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To the people constantly saying that twitter is a private company and should be allowed to do whatever they want: Would you support the same idea around electr

by blhack 6y ago

To the people constantly saying that twitter is a private company and should be allowed to do whatever they want: Would you support the same idea around electrical power? If the power company providing the power to the office at the NyPost decided that they had a political disagreement with them, would it be okay to just cut off their power? NyPost could just make their own power, of course, by purchasing a generator.

slondr 6y ago
Electrical power shouldn't be privately controlled.
- blhack 6y ago
  Maybe not, but it is.
  - function_seven 6y ago
    It may be privately owned, but regulatory control still exists, and prevents the scenario you're talking about. To the extent that the regulatory scheme fails, that is a problem when and where it happens. But I've never heard of a power company refusing to provide electricity to a customer due to political disagreements. At least not in the U.S.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  There's nothing wrong with it being privately controlled. It was privately invented and developed, after all.
  - edmundsauto 6y ago
    How does it matter whether it was developed publicly, or privately? Deregulation in the late 90s led to the Enron scandal, so I think there are clear reasons why not to be privately owned.
    - chrisco255 6y ago
      Right, and government officials were in charge of the Flint Water crisis. And government officials have abused the 4th amendment vis-a-vis the Patriot act. And governments have lied about WMDs to spend trillions on war. I guess the only difference between the private and public sector is that when a private company fucks up and gets caught, people actually lose money and go to jail.
      - edmundsauto 6y ago
        I don't concede that private companies are more accountable. My point wasn't that governments are great at running utilities, merely that "turn it over to the private markets" is not the solution that many people seem to think.
  - colinmhayes 6y ago
    I agree with you, but that's a truly horrible reason.
- vaccinator 6y ago
  in many places it is, but at the same time the government controls the price
function_seven 6y ago
Twitter is not a utility. It is not common infrastructure. The Internet is, and I would not be okay with Internet access being terminated over political disagreements. But individual services? Sure, why not? For those who argue that Twitter is a de facto common platform, well these decisions are moving them away from that role. The more they exercise their own prerogatives in removing content, the more they're no longer some sort of vital communication platform.
- blhack 6y ago
  Twitter is an infrastructure on top of which thousands of services are run. It's a notification service, it's a messaging server, it's an authentication/identify verification service, it's a news dissemination and discussion service, etc. But that actually doesn't even damage the argument: would it be okay if Google decided that they didn't like NyPost's politics, so they disabled the functionality of all of their nest thermostats? What if they used smart locks on their office: could they just disable the "unlock" function on the doors? Would anybody be supporting this?
  - richardwhiuk 6y ago
    Twitter isn't critical infrastructure.....
  - jmuguy 6y ago
    This may be the best example I've seen on the internet of a bad faith argument.
  - function_seven 6y ago
    No. Google is different. They hold a monopoly on search that I think should be broken up. I have big problems with the power Google wields in finding things online. But, going back to my previous comment, it would in a way be a good thing if Google started capriciously "disappearing" sites like this, in a high-profile manner. It would accelerate the move to other search providers and bring a more diversified Internet to us all. (I'm not advocating for it, but the end result would probably be better than what we have now: SEO madness all to please The One Algorithm.) Twitter has competition. Reddit, Facebook, Apple News, and traditional media outlets all disseminate information. They all offer notifications on your phone. Where we're typing this out is HN, which is another news dissemination and discussion service. The more Twitter does things to make it clear it's not a neutral platform, the more other services can find users. I do not want Twitter to be a monopoly platform. Tagging them with some common-carrier-like status, while allowing them to remain private, just entrenches that monopoly.
striking 6y ago
Not only are utilities regulated fairly closely by the government as a result of being common infrastructure, the NY Post has its own newspaper and website and drives plenty of traffic that way.
jlmorton 6y ago
Of course not, specifically because electrical utilities are granted de facto monopolies, and for that reason are either heavily regulated, or else publicly owned and operated, and because electricity is a modern safety requirement. That is wildly, incomparably different than a single social media website.
cortesoft 6y ago
Power companies are regulated monopolies. There are no competitors. Twitter is in no way even close to the only way to publish something. It is no where near as difficult to publish on a different platform than it is to generate your own power. If an ISP was cutting off the NyPost, I would have issues with that. If they had their domain name seized, I would have an issue with that. If other ISPs blocked network routes to their site, I would have issues with that. I don't have an issue with Twitter blocking them. It just isn't the same.
- blhack 6y ago
  >There are no competitors. What an absurd statement to make on hacker news of all places, where every minor movement of tesla/solar city is reported as breaking news. Or in a world where more and more people are going "off grid" and making their own electricity. The power company is the easiest/most convenient way to power my home. It is definitely not the only way to do it.
- jimbokun 6y ago
  A very small handful of companies have a stranglehold over the lion's share of all global communications: Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter. So maybe Twitter isn't quite a monopoly on its own, but the consolidation of control over information and data distribution into the hands of a very small number of organizations has worrying implications for how we think about censorship and freedom of speech.
  - khawkins 6y ago
    It's interesting to see how quickly Silicon Valley culture has changed over the past 10 years from one of free speech absolutism to "benevolent censorship". The people so vociferously clamoring about the nightmare-hellscape of a world without Net-Neutrality are now telling us that a handful of major corporations actively and blatantly censoring speech is no cause for concern.
    - cortesoft 6y ago
      Net Neutrality is different. No one is arguing that it is ok to block NyPost at a network level. Free speech does not mean a free platform.
hilbertseries 6y ago
A utility company, is not a social media platform and they are regulated differently as you would expect. This reminds me of the time I talked to an engineering manager and he told me twitter was the electricity the internet runs on. I thought that was ridiculous, but this is taking it to a new level, where twitter is equivalent to electricity.
Fauntleroy 6y ago
To that I say: campaign to get Twitter considered a utility, then you can regulate it as one.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  Ok change the analogy. Should Verizon be able to disconnect your calls and block text messages if they don't like the content? Everyone here is arguing with the analogy and not with the thrust of OPs argument.
btbuildem 6y ago
Well.. that would be a breach of contract (providing NYP paid their utility bills) and they could be sued. With Twitter et al, their service is free and "you are the product", so.. they can ban you whenever with no recourse at all.
- frollo 6y ago
  Exactly. The NYPost (or basically any news outlet and their readers) became dependent on Twitter on their own choice (or on their own laziness), and one of the consequences of being dependent on an external platform for your traffic is that you are subject to their contract. If you don't like the rules, you find or build another platform (and put in the money and effort to make it work). This is basically the NYPost crying because it wants free stuff with no strings attached.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    > The NYPost (or basically any news outlet and their readers) became dependent on Twitter on their own choice (or on their own laziness), I'm curious what exactly you think they could have done to not end up here. I'm not aware of Twitter even offering a paid service that they could use, and network effects mean that failing to publish on Twitter just means that fewer people will see your stuff.
    - frollo 6y ago
      Most news outlets used to have RSS feeds which, once upon a time before it was removed from a lot of big websites (such as news outlets), allowed lots of people to get a feed of what was published. It worked for a lot of years and, if kept up and published, it could probably have given Twitter a run for its money. You could share the feeds you followed or even build public feeds from that (there are stil a bunch of them, mostly named after planets, for very niche things), so you could have a network effect. Twitter doesn't have a paid service for users (it has paid access to their API, just in case somebody on this site still had doubts about what really is their core business), I was just making a (probably poorly phrased) example.
apta 6y ago
Watch them change their opinion when there are unproven articles published about Trump by left wing media.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tenebrisalietum 6y ago
A better analogy: Twitter is like Fedex refusing to deliver your packages based on your politics, not the electrical utility company.
- esotericimpl 6y ago
  FedEx will refuse to deliver the package if they suspect there’s illicit or illegal stuff in it. Twitter can do the same, why do they have to be a carrier for right wing sycophants? If they don’t like their politics use UPS. What a terrible analogy.
- barumi 6y ago
  >>Twitter is like Fedex refusing to deliver your packages (...) In case you don't know, FedEx or pretty much any delivery company are free to refuse shipping your parcels. A cursory googling is enough to allow you to discover fedex's shipping guidelines.
  - razius 6y ago
    Except those are pretty transparent and non-political.
    - barumi 6y ago
      The only thing that makes Twitter's action as political is that we have a radical segment of the US's population which is hell-bent on supporting a smear campaign against a candidate they feel threatened about even though they are well aware the campaign is based on false or misleading info likely force-fed by a totalitarian regime. And to make matters worse, this radical group doesn't even care if the information is available or not, they only care about spreading it as far and wide as it's conceivable and attack anyone that they deem reactionary, including social networks that flag posts as having unsubstantiated information.
      - tenebrisalietum 6y ago
        Haha. Glad you are talking about the political party other than the one I'm supporting.
thinkingemote 6y ago
Is it just me, or is there always a post in these types of discussions that say "it's a private company, it's not censorship"?
- gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
  Since the discussion is polarized by virtue of politics nowadays, it’s worth remembering that a private company can censor their content, but it’s perfectly reasonable to criticize them. Recognizing their freedom doesn’t insulate them from criticism. Freedom/regulatory regime != morality. FWIW I'm fully supportive of company autonomy, and I also like expressing criticism when their actions don't line up with my values.
djsumdog 6y ago
The right solution is that people should move off of Twitter and leave that wretched garbage platform in the dust. I wrote this the other day, but people have already pointed out tons of problems with it and I tend to agree with those issues: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-solution-to-big-tech-isnt-legislation-its-technology/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-solution-to-big-tech-isnt... The reality is they have massive market share. Keep in mind, Facebook and Twitter prevented the spread of this story via PRIVATE DIRECT MESSAGES! Imagine if AT&T or Verizon started blocking texts because of their content. You can say, "Well don't use Messenger" and you need to realize, a lot of us don't have each other's phone numbers any more. For my international friends, I might only have a Messenger or Hangouts connection. And this is where the rub comes into play. At what point is one of these platforms so big that they become a regular communication utility? If you were paying for the service, that's one thing, but in the case of Faceobook/Twitter, they make money from you in more abstract ways (adverts). People can still go to NY Post directly, and because we have such good freedoms in the US, we can route around the censorship to some degree. But at some point, this also becomes election interference. Politicians don't understand the Internet enough to get reforms right. (Remember Stevens and the series of tubes?). 230 Reforms would probably need: a) Remove the algo Timeline entirely. Results should be the way they were in the old days: Reverse Chronological. (or baring that, inboxes with the default search order of names being alphabetical). b) Don't block any direct messages unless it's clearly malware or illegal. (This can get super tricky. Look at the sad state of e-mail). The real solution is to get people to use more diverse platforms, platforms people pay for (even $1/month) and that distribute/federate data rather than centralize it. There are technological solutions around this. The problem is people and adoption.
- esotericimpl 6y ago
  This is a terrible argument.
lambda_dn 6y ago
A better analogy would be a service that runs on he electricity such as advertisement boards.
zonzobonzo 6y ago
What a dumb idea wrapped in flowery language. Your English really is quite good.
Gibbon1 6y ago
I kinda expect my power company to not connect my house to some dodgy power plant that's putting out 155VAC at 47.2 HZ.
RIMR 6y ago
Ideally, private ownership of societally critical ownership wouldn't be legal. But America is a capitalist country, and Twitter owns their platform and has free speech by law. And the equivocation of a tabloid to a utility company is just completely absurd...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wvenable 6y ago
As far as I'm aware, the NYPost isn't a customer of Twitter. They don't have a transactional relationship. So this isn't even the case of a business refusing service.

by blhack 6y ago

slondr 6y ago

Electrical power shouldn't be privately controlled.

blhack 6y ago
Maybe not, but it is.
- function_seven 6y ago
  It may be privately owned, but regulatory control still exists, and prevents the scenario you're talking about. To the extent that the regulatory scheme fails, that is a problem when and where it happens. But I've never heard of a power company refusing to provide electricity to a customer due to political disagreements. At least not in the U.S.
chrisco255 6y ago
There's nothing wrong with it being privately controlled. It was privately invented and developed, after all.
- edmundsauto 6y ago
  How does it matter whether it was developed publicly, or privately? Deregulation in the late 90s led to the Enron scandal, so I think there are clear reasons why not to be privately owned.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    Right, and government officials were in charge of the Flint Water crisis. And government officials have abused the 4th amendment vis-a-vis the Patriot act. And governments have lied about WMDs to spend trillions on war. I guess the only difference between the private and public sector is that when a private company fucks up and gets caught, people actually lose money and go to jail.
    - edmundsauto 6y ago
      I don't concede that private companies are more accountable. My point wasn't that governments are great at running utilities, merely that "turn it over to the private markets" is not the solution that many people seem to think.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  I agree with you, but that's a truly horrible reason.
vaccinator 6y ago
in many places it is, but at the same time the government controls the price

function_seven 6y ago

Twitter is not a utility. It is not common infrastructure. The Internet is, and I would not be okay with Internet access being terminated over political disagreements. But individual services? Sure, why not? For those who argue that Twitter is a de facto common platform, well these decisions are moving them away from that role. The more they exercise their own prerogatives in removing content, the more they're no longer some sort of vital communication platform.

blhack 6y ago
Twitter is an infrastructure on top of which thousands of services are run. It's a notification service, it's a messaging server, it's an authentication/identify verification service, it's a news dissemination and discussion service, etc. But that actually doesn't even damage the argument: would it be okay if Google decided that they didn't like NyPost's politics, so they disabled the functionality of all of their nest thermostats? What if they used smart locks on their office: could they just disable the "unlock" function on the doors? Would anybody be supporting this?
- richardwhiuk 6y ago
  Twitter isn't critical infrastructure.....
- jmuguy 6y ago
  This may be the best example I've seen on the internet of a bad faith argument.
- function_seven 6y ago
  No. Google is different. They hold a monopoly on search that I think should be broken up. I have big problems with the power Google wields in finding things online. But, going back to my previous comment, it would in a way be a good thing if Google started capriciously "disappearing" sites like this, in a high-profile manner. It would accelerate the move to other search providers and bring a more diversified Internet to us all. (I'm not advocating for it, but the end result would probably be better than what we have now: SEO madness all to please The One Algorithm.) Twitter has competition. Reddit, Facebook, Apple News, and traditional media outlets all disseminate information. They all offer notifications on your phone. Where we're typing this out is HN, which is another news dissemination and discussion service. The more Twitter does things to make it clear it's not a neutral platform, the more other services can find users. I do not want Twitter to be a monopoly platform. Tagging them with some common-carrier-like status, while allowing them to remain private, just entrenches that monopoly.

striking 6y ago

Not only are utilities regulated fairly closely by the government as a result of being common infrastructure, the NY Post has its own newspaper and website and drives plenty of traffic that way.

jlmorton 6y ago

Of course not, specifically because electrical utilities are granted de facto monopolies, and for that reason are either heavily regulated, or else publicly owned and operated, and because electricity is a modern safety requirement. That is wildly, incomparably different than a single social media website.

cortesoft 6y ago

Power companies are regulated monopolies. There are no competitors. Twitter is in no way even close to the only way to publish something. It is no where near as difficult to publish on a different platform than it is to generate your own power. If an ISP was cutting off the NyPost, I would have issues with that. If they had their domain name seized, I would have an issue with that. If other ISPs blocked network routes to their site, I would have issues with that. I don't have an issue with Twitter blocking them. It just isn't the same.

blhack 6y ago
>There are no competitors. What an absurd statement to make on hacker news of all places, where every minor movement of tesla/solar city is reported as breaking news. Or in a world where more and more people are going "off grid" and making their own electricity. The power company is the easiest/most convenient way to power my home. It is definitely not the only way to do it.
jimbokun 6y ago
A very small handful of companies have a stranglehold over the lion's share of all global communications: Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter. So maybe Twitter isn't quite a monopoly on its own, but the consolidation of control over information and data distribution into the hands of a very small number of organizations has worrying implications for how we think about censorship and freedom of speech.
- khawkins 6y ago
  It's interesting to see how quickly Silicon Valley culture has changed over the past 10 years from one of free speech absolutism to "benevolent censorship". The people so vociferously clamoring about the nightmare-hellscape of a world without Net-Neutrality are now telling us that a handful of major corporations actively and blatantly censoring speech is no cause for concern.
  - cortesoft 6y ago
    Net Neutrality is different. No one is arguing that it is ok to block NyPost at a network level. Free speech does not mean a free platform.

hilbertseries 6y ago

A utility company, is not a social media platform and they are regulated differently as you would expect. This reminds me of the time I talked to an engineering manager and he told me twitter was the electricity the internet runs on. I thought that was ridiculous, but this is taking it to a new level, where twitter is equivalent to electricity.

Fauntleroy 6y ago

To that I say: campaign to get Twitter considered a utility, then you can regulate it as one.

missedthecue 6y ago
Ok change the analogy. Should Verizon be able to disconnect your calls and block text messages if they don't like the content? Everyone here is arguing with the analogy and not with the thrust of OPs argument.

btbuildem 6y ago

Well.. that would be a breach of contract (providing NYP paid their utility bills) and they could be sued. With Twitter et al, their service is free and "you are the product", so.. they can ban you whenever with no recourse at all.

frollo 6y ago
Exactly. The NYPost (or basically any news outlet and their readers) became dependent on Twitter on their own choice (or on their own laziness), and one of the consequences of being dependent on an external platform for your traffic is that you are subject to their contract. If you don't like the rules, you find or build another platform (and put in the money and effort to make it work). This is basically the NYPost crying because it wants free stuff with no strings attached.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > The NYPost (or basically any news outlet and their readers) became dependent on Twitter on their own choice (or on their own laziness), I'm curious what exactly you think they could have done to not end up here. I'm not aware of Twitter even offering a paid service that they could use, and network effects mean that failing to publish on Twitter just means that fewer people will see your stuff.
  - frollo 6y ago
    Most news outlets used to have RSS feeds which, once upon a time before it was removed from a lot of big websites (such as news outlets), allowed lots of people to get a feed of what was published. It worked for a lot of years and, if kept up and published, it could probably have given Twitter a run for its money. You could share the feeds you followed or even build public feeds from that (there are stil a bunch of them, mostly named after planets, for very niche things), so you could have a network effect. Twitter doesn't have a paid service for users (it has paid access to their API, just in case somebody on this site still had doubts about what really is their core business), I was just making a (probably poorly phrased) example.

apta 6y ago

Watch them change their opinion when there are unproven articles published about Trump by left wing media.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tenebrisalietum 6y ago

A better analogy: Twitter is like Fedex refusing to deliver your packages based on your politics, not the electrical utility company.

esotericimpl 6y ago
FedEx will refuse to deliver the package if they suspect there’s illicit or illegal stuff in it. Twitter can do the same, why do they have to be a carrier for right wing sycophants? If they don’t like their politics use UPS. What a terrible analogy.
barumi 6y ago
>>Twitter is like Fedex refusing to deliver your packages (...) In case you don't know, FedEx or pretty much any delivery company are free to refuse shipping your parcels. A cursory googling is enough to allow you to discover fedex's shipping guidelines.
- razius 6y ago
  Except those are pretty transparent and non-political.
  - barumi 6y ago
    The only thing that makes Twitter's action as political is that we have a radical segment of the US's population which is hell-bent on supporting a smear campaign against a candidate they feel threatened about even though they are well aware the campaign is based on false or misleading info likely force-fed by a totalitarian regime. And to make matters worse, this radical group doesn't even care if the information is available or not, they only care about spreading it as far and wide as it's conceivable and attack anyone that they deem reactionary, including social networks that flag posts as having unsubstantiated information.
    - tenebrisalietum 6y ago
      Haha. Glad you are talking about the political party other than the one I'm supporting.

thinkingemote 6y ago

Is it just me, or is there always a post in these types of discussions that say "it's a private company, it's not censorship"?

gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
Since the discussion is polarized by virtue of politics nowadays, it’s worth remembering that a private company can censor their content, but it’s perfectly reasonable to criticize them. Recognizing their freedom doesn’t insulate them from criticism. Freedom/regulatory regime != morality. FWIW I'm fully supportive of company autonomy, and I also like expressing criticism when their actions don't line up with my values.

djsumdog 6y ago

The right solution is that people should move off of Twitter and leave that wretched garbage platform in the dust. I wrote this the other day, but people have already pointed out tons of problems with it and I tend to agree with those issues: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-solution-to-big-tech-isnt-legislation-its-technology/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-solution-to-big-tech-isnt... The reality is they have massive market share. Keep in mind, Facebook and Twitter prevented the spread of this story via PRIVATE DIRECT MESSAGES! Imagine if AT&T or Verizon started blocking texts because of their content. You can say, "Well don't use Messenger" and you need to realize, a lot of us don't have each other's phone numbers any more. For my international friends, I might only have a Messenger or Hangouts connection. And this is where the rub comes into play. At what point is one of these platforms so big that they become a regular communication utility? If you were paying for the service, that's one thing, but in the case of Faceobook/Twitter, they make money from you in more abstract ways (adverts). People can still go to NY Post directly, and because we have such good freedoms in the US, we can route around the censorship to some degree. But at some point, this also becomes election interference. Politicians don't understand the Internet enough to get reforms right. (Remember Stevens and the series of tubes?). 230 Reforms would probably need: a) Remove the algo Timeline entirely. Results should be the way they were in the old days: Reverse Chronological. (or baring that, inboxes with the default search order of names being alphabetical). b) Don't block any direct messages unless it's clearly malware or illegal. (This can get super tricky. Look at the sad state of e-mail). The real solution is to get people to use more diverse platforms, platforms people pay for (even $1/month) and that distribute/federate data rather than centralize it. There are technological solutions around this. The problem is people and adoption.

esotericimpl 6y ago
This is a terrible argument.

lambda_dn 6y ago

A better analogy would be a service that runs on he electricity such as advertisement boards.

zonzobonzo 6y ago

What a dumb idea wrapped in flowery language. Your English really is quite good.

Gibbon1 6y ago

I kinda expect my power company to not connect my house to some dodgy power plant that's putting out 155VAC at 47.2 HZ.

RIMR 6y ago

Ideally, private ownership of societally critical ownership wouldn't be legal. But America is a capitalist country, and Twitter owns their platform and has free speech by law. And the equivocation of a tabloid to a utility company is just completely absurd...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

wvenable 6y ago

As far as I'm aware, the NYPost isn't a customer of Twitter. They don't have a transactional relationship. So this isn't even the case of a business refusing service.