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Constitutions are squishy things, ultimately. They evolve over the years. I take your point about legality. But, I'd make the point that we don't have a clear

Constitutions are squishy things, ultimately. They evolve over the years. I take your point about legality. But, I'd make the point that we don't have a clear moral or legal concept of free speech that relates to the current world. "We can argue about whether or not Google should ban certain opinions on their platform, or where the line should be drawn, but it is arguable that hey have the legal right to do so." At some point, the distinction between legal and moral breaks down. In theory, google could legally do quite a lot. Say google decides to censor all mentions of the tiananmen square rising. They could remove it from search, youtube, android phones, chrome. Gmail could spam filter emails mentioning it. They could exert influence outside of companies/services that they own directly. None of that is illegal (at least not unconstitutional). In practice, this is very close to what China does with the great firewall. It also wouldn't stand. Something like this would be too contradictory to the moral concept of free speech. Constitutions are interpreted, and the supreme court is not the only interpreter. It's a cultural construct as well as a legal one. We are effectively at this point now. Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc... These aren't platforms in the way newspapers were. They're not platforms at all. They're the level ground, in terms of speech, press, the right to petition the government or practice religion. The reasons that amendment was written runs through google.

Animats 6y ago
It also wouldn't stand. Something like this would be too contradictory to the moral concept of free speech. I don't know. If Google decided to censor "hate speech" in GMail, could anyone stop them? Some people would applaud. Machine learning is good enough now that misspellings and euphemisms can be caught. So topic-based censorship could really work. Especially for Google, which has so much history on each sender, and so much experience with spam filtering.
- intended 6y ago
  Hey! I'm fiddling around with this right now for a submission. What I've found so far makes it look like hate speech is not easy to catch: 1) Slang evolves. 2) Combining two languages, especially under-resourced languages, mean that a chunk of words fall outside the range of a hate-speech lexicon. So maybe in languages which have huge resources devoted to it (English), its easy to figure out, but I don't know how well covered the evolving edge, and the code-mixed (language mixed) edges are.
  - Animats 6y ago
    Facebook is working on this.[1] There's even a $100,000 "Hateful Memes" competition.[2] In order for AI to become a more effective tool for detecting hate speech, it must be able to understand content the way people do: holistically. When viewing a meme, for example, we don’t think about the words and photo independently of each other; we understand the combined meaning. This is extremely challenging for machines, however, because it means they can’t analyze the text and the image separately. They must combine these different modalities and understand how the meaning changes when they are presented together. Facebook is going for the really hard case, where non-hate images and non-hate text combine to induce hate. They already have a text-only system. [1] https://venturebeat.com/2020/05/12/facebook-is-using-more-ai-to-detect-hate-speech/ https://venturebeat.com/2020/05/12/facebook-is-using-more-ai... [2] https://ai.facebook.com/tools/hatefulmemes/ https://ai.facebook.com/tools/hatefulmemes/
  - mc32 6y ago
    If the CCP can do it —and they do it to catch all the circumventions Chinese internet users use to try to avoid censorship —which they do successfully, then we know it’s possible and if it’s possible the big players are doing it too.
    - intended 6y ago
      The CCP doesn't manage to catch all circumventions, AND they are not a multinational firm crossing multiple jurisdictions. So when we say big players, do you mean FB or do you mean the National Govs? Side note - the CCP also employs manpower to handle the task, so its not just ML, my point hovers on the ML aspect of it.
      - ummwhat 6y ago
        The CCP doesn't need to catch them all. A 90% filter with a terrible false positive rate still accomplishes their societal engineering objectives.
- bastardoperator 6y ago
  People can be as hateful as they want and the government isn't coming after them. What people that use hateful verbiage are really arguing for is free from consequence speech and that just doesn't exist. They want to be allowed to be hateful and hurt Google's reputation and Google just needs to shut up aka these folks don't really value freedom of speech when people start using theirs to counter them.
intended 6y ago
So for some of my volunteer moderation work, this was a question I tried to answer, so that we could have a justification for censorship, instead of "We need to do this, or the forum will continue to be a dumpster fire of hate". The argument was a closer look at the "market place of ideas" analogy. There are actors in the market selling bad content. Content designed to addict, poison or over turn the fair functioning of the market place. Earlier things were far slower, so this was not as pertinent a threat. With social media, and virality, this is a clear and present danger for the functioning of the digital meeting places we enjoy. Therefore, there is a need for action to prevent these market perverting actions. <This ignores the class of locutionary actions that cause direct harm, such as hate speech etc. but the same argument can be made for them, and because of the clear harm they cause.> Nathan Mattias at Cornell is someone who wrote/writes about it, while also working to help citizen run experiments to figure out what works for content moderation. He had an interesting article which makes a better argument: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/18/a-toxic-web-what-the-victorians-can-teach-us-about-online-abuse https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/18/a-toxic-w... Other interesting articles: https://citizensandtech.org/2020/02/can-public-infrastructure-fix-social-media-ethan-zuckerman-at-cornell/ https://citizensandtech.org/2020/02/can-public-infrastructur...
gwbrooks 6y ago
> Constitutions are squishy things, ultimately. They evolve over the years. They're really not -- or shouldn't be. Certainly not when you have a textualist/originalist majority on the court charged with deciding what is and isn't constitutional. I get your broader point that societies and norms change. But the last thing any of us should want is a constitution that is lightly referenced and broadly interpreted because history shows such easily interpreted and changed documents benefit the oppressor far more than the oppressed. Your final point is a strong one: Substantial parts (and, for some forms of speech, nearly all parts) of our freedom of speech runs through a handful of large social -media companies. There's little reason that can't be addressed with appropriate federal legislation but, if that's not enough, then let's get on with the heavy lift of actually amending the Constitution, rather than hoping our better angels prevail in interpreting it.
- nvahalik 6y ago
  Agree. To extend your argument, we find that over the years that the application of the constitution has to be understood in new contexts. It doesn't evolve, but how it is understood to apply is discussed and what it covers does. That's why textualism/originalism is important: if we understand what someone said and why they said it, we can better represent the intention of the rule here, several hundred years later.

Animats 6y ago

It also wouldn't stand. Something like this would be too contradictory to the moral concept of free speech. I don't know. If Google decided to censor "hate speech" in GMail, could anyone stop them? Some people would applaud. Machine learning is good enough now that misspellings and euphemisms can be caught. So topic-based censorship could really work. Especially for Google, which has so much history on each sender, and so much experience with spam filtering.

intended 6y ago
Hey! I'm fiddling around with this right now for a submission. What I've found so far makes it look like hate speech is not easy to catch: 1) Slang evolves. 2) Combining two languages, especially under-resourced languages, mean that a chunk of words fall outside the range of a hate-speech lexicon. So maybe in languages which have huge resources devoted to it (English), its easy to figure out, but I don't know how well covered the evolving edge, and the code-mixed (language mixed) edges are.
- Animats 6y ago
  Facebook is working on this.[1] There's even a $100,000 "Hateful Memes" competition.[2] In order for AI to become a more effective tool for detecting hate speech, it must be able to understand content the way people do: holistically. When viewing a meme, for example, we don’t think about the words and photo independently of each other; we understand the combined meaning. This is extremely challenging for machines, however, because it means they can’t analyze the text and the image separately. They must combine these different modalities and understand how the meaning changes when they are presented together. Facebook is going for the really hard case, where non-hate images and non-hate text combine to induce hate. They already have a text-only system. [1] https://venturebeat.com/2020/05/12/facebook-is-using-more-ai-to-detect-hate-speech/ https://venturebeat.com/2020/05/12/facebook-is-using-more-ai... [2] https://ai.facebook.com/tools/hatefulmemes/ https://ai.facebook.com/tools/hatefulmemes/
- mc32 6y ago
  If the CCP can do it —and they do it to catch all the circumventions Chinese internet users use to try to avoid censorship —which they do successfully, then we know it’s possible and if it’s possible the big players are doing it too.
  - intended 6y ago
    The CCP doesn't manage to catch all circumventions, AND they are not a multinational firm crossing multiple jurisdictions. So when we say big players, do you mean FB or do you mean the National Govs? Side note - the CCP also employs manpower to handle the task, so its not just ML, my point hovers on the ML aspect of it.
    - ummwhat 6y ago
      The CCP doesn't need to catch them all. A 90% filter with a terrible false positive rate still accomplishes their societal engineering objectives.
bastardoperator 6y ago
People can be as hateful as they want and the government isn't coming after them. What people that use hateful verbiage are really arguing for is free from consequence speech and that just doesn't exist. They want to be allowed to be hateful and hurt Google's reputation and Google just needs to shut up aka these folks don't really value freedom of speech when people start using theirs to counter them.

intended 6y ago

So for some of my volunteer moderation work, this was a question I tried to answer, so that we could have a justification for censorship, instead of "We need to do this, or the forum will continue to be a dumpster fire of hate". The argument was a closer look at the "market place of ideas" analogy. There are actors in the market selling bad content. Content designed to addict, poison or over turn the fair functioning of the market place. Earlier things were far slower, so this was not as pertinent a threat. With social media, and virality, this is a clear and present danger for the functioning of the digital meeting places we enjoy. Therefore, there is a need for action to prevent these market perverting actions. <This ignores the class of locutionary actions that cause direct harm, such as hate speech etc. but the same argument can be made for them, and because of the clear harm they cause.> Nathan Mattias at Cornell is someone who wrote/writes about it, while also working to help citizen run experiments to figure out what works for content moderation. He had an interesting article which makes a better argument: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/18/a-toxic-web-what-the-victorians-can-teach-us-about-online-abuse https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/18/a-toxic-w... Other interesting articles: https://citizensandtech.org/2020/02/can-public-infrastructure-fix-social-media-ethan-zuckerman-at-cornell/ https://citizensandtech.org/2020/02/can-public-infrastructur...

gwbrooks 6y ago

> Constitutions are squishy things, ultimately. They evolve over the years. They're really not -- or shouldn't be. Certainly not when you have a textualist/originalist majority on the court charged with deciding what is and isn't constitutional. I get your broader point that societies and norms change. But the last thing any of us should want is a constitution that is lightly referenced and broadly interpreted because history shows such easily interpreted and changed documents benefit the oppressor far more than the oppressed. Your final point is a strong one: Substantial parts (and, for some forms of speech, nearly all parts) of our freedom of speech runs through a handful of large social -media companies. There's little reason that can't be addressed with appropriate federal legislation but, if that's not enough, then let's get on with the heavy lift of actually amending the Constitution, rather than hoping our better angels prevail in interpreting it.

nvahalik 6y ago
Agree. To extend your argument, we find that over the years that the application of the constitution has to be understood in new contexts. It doesn't evolve, but how it is understood to apply is discussed and what it covers does. That's why textualism/originalism is important: if we understand what someone said and why they said it, we can better represent the intention of the rule here, several hundred years later.