6 ms·

And this is why free speech (beyond what the First Amendment guarantees) is important. We shouldn't be having Zuckerberg or Pichai's opinion on the relative mor

by ponker 6y ago

And this is why free speech (beyond what the First Amendment guarantees) is important. We shouldn't be having Zuckerberg or Pichai's opinion on the relative moral differences between Leila Khaled and the CCP affect what speech we can hear regarding it.

godelski 6y ago
While I'm a big advocator for free speech (I think companies should act like Signal and wash their hands of it), there's a difference between a government censoring an event and a public entity. If strong man Randy Savage wanted to give a public speech on your front lawn, you should have the right to say no because that's your property. You should also be able to say yes. This gets complicated because these online platforms blur the lines between public and private spaces. Objectively they are private spaces because the companies own the "land." But we as users think about them as public spaces because they facilitate similar things to public spaces in the offline world. There'd also be an inherit danger to making those platforms a real public space, controlled by governments (who's!). The case is honestly really messy and we don't need to overly simplify it, we need to solve the problem (as a society) and figure out how to move forward.
- ponker 6y ago
  The law forces private property owners to pay taxes they don’t want to. The law forces restaurants to serve “coloreds” even if they don’t want to. Private property rights operate within limits circumscribed by the law. And a good law to govern that is the First Amendment. Just extend First Amendment rights to online spaces that are operated by monopolies or near-monopolies.
  - xxpor 6y ago
    Go look at the majority of 1st amendment cases in the courts the past few years. They're mostly corporations arguing against regulations as free speech issues. The jurisprudence, largely from "conservative" judges, is that "speech" is any expression, and it applies to corporations. Ironically, that's what'll make it tough to regulate Facebook/Twitter/etc. They didn't see the 2nd order affects coming.
    - prirun 6y ago
      The ridiculous part is that a corporation was given "personhood" by the law, with all the rights that people have. A corporation is not a person. Here's the 1st amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." What works for me is to replace the words Congress & government with Facebook, Twitter, or any company with a certain market share. If you want to be a corporation that facilitates communication between thousands of people, you're subject to the rule, ie, you lose some of your private property rights. If you have fewer than say 1000 users, do what you want: only private property rules apply.
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  > If strong man Randy Savage wanted to give a public speech on your front lawn, you should have the right to say no because that's your property. You should also be able to say yes. Correct. Because of private property laws, not free speech. The problem isn't (exactly) whether companies have a right to do this. The problem is that increasingly they are our primary method of communication, and want to be, and with lockdowns, have to be. If private companies are the only way we communicate, we may still have a free speech problem. Just as if everyone only communicated using yoghurt pots and strings, and a private company owned the strings and decided whose should be cut.
  - godelski 6y ago
    I mean... this is what I'm trying to get at and why it is complicated. The issue I see is that the conversation has become reductionist. I see a few options: 1) Business as usual (i.e. private entities make their own rules on their own property). 2) We classify these as public spaces. We then run into problems of "all" or "of a certain size." Both of which will have weird effects. "All" makes it difficult for competitors or niche groups (do we allow all articles on HN?). Of a certain size means companies have to transition and creates a new major speed bump in companies going through that transition. 3) We create a government owned platform. Now we'd be legally required to have free speech protected as this is clearly public property and free speech applies to government controlled platforms. But this has the downside of potential for abuse and turnkey tyranny. This becomes a bigger problem because these platforms tend to be multi-national. So does each nation run their own? Do we connect them? Does the UN run it? 4) We radically restructure the internet to be privacy forward. No one can dip their fingers in the pudding and taste it. No governments, no private entities. Do we do this centralized? Federated? Mixture? Do we do domain fronting? Do we force large private entities to facilitate such techniques so that we have a cultural fight? (i.e. encourage secure communications in oppressed countries) Or do we leave everyone alone? There's a lot of other options too, but I see these as at least covering a few major points. The conversation is really difficult and we need to think about how to solve it and what the problems are instead of just shouting about it being a problem. I think everyone agrees that it is a problem, so let's move the conversation forward. Especially on a form for people that are able to solve many of the technological challenges to some of the above options. But society needs to decide the societal parts of the solutions and that requires discussion.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
  >strong man Randy Savage macho man Randy Savage
  - godelski 6y ago
    I have made a grave mistake and I apologize to Macho Man Randy Savage and the entire Macho Man community.
- astrobe_ 6y ago
  Operators of social medias are judge, jury and executioners by full right. But corporations are not democratic entities. They are subject to the democratic (or not) laws of the countries where they operate, but they also are subject to unwritten profit laws. I think the answer is in decentralized networks, because they are controlled neither by governments nor by companies.
- Natsu 6y ago
  Currently a handful of billionaire oligarchs own a majority of the sites used for public discourse by ordinary people. I don't see how that can remain the case and democracy can survive when you need only a handful of sites to censor some topic. It seems to me that the online monopolies, natural or otherwise, should have to give way to something akin to common carrier status given their outsized importance on public discourse. This isn't exactly new. Back in the days of the telegraph, those were abused and tapped and eventually the phone company became a common carrier.
  - root_axis 6y ago
    > Currently a handful of billionaire oligarchs own a majority of the sites used for public discourse by ordinary people They own the sites, not the people or their discourse. The people are in complete control of which websites they visit and it costs them nothing to use another website, which of course literally everyone does.
    - hanselot 6y ago
      With the number of studies that show how addicting social media is, are people really free to leave? It takes just one family member or friend to post events on insert platform X here, to lure a person back.
    - Natsu 6y ago
      > They own the sites, not the people or their discourse. They sure believe they own the people and they do own the discourse, sometimes almost literally so in giving themselves unlimited IP rights to it. And this is part of the problem--that they censor communications between willing participants. We wouldn't stand for this with the phone companies and we shouldn't for any other oligarch-controlled monopoly entities. The larger a share of the world audience a platform owns, the less it should be able to censor. Otherwise, one of these days, someone you don't approve of will get power over these companies and then it will be too late to regret it. I don't like the proverbial nazis on the front lawn, but when your 'front lawn' is the entire country, and it's less literal nazis and more 'people who get accused of being witches', it's harder to support. With great power should come great responsibility. I don't think we should hand over control of everyone's speech to a cartel of billionaires.
- kodah 6y ago
  > While I'm a big advocator for free speech (I think companies should act like Signal and wash their hands of it), there's a difference between a government censoring an event and a public entity This used to be true but is no longer true, I'm afraid. Government and Public Entities are now colluding in suppression and censorship. There are no checks and balances, this is a government taking a stance, promoting a narrative, and companies attempting to garner social standing or the opposite, which is to garner social standing by non-involvement. Sometimes these companies are looking out for their own legal responsibilities and associations in the given government too. My generation thought it was a good idea for companies to take moral stances on stuff. In a way we asked companies to regulate morality because the government could or would not. Deplatforming became a word propagated by activists for use against their perceived enemies at the time, which were largely the "intellectual dark web". Those tactics took shape, were refined, and are now being used by social media companies, the government, and law enforcement in what appears to be almost cooperation agreements to suppress and censor in the name of fighting misinformation "for the public good". The juicy note here is that the same infrastructure that fights misinformation "for the public good" is nearly the same infrastructure that autocratic rulers and governments install to control narratives, beliefs, and the spread of ideas. Americans, much less the world, should be watching on now. What is the public good, who decides it, and what are the repercussions for being wrong? The last part I think is the most important, we cannot let the people who propagated these ideas and cemented them as a solution walk away unscathed in history.
- apostacy 6y ago
  Are you comparing Facebook's property to a person's lawn? Because that is nonsense. I really don't agree with people comparing ubiquitous global telecom monopolies like Facebook to small businesses and private citizens who want people to stay off their lawns and not have the government regulate their IRC server that they run out of their basement. If you don't just own a lawn, but you own every lawn in the town and every single space where people could congregate, then no I don't think you should have absolute control over who can use it. Coal corporations and sharecroppers tried doing that a century ago with "company towns". If you own more than a certain amount of property, you have responsibilities as well as rights. You can't just build your own little nation within a nation, because you can afford the land. And you certainly can't use your money and influence to bully and evict people because you disagree with them. Many churches have done that in the past. You can't circumvent our laws by just privatizing everything. Internet platforms over a certain size need to be required to reflect American values.
  - anchpop 6y ago
    > Are you comparing Facebook's property to a person's lawn? Because that is nonsense. > I really don't agree with people comparing ubiquitous global telecom monopolies like Facebook to small businesses and private citizens ... You can compare two things without them being exactly the same in every way. Two things being different doesn't mean they shouldn't be compared. The point the GP was making is that in this context, the difference between Facebook and HN (or any other small site) is one of scale, not kind. They acknowledge that there may be a need for regulation anyway when they write: > But we as users think about them as public spaces because they facilitate similar things to public spaces in the offline world. Which I think is clearly indicating that Facebook's property should not necessarily be treated the same as someone's lawn.
- netheril96 6y ago
  In that case, why is Zoom's censoring a problem at all?
aspaceman 6y ago
This is so densely hard to respond to. The idea of rhetoric crystallizing is apt here. Why do we need to allow someone to advocate for violence on the platform? You seem yo be making this grand slippery slope argument, that by banning this person “WHO NEXT”. It’s a nonsensical position. I don’t care who’s next because it’s fucking YouTube and all you have to do to exert your “free speech” is write a book, stage a protest, whatever. When YouTube shut this down, they did not silence this person. They didn’t prevent you from finding this information. Arguing that all speech is being silenced is genuinely idiotic in my view and speaks to a larger persecution complex. YouTube is not the government. If you want it to be, integrate it as a utility or something. But no, I don’t need Nazis or terrorists on YouTube. I’m not afraid of a chilling effect. And I’m genuinely thrilled they’ve been removed from a platform I frequent. Because they suck. On the other hand, I want to see the Tiannemen Square massacre. It is valuable information. Crucial information and information that I want disseminated, preserved, and a part of the platforms I frequent.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  > Why do we need to allow someone to advocate for violence on the platform? Why do we need to allow someone to advocate for violence over the telephone? Not rhetorical; we need to allow someone to advocate for violence over the telephone so we neither have to monitor all phone calls nor come up with and administrate a corporate definition of violence. > On the other hand, I want to see the Tiannemen Square massacre. A patriotic Chinese person asks: Why do we need to allow someone to advocate for terrorism on the platform?
  - aspaceman 6y ago
    You’re acting like it’s a constantly sliding scale, that’s it’s impossible to make a decision about what’s good and what’s bad, so no one should make any decisions at all. I disagree emphatically with that position. Denying the Holocaust = bad Tiannemen square protests = good Making these decisions is not impossible and saying we just can’t decide does not track with me as a valid argument. People can tell the difference between Tiannemen and terrorism when you give them the info to do so. You don’t need to show someone nazis and Holocaust denial so they know it exists. I understand the position you take, so don’t be so condescending about “well what would a Chinese person think”. You’re entirely missing my point.
root_axis 6y ago
> We shouldn't be having Zuckerberg or Pichai's opinion on the relative moral differences between Leila Khaled and the CCP affect what speech we can hear regarding it. Then don't use Zuckerberg or Pichai's website. Your website works on the exact same internet as theirs.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  Which is fine until Zuckerberg buys the other websites you might use too, or Pichai stops listing the ones you do use in the search results on the search engine that 92% of your readers use.
  - root_axis 6y ago
    Zuckerberg will never buy out your blog. Nobody is owed a spot on google's search index and there is a finite number of spots on the first page of a given search query.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      > Zuckerberg will never buy out your blog. Maybe if you host it on a server which is physically in your house, but most ordinary people don't really have the chops for that, or the resources. Comcast tends to frown upon it. And when they use Instagram because they didn't like Facebook, that's still Zuckerberg. > Nobody is owed a spot on google's search index and there is a finite number of spots on the first page of a given search query. They can have editorial control or they can have a monopoly, but not both. But agreed that trying to regulate search results is a fool's game. Dissolving the monopoly is almost certainly the better way to fix this class of problem, across the board.
- ponker 6y ago
  What if McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, KFC, and Subway all decided to ban people whose name started with R? I’d be out of luck on any road trips and would have to look harder and pay more for a meal, and it would be grossly unfair. You can say “it’s their restaurant their rules” but I think that the law should tell them to get fucked, and I think that most would agree.

by ponker 6y ago

godelski 6y ago

While I'm a big advocator for free speech (I think companies should act like Signal and wash their hands of it), there's a difference between a government censoring an event and a public entity. If strong man Randy Savage wanted to give a public speech on your front lawn, you should have the right to say no because that's your property. You should also be able to say yes. This gets complicated because these online platforms blur the lines between public and private spaces. Objectively they are private spaces because the companies own the "land." But we as users think about them as public spaces because they facilitate similar things to public spaces in the offline world. There'd also be an inherit danger to making those platforms a real public space, controlled by governments (who's!). The case is honestly really messy and we don't need to overly simplify it, we need to solve the problem (as a society) and figure out how to move forward.

ponker 6y ago
The law forces private property owners to pay taxes they don’t want to. The law forces restaurants to serve “coloreds” even if they don’t want to. Private property rights operate within limits circumscribed by the law. And a good law to govern that is the First Amendment. Just extend First Amendment rights to online spaces that are operated by monopolies or near-monopolies.
- xxpor 6y ago
  Go look at the majority of 1st amendment cases in the courts the past few years. They're mostly corporations arguing against regulations as free speech issues. The jurisprudence, largely from "conservative" judges, is that "speech" is any expression, and it applies to corporations. Ironically, that's what'll make it tough to regulate Facebook/Twitter/etc. They didn't see the 2nd order affects coming.
  - prirun 6y ago
    The ridiculous part is that a corporation was given "personhood" by the law, with all the rights that people have. A corporation is not a person. Here's the 1st amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." What works for me is to replace the words Congress & government with Facebook, Twitter, or any company with a certain market share. If you want to be a corporation that facilitates communication between thousands of people, you're subject to the rule, ie, you lose some of your private property rights. If you have fewer than say 1000 users, do what you want: only private property rules apply.
robertlagrant 6y ago
> If strong man Randy Savage wanted to give a public speech on your front lawn, you should have the right to say no because that's your property. You should also be able to say yes. Correct. Because of private property laws, not free speech. The problem isn't (exactly) whether companies have a right to do this. The problem is that increasingly they are our primary method of communication, and want to be, and with lockdowns, have to be. If private companies are the only way we communicate, we may still have a free speech problem. Just as if everyone only communicated using yoghurt pots and strings, and a private company owned the strings and decided whose should be cut.
- godelski 6y ago
  I mean... this is what I'm trying to get at and why it is complicated. The issue I see is that the conversation has become reductionist. I see a few options: 1) Business as usual (i.e. private entities make their own rules on their own property). 2) We classify these as public spaces. We then run into problems of "all" or "of a certain size." Both of which will have weird effects. "All" makes it difficult for competitors or niche groups (do we allow all articles on HN?). Of a certain size means companies have to transition and creates a new major speed bump in companies going through that transition. 3) We create a government owned platform. Now we'd be legally required to have free speech protected as this is clearly public property and free speech applies to government controlled platforms. But this has the downside of potential for abuse and turnkey tyranny. This becomes a bigger problem because these platforms tend to be multi-national. So does each nation run their own? Do we connect them? Does the UN run it? 4) We radically restructure the internet to be privacy forward. No one can dip their fingers in the pudding and taste it. No governments, no private entities. Do we do this centralized? Federated? Mixture? Do we do domain fronting? Do we force large private entities to facilitate such techniques so that we have a cultural fight? (i.e. encourage secure communications in oppressed countries) Or do we leave everyone alone? There's a lot of other options too, but I see these as at least covering a few major points. The conversation is really difficult and we need to think about how to solve it and what the problems are instead of just shouting about it being a problem. I think everyone agrees that it is a problem, so let's move the conversation forward. Especially on a form for people that are able to solve many of the technological challenges to some of the above options. But society needs to decide the societal parts of the solutions and that requires discussion.
layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
>strong man Randy Savage macho man Randy Savage
- godelski 6y ago
  I have made a grave mistake and I apologize to Macho Man Randy Savage and the entire Macho Man community.
astrobe_ 6y ago
Operators of social medias are judge, jury and executioners by full right. But corporations are not democratic entities. They are subject to the democratic (or not) laws of the countries where they operate, but they also are subject to unwritten profit laws. I think the answer is in decentralized networks, because they are controlled neither by governments nor by companies.
Natsu 6y ago
Currently a handful of billionaire oligarchs own a majority of the sites used for public discourse by ordinary people. I don't see how that can remain the case and democracy can survive when you need only a handful of sites to censor some topic. It seems to me that the online monopolies, natural or otherwise, should have to give way to something akin to common carrier status given their outsized importance on public discourse. This isn't exactly new. Back in the days of the telegraph, those were abused and tapped and eventually the phone company became a common carrier.
- root_axis 6y ago
  > Currently a handful of billionaire oligarchs own a majority of the sites used for public discourse by ordinary people They own the sites, not the people or their discourse. The people are in complete control of which websites they visit and it costs them nothing to use another website, which of course literally everyone does.
  - hanselot 6y ago
    With the number of studies that show how addicting social media is, are people really free to leave? It takes just one family member or friend to post events on insert platform X here, to lure a person back.
  - Natsu 6y ago
    > They own the sites, not the people or their discourse. They sure believe they own the people and they do own the discourse, sometimes almost literally so in giving themselves unlimited IP rights to it. And this is part of the problem--that they censor communications between willing participants. We wouldn't stand for this with the phone companies and we shouldn't for any other oligarch-controlled monopoly entities. The larger a share of the world audience a platform owns, the less it should be able to censor. Otherwise, one of these days, someone you don't approve of will get power over these companies and then it will be too late to regret it. I don't like the proverbial nazis on the front lawn, but when your 'front lawn' is the entire country, and it's less literal nazis and more 'people who get accused of being witches', it's harder to support. With great power should come great responsibility. I don't think we should hand over control of everyone's speech to a cartel of billionaires.
kodah 6y ago
> While I'm a big advocator for free speech (I think companies should act like Signal and wash their hands of it), there's a difference between a government censoring an event and a public entity This used to be true but is no longer true, I'm afraid. Government and Public Entities are now colluding in suppression and censorship. There are no checks and balances, this is a government taking a stance, promoting a narrative, and companies attempting to garner social standing or the opposite, which is to garner social standing by non-involvement. Sometimes these companies are looking out for their own legal responsibilities and associations in the given government too. My generation thought it was a good idea for companies to take moral stances on stuff. In a way we asked companies to regulate morality because the government could or would not. Deplatforming became a word propagated by activists for use against their perceived enemies at the time, which were largely the "intellectual dark web". Those tactics took shape, were refined, and are now being used by social media companies, the government, and law enforcement in what appears to be almost cooperation agreements to suppress and censor in the name of fighting misinformation "for the public good". The juicy note here is that the same infrastructure that fights misinformation "for the public good" is nearly the same infrastructure that autocratic rulers and governments install to control narratives, beliefs, and the spread of ideas. Americans, much less the world, should be watching on now. What is the public good, who decides it, and what are the repercussions for being wrong? The last part I think is the most important, we cannot let the people who propagated these ideas and cemented them as a solution walk away unscathed in history.
apostacy 6y ago
Are you comparing Facebook's property to a person's lawn? Because that is nonsense. I really don't agree with people comparing ubiquitous global telecom monopolies like Facebook to small businesses and private citizens who want people to stay off their lawns and not have the government regulate their IRC server that they run out of their basement. If you don't just own a lawn, but you own every lawn in the town and every single space where people could congregate, then no I don't think you should have absolute control over who can use it. Coal corporations and sharecroppers tried doing that a century ago with "company towns". If you own more than a certain amount of property, you have responsibilities as well as rights. You can't just build your own little nation within a nation, because you can afford the land. And you certainly can't use your money and influence to bully and evict people because you disagree with them. Many churches have done that in the past. You can't circumvent our laws by just privatizing everything. Internet platforms over a certain size need to be required to reflect American values.
- anchpop 6y ago
  > Are you comparing Facebook's property to a person's lawn? Because that is nonsense. > I really don't agree with people comparing ubiquitous global telecom monopolies like Facebook to small businesses and private citizens ... You can compare two things without them being exactly the same in every way. Two things being different doesn't mean they shouldn't be compared. The point the GP was making is that in this context, the difference between Facebook and HN (or any other small site) is one of scale, not kind. They acknowledge that there may be a need for regulation anyway when they write: > But we as users think about them as public spaces because they facilitate similar things to public spaces in the offline world. Which I think is clearly indicating that Facebook's property should not necessarily be treated the same as someone's lawn.
netheril96 6y ago
In that case, why is Zoom's censoring a problem at all?

aspaceman 6y ago

This is so densely hard to respond to. The idea of rhetoric crystallizing is apt here. Why do we need to allow someone to advocate for violence on the platform? You seem yo be making this grand slippery slope argument, that by banning this person “WHO NEXT”. It’s a nonsensical position. I don’t care who’s next because it’s fucking YouTube and all you have to do to exert your “free speech” is write a book, stage a protest, whatever. When YouTube shut this down, they did not silence this person. They didn’t prevent you from finding this information. Arguing that all speech is being silenced is genuinely idiotic in my view and speaks to a larger persecution complex. YouTube is not the government. If you want it to be, integrate it as a utility or something. But no, I don’t need Nazis or terrorists on YouTube. I’m not afraid of a chilling effect. And I’m genuinely thrilled they’ve been removed from a platform I frequent. Because they suck. On the other hand, I want to see the Tiannemen Square massacre. It is valuable information. Crucial information and information that I want disseminated, preserved, and a part of the platforms I frequent.

pessimizer 6y ago
> Why do we need to allow someone to advocate for violence on the platform? Why do we need to allow someone to advocate for violence over the telephone? Not rhetorical; we need to allow someone to advocate for violence over the telephone so we neither have to monitor all phone calls nor come up with and administrate a corporate definition of violence. > On the other hand, I want to see the Tiannemen Square massacre. A patriotic Chinese person asks: Why do we need to allow someone to advocate for terrorism on the platform?
- aspaceman 6y ago
  You’re acting like it’s a constantly sliding scale, that’s it’s impossible to make a decision about what’s good and what’s bad, so no one should make any decisions at all. I disagree emphatically with that position. Denying the Holocaust = bad Tiannemen square protests = good Making these decisions is not impossible and saying we just can’t decide does not track with me as a valid argument. People can tell the difference between Tiannemen and terrorism when you give them the info to do so. You don’t need to show someone nazis and Holocaust denial so they know it exists. I understand the position you take, so don’t be so condescending about “well what would a Chinese person think”. You’re entirely missing my point.

root_axis 6y ago

> We shouldn't be having Zuckerberg or Pichai's opinion on the relative moral differences between Leila Khaled and the CCP affect what speech we can hear regarding it. Then don't use Zuckerberg or Pichai's website. Your website works on the exact same internet as theirs.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
Which is fine until Zuckerberg buys the other websites you might use too, or Pichai stops listing the ones you do use in the search results on the search engine that 92% of your readers use.
- root_axis 6y ago
  Zuckerberg will never buy out your blog. Nobody is owed a spot on google's search index and there is a finite number of spots on the first page of a given search query.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > Zuckerberg will never buy out your blog. Maybe if you host it on a server which is physically in your house, but most ordinary people don't really have the chops for that, or the resources. Comcast tends to frown upon it. And when they use Instagram because they didn't like Facebook, that's still Zuckerberg. > Nobody is owed a spot on google's search index and there is a finite number of spots on the first page of a given search query. They can have editorial control or they can have a monopoly, but not both. But agreed that trying to regulate search results is a fool's game. Dissolving the monopoly is almost certainly the better way to fix this class of problem, across the board.
ponker 6y ago
What if McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, KFC, and Subway all decided to ban people whose name started with R? I’d be out of luck on any road trips and would have to look harder and pay more for a meal, and it would be grossly unfair. You can say “it’s their restaurant their rules” but I think that the law should tell them to get fucked, and I think that most would agree.