31 ms·

I have no idea what happened during the early 2010s. I grew up during the late 90s (born in late 80s) learning about the internet and its philosophies. Allowing

• wutbrodo 6y ago
  I think this is just an extension of the Eternal September. The population of the Internet is wildly different from those that you're thinking of: not only is a majority of the world now online, a vanishing minority of the countries many of us are primarily exposed to are not. There are plenty of reasons that this new population may establish different norms than the old one: Some say it's because they're privileged, and don't understand the harm that Enlightenment liberalism does to the marginalized. Some say it's because they were free-thinkers and iconoclasts, and indeed, you'd expect any heavily-selected subpopulation to be less conformist than "all people". Others have claimed it's simply intelligence: back when the Internet was all educated nerds, support for free speech was higher because of the well-known correlation between intelligence and free speech absolutism[1]. In addition to the Eternal September effect, I think the broader retrenchment of liberalism we see across the world is very relevant. The cause/effect relationship between the Internet and this cultural retrenchment is unclear but IMO, almost certainly bidirectional. My model of liberalism has always been that its support in large populations is a fragile state, and that it's only supported by the masses when they've cargo-culted it from their civic religion. The minute this effect fades, most people don't have the moral reasoning ability to actually hold a principle, and can't be convinced that protection of an enemy under a principle is a protection of that principle, not of the enemy. They also don't appear to have the capacity to understand that the world turns, and the person on top is guaranteed to be someone they dislike, at one point or another. The only skew that rolling back Enlightenment protections is likely to have over time is against the _marginalized_. [1] Note that this isn't a stand-in for "free speech is good", since the proponents of the privilege argument would claim that measures of intelligence are themselves just measuring privilege.
• kitsune_ 6y ago
  Oregon Trail Generation checking in. IRC, even the rowdy networks, had no free speech thanks to the 'tyranny' of channel operators. #politics on EFNet was (is?) notoriously right wing for instance. Message boards had no free speech thanks to their moderators. I don't see how this is any different?
• vmception 6y ago
  Private companies censoring things arbitrarily is pro-free speech. I'm not making any particular argument, only showing the weakness in your cognitive dissonance.
• donohoe 6y ago
  Its is not censorship. No censorship has taken place. The article still exists on the NY Post web site and their newspaper. Their audience is still sizable. Their article included personal information and was consistent with policies that have been in place for almost a year. Twitter is not a public utility in the way that phone services are. They were (rightly) criticized along with others for letting mis-information run amok in the last election and beyond. They have (slowly) taken steps to listen to these concerns and this is what happens. I full support Twitter in this. This is not censorship, this is limitation of deliberate mis-information and personal information.
  • Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
    But that standard has never been used before and was manually engaged here. Trump's taxes were repeatedly shared and there are photos of the content (not to mention the content itself, which is far more private than an email address). This standard has never been applied like this, and you can still link to the Web Archive version without limitation - same content. It's also not "limitation of deliberate misinformation" - that has never once been used on deliberate misinformation like the Steele dossier. Ahmari of the NYP had a reasonably good counter: https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/if-unreliable-is-the-issue-why-did-social-media-never-block-anti-trump-stories/ https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/if-unreliable-is-the-issue-why...
    • tabtab 6y ago
      Re: "Trump's taxes were repeatedly shared..." That's kind of comparing apples to oranges. One is a public figure, the other not. And is tax info comparable to email addresses? I'm not saying whether or not it's fair, only that it's very different kinds of personal information being compared here. Equivalency is hard to establish.
      • Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
        Being a public figure doesn't mean your rights don't exist. I actually abhor that the photos of Hunter were shared, but he's a public figure too. As this (and other recent reporting) has shown, he was using his father's name and implied access thereto for personal profit. Note that there is no evidence Hunter ever actually got Joe to do anything for him. What is a matter of record is that Hunter was IMPLYING he could do so, which is scummy but probably not illegal. Johnson-Grassley investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe and I want to stress I'm not alleging otherwise.
• meerita 6y ago
  Free speech is dead. When you have a mass of people who are hysterical, and not willing to get into a debate, that's what is happening.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Fauntleroy 6y ago
  If you're having trouble with it, then perhaps try and remember how the Internet has changed over time. What started as a network of scientists and enthusiasts has become a network of corporations and governments (increasingly driven by party-focused politicking). That's not even mentioning the emergency of social networks and the prevalence of foreign and domestic misinformation/manipulation therein. If the Internet hadn't changed so radically, their viewpoints might have also remained similarly stale.
• senthil_rajasek 6y ago
  It didn't happen overnight. 2016 U.S elections changed things a lot. Spreading misinformation is not free speech.
  • colordrops 6y ago
    Yes, it is.
  • andrew_ 6y ago
    What? It absolutely is. A lie is covered under free speech. One can say anything under that doctrine.
    • millzlane 6y ago
      This is not true and does not cover fraud.
      • andrew_ 6y ago
        incorrect. you're conflating action with speech. engaging in fraud is not speech. If I told you that I owned a hedge fund and would make you 10x returns, that's speech. If I take your money with the promise of 10x returns and enroll you in a scheme, that's an action.
        • 8note 6y ago
          It's certainly possible to twist this situation around to where I don't give you money, like giving it to the guy right next to you. The action there is separate from the speech. I imagine for these disinformation type campaigns, the action is voting
        • millzlane 6y ago
          >If I told you that I owned a hedge fund and would make you 10x returns, that's speech. If I gave you money based on that speech it would be hard to argue in court that you didn't engage in fraud. I'm not a lawyer, so I'll agree with you.
• whymauri 6y ago
  >I have no idea what happened The fundamentals of free speech are just easier to uphold when the forum (Internet) is much smaller and the participants (hacker culture, chat rooms) are more uniform. Both the size of the forum and the diversity of the participants has changed - that's what happened.
  • 8note 6y ago
    I'm not sure the diversity matter so much as the scale. Once you've got a very large audience, it becomes possible to scale abuse on it. When each community is small, you have to put in a lot more work to say, spread disinformation so there's natural censorship on it.
  • dboreham 6y ago
    Put another way: humans evolved living in fairly small groups that were often related to each other. Their brains are optimized to operate in that environment. Put those brains into an environment where the number of other humans is orders of magnitude larger and most of those other humans are not physically present and not related to you and...that brain doesn't work well.
• nexuist 6y ago
  I grew up in the early 2000s. I find it difficult to understand as well, but I think what happened is that emotional human contact was overrun by corporate/nation-state bots. Bots cannot be convinced that their positions are wrong; they exist solely to spread discontent and fear. This is far different than the early Internet where you could safely assume everyone you were talking to is a real person. They may be a dangerous person, but a person nonetheless. You could equally assume that their day job does not consist of demoralizing or confusing people, and their positions on the issues were a result of genuine thought and strategy rather than a built in set of beliefs meant to serve some mystery person or group's end game. Basically, free speech only works if we have reason to believe the people holding onto the "bad" ideas in the idea marketplace listen. It stops being a solution when there are no consequences to being wrong, when your reputation doesn't matter, and when you can be as immoral or insidious as you want without a care in the world. This is the result of automation invading human spaces.
  • mnky9800n 6y ago
    So make political bots illegal and the world becomes sane again?
    • rtx 6y ago
      What needs to be banned is thinking that some people can't think for themselves.
      • gameswithgo 6y ago
        they clearly cannot though. example: the spread of qanon. and if you think that is real, then the example is everyone who think qanon is absurd.
        • ribosometronome 6y ago
          Antivaxxers, people who deny the efficacy of mask wearing and social distancing in preventing the spread of airborne diseases, climate change deniers, people who think emacs is better than vim. There's a lot of cases where the evidence is plentiful and unrestricted speech is at odds with keeping the world going.
• blhack 6y ago
  I just want to tell you that you're not alone in this. It's seriously unsettling to me to see the way in which this culture has changed.
  • octoberfranklin 6y ago
    Most of the tech companies have decided that China will soon dominate the world. They appear to be getting ready for China's attitude towards free speech to be imposed on the rest of the world. I hope I'm wrong.
    • RonanTheGrey 6y ago
      You know that's not the first time that idea has occurred to me either and I have this worrying nagging in the back of my head that that is literally exactly the long game they're playing.
• Cookingboy 6y ago
  > Allowing Free speech still is the hill I'd like to die on At this rate it will be the hill that the civilization dies on. The whole "absolute free speech is a sacrosanct human rights for everyone" is an ideal that simply would not scale with the 21st century civilization. Most users around here grew up firmly believing that value, and it is further reinforced by American/Western exceptionalism, so I can see how this comment will be very negatively received. But we can all agree that freedom isn't free, at one point in the future the cost would be so high that the whole civilization would be facing a "give me freedom or give me death" moment. I can't predict whether that moment will come in the form of an anti-science misinformation campaign during a pandemic that is far more serious than even Covid or a mentally deranged, conspiracy theory supporting leader who has full control of the nuclear arsenal, but that moment will come one day. The second law of thermal dynamics applies to more than just physical systems, entropy also plays similar role in a complex society that is getting ever more complex. Before our species can attain the ability to modularize our own society through interplanetary colonization to ensure survival, we have to face the very uncomfortable truth that we have to put in more rules and checks into our existing society to ensure the entropy doesn't snowball out of control too fast. That means we have to put everything on the table and re-exam all of our values, because there is no value to speak of in a dead world. The unfortunate thing is it's very difficult to have this conversation, even with very intelligent people, without everyone getting emotional. After all a lot of these beliefs and values are something we hold very dear, and maybe that is the ultimate tragedy of our world.
  • nullc 6y ago
    I don't follow your argument. Free Speech doesn't mean that anyone has an obligation to listen. You can solve being saturated by noise on the listening side much better than on the sending side... much better because the listeners needs are diverse, because listeners must be robust against adversarial inputs (or otherwise the first madman with a random number generator floods you out), because the listeners time/sanity is what is at stake so that's where the incentives are, and so on. The fight against entropy should be all of our missions but it can be accomplished without forcefully silencing people.
    • 6y ago
• jasonlotito 6y ago
  HN hasn't change. It's always been this way since it first started. Even in the 90s, "censorship" like what we see today happened. The actions haven't changed. The scope is what is different. Instead of affected a few hundred people, it's now affecting hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions. > internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship I don't see that having changed. Obviously I don't know the specific people you are thinking of, but judging by your comment here and the timeline you are mentioning, I don't see much as change beyond scope. Honestly, if people think people are becoming pro-censorship, I think it's more a case of ignoring everything that was happening before.
• nemothekid 6y ago
  I was born in the early 90s, and likely grew up on the same internet you did in the late 90s/2000s. In that time, I remember fondly, of participating and even moderating many, many, phpBB, vBulletin and Invision forums, and this idea that, in the past, you could post anything you wanted and people would just "put up with it" has never been true to me at least. Even 4chan never had the "free from consequences" free speech that seems to be worshipped.
  • judge2020 6y ago
    Even pre-internet, one's social groups would cast them out if they were to say something everyone else in the group thought was wrong or didn't want to hear..
  • donmcronald 6y ago
    Yeah. There was a significantly higher ratio of moderators to users back then and the way I remember it is that toxic people were banned and no one batted an eye. Now it seems like half the internet is comprised of toxic people. The “communities” are also huge and generic rather than smaller and topical. Back in the 90s/2000s moderators were usually enthusiasts with domain knowledge and insisting people stay on topic was a pretty solid moderation tool since the moderators’ on topic opinions usually had more value than some random troll.
• Voloskaya 6y ago
  New technologies brought new challenges. There was no social network in the 2000s and before. No retweet button, no "curated" timeline that showed you what you "like". YouTube did not try to push more videos like the ones you watched previously until the mid 2010s. Free speech does not have the same meaning as before. Before it just meant that you could say whatever you wanted. Now people use it implicitly to mean that they can say whatever they want, but also that they are entitled to have their thoughts broadcasted at large using the amplification mechanisms I mentioned above. While I believe free speech is a good thing, I believe free amplification is terrible. If you think about it, before social networks, amplification was done through TV and newspapers, and those have editorial boards that filters the content they share. If a newspaper's staff is pro-environment, they can prevent any columnist writing anything that denies climate change, and it's not controversial. However the problem is how do we decide who can get free amplification and who can't? Based on what? My preference would be that no one is, and we go back to uncurated things and to an internet where you have to look for the things you want to read/watch, versus getting content pushed onto you.
  • rayiner 6y ago
    You’re mischaracterizing how free speech was viewed in the recent past. “Free speech” (as a cultural value, I’m not talking about the first amendment) was about the marketplace of ideas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketplace_of_ideas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketplace_of_ideas. It meant a free market in ideas, where the dominant ideas arise from competition. What you call “amplification” is just something that makes the marketplace more efficient—it allows ideas to disseminate faster so people can decide which are the good ones and the bad ones. The curation you mention is the antithesis of a free market of ideas.
    • canjobear 6y ago
      I understand the theoretical argument, but empirically do you think the quality of ideas that people believe has increased from (say) 2000 to 2020? It seems like there's a lot more going on than just faster dissemination, and the way information travels these days might have introduced new asymmetries and inefficiencies.
• manigandham 6y ago
  The problem is the scale and centralization of power with social media. Global conglomerates serving billions where moderation is controlled by a few individuals with absolute control and no accountability. This is a major issue as these networks are quickly becoming a critical medium of communication and expression in this century.
  • Mountain_Skies 6y ago
    But what if some of those small communities engage in no-no think? How can we allow those with no-no think to co-exist with our world? Shouldn't they be stamped out of existence for the good of everyone else who doesn't have no-no think? Sadly the above is a very common belief structure now. It's a product of utopian thinking where if just this one more enemy can be destroyed, peace will fall upon the Earth and all will be well. It seems to be that these utopian dreamers always end in the elimination of those who don't share their dream vision of the world.
    • manigandham 6y ago
      I would much rather go back to a series of small private communities with known members, much like how the physical world still has neighborhoods and groups of friends. It still has plenty of idea sharing but enough social friction to support proper filtering and decorum.
• meroes 6y ago
  So HN can't remove posts either because that violates free speech? I grew up on the internet too and forum bans were always a thing. You haven't convinced me this is different.
  • swalsh 6y ago
    The president doesn't make major annoucements using HN. The fact is, Twitter has taken on a different role.
    • strathmeyer 6y ago
      Telling Twitter what to say violates their free speech.
      • michrassena 6y ago
        I have to agree with this. How is this really any different than blocking spam links or links to undesirable websites in direct messages? How does it differ from moderators on a website removing users from a group for valid or for trivial reasons? Does a company like Twitter have any obligation to allow anything it doesn't want on its platform? This situation is very much a double-bind. In this case, someone gets to make noise about the "truth they won't let you see" and claim bias.
    • ribosometronome 6y ago
      What hacker communities did you grow up in where the only free speech worth protecting was the US President's?
    • pengaru 6y ago
      Give me a break, the president should have his twitter account permabanned for all his ToS violations, and he should use official channels like a .gov web site to address the nation, where he can be held more accountable when spreading blatant falsehoods and certainly won't be censored. This whole sham of using Twitter is a freedom of private speech trick he uses to facilitate ambiguously mixing occasionally factual official statements with trash "protected" speech. If anyone holds his feet to the fire for tweets, he can simply claim he was acting as a private citizen stating an opinion - obviously the president of the united states wouldn't use twitter for official business! I look forward to seeing how history treats this embarrassingly incompetent era of american politics.
• snowwrestler 6y ago
  It's 100% inline with free speech to let a given website decide what they want to publish. Even if it is a very popular website. If they make bad decisions, then people can go to competitors; it's as easy as typing in a different URL. That's how the Internet--and open societies in general--are supposed to work. What it looks like to me--someone who has been on the Internet since before the turn of the century--is that a more recent generation of people grew up with these very popular websites as part of their lives, and they came to believe that these very popular websites are somehow inherent to the Internet and to society in general. They're not. The Internet is more available to entrepreneurs, startups, and new ideas today than it was when Twitter and Facebook were started. They're not too big to fail.
  • manigandham 6y ago
    Scale makes a difference. These social networks are no longer just a small private website serving a local community but a critical communications medium. When they can influence billions and shape elections, it's time to seriously review their power. This is how we treat ISPs and phone providers today, and social networks of a certain size should be considered in the same class.
    • riffic 6y ago
      > critical communications medium Undersea cables, phone lines, and the radio spectrum are critical communications media. Private web sites with selective publication criteria by way of their content moderation policies are not.
      • manigandham 6y ago
        Why? What's your reasoning exactly? Should private companies have any regulation at all? Should oil companies avoid pollution? Should ISPs ensure quality of service? Should medical companies ensure safety? Why is it that trillion-dollar companies that are larger and more powerful than anything else before should not be regulated when it comes to something as crucial as our freedom to communicate? I find it ironic that another major HN story today is another instance of Google wiping out someone's account without any recourse, erasing their online presence and decades of data. Is that the new normal? Megacorporations ruling our lives without reason or appeal? The world has changed. Social media is no longer just a website. It's communication fabric with network effects larger than entire nations that surrounds our lives. We either deal with it accordingly or risk losing much more.
• gameswithgo 6y ago
  i was with you back in the 90s, but ive observed the open communication of the internet not going at all well. forums that don’t censor always turn into cesspools. HN censors, yet you are here.
• dr-detroit 6y ago
  Corporations tricked the average citizen into thinking infowars and wikileaks are credible journalism sources and people like you claim its free speech but its the societal equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater
• Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  It's censorship that benefits their power structure or preferred power structure. It's easy to demand freedoms when others have them and you are fighting to gain them. Once that freedom or power has been achieved, some simply turn out to have not been concerned about gaining it for everyone but just for themselves and their group. Talk of fairness wasn't genuine, it was a means to a end for them to gain what they wanted with no concern for everyone else. The real folly in all of this is the assumption that these tools will always be in their hands and will never end up turned against them. History shows that this is almost always a poor assumption and that the reversal of power often happens both sooner and faster than ever imagined.
• appleflaxen 6y ago
  What twitter does has nothing to do with the NY Posts' free speech. Just as NYP is free to say whatever they want, Twitter is free to silence it on their platform. Freedom of speech and the first amendment is to restrain the federal government from prohibiting speech. That is the hill to die on, as it protects twitter's right to do what it wants to do with its platform. An orthogonal issue is social platform monopoly or oligopoly, and that we need more options and better competition.
  • 8note 6y ago
    They should also be taking responsibility for copyright infringement in that case, which to my understanding is what the section 230 changes are? If twitter wants to defer to users being responsible for their speech, the users should be having the rights to post what they want.
    • LocalPCGuy 6y ago
      This isn't an all-or-nothing type of deal. A company does not have to take responsibility for copyright infringement in order to have the right to moderate their own platform. I do not see what Twitter does as censorship and don't believe users should have the expectation that whatever they post will be amplified.
    • esoterica 6y ago
      Do you think it should be illegal for HN to moderate posts and ban users (without accepting legal liability for all user generated comments)? If HN can moderate comments, why not Twitter? If you think it's unethical for HN to operate the way it currently does, why are you still here? Maybe you should stick to your principles and delete your account.
• thelean12 6y ago
  What's the alternative? During the 90s information traveled slower and those with large audiences took the time to research reports before sharing it with the world. And if it turns out that they were wrong, the correct information can be spread across those few platforms to everyone. Now, misinformation can be created way faster than it can be discredited and there are a massive number of surfaces where the misinformation can live without being corrected.
• afrojack123 6y ago
  Politicians need to control the narrative. If everybody is on Facebook, Twitter, that's where politicians will go. Wait until everybody starts coming to HackerNews lol.
• rebolek 6y ago
  I was born in late 70's in Czechoslovakia so I remember the communist regime with its propaganda. I'm all for free speech but when I see propaganda I want to smash it with a steel tube which probably makes me pro-censorship. I still want to believe in the ideals of Internet as I've encountered it back in 1994 but that would require ideal people and we're not ideal. So some rules are needed.
  • seneca 6y ago
    And what would happen if the communists you hate so much were the ones deciding what gets censored?
    • krimeo 6y ago
      Just like the communists have always been doing.
• vowelless 6y ago
  > I have no idea what happened during the early 2010s. $TWTR $FB
• natalyarostova 6y ago
  Up until a few months ago I agreed. I have since been convinced that the power of Twitter/FB etc in connecting people who have never been connected is something we need to think carefully about...
• swalsh 6y ago
  When guns were flint locks, the amount of damage one person could do was pretty limited. When machine guns became generally available (and i'm aware $200 is not "generally available" in 1920). That changed. These weapons were introduced to "force multiply" an individual. Before the internet, the amount of damange a single guy with free speech could do was pretty limited. But with the internet, we're all force-multiplied. This message is probably going to be read by hundreds of people. Maybe thousands. In meat space, i'd have to be standing in a large concert hall for that kind of audince. I still believe in free-speech, and frankly I also believe regular individuals should be able to buy machine guns. But I don't blame people for having some hesitation about that. Crazy people exist... and force-multiplying those individuals can cause a lot of harm to society. I'm very pro-speech, but I respect that we might need to have a conversation about it.
  • hintymad 6y ago
    Never owned gun, and never thought of owning one, until this year, precisely when politicians told us, on TV, that calling 911 is a privilege, and when politicians condoned publicly looting and robbery and violence and abolishing police. I never felt so much need to own many guns and train for tactical shooting to defend my family when needed.
    • AlexandrB 6y ago
      Don't be confused. Regardless of political leaning, the police are not your friends. If the US were to degrade to a dictatorship it would be the police rounding up the "undesirables".
      • hintymad 6y ago
        No, I'm not confused. Police has been of great help in my community. They are kind. They take crimes seriously. They are friendly to kids in school. I shouldn't need to mention this as it goes without saying, but whatever: they are kind and friendly to kids of all colors in my community. And dictatorship in what way? You mean that the president repeatedly asked mayors and governors to ask for national guard, as required by law, but couldn't do anything because they said no? You mean the president has no power over state or city jurisdiction so he could only yell on Twitter for opening the cities -- pathetic in a way. You mean the president has no authority to ban critical race theory so all he could do is to ban them in federal agencies, again under his full authority? You mean the president has no power over media so all he could do is to call them fake news? Or you mean that the first thing that Hitler did to gain power is to disband the police, just like many of our justice fighters have been demanding?
• millzlane 6y ago
  The internet is still in it's current form the same internet with the same philosophies. You can always host your own website and say whatever the hell you want.
• suyash 6y ago
  I'm with you, solutions that come to me are: 1. Creating a level playing field by setting clear standards of what is allowed vs what is now allowed for all social media. Gov bodies are the ones to do this as companies have proven they can't self police themselves. 2. Break up big tech - too much power in their hand that they are absuing. This would be painful though for the stakeholders and won't happen easily as there are lot of vested interests.
• foobarian 6y ago
  You have the right to speak freely, but you do not have the right to make me listen. s/me/FB/ you get the idea.
• bosswipe 6y ago
  I think a big part of the backlash is because of 4chan culture going mainstream. 4chan's idea of finding weaknesses in society and attacking them "for the lulz" has been adopted by right wing youth culture. The culture war has lost all morals. I've asked friends that knowingly disseminate false information why they do it and they see themselves as part of an all out political war where anything goes. I don't see how democracy can function in such an environment where nobody knows what is real or fake.
• theklub 6y ago
  "Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me" Was the phrase I grew up on. Seems like the opposite today where we allow looting and riots but saying the wrong thing gets you in trouble.
  • tootie 6y ago
    Looters and rioters were arrested by the scores. Meanwhile our sitting president insults, lies, spreads disinformation and incitement to violence and we made him president.
    • krapp 6y ago
      >Meanwhile our sitting president insults, lies, spreads disinformation and incitement to violence and we made him president. Yeah, but I heard Hillary injects the blood of unbaptized white babies into her eyeballs. That's crazy. Isn't that crazy?! Right into her eyeballs.
  • doktrin 6y ago
    Arm one man with a stick and the other with a verified twitter account, and I know who I'd bet on.
• wesleywt 6y ago
  A government entity cannot censor your speech. But YouTube definitely can. They are a private entity.
• msie 6y ago
  There is no difference between "censorship" on Twitter/Facebook and "censorship" on HackerNews. Each site has a set of rules that must be followed. Don't like it? Then start your own website.
• originalvichy 6y ago
  Free speech moved from everyone having a voice on _their_ servers to people being entitled to say what they want on _your_ servers. There have been moderators ever since people gathered on someone’s server to discuss things. Moderators still exist even though we are not just on IRC anymore. Your idea of free speech doesn’t exist in communal internet spaces as abundantly as you might believe. Perhaps it never did.
• nemo44x 6y ago
  Speech is considered violence by some people. It has been this way since the late 80's but it was confined to certain subcultures that weren't taken too seriously. But they have taken over certain institutions, like the university (and increasingly big-tech), and own that platform and teach this as esteemed fact rather than an opinion. And it's dangerous because when you equate speech with violence then how far are we from responding with a so called violent act with actual violence? One thing they've gotten right is that discourses (how we talk about things) does in fact have a lot of power. So controlling discourses means you consolidate power. When you control how we talk about things then you can control what we talk about. When you control that, then you control how people think about things and you've now successfully won the culture and therefore seized actual, real power. Like being able to use a small minority of corporate activists to pressure a company into viewing certain content as violent or "problematic" and other content as orthodox and therefore appropriate to "platform". This is how the church worked in the West for years, how it still does in certain places (Saudi Arabia) - by using dogma to determine what is right and wrong. To become the sole arbiter on what is knowledge and what is blasphemy and therefore the authority to discipline and punish. This is where we are.
  • nostromo 6y ago
    > But they have taken over certain institutions, like the university (and increasingly big-tech) And the media, which is increasingly opposed to free speech. Today we're seeing journalists talk about how other journalists should be banned from the public square by powerful corporations. They seemingly aren't bright enough to pause and wonder if this will ever be used against them. And this is being done under the banner of progressivism. There are so many layers of irony here.
    • nemo44x 6y ago
      > And this is being done under the banner of progressivism I think it's a very confusing time. A lot of people want to be "good people". They don't understand how the definitions of words have changed and what they're really signing up for. "Anti-racisim" sounds great - what reasonable, moral person wants to be racist? But you begin to read the text and you start to see it isn't what you think it is. That it isn't anything like what we've been working towards in terms of civil rights and equality. I don't think "Progressivism" is the right word. There's not a good name for this philosophy yet other than derogative terms like "woke". Social Justice maybe but I find it unjust. I've seen "therapeutic totalitarianism" as one candidate.
• tomjen3 6y ago
  I am the same age as you and agree with you, but don't plan on dying on any hill: the high ground is a strategically superior position so we should win.
• abootstrapper 6y ago
  Is it “free speech” to deliberately create a misleading story/propaganda for your advantage, then spend money on fake accounts to astroturf your propaganda and give it fake credibility on third party corporate services? — That sounds beyond the intent of “free speech” to me. BTW, I use to run “blue ribbon campaign” banners on my 90s era webpages. So I understand where you’re coming from.
  • giardini 6y ago
    You're describing what's long been called a "confidence game".
  • whiddershins 6y ago
    It falls within free speech, because otherwise the institution which determines whether the speech is what you describe becomes too powerful. The correct way to deal with this is probably twofold: to have a variety of organizations which determine what is untrue, and to somehow figure how to make them seem credible. Those organizations should probably operate independently of the companies actually implementing their blocking algorithms, and obviously of each other. Then we need a diverse enough set of communications channels that each can make independent determinations how they filter communications on their platform, referencing the analysis of various organizations in the first paragraph. This would maybe make for more controlled environments while not having universal censorship of controversial ideas.
• azangru 6y ago
  I am from the same generation. Got introduced to the internet in mid-90s, after about a year of using FidoNet. Will die on the same hill.
• rbetts 6y ago
  I was born in 1974. Netscape's browser (what became Mozilla) was released my junior year of college. It was a cute alternative to gopher and ftp. Then, newspapers were published once or twice a day. Magazines weekly or monthly. Publishers worked as editors, fact-checkers, and curators (with their various agendas, of course). The original miracle of internet free speech was the promise that anyone could become a publisher - no more gate keeping by major media companies - no more financial barrier to entry to buy presses, paper, delivery trucks. Then various platforms emerged to centralize online publishing -- Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LiveJournal, Yelp, ... and thousands more. They took the profit model of traditional publishers (paid advertising), exploited the structural advantages of digital publishing, and gave up the overhead and responsibility of curating and creating content. Now we are trying to figure out how to manage real time publishing platforms that can't (or won't?) validate identity, won't take responsibility for fact-checking, are open to targeted manipulation by adversaries, and are capable of distributing damaging lies and propaganda with little oversight or financial consequences. Speech is still "freer" now than when I was a teenager. The reach of an individual voice is massive in today's world compared to the 1980's. When I was young, my community was the people who lived within biking distance. Now it includes all of reddit, twitch, hackernews... Can we sustain these advances while managing the mob-mentality inherent in human nature? Can we protect our forums from adversarial misuse? Are open platforms that shrug off responsibility for content while collecting advertising profits compatible with democracy? Looks like we'll find out in the next few years.
  • donmcronald 6y ago
    > Now we are trying to figure out how to manage real time publishing platforms that can't (or won't?) validate identity, won't take responsibility for fact-checking, are open to targeted manipulation by adversaries, and are capable of distributing damaging lies and propaganda with little oversight or financial consequences. The identity validation part is worth repeating. I'm not a fan of real names, but I'd consider opting in to an identity that follows me between platforms so I could build a reputation. I'd also like to see more transparency from social media platforms. I'd love to be able to get metrics on a post. X% of likes came from these countries. X% of retweets came from known VPN IPs. X% of shares came from IPs in known botnets. I'd also LOVE to filter out people that participate over a certain volume. If someone is spending 8h+ per day on Twitter, I want them hidden because IMO they have nothing to add if all of their experience is from social media and not the real world.
• rayrag 6y ago
  Entry barrier became too low, no skills required to post anything. Web became centralized. Instead of visiting dozens websites you started visiting few conglomerates. People thought that their opinions are unique and matters anything, so they started posting everything everywhere.
• addicted 6y ago
  You say on HN which has highly moderated comment threads. So suppressing free speech is only ok if it’s done by unpaid volunteers (never mind that free speech as such never existed, since you still had all sorts of restrictions include libel, defamation, fire in a theater, etc kind of restrictions).
  • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    If I discovered that HN moderators were banning links to specific major news articles they didn't like, I'd find that extremely concerning. As far as I know, the HN moderators restrict only comments which are needlessly inflammatory and posts which don't have to do with the technology industry, and I'd be fine with it if Twitter or Facebook adopted similarly general policies. (I'd be a huge fan of forming some version or corner of Twitter without politics at all, frankly.)
• stevebmark 6y ago
  I would rather see you work on removing US libel and slander laws, and petitioning Germany to make it legal to make nazi salutes again, which are more direct free speech issues, instead of private platforms doing what they want with their private platforms.
• vonwoodson 6y ago
  It’s weird how happy people are to give up freedom, isn’t it? American Democracy is absolutely, 100% under attack on the internet today. We should be doubling down on the freedoms that make America the amazing place it is, rather than sowing the seeds of tyranny.
  • heurist 6y ago
    I wonder if you will feel that way when GPT-3, deepfaking, and bots produce the vast majority of online content. That day is coming quickly.
• rllearneratwork 6y ago
  Misinformation and hate speech are clearly important issues. But loosing free speech would be a colossal mistake. I used to live in a country with no free speech, trust me the USA in its current state is hundred million times better and more just. Free speech is just super fundamental. So, in my opinion, nothing restricting free speech is acceptable - the downsides of that are just too enormous. We need to learn to live in a society where information is easily available and free speech has absolute protection. And yes, this involves learning to be able to detect misinformation, manipulation, etc. without outright banning it. Voltaire put it well: ""I disagree with what you have to say, sir, but I will defend, to the death, your right to say it."
  • tayo42 6y ago
    No one in america is restricting your free speech. Go buy server space and write what ever you want.
    • rllearneratwork 6y ago
      There are then questions of monopolies and utilities. Cloud providers won't allow you to host certain content and if you buy your own server your internet provided can and will restrict the kind of content you can host. Also there are de-facto monopolies on communications and social networks.
      • tayo42 6y ago
        > Cloud providers won't allow you to host certain content and if you buy your own server your internet provided can and will restrict the kind of content you can host. yeah because in practice free speech isn't black and white like these internet discussions like to pretend it is. Is not being allowed to host child porn a violation of my free speech? there's nuance when defining free speech. Similar to the paradox of tolerance, you need to draw the line somewhere otherwise you'll be drowned out and taken over by speech that doesn't happen in good faith.
        • 6y ago
• joe_the_user 6y ago
  I too started the Internet in the 90s and I was post 20 then. I also have seen "weaponized trolling" in the last ten years that seems to make the world a good deal worse. The way climate change denial has gotten legs from combination of the average person's poor thinking and the particular dynamics of electronic communication. I see bots on my FB feed activating now, pushing propaganda that makes me chuckle but certainly push some morons to actions. Putting aside the point that Twitter/FB own the medium. Someone is going to manage any given medium. Is "throttling" censorship? Because the NY Post story never was made unavailable, it was just throttled, it just slowed down, slowed down enough that the rebuttal was made available at the same rate as the original story. There are junctures where "free speech" can't really be a criteria - Oliver Wendel Holmes' "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" is the epitome of such examples (and these can be misused, in fact Holmes' made his example to misuse it, justifying repression against those who oppose WWI). Is spread viral false news on the eve of an election in the "fire" or the "freedom" category? Honestly, throttling seems like a good compromise if we're looking for the simple free availability of information. But when information is the coordination, activation and/or manipulation of people at scale, talking about freedom stops meaning a lot. Suppose there's a fire, and a hurricane, and an epidemic and an economic crisis and different things shouted will save some people and trample other people. What category is "shouting" "you don't need a mask, come shop before I go bankrupt"? Etc.
• patcon 6y ago
  First, I'm not for or against any specific actions in saying this, but... I'd say that if your views on what censorship is haven't changed as the actual social medium of thought has (over 20 years), then you're perhaps being dogmatic about censorship. Ideas around censorship came about when the social medium that mobilized thought were MUCH more viscous. Like imagine a physical surface on some liquid medium, in which its initial properties were such that a small force rippled to such a degree due to viscosity. You'd generally know the forces other points would feel when event Y happened so much distance away. But if suddenly the liquid developed very different properties, and now waves travelled differently through it, you must respond by adapting (or at least CONSIDER adapting). Whatever science or activity or measurement was happening on that surface before, that would need to be adapted or changed or even discarded. One's views on how to navigate the environment must change to respond to such an important change in the mediating layer. Sorry if that's a bit of mixed metaphor, but I truly feel it's more than light analogy. Anyhow, be well!
• devilduck 6y ago
  It's really poor quality thinking to call this censorship but whatever, it's your hill to die on.
• JohnBooty 6y ago
  But the new generation of people, even here on HN and the internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship I was born in the 1970s and I can tell you why I flipped. The (hopelessly naive) ideal many of us had was that, by breaking down communication barriers, we'd create an egalitarian "marketplace of ideas" and the best ideas would win. And by "best" ideas we generally meant principles of equality, science, and so forth. Regardless of what you feel needs to be done... I'm sure you can agree that hasn't been achieved. Probably more like the opposite. The problem is that by amplifying all voices, we've simply created another "might makes right" situation. Unfettered online discourse is dominated by those who yell the loudest. This includes a large number of woefully misinformed people, and genuinely malicious actors such as (for example) the hordes of paid internet trolls funded by America's rivals in order to sow discord and disinformation during our 2016 elections. In effect, we've replaced the staid and conservative corporate self-censorship of decades past with something that is quite frequently worse. I mean, free speech sure sounds good, but in reality it means that your racist uncle ranting about chemtrails on Facebook gets to be heard right alongside people who actually know what the fuck they're talking about. I unapologetically do not know what the solution is.
  • Karunamon 6y ago
    There is no solution to this problem that doesn't involve unaccountable third parties setting the ground rules for what is okay to say. I'd take a thousand racist uncles writing about chemtrails before taking a single official censor. The abuse factor for the latter is simply too high to ever permit. Freedom of speech, as a concept, includes by extension the freedom to be wrong.
    • JohnBooty 6y ago
      There is no solution to this problem that doesn't involve unaccountable third parties setting the ground rules for what is okay to say Literally nobody is talking about taking away anybody's right to say, write, or think things. You're confusing this right with Twitter's utterly nonexistent obligation to transmit and amplify your thoughts to others.
• mattchew 6y ago
  A little older than you, but same basic experience. I also don't understand how the tide turned so swiftly against freedom of speech, and in favor of authorities deciding what people should be allowed to hear or read. But it did turn, and I don't see the trend reversing. While I don't like the prospect of an increasingly censored society, it will be interesting to watch the struggle between the big platform censors and those who want to say banned things. I expect this will only escalate over time. Anyway, just wanted to say you're not alone. Watching some of your cherished values be discarded by society is something you have to accept as you get old, I'm afraid.
  • SECProto 6y ago
    > I also don't understand how the tide turned so swiftly against freedom of speech, and in favor of authorities deciding what people should be allowed to hear or read. Freedom of speech meant freedom from /government/ control of speech. It has never meant freedom from the any impact. This article (facebook et al blocking/removing/deplatforming) is functionally no different than a newspaper choosing what to publish in their editorials page, a property owner having a bulletin board whose postings they control, or a shopping mall not allowing someone to stand up on a soap box and proselytize.
    • mattchew 6y ago
      Freedom of speech has always meant the idea that different points of view should be aired, not suppressed, and that people should decide for themselves what is right or what is correct, rather than authorities deciding for them. A society where "wrong" points of view are thoroughly suppressed by giant social media companies or angry mobs (or angry mobs on social media) might not violate the literal text of the First Amendment, but it lacks the spirit of free speech that inspired the First Amendment in the first place. What I find most disappointing is not that Facebook is censoring QAnon (or whatever), but that the popular sentiment is they should be. That's a big change from the culture I grew up in, and not for the better.
      • SECProto 6y ago
• ccktlmazeltov 6y ago
  internet and social medias pretty much emphasized problems that were already existent, and made them much harder to ignore. For example, I truly believe gay marriage wouldn't have been a thing worldwide without social medias. I think Americans need to have a talk about what they want to define as protected free speech, and what consist speech that endanger others or doesn't move the world in a better place (perhaps this needs a definition of what "a better place" is as well).
• TLightful 6y ago
  >>" I don't believe I'm in a proper reality/timeline anymore." Appropriate. Currently, freedom of speech is this climate technological sphere is freedom to amplify hate, lies, conspiracy and fear in seconds. I don't have the answers, but you're not asking the right questions. Time to have a word with your tech overlords, methinks.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• shirakawasuna 6y ago
  A large portion of liberals convince themselves that woke capitalist censorship isn't really censorship and that it's fighting "the good fight" so long as it's hurting their enemies. A large portion of conservatives convince themselves that the media has a left bias and therefore it's reasonable to ingest even trashier garbage uncritically. Very similar position - so long as their media is confirming their biases / hurting their enemies, they're cool with it, even if it's based on fiction. We're in desperate need of a nationwide media criticism education and the free time for average people to actually engage in it. We should all be aware of various journalists, publications' biases, the think tanks they cite as "neutral" (often Koch-backed, e.g.), etc. The problem with garbage "news" in social media is that it convinces people of nonsense. That's not really a problem of media outlets so much as a public that has no real response to it. Little familiarity with media criticism and no way to effectively push back outside of something like Twitter. Everyone tries to work within their extremely limited frameworks, many of which are systematically hampered by the forces that fund and profit from these camps. The first steps to getting the boot off of our necks are (1) vastly improved public education with practical political courses that include media criticism, critically responding to statistical claims and graphs, and questionable forms of argument, and (2) a strong enough economic floor so that the average person can justify spending the time to actually pay attention to this stuff. If you're worried about your next paycheck and avoiding the stress of bills and incoming financial woes, you'd rather watch some TV than spend several hours learning about why Bari Weiss kind of sucks.
• madeofpalk 6y ago
  Is it ‘pro censorship’ or pro ‘companies should have the freedom to run their company the way they want’? I don’t understand how the government enforces private companies to (re)publish content in a way that doesn’t infringe on the companies first amendment right.
  • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    You can (and I personally do!) say that Twitter should have the freedom to make censorious decisions while still encouraging them not to do it. It's like saying "everyone should eat healthy meals" - that doesn't mean the government should force them to! So if someone takes the extra step and says they endorse Twitter's actions here, I think it's fair to call that pro censorship.
• kerng 6y ago
  The problem is not free speech, people should focus on the monetary aspects which is the root cause of this. Social media and ad revenue are the driving forces. Free speech would still be not an issue weren't it for those conflicting interests of the social media companies.
• cbvan 6y ago
  What happened during the early 2010s is that colleges and universities started implementing Stasi methods like anonymous reporting on professors and making professors write humiliating self-criticisms. All this to appease a fragile and spoiled generation. The effects now show on the Internet, where "open" source projects implement similar oppressive tactics in the name of attracting new "contributors" (who rarely do anything useful). Unfortunately, the boomers, who first raked in all the money and leadership positions in SV companies, support this cultural revolution in a last attempt to preserve their power. [1] former East German surveillance apparatus
• esoterica 6y ago
  If you believe in free speech then you must believe that Twitter has the free speech right to choose what they want to host on their privately owned servers, the same way a homeowner has the free speech right to choose what lawn signs they want to display on their yard, and a newspaper has the free speech right to decide what editorials they want to publish. If you think free speech gives you the right to force your speech onto other people then you don't understand the concept of free speech. You reminisce fondly of the old internet, but the old school forums were all heavily and completely arbitrarily moderated according to the whims and egos of the mods. Unrestricted free speech was never a thing there.
• LocalPCGuy 6y ago
  I fully agree with you regarding free speech. Where we probably differ is that I also uphold the rights of private companies, however large, to set their own standards of what can be posted to their platform. Now, if we want to have the debate about whether the platforms are too large, have too much power to shape the conversations we have, etc, we can have that debate. But it isn't censorship for a private company to remove information it believes violates it's standards (whether because it's false, misleading, or for other reasons).
  • RIMR 6y ago
    If anything, the first amendment explicitly protects a private organization's right to curate their own platforms the way they see fit. Twitter could declare support of Donald Trump a bannable offense today, and those people can promptly sign up for a site like Parler. And Parler has even more censorship. Adult work is completely legal in the US, and pornography is a form of constitutionally protected free speech, yet Parler strictly prohibits it on "Decency" grounds. I see no problem with social netoworks drawing a line in the sand. The big ones can draw a line at violence, hatred, and fascism. The little ones can draw the same line and stand shamefully on the other side. And nobody loses their right to speak.
• some_account99 6y ago
  Same and i miss our people.
• eli_gottlieb 6y ago
  I'm with you. Rather than censor "disinfo", I'd really prefer to just break up the damn networks so it can't spread so easily.
• throwawaymanbot 6y ago
  No one is totally stopping you from saying whatever racist/misogynist/Russian disinformation stuff you want. BUT... this private company does not have to be obliged or subjugated to your speech whims. I see no violation of anyones rights. Just a private company exercising its rights in its policy. I wish people would Stop whinging.
• ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  What’s stranger to me is that people who spent their whole lives distrustful of the US intelligence apparatus suddenly found the CIA and FBI above reproach in 2016. The entire Russian hacking the elections in 2016 narrative should be a black pill to every technical person in 2020. Did you ever even find out what that “back channel from Trump Towers to Alfa Bank” ever was?
• RIMR 6y ago
  I think the fundamental issue with what you're saying here is that it assumes that privately owned social networks are places where free speech matters. These are curated spaces, and they are not run democratically, they are run capitalistically. Twitter isn't even in the business of providing a forum for speech. They're in the business of serving ads. Your free speech cannot be infringed by a corporation, as the corporation does't gatekeep anything but access to their platform that they own. Your right to speech exists separate from their platform or their permission to use it. And if you believe in the free market, you can't complain that the largest social networks gravitate towards political ideologies that are most friendly to their profits. You also have no obligation to participate in those networks if they don't offer you a space that you enjoy participating in. Just because the social networks that cater to you are smaller doesn't mean your rights are being infringed upon. It just means your ideas are less successful in a free and open marketplace of ideas.
  • lurchpop 6y ago
    It becomes an issue when people do try to start their own networks, those networks get smeared and service providers (credit cards, hosting, dns) start cutting them off.
• ManBlanket 6y ago
  What could go wrong from empowering biased corporations with the ability to control a national narrative of what constitutes misinformation and hyperbole? I'm noticing a wide spread lack of the ability to weigh the pros and cons of policy in order to arrive at a rational decision based on due consideration of legitimate data analysis. I guess we should've been concerned when today's young adults couldn't discern real from fake news sources. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK284782/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK284782/ Makes me wonder how well equipped the next generation of underprivileged and minority children will be, among whom illiteracy will be a serious issue because they and their parents were never able to catch-up socially after being thrown to the wolves of self preservation and unchecked puritanical shaming. Sure a website like hacker news is well-moderated and I am appreciative, but it's a matter of scale. A for-profit corporation granted with the ability to control the political narrative of an entire country is neither, "moderated content", nor, "news". If time has anything to tell it works fine, until the narrative is wrong.
  • andrewprock 6y ago
    The most interesting thing about this comment is that this is precisely how things have been for a very very long time. If you would like to know "what could go wrong" you need simply take a look and see what is going wrong now.
    • RonanTheGrey 6y ago
      Yeah, I think the "what could go wrong" line was more hyperbolic than anything else. It's been happening for a long time now.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Latty 6y ago
  A private company stopping people spewing misinformation to huge numbers of people using their private platform isn't "censorship". The problem with "some people only use facebook for news and so this means they are effectively censored" is "some people only use facebook for news". Fix that, don't try to force services to broadcast obvious harmful nonsense to people. The idea of truly unfiltered free speech on a global scale is impossible, because you have to be heard and we can't let everyone broadcast to everyone: there is too much noise. Free speech does not—and has never meant—the right to every platform.
  • alentist 6y ago
    > A private company stopping people spewing misinformation to huge numbers of people using their private platform isn't "censorship". How does this relate to Twitter blocking private messages between two people for including the NYP article? > because you have to be heard and we can't let everyone broadcast to everyone: there is too much noise. How does this relate to Twitter blocking people from seeing an NYP article shared by people they explicitly chose to follow?
• intended 6y ago
  I can answer this one - 1) Old school free speech advocate, changed positions since 2) Had to figure this out practically, so not just theory crafting. Context: Part of a mod team for a forum, and we were torn between ideals of free speech and what was actually happening on the forum. Important note, moderation may be the main service the internet/SM platforms sell - curation, removal of trolls, the cleaning and keeping viable an environment for exchange of ideas. Earlier ideas from 2000, web 2.0 etc assumed this would happen naturally. "The better ideas bubble to the top". The market place of ideas. This metaphor doesn't work when someone is selling goods that destroy the market. If you have a vegetable market, and someone starts selling crack cocaine, then there really isn't something an egg plant vendor can do about getting people to buy the healthier vegetable/argument. And thats what is happening. On our forum, people were introducing material that short circuits logic. Any long intelligent answer was displaced by an emotional outburst, or cat videos, or jokes, flame wars - on serious topics. This makes the exchange of ideas moot, and replaces it with the exchange of emotions. The market place of ideas does not work at the internet scale, even for web forums, unless someone is moderating. --------------- Additional random thoughts: First, things are much worse than you feel, because the act of speaking is almost entirely the act of being online. Censorship means you don't get to be heard (although you can speak), so it is, in internet terms, pretty serious. 1) This worked when the network didnt have centralized forces (as value collects in a network, activity increases, and the network will create some version of filters who become gatekeepers.)
  • tossAfterUsing 6y ago
    You're not describing free speech, you're describing the challenges of moderation.
    • intended 6y ago
      Thank you, I’m great full for the input. Yes. Moderation is needed for free speech to work. Without it, the effective exchange of ideas breaks down because the communication medium happily amplifies noise. Viral and malformed ideas will beat facts every time. Counter speech fails. Moderation is what FB/twitter are doing.
• sergiotapia 6y ago
  "Man Who Agrees With The Media, Universities, Corporations, And Hollywood Thinks He's Part Of The Resistance" - https://babylonbee.com/news/counter-cultural-rebel-believes-everything-athletes-reporters-actors-ceos-believe https://babylonbee.com/news/counter-cultural-rebel-believes-... I was born in 89, I don't remember things being this way. It feels artificial and forced, like some foreign state is having their way with public influence in our country and by extension the world. Sickening. Free speech should be free, and I'm surprised people in the tech industry feel opposite. I wonder, do they really feel this way? Or do they pretend, to go with the flow and not be labeled a racist?
• moksly 6y ago
  Your 90ies must have been very different from mine. IRC operators, forum moderators and what not happily banned people back then. It’s not like you could even take your bullshit to your own channels or sub forums if it was bad enough, because you’d get network banned. Things have changed though. In the 90ies you would have been laughed off the internet if you seriously suggested the earth was flat. Conspiracy theories back then weren’t making people shoot up pizza places or plan to kidnap governors. Today we’re seriously seeing diseases we defeated come back and kill thousands of people because of anti-vaccine Facebook groups. So yeah, people around you have likely changed, because free speech doesn’t work when it has no consequences. And I’m not talking about putting people in prison, I’m talking about laughing them back to their caves so their infectious collective stupid doesn’t ruin democracy. If it’s not already too late. I used to be right with you on that free speech hill, but like so many other people I just got sick of all the anti-vaxxers, Holocaust deniers and whatever scumbags who cause harm, abusing it. And it’s not like they don’t have freedom of speech just because they get banned from popular platforms. Just like the 90ies, they are free to set up their own.
• linuxhansl 6y ago
  We always used to disagree on topics, and argued passionately over these. But we (mostly) agreed on facts and what is true and what is not - and then argued conclusions or actions. What is different these days is that we simply deny the facts, provide "alternate facts", or simply lie about facts. As a result we no longer agree on a basic basis of truth, truth has become a belief or a choice. That is toxic, since it is used to simply avoid meaningful discussion. It is a fundamental change in how we conduct our discourse. And so new measures are needed. Rather than censoring speech, I'd prefer fact checking, which may or may not amount to the same.
• jonstewart 6y ago
  I was born in the late 70s and also was there and ready for the heady birth of the web—as a teen and then a college student, it was great. I subscribe to the free speech, anti-censorship ethos. But this ain’t censorship; free speech is alive and well for anyone willing to find the right platform. This is a platform provider [belatedly] denying access to lies (they aren’t opinions) that have been weaponized to exploit those platforms’ recommendation algorithms for the liars’ own gain. It is more like how the internet started to develop defenses against spam in the late 90s, with spamsum, SpamAssassin, etc.
  • cambalache 6y ago
    I am probably your same age and I have a totally different position. This does not mean I am wrong and you are right, it just only mean your opinion is just an individual take, not a generation voice. Yes, there are many platforms, but what is happening now is the 90s equivalent to be banned from MSN messenger, MICQ, IRC and Usenet at the same time, sure you could go to an obscure geocities page to express yourself there but it is not the same. Thankfully that did not happen then. In this specific case is not about lies, it is just unsavory emails and pics, highly unethical but not very different from what all the rags do all the time, it's very disingenous to think Twitter acted on good faith and not because it was politically convenient for its CEO. If the leaks would have been about Trump people would be crying bloody murder about the censorship. Humans, humans never change.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• teton88 6y ago
  2010s aside, in the context of this article and discussion, there has been no infringement on freedom of speech. When you engage discourse within an institution, you are subject to an informal, sometimes formal social contract. If you entered a christian church in 1789 making certain statements, you would be removed (censored) from the church at the minimum. That still holds true today. Only today, this private institution is no small church with a handful of people, but billions. Still, under our current framework it is a private institution with a social contract that its users have agreed to, formally, or informally. There has been no violation of free speech because it is not a public institution. If you feel there's a moral violation, you can either choose not to participate as is your right, or you can petition, as is your right, to have the state get involved with how this private institution conducts itself.
• devwastaken 6y ago
  The information in question was obtained very clearly illigally, where linking and consuming the source information is illigal. Twitter has a legal obligation to not allow people on their platform to use their service to do this.
• ggm 6y ago
  Its not a black and white world. Its a shades-of-gray world. Hill to die on is a figure of speech. The problem is, some people have taken its metaphorical strength to very odd places: Pizzagate, is turning it into a hill to kill from. I love free speech. I hate the outcome. I wanted a more literate connected world to empower truth, and did not realise the compelling power of falsity. It spreads faster.
• crusso 6y ago
  We're in a power transition where the Left is now in control of major societal levers: Academia, Hollywood, sports entertainment, the mainstream news media, large government bureaucracies, and big tech. Once the loudest champions of free speech because they were trying to break down the old power structures, the Left is now consolidating its power and sees no need to allow upstarts to criticize the new order.
  • joe_the_user 6y ago
    To call this "the left" is ridiculous. What you're talking about is the "multicultural mainstream", the neoliberal center. Essentially, it's the ideology of those major corporation that want to ban all sexist and racist discourse because this sort of thing makes it harder for teams of people scattered about the world to work together. It's an ideology that's still OK with tremendous wealth disparities but which want those disparities to not be reinforced chauvinistically.
    • crusso 6y ago
      My POV is from American politics where the left is in lockstep with the censorship going on at Google, Facebook, and Twitter. This very story is about how Joe Biden is being protected by those tech giants. Those tech giants also are the ones protecting leftist movements like Antifa and the Democratic Socialists of America. Maybe there's a part of the left outside of the USA that still stands up for free speech? Not here in the USA. That game is over. Except for a few voices in the wilderness like Brett Weinstein and Sam Harris, the left is comprised of those whose interests and actions now align with the tech giants.
• draw_down 6y ago
  The truth is that everyone has a list of speech they would curtail. Everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone. This is not to excuse it here, to be clear. Just to say the pattern of history is- whoever is in charge gets to decide what speech is dangerous, and then when who’s in charge changes the dangerous speech changes. You used to couldn’t say the war in Iraq was bad. Now you can’t say ___________.
• jandrese 6y ago
  The question is: Does the news media (which includes Facebook, Twitter, and other social media) have a duty to objective reality? In the old days major news organizations had a public obligation to stick to the truth as much as possible. They had fact checkers, independent editorial boards, and other firewalls against false information. Without such protections people end up believing convenient lies at a much greater rate, which is destructive to society. We've tried the big experiment with unfettered flow of information and it resulted in people being less informed and more radicalized. Clearly it doesn't work, at least not at scale.
• stjohnswarts 6y ago
  The problem is this isn't a Freedom of Speech issue except from Twitter's point of view. They can delete whatever they like on their platform. People are free to leave the platform if they don't like that policy. Everyone gets what they want (as reasonably as possibly!) in the end.
• finikytou 6y ago
  people are strong believers that if they are in the side of "good" they can voice their opinions freely as long as they don't hurt "others opinions" note that this others opinions will change every day/months/political agenda make sense just like when Amy said "sexual preference" and the dictionary deemed it as offensive the day after. we are living in an idiocracy of the good equal to the one of the Z movie demolition man. Also from the moment you not in this axis of the good anymore you'll be deemed nazi, fake news, banned by social media. it is crazy to see that all the newspaper took the russian collusion seriously at first (and even do it know while many investigations couldnt find it) but their first reaction to a biden article is to ban it. We are living in a democracy of the good where the good is defined by a minority of overly violent only entitled personalities
• II2II 6y ago
  Over simplified version: free speech advocates of the bygone era started hearing too much that they disagreed with. The reality is that people were always saying what is being said today, but there were many more checks that reduced how far and how quickly the message would spread. You may have had right and left leaning media outlets, but they were typically closer to centrist views. This is more due to them having to maintain their reputation by checking facts than censorship, so the main thing that differed was their spin on a story. That pretty much left word of mouth and fringe publications. Fringe publications are just that, they had limited distribution. Word of mouth was pretty much restricted to social circles. Anything too far from reality (or people's perceptions) quickly died off. Online business models changed that. Fringe publications are no longer fringe, at least not in the historic sense. Word of mouth is no longer word of mouth, since people have access to publishing platforms. Reputation is no longer a restraint, so fact checking is irrelevant. Rather than settling on more centrist views, we tend to focus upon the extremes. A lot of disagreeable stuff is being said at those extremes, which is why (I suspect) that a lot of the old-time free speech advocates have reevaluated their positions. (And all of that is before considering how some people are actively manipulating what we are exposed to.)
• zelon88 6y ago
  People are purposely spreading misinformation on these platforms and dumb people are eating it up. It is causing an intelligence crisis in the country because anyone can register a $20 domain, throw a WordPress blog on it, post some fake partisan smut and have it go viral. You have freedom of speech. You don't have freedom to build a cult out of gullible people. Back in the 1990s when we were kids the only people on the internet were people smart enough to be there. Misinformation didn't have the reach it does now because the surfing public was mostly techie people with above average intelligence. The bar has been dropped and now everyone is on the internet. There's "proof" of every concept on the internet. And no central repository for truth that everyone trusts. There's a difference between being pro-speech and being anti-weaponization-of-falsehoods. And then there's the issue of Facebook spending billions of dollars on code and infrastructure. How would you like it if you developed a social network, discovered that terrorists were using it as part of their deception campaign, and then have the government FORCE you to participate in the terrorist plot that you, your shareholders, and your engineers don't agree with? How is that fair to Facebook, who invested their resources into developing the entire platform? Maybe before the GOP wants to use disinformation campaigns they should have thought about developing their own distribution network beforehand? I mean you can't seriously be mad at Facebook for being good at capitalism, can you?
• mechnesium 6y ago
  Just wait until dang comes and censors you for inciting a flame war about free speech. (Just kidding dang, please don’t ban me. I’m just salty about previous incidents.)
• jancsika 6y ago
  > I grew up during the late 90s (born in late 80s) learning about the internet and its philosophies. And with this specific case, I'm with you on your hill. But more broadly we're usually not talking about the web from the late 90s. We're talking about a handful of modern social networks most of which use of anti-democratic dark patterns. And algorithms that are known to push a given percentage of users down a rabbithole, who can then be weaponized for who knows what purpose by who knows which nasty actors. In essence, we're talking about factories which-- if there were a market for it-- could produce a version of the internet from the 90s with the slight difference that a sizable proportion of your 90s internet acquaintances happen to spout racist rhetoric and becoming walking, talking bioweapons this time around. I know that's not the topic here. But that is a much bigger problem IMO and the answer of "more speech" is at most helplessly incomplete wrt it.
  • heartbeats 6y ago
    >But that is a much bigger problem IMO and the answer of "more speech" is at most helplessly incomplete wrt it. Why? Why can't the leftists push people down rabbit holes and make them rabid communists? Serious question.
    • jancsika 6y ago
      Two answers. One utilitarian-- it's a smaller market. E.g., there was story on the intercept sourcing leaked FBI documents that showed the FBI's awareness and concerns about white supremacist infiltration of local law enforcement[1]. This was to the point that the FBI was cautious about sharing access to its surveillance tools for fear that they could be used by some local LE to target and harass minorities. (Not sure if that's in the same article or a different Intercept article.) Racist rabbitholes can draw on a pre-existing audience of racists, which make them more widespread and effective, and that attracts more ad dollars. Two-- emphasis on "rabid." There are racist groups where the membership is people from various ethnic backgrounds spouting the stereotypical white-supremacist rhetoric. The draw is apparently aggression and violence. If someone on the left wants to "counter" that, the video content is going to need to be equally irrational and aggressive to sufficiently capture the audience's attention. Again, you've got a smaller audience here. But the smaller audience you gain is going to be equally irrational to the far right group. So you've got a system that optimizes for irrational, rabbit-hole ideologies (hell, it could be bigfoot or flat earth for all they care), that tends to filter out more reasoned, thoughtful content. Hell, I can't even listen to a movement of a Brahms symphony without commercials interrupting a section. Even television isn't that fucking allergic to reasoned reflection. Talking about free speech inside such an unhealthy, anti-democratic system is about as coherent as adopting one of that system's rabid, rabbit-hole ideologies. 1: https://theintercept.com/2020/09/29/police-white-supremacist-infiltration-fbi/ https://theintercept.com/2020/09/29/police-white-supremacist...
• djsumdog 6y ago
  One of my best friends from high school (in the 90s), highly conservative back then, asked me two years back, about how he was rethinking "this whole free speech thing" I've lived in 3 countries. I've visited over 15. I had problems with America's foreign war involvement, and the corruption that bled from the Bush years into the Obama years. But I still came back, because despite all our issues, the Freedom to Speak is the bedrock of America and it is the only thing that can truly fight the type of corruption we are seeing today. I wrote this a few weeks ago: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/why-i-no-longer-hate-america/#the-freedom-to-speak https://battlepenguin.com/politics/why-i-no-longer-hate-amer...
• BearsAreCool 6y ago
  A lot of us spent a fair bit of time on hardcore free speech platforms and "saw what that got us" with cesspools like the various internet chans. A society that doesn't police itself is anarchy, and that really isn't helpful for any civil discussion or learning. While there should be no rules in private between friends etc, public forums need restrictions in order to have some level of functionality without descending into flamewars. The hill I'd really worry about with free speech is when punk hacker types turn on encryption, the current ultimate guard ensuring free speech. Edit note: I'm not pro the twitter blocking of the article, especially not in DMs as some have noted is occurring. I'm just slightly disillusioned to unlimited speech on the internet superhighway thanks to trolls, flamebaiters, frauds, and more.
• throwawaygh 6y ago
  But were you ever a member of a forum that didn’t moderate? Even bbs’s had moderation (although slightly less necessary). The internet I remember had “host your own website” type freedom, not “you can say whatever yo want anywhere you want” freedom. But then, people back then didn’t equate using some company’s platform with publishing. No, publishing meant setting up your own thing.
• ABCLAW 6y ago
  >But the new generation of people, even here on HN and the internet hacker personalities I used to align with have turned so pro-censorship that I don't believe I'm in a proper reality/timeline anymore. It turns out being able to lie at scale is a more credible and more immediate threat to society than nuanced restrictions on the flow of information. If you play any Town of Salem style game, you know that being able to call out and dissuade low effort, poor quality information is a way to improve pro-social discourse. Are there issues with selecting what counts as anti social information? Yes. Which is why restrictions are typically exceedingly narrow. However the ambit of what restrictions are justifiable runs along a spectrum; even amongst western democracies, there is a dramatic difference in what is acceptable and what is not. Germany, for instance, has exceedingly strong restrictions on pro-nazi speech. The US, by contrast, places a far higher immediate value on freedom of speech, to the point that it struck down campaign finance laws as being of lesser importance. Times change and people are noticing that the result of the pendulum being so far swung in one direction on this issue has caused tremendously deleterious effects.
  • anthonyrstevens 6y ago
    >> It turns out being able to lie at scale is a more credible and more immediate threat to society than nuanced restrictions on the flow of information. This is so spot on.
• sk2020 6y ago
  It’s pretty easy to confuse principles for tactics and vice-versa
• grumple 6y ago
  What internet were you a part of? We banned trolls, nazis, and conspiracy theorists all the time on early Internet forums and irc channels. It’s only in recent years that this behavior has been tolerated on large platforms. The fact is that newer platforms just serve to promote bad behavior rather than expose it.
• geitir 6y ago
  putting on my asshole hat maybe it's because the internet in the 90s was mostly above average intelligence techies who statistically had a better chance of doing thorough research. But now everyone's on the internet and those same techies are trying to come up with ways to prevent false information disseminating among the uneducated or at minimum unwilling-to-do-research masses
• urda 6y ago
  I miss the old internet.
• 99_00 6y ago
  Millennia's took over, is what happened. Welcome to the future.
• jmnicolas 6y ago
  > I have no idea what happened during the early 2010s. Web monopolies happened. The more a platform has members (including HN) the harder it gets to have meaningful conversations. Then come the rules.
• j8014 6y ago
  You are still surrounded by people with the same ideologies, it's just harder to hear us because of the noise. The people who are pro-censorship and regulation have never been a friend to the internet or its philosophies.
• tru3_power 6y ago
  I agree with this. One thing I’ve also come to realize is that a lot of people simply believe everything they read on the internet these days.