwoods 7y ago
    I agree generally with what you say but I’d substitute experts with humans.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  I remember in the old days, instead of "censors" we called them "editors". It seems like a general rule, that people often get most concerned about something when it is dying out anyway.
- dlivingston 7y ago
  There is a brilliant speech by the late Christopher Hitchens [0] on free speech that I must have seen a dozen times. An excerpt: “The freedom of speech is meaningless unless it means the freedom of the person who thinks differently... Don't take refuge in the false security of consensus, and the feeling that whatever you think you're bound to be okay because you're in the safely moral majority. ...Bear in mind, ladies and gentlemen, that every time you violate or propose to violate the free speech of someone else, you, in potentia, are making a rod for your own back.” [0]: https://youtu.be/4Z2uzEM0ugY https://youtu.be/4Z2uzEM0ugY
cvwright 7y ago
> But the difference between the stupidities cherished by the Idiocracy set injecting fish cleaner, and the ones pushed in places like the Atlantic, is that the jackasses among the “expert” class compound their wrongness by being so sure of themselves that they force others to go along. Damn. Taibbi's not looking to make this debate any calmer, is he?
- jkachmar 7y ago
  He rarely, if ever, is. It’s his biggest flaw, IMO: in spite of the fact that he’s extremely smart and very articulate, he quickly escalated his rhetoric and takes extreme positions based on his gut.
  - deleted 7y ago
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- JPKab 7y ago
  He shouldn't be trying to calm it down. The erosion of free speech is outrageous. Outrage is called for.
nicbou 7y ago
We are trusting a few large companies to moderate acceptable speech on the internet. Is it a good idea to entrust such power to a semi-homogenous group of liberal Americans in the Bay Area? Shouldn't the rest of the planet also have a say in this? Suppose America goes to war with Examplistan. What does that mean for the Examplistanis? Will they get deplatformed as enemy propaganda? Will the internet become a propaganda machine for wherever those large companies are headquartered? What if Google was anti-LGBT? Would we grant it the same moderation powers? Would we be ok with YouTube removing or demonetising videos featuring homosexual displays of affection? I find it crazy that we grant those companies so much power simply because they happen to share some of our views.
- lurquer 7y ago
  Who is this “we” you repeatedly use in your post? Perhaps you mean “I”? You make good points... But, with all due respect, your use of that pronoun evidences a strange collectivist view of the world that may be part of the problem.
- cfmcdonald 7y ago
  > Suppose America goes to war with Examplistan. What does that mean for the Examplistanis? Will they get deplatformed as enemy propaganda? Will the internet become a propaganda machine for wherever those large companies are headquartered? Isn't this already the case? You can post videos on YouTube encouraging people to join the U.S. Marines, but not Al-Queda. I guess I don't find this very disturbing. Why should Google be required to host data for an enemy state? > What if Google was anti-LGBT? Would we grant it the same moderation powers? Would we be ok with YouTube removing or demonetising videos featuring homosexual displays of affection? YouTube's policies reflect mainstream social mores. Had YouTube existed 30 years ago, it almost certainly would have done this, and most people would have been fine with it. If YouTube did this today, it would quickly cease to be the dominant video hosting platform.
  - paganel 7y ago
    > Why should Google be required to host data for an enemy state? It's MS, not Google, but personally I find things like these very wrong and disturbing [1]: > GitHub, the world’s largest host of source code, is preventing users in Iran, Syria, Crimea and potentially other sanctioned nations from accessing portions of the service, chief executive of the Microsoft-owned firm said. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/29/github-ban-sanctioned-countries/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/29/github-ban-sanctioned-coun...
deleted 7y ago
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sameers 7y ago
Does anyone understand what point he's trying to make, or is it that the point is a very generic, "hey censorship is bad," which most people will agree with, but is argued rather poorly? At the end he writes, "From everything I’ve heard, talking to doctors and reading the background material, the Bakersfield doctors are probably not to be trusted. But the functional impact of removing their videos (in addition to giving them press they wouldn’t otherwise have had) is to stamp out discussion of things that do actually need to be discussed, like when the damage to the economy..." Does taking down a video of a couple of charlatans, "stamp out discussion of things that do actually need to be discussed"? I don't see how at all, maybe I'm missing something about why this has upset Taibbi so much. Other than, maybe anything that involves Google/Facebook playing a role in removing content from the Internet will just make him mad, regardless of the issue at hand.
- masswerk 7y ago
  From the article's comments section on the Erickson and Massahi video and "stamping the discussion": > The comments section was filled with interesting discussion (I'd say as many against as for, but I didn't count). It gave people a public sphere. The point by point dissection of the doctors' presentation by many commenters expanded understanding. Many of the commenters provided refutation and data analysis. Taking the presentation down ended the discussion. > The rush to censor is fearful. At least the Erickson and Massahi video provided (for a brief few days) a forum where people of different viewpoints engaged each other.
  - sameers 7y ago
    Thanks for engaging - I appreciate the chance to have a discussion. I haven't read any previous thread on this issue. Just from your comment, it appears that discussion of this issue is absolutely alive and well - we are discussing it right here! The question of balance between physical and economic health has hardly been suppressed - governors, mayors and public health officials across the country are engaging in it every day and are being quoted in major news outlets regularly. I too wish, like Taibbi, that we didn't have a left/right media where everyone takes a particular side and vilifies the others, but while that points to a decay in journalistic decorum, I don't see how it qualifies as censorship and suppression of free speech. If I want to know how conservatives feel, I read the WSJ and listen to Fox News. For middle-of-the-road liberals, NYT and NPR. To get mad about rich people, Red Rose Twitter. It's all out there, completely uncensored! In the face of all this abundance, I continue to be mystified at Taibbi's rage about this one particular video, whose purveyors have suspect motives to boot. Like, if I was a lawyer trying to make a case, this wouldn't be one of my top witnesses.
PeterStuer 7y ago
What is the difference between government running corporations and corporations running government? Both are just an oligarchic circle jerk.
54351623 7y ago
Considering those two doctors are the poster children of censorship right now, I've seen more articles about them than any other single medical professional or said professional's opinions.
boyadjian 7y ago
Censorship is everywhere on social networks. This was true much before the COVID-19
cryptica 7y ago
The idea that any kind of censorship is necessary is a terrible argument. Free speech worked fine thus far in all of history. The problems are simply wealth inequality and the size of corporations. This is what's new and unproven.
throwaway888abc 7y ago
Local news outlets reported that Facebook had repeatedly taken down event listings advertising Thursday’s capitol protest. “Events that defy government’s guidance on social distancing aren’t allowed on Facebook,” a Facebook spokesperson said, confirming the removal. [1] One more time: “Events that defy government’s guidance on social distancing aren’t allowed on Facebook,” Near future ? Events that defy government’s guidance aren’t allowed, [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/michigan-protests-coronavirus-lockdown-armed-capitol https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/michigan-pro...
- sfj 7y ago
  > Near future ? Events that defy government’s guidance aren’t allowed, ... on a private platform, so? I hate censorship also, but the more these major platforms do this, the more people will begin to recognize there are alternatives. They're shooting themselves in their own foot, and I for one, am happy to stand back and let them do so.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  You would think that the left, OF ALL PEOPLE, would be wary of totalitarianism.
baryphonic 7y ago
I should state from the beginning that I detest the tech monopolies engaging in censorship, and I question whether they even have a right to do so (they seem like common carriers to me). One of the interesting aspects of this censorship is that is taking places in the US is that it probably is taking down mostly misleading information. The main issue with it is that no one actually knows that much, and so whichever faction of experts is most influential or savvy or popular gets to dictate the so-called consensus. That being said, while I still vehemently disagree with censorship, I don't think there is immense harm in taking down a video that advocates, say, psychic consultation to prevent COVID. Once a culture becomes a censorship culture, the calculus changes. While right now in America, the effort appears to mostly be an attempt to weed out information that these experts believe is untrue, we have seen that in China, the censorship explicitly weeds out information that is true. The so-called conspiracy theory about the virus leaking from either the Wuhan CDC or the Wuhan Institute of Virology in November that has since been corroborated in multiple Western mainstream publications was discovered mostly due to Chinese officials engaging in fairly heavy-handed censorship. The Wuhan Institute of Virology was scrubbed of information about one particular young woman who was working as an intern there, and has been named as a possible "patient zero." A paper released by researchers at the South China University of Technology also suggested the Wuhan CDC as a probable point of origin, and this was also scrubbed by Chinese Communist Party censors. Every instance of this is like a canary for lies being propagated by the CCP. And they have helped astute Western observers of China find the trail of the truth just by looking at differences in what has been censored without a trace. This is why I am so opposed to censorship (and torture and deplatforming and partisan violence and the list goes on): every time it becomes a regular tool, it becomes twisted only in a way to serve those in power and punish their enemies, often when the authorities are spreading lies and their enemies are daring to tell the truth.
- knzhou 7y ago
  This comment is a gish gallop that contains piles of exaggeration, misdirection, and outright fabrication, and I bet I know its shitty source. Folks, don’t fall for it. Baryphonic, if you fell for it, I’m sorry, but do try to seek out at least some of the opposing information, for your own sake.
asdfjlkajsdf 7y ago
bay area liberals are destroying the world
asdfjlkajsdf 7y ago
gavin newsom deserves jail (and possibly worse) - as do much of the SV vc community for advocating this fascist un-american response seriously - the vc/startup valley community is very responsible for the outlandish liberal lies that have been spewed across the world forcing these 1984 stasi means of domination
wenc 7y ago
From the article: > Earlier this week, Atlantic magazine – fast becoming the favored media outlet for self-styled intellectual elites of the Aspen Institute type Genuinely curious, does anyone know what insinuation is being made here? What does it mean to be of "the Aspen Institute" type?
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Well, the Aspen Institute is a think tank funded by donations from billionaires and their foundations. They apparently try to be non-partisan. They claim to "drive change", but I cynically suspect that they don't make much of a difference on anything, ever. Couple that with the "self-styled intellectual elites" comment, and I think the idea is that of a group of self-anointed bright people who are out to change the world by sitting around and talking on other peoples' dime, and feeling smug in the process, while actually doing nothing that matters. But I'm not the author, and I'm just looking stuff up about the Aspen Institute, so this is just (slightly informed) guesswork.
  - scrollbar 7y ago
    Yep. Check out this podcast episode with Anand Giridharadas talking about his experiences addressing the Aspen Institute - was my first exposure to it and was pretty interesting https://www.vox.com/2018/9/5/17821522/anand-giridharadas-winner-take-all-ezra-klein-podcast https://www.vox.com/2018/9/5/17821522/anand-giridharadas-win...
mirimir 7y ago
Bottom line, if you don't want censorship, build, use and support systems that are designed to make censorship impossible. Instead of censorship, demand robust filtering, applied locally. So everything remains available, and users get to choose exactly what they want to see, and what they don't.
- deleted 7y ago
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- dilap 7y ago
  You still need an at least mildly tolerant political environment, or else they'll just make censorship-resistant software illegal. I hope to be wrong, but I think the current trend in the US is that direction.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    Good point. So providers must also be immune from legal pressure.
- sneak 7y ago
  I’ll go one further: tell your friends, family, and people that you see donating free content to censorship platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube that they are harming society by doing so. It will eventually be a matter of life and death. We can’t wait to respond until then. https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/ https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    Therein lies the issue. To be blunt, human nature is tribalism, it's desire for food and sex, and, unfortunately, it's waiting until something is a matter of life and death to respond. Activists imploring people not to watch YouTube and whatnot in 2020, should work just about as well as activists imploring people not to watch MTV and play Doom worked in the 90's. I predict we'll basically have to wait until something better comes along to unseat the incumbents. That said, it's also highly likely that whatever unseats the incumbents will have all the drawbacks activists didn't like about the incumbents. Just as CoD or Modern Warfare still gets blamed for school shootings today, Doom was blamed in the 90s. Just as MTV was blamed for making society less intelligent in the 90's, Twitter is blamed for the same today. My suspicion is that whatever replaces Twitter or Youtube will be just as censor-able, (maybe even moreso with builtin tracking and tracing). It'll just have much more content on it, and that content will be prettier. I'm thinking in the digital information age, it's impossible to go backwards to privacy and freedom. Different strategies will need to be pursued. Like surging information you don't want censored. Or having your devices generate believably fake access trails for trackers and tracers to follow. I don't believe either of those are illegal in the US yet? Could be wrong though?
Barrin92 7y ago
I'm not American and to me, this kind of response, that I've seen a lot over the last month, is almost like a sort of turnkey censorship by the means of uncritical faith into the first amendment and myth. The entire piece mostly consists of personal attacks. On elites who are allegedly all corrupt and untrustworthy. On journalists who don't really know anything, and it conjures up an image of all elites only holding the positions they hold because they think of everyone else as if they were unwashed masses. It's hard to have a serious discussion when that's the premise that the argument is built on. There is no serious discussion on the dangers of false information, what merit there may be to delegating decision making to experts in particular in a crisis like this (I for once have more trust in Fauci than Trump to be honest, and I think many people would agree). It's almost comical in a way that a piece that asks for more free speech so vehemently attacks people who exercise their free speech to question something that really matters, whether the foundations that the United States are built on are correct. We can and should have free speech about absolutely everything, except of course the merits of free speech and the American constitution, which is timeless, self-evident, and made by god.
- runawaybottle 7y ago
  Why do you reject the premise? In the last twenty years, a motivated political establishment executed a fraudulent war, with most of the media either being complicit or negligent. Within the same era, you had a financial establishment that concocted economic fraud that was akin to a financial terrorist attack that literally collapsed the economy. Again, the media/press was mostly complicit or negligent as it happened, and the political establishment was mostly unwilling to administer criminal justice in the aftermath. So, that’s roughly two bullshit wars, and economic collapse due to deliberate fraud on a massive scale, all wrapped up in a package of negligent media coverage, and zero justice. These institutions don’t deserve respect at the moment. It will take a long time to reestablish integrity on their part. I understand if you find this general attitude snobbish, distasteful, and pretentious, which is fine, you may be more polite than the rest of us. But the premise is not inaccurate.
  - AndrewBissell 7y ago
recallg 7y ago
https://www.change.org/p/recall-california-governor-gavin-newsom https://www.change.org/p/recall-california-governor-gavin-ne...
tengbretson 7y ago
> But the difference between the stupidities cherished by the Idiocracy set ingesting fish cleaner Id highly recommend googling for the follow up to this story for the curious out there.

127 points by AndrewBissell 7y ago

Although I disagree with it completely, I would defend the right of private platforms, like Google and Twitter to take down whatever content they like. When the government starts to mandate what information can and cannot be shared, that is where I draw the line. What confuses the issue is that the government and big corporations appear to be slowly merging into one elite, ruling body. Not sure how to solve the issue when the lines become more and more blurred.

gshdg 7y ago
Perhaps by putting our concern into preventing the lines from blurring more than into worrying about private platform censorship in and of itself?
ksk 7y ago
There aren't any public platforms to voice opinions, so if you are cancelled from private platforms, then you are essentially silenced into submission. In my opinion, it's worse if the government is not involved, you can at-least vote the current government out.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 7y ago
  There are certainly public platforms to voice opinions, but they are just as certainly drowned out by or hidden from the rest of the platforms. Independent, peer to peer social media, for example, “dark web”, or just plain old WWW / Gopher /forums discovered without the private search platforms. On one level, it isn’t that there aren’t public platforms, it’s that the market for public speech is a niche market that isn’t really bought into by the public.
  - netsharc 7y ago
    I wonder if there's money to be made in selling a search engine to a government (of a country that cares about free speech, obviously). Or to look it the other way, if there is a job to be had by marketing the idea/yourself to a government agency. And the government might do it to sell goodwill to the users, imagine having "This search engine is provided to you by Elbonia. Click here to learn more about Elbonia. Click here to find flights to Elbonia" at the bottom of every search result page.
  - ksk 7y ago
    >Independent, peer to peer social media, for example, “dark web”, or just plain old WWW / Gopher /forums discovered without the private search platforms. Those are still private platforms. With enough pressure you can get an ISP to cancel someones service, or get a domain service/hosting provider to cancel them, etc, etc.
    - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 7y ago
      Electricity is a private platform too, so by your argument, with enough pressure you could get a utility to cancel the power for a public platform.
      - ksk 7y ago
        No that is not my argument at all.
tomohawk 7y ago
Youtube is Google's video monopoly. If there was an actual market with many providers, then you might make a case. However, a monopolist doesn't get to make these kinds of decisions. Would we stand for it if the local electric monopoly started pulling the plug on abortion clinics? On churches? A monopoly gets limited discretion in exchange for the monopoly.
- didgeoridoo 7y ago
  You’re talking about government-granted monopolies, like your electric company example. YouTube is merely limited in its ability to use its pricing power to squeeze its customers without attracting regulatory attention. And we aren’t the customer — the advertisers are. I don’t think they’re bothered one bit by all this.
  - vl 7y ago
    YouTube became possible because Google funneled billions of dollars from other divisions for many years until competition was completely napalmed out and finally it became profitable. No other company or private investors can do this kind of investment for so many years. Google should be split up.
pnako 7y ago
I would defend the right of private platforms to hunt and execute opponents. When the governments starts doing it, that is where I draw the line.
apatters 7y ago
The solution to this, or at least the first step, is simple. It's to recognize that Google is an illegal monopoly, contact your representatives and demand enforcement of the antitrust laws on the books. This is already in process, 48 states are investigating Google today. Support it. Support lawmakers who support it. More broadly a very large wave of antitrust reform is badly needed in the United States and this is a good place to start. The United States needs free and competitive markets that aren't controlled by illegal monopolies. One of the benefits of free and competitive markets will be that there will be more companies promoting more platforms, but these companies will be less powerful. Then it won't be such a big deal if one of them decides to censor a certain type of content. The answer is to support and elect representatives who will enforce the law against these lawbreaking companies.
- arvinsim 7y ago
  So why only Google? Why not Facebook, Twitter, Apple?
baryphonic 7y ago
The common law has treated many monopoly platforms as common carriers for quite a long time. In the US, this has been explicitly enacted via statute for certain types of carriers (indeed, this is what the FCC Title I vs Title II issue was about for ISPs). While I agree that ordinary private companies that are basically competitive should have few if any restrictions, it seems quite suboptimal to permit monopolies (including Google, Facebook or Amazon) to make extremely arbitrary decisions on a whim with no review.
nomel 7y ago
Related, I noticed what looked like coronavirus censorship, from Google, when I tried to search for any constitutional analysis of the shelter at home orders back in March. I was curious and just wanted to know. I assumed I would find posts from UCLA, Harvard, anything, but there was almost nothing. Bing/DuckDuckGo gave a full page of results, the top few being reputable sources. Searching now, everything looks normal. I assume it was the result of an automated filter seeing a bunch of bad actors posting about the topic, rather than a conscious action, but it was interesting seeing how inaccessible the information became, at the time.

mikedilger 7y ago

Censorship "theory" is sound. And that's what is so pernicious and dangerous about the idea. The idea of removing content that could cause harm makes total sense. If the people making the censorship decisions were widely respected experts in the field and ideologically neutral, and used extensive and rigorous processes to determine what should be and what shouldn't be censored based on actual harm not political leanings, and were also accountable, then it could in theory be a useful tool. But censorship practice is utterly corrupt. It's based on ideological goal-driven thinking, a form of thinking most of us use most of the time (unfortunately). The decisions are made by non-experts who are nameless, faceless and unaccountable. The result is dangerous and divisive.

tomohawk 7y ago
Today's expert is tomorrow's outcast or loser. Experts have a vested interest in protecting the prestige of the knowledge they are expert in. If an upstart comes along with information the obsoletes their ideas - just look at what happened to Galileo or any number of other people. And note, that an expert doesn't even have to be wrong to be wrong. What I mean by this is that an expert in epidemiology may be completely correct from that point of view, but that viewpoint does not include all of the other fields of expertise that might be relevant when making decisions at a national level. Tunnel vision is a crazy thing, and causes normally smart people to do silly things.
- ashwoods 7y ago
  I agree generally with what you say but I’d substitute experts with humans.
perl4ever 7y ago
I remember in the old days, instead of "censors" we called them "editors". It seems like a general rule, that people often get most concerned about something when it is dying out anyway.
dlivingston 7y ago
There is a brilliant speech by the late Christopher Hitchens [0] on free speech that I must have seen a dozen times. An excerpt: “The freedom of speech is meaningless unless it means the freedom of the person who thinks differently... Don't take refuge in the false security of consensus, and the feeling that whatever you think you're bound to be okay because you're in the safely moral majority. ...Bear in mind, ladies and gentlemen, that every time you violate or propose to violate the free speech of someone else, you, in potentia, are making a rod for your own back.” [0]: https://youtu.be/4Z2uzEM0ugY https://youtu.be/4Z2uzEM0ugY

cvwright 7y ago

> But the difference between the stupidities cherished by the Idiocracy set injecting fish cleaner, and the ones pushed in places like the Atlantic, is that the jackasses among the “expert” class compound their wrongness by being so sure of themselves that they force others to go along. Damn. Taibbi's not looking to make this debate any calmer, is he?

jkachmar 7y ago
He rarely, if ever, is. It’s his biggest flaw, IMO: in spite of the fact that he’s extremely smart and very articulate, he quickly escalated his rhetoric and takes extreme positions based on his gut.
- deleted 7y ago
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JPKab 7y ago
He shouldn't be trying to calm it down. The erosion of free speech is outrageous. Outrage is called for.

nicbou 7y ago

We are trusting a few large companies to moderate acceptable speech on the internet. Is it a good idea to entrust such power to a semi-homogenous group of liberal Americans in the Bay Area? Shouldn't the rest of the planet also have a say in this? Suppose America goes to war with Examplistan. What does that mean for the Examplistanis? Will they get deplatformed as enemy propaganda? Will the internet become a propaganda machine for wherever those large companies are headquartered? What if Google was anti-LGBT? Would we grant it the same moderation powers? Would we be ok with YouTube removing or demonetising videos featuring homosexual displays of affection? I find it crazy that we grant those companies so much power simply because they happen to share some of our views.

lurquer 7y ago
Who is this “we” you repeatedly use in your post? Perhaps you mean “I”? You make good points... But, with all due respect, your use of that pronoun evidences a strange collectivist view of the world that may be part of the problem.
cfmcdonald 7y ago
> Suppose America goes to war with Examplistan. What does that mean for the Examplistanis? Will they get deplatformed as enemy propaganda? Will the internet become a propaganda machine for wherever those large companies are headquartered? Isn't this already the case? You can post videos on YouTube encouraging people to join the U.S. Marines, but not Al-Queda. I guess I don't find this very disturbing. Why should Google be required to host data for an enemy state? > What if Google was anti-LGBT? Would we grant it the same moderation powers? Would we be ok with YouTube removing or demonetising videos featuring homosexual displays of affection? YouTube's policies reflect mainstream social mores. Had YouTube existed 30 years ago, it almost certainly would have done this, and most people would have been fine with it. If YouTube did this today, it would quickly cease to be the dominant video hosting platform.
- paganel 7y ago
  > Why should Google be required to host data for an enemy state? It's MS, not Google, but personally I find things like these very wrong and disturbing [1]: > GitHub, the world’s largest host of source code, is preventing users in Iran, Syria, Crimea and potentially other sanctioned nations from accessing portions of the service, chief executive of the Microsoft-owned firm said. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/29/github-ban-sanctioned-countries/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/29/github-ban-sanctioned-coun...

deleted 7y ago

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sameers 7y ago

Does anyone understand what point he's trying to make, or is it that the point is a very generic, "hey censorship is bad," which most people will agree with, but is argued rather poorly? At the end he writes, "From everything I’ve heard, talking to doctors and reading the background material, the Bakersfield doctors are probably not to be trusted. But the functional impact of removing their videos (in addition to giving them press they wouldn’t otherwise have had) is to stamp out discussion of things that do actually need to be discussed, like when the damage to the economy..." Does taking down a video of a couple of charlatans, "stamp out discussion of things that do actually need to be discussed"? I don't see how at all, maybe I'm missing something about why this has upset Taibbi so much. Other than, maybe anything that involves Google/Facebook playing a role in removing content from the Internet will just make him mad, regardless of the issue at hand.

masswerk 7y ago
From the article's comments section on the Erickson and Massahi video and "stamping the discussion": > The comments section was filled with interesting discussion (I'd say as many against as for, but I didn't count). It gave people a public sphere. The point by point dissection of the doctors' presentation by many commenters expanded understanding. Many of the commenters provided refutation and data analysis. Taking the presentation down ended the discussion. > The rush to censor is fearful. At least the Erickson and Massahi video provided (for a brief few days) a forum where people of different viewpoints engaged each other.
- sameers 7y ago
  Thanks for engaging - I appreciate the chance to have a discussion. I haven't read any previous thread on this issue. Just from your comment, it appears that discussion of this issue is absolutely alive and well - we are discussing it right here! The question of balance between physical and economic health has hardly been suppressed - governors, mayors and public health officials across the country are engaging in it every day and are being quoted in major news outlets regularly. I too wish, like Taibbi, that we didn't have a left/right media where everyone takes a particular side and vilifies the others, but while that points to a decay in journalistic decorum, I don't see how it qualifies as censorship and suppression of free speech. If I want to know how conservatives feel, I read the WSJ and listen to Fox News. For middle-of-the-road liberals, NYT and NPR. To get mad about rich people, Red Rose Twitter. It's all out there, completely uncensored! In the face of all this abundance, I continue to be mystified at Taibbi's rage about this one particular video, whose purveyors have suspect motives to boot. Like, if I was a lawyer trying to make a case, this wouldn't be one of my top witnesses.

PeterStuer 7y ago

What is the difference between government running corporations and corporations running government? Both are just an oligarchic circle jerk.

54351623 7y ago

Considering those two doctors are the poster children of censorship right now, I've seen more articles about them than any other single medical professional or said professional's opinions.

boyadjian 7y ago

Censorship is everywhere on social networks. This was true much before the COVID-19

cryptica 7y ago

The idea that any kind of censorship is necessary is a terrible argument. Free speech worked fine thus far in all of history. The problems are simply wealth inequality and the size of corporations. This is what's new and unproven.

throwaway888abc 7y ago

Local news outlets reported that Facebook had repeatedly taken down event listings advertising Thursday’s capitol protest. “Events that defy government’s guidance on social distancing aren’t allowed on Facebook,” a Facebook spokesperson said, confirming the removal. [1] One more time: “Events that defy government’s guidance on social distancing aren’t allowed on Facebook,” Near future ? Events that defy government’s guidance aren’t allowed, [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/michigan-protests-coronavirus-lockdown-armed-capitol https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/michigan-pro...

sfj 7y ago
> Near future ? Events that defy government’s guidance aren’t allowed, ... on a private platform, so? I hate censorship also, but the more these major platforms do this, the more people will begin to recognize there are alternatives. They're shooting themselves in their own foot, and I for one, am happy to stand back and let them do so.
commandlinefan 7y ago
You would think that the left, OF ALL PEOPLE, would be wary of totalitarianism.

baryphonic 7y ago

I should state from the beginning that I detest the tech monopolies engaging in censorship, and I question whether they even have a right to do so (they seem like common carriers to me). One of the interesting aspects of this censorship is that is taking places in the US is that it probably is taking down mostly misleading information. The main issue with it is that no one actually knows that much, and so whichever faction of experts is most influential or savvy or popular gets to dictate the so-called consensus. That being said, while I still vehemently disagree with censorship, I don't think there is immense harm in taking down a video that advocates, say, psychic consultation to prevent COVID. Once a culture becomes a censorship culture, the calculus changes. While right now in America, the effort appears to mostly be an attempt to weed out information that these experts believe is untrue, we have seen that in China, the censorship explicitly weeds out information that is true. The so-called conspiracy theory about the virus leaking from either the Wuhan CDC or the Wuhan Institute of Virology in November that has since been corroborated in multiple Western mainstream publications was discovered mostly due to Chinese officials engaging in fairly heavy-handed censorship. The Wuhan Institute of Virology was scrubbed of information about one particular young woman who was working as an intern there, and has been named as a possible "patient zero." A paper released by researchers at the South China University of Technology also suggested the Wuhan CDC as a probable point of origin, and this was also scrubbed by Chinese Communist Party censors. Every instance of this is like a canary for lies being propagated by the CCP. And they have helped astute Western observers of China find the trail of the truth just by looking at differences in what has been censored without a trace. This is why I am so opposed to censorship (and torture and deplatforming and partisan violence and the list goes on): every time it becomes a regular tool, it becomes twisted only in a way to serve those in power and punish their enemies, often when the authorities are spreading lies and their enemies are daring to tell the truth.

knzhou 7y ago
This comment is a gish gallop that contains piles of exaggeration, misdirection, and outright fabrication, and I bet I know its shitty source. Folks, don’t fall for it. Baryphonic, if you fell for it, I’m sorry, but do try to seek out at least some of the opposing information, for your own sake.

asdfjlkajsdf 7y ago

bay area liberals are destroying the world

asdfjlkajsdf 7y ago

gavin newsom deserves jail (and possibly worse) - as do much of the SV vc community for advocating this fascist un-american response seriously - the vc/startup valley community is very responsible for the outlandish liberal lies that have been spewed across the world forcing these 1984 stasi means of domination

wenc 7y ago

From the article: > Earlier this week, Atlantic magazine – fast becoming the favored media outlet for self-styled intellectual elites of the Aspen Institute type Genuinely curious, does anyone know what insinuation is being made here? What does it mean to be of "the Aspen Institute" type?

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Well, the Aspen Institute is a think tank funded by donations from billionaires and their foundations. They apparently try to be non-partisan. They claim to "drive change", but I cynically suspect that they don't make much of a difference on anything, ever. Couple that with the "self-styled intellectual elites" comment, and I think the idea is that of a group of self-anointed bright people who are out to change the world by sitting around and talking on other peoples' dime, and feeling smug in the process, while actually doing nothing that matters. But I'm not the author, and I'm just looking stuff up about the Aspen Institute, so this is just (slightly informed) guesswork.
- scrollbar 7y ago
  Yep. Check out this podcast episode with Anand Giridharadas talking about his experiences addressing the Aspen Institute - was my first exposure to it and was pretty interesting https://www.vox.com/2018/9/5/17821522/anand-giridharadas-winner-take-all-ezra-klein-podcast https://www.vox.com/2018/9/5/17821522/anand-giridharadas-win...

mirimir 7y ago

Bottom line, if you don't want censorship, build, use and support systems that are designed to make censorship impossible. Instead of censorship, demand robust filtering, applied locally. So everything remains available, and users get to choose exactly what they want to see, and what they don't.

deleted 7y ago
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dilap 7y ago
You still need an at least mildly tolerant political environment, or else they'll just make censorship-resistant software illegal. I hope to be wrong, but I think the current trend in the US is that direction.
- mirimir 7y ago
  Good point. So providers must also be immune from legal pressure.
sneak 7y ago
I’ll go one further: tell your friends, family, and people that you see donating free content to censorship platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube that they are harming society by doing so. It will eventually be a matter of life and death. We can’t wait to respond until then. https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/ https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  Therein lies the issue. To be blunt, human nature is tribalism, it's desire for food and sex, and, unfortunately, it's waiting until something is a matter of life and death to respond. Activists imploring people not to watch YouTube and whatnot in 2020, should work just about as well as activists imploring people not to watch MTV and play Doom worked in the 90's. I predict we'll basically have to wait until something better comes along to unseat the incumbents. That said, it's also highly likely that whatever unseats the incumbents will have all the drawbacks activists didn't like about the incumbents. Just as CoD or Modern Warfare still gets blamed for school shootings today, Doom was blamed in the 90s. Just as MTV was blamed for making society less intelligent in the 90's, Twitter is blamed for the same today. My suspicion is that whatever replaces Twitter or Youtube will be just as censor-able, (maybe even moreso with builtin tracking and tracing). It'll just have much more content on it, and that content will be prettier. I'm thinking in the digital information age, it's impossible to go backwards to privacy and freedom. Different strategies will need to be pursued. Like surging information you don't want censored. Or having your devices generate believably fake access trails for trackers and tracers to follow. I don't believe either of those are illegal in the US yet? Could be wrong though?

Barrin92 7y ago

I'm not American and to me, this kind of response, that I've seen a lot over the last month, is almost like a sort of turnkey censorship by the means of uncritical faith into the first amendment and myth. The entire piece mostly consists of personal attacks. On elites who are allegedly all corrupt and untrustworthy. On journalists who don't really know anything, and it conjures up an image of all elites only holding the positions they hold because they think of everyone else as if they were unwashed masses. It's hard to have a serious discussion when that's the premise that the argument is built on. There is no serious discussion on the dangers of false information, what merit there may be to delegating decision making to experts in particular in a crisis like this (I for once have more trust in Fauci than Trump to be honest, and I think many people would agree). It's almost comical in a way that a piece that asks for more free speech so vehemently attacks people who exercise their free speech to question something that really matters, whether the foundations that the United States are built on are correct. We can and should have free speech about absolutely everything, except of course the merits of free speech and the American constitution, which is timeless, self-evident, and made by god.

runawaybottle 7y ago
Why do you reject the premise? In the last twenty years, a motivated political establishment executed a fraudulent war, with most of the media either being complicit or negligent. Within the same era, you had a financial establishment that concocted economic fraud that was akin to a financial terrorist attack that literally collapsed the economy. Again, the media/press was mostly complicit or negligent as it happened, and the political establishment was mostly unwilling to administer criminal justice in the aftermath. So, that’s roughly two bullshit wars, and economic collapse due to deliberate fraud on a massive scale, all wrapped up in a package of negligent media coverage, and zero justice. These institutions don’t deserve respect at the moment. It will take a long time to reestablish integrity on their part. I understand if you find this general attitude snobbish, distasteful, and pretentious, which is fine, you may be more polite than the rest of us. But the premise is not inaccurate.
- AndrewBissell 7y ago

recallg 7y ago

https://www.change.org/p/recall-california-governor-gavin-newsom https://www.change.org/p/recall-california-governor-gavin-ne...

tengbretson 7y ago

> But the difference between the stupidities cherished by the Idiocracy set ingesting fish cleaner Id highly recommend googling for the follow up to this story for the curious out there.