9 ms·

The Treehouse Is De-Plaformed

62 points by chrissnell 6y ago

blisseyGo 6y ago
CTH is one place which never puts out any info without hard evidence to the documents which prove their case. Somehow that's not acceptable now a days. And despite this, there will still be people who will claim there's no censorship of conservative voices.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  I don't see any data that backs this statement up: >There is a COVID-19 virus; however, COVID is not more dangerous than all other flu-like viruses that impact the respiratory system. COVID-19 is very manageable and doesn’t carry a higher fatality rate.
  - duck 6y ago
    I'm not saying that statement is true, but if we go by "don't see any data that backs this statement up", then that would be 99% of the internet.
    - jedimastert 6y ago
      I think you might be stumbling on to something...
    - dllthomas 6y ago
      The comment you reply to was itself a response to a claim that this site in particular "never puts out any info without hard evidence". The comment you reply to disputes that. The rest of the internet is irrelevant.
  - nl 6y ago
    Indeed, the doesn’t carry a higher fatality rate part is factually incorrect. It's sad to see people spreading this kind of thing because it causes problems for their ideology. COVID-19 has a fatality rate between 1 and 10%[1]. The variation is mostly due to testing - the places with the higher rate are under testing. The flu has a death rate around 0.1% in the US - although that overestimate it because most people who get the flu are never tested and don't report it[2]. The flu is also much less contagious than COVID-19. Influenza has a R0 of between 0.9 and 2.8 (for the 1928 Pandemic stream). COVID-19 is between 3 and 6[3]. [1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality [2] https://www.livescience.com/new-coronavirus-compare-with-flu.html https://www.livescience.com/new-coronavirus-compare-with-flu... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
    - m0zg 6y ago
      > COVID-19 has a fatality rate between 1 and 10% There's a whole slew of reasons why even 1% estimate is bullshit. Consider this: median age of COVID death is currently 78 years old. US all-age life expectancy as of 2018 is 78.9 years. That is, approximately half the people who are dying of this would die anyway that same year. Now granted, expectancy is a mean, not a median, but you get my point. 1% CFR means 3.3 million deaths in the US alone if everyone gets it, which everyone eventually will, and which exceeds even the most ridiculous estimates from March of this year by a factor of 1.5, and is quite obviously not going to happen. It's also ridiculously difficult to track down this median age number for the US, by the way. I wonder why that is. That's before we even consider how the US has 760 deaths per million, and the likes of Iran or Russia (which have nowhere near the medicine the US has) report one half and one third that correspondingly. So yes, C19 quite obviously has substantially higher CFR than the flu, but 9 months in nobody has any idea as to how much higher. Anyone who says otherwise is selling you something.
      - dragonwriter 6y ago
        > Consider this: median age of COVID death is currently 78 years old. US life expectancy as of 2018 is 78.9 years. That is, approximately half the people who are dying of this would die anyway that same year. You are confusing life expectancy at birth of 78.9 for life expectancy at age 78 of 0.9, that's not correct. Life expectancy at age 78 is 9.43 years for males, 10.98 years for females.
        m0zg 6y ago
        Yes, and a lot of those 78.9 year old COVID patients will survive, although of course their probability of death is much higher. The point is not that. The point is it's dumb to pretend that the CFR is going to be uniform, and that just because it's 2.2% in the US at the moment, it can be linearly scaled up to the entire population (which is what would need to happen if we are to compare it to the flu, which easily 60% of people get in any given year), given the underlying demographics of fatalities. Downright dishonest, if you ask me. Again, it is more dangerous than the flu. But nobody knows by how much, and nobody is even trying to find out as far as I can tell. Seems like a crucial question that needs to be answered, no?
- nl 6y ago
  > CTH is one place which never puts out any info without hard evidence to the documents which prove their case. They have whole posts like https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/11/13/steve-cortes-discusses-the-election-of-statistical-improbabilities-ga-with-95000-biden-only-votes/ https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/11/13/steve-cortes.... Of course, this just isn't a thing![1] But people seem to believe it is because it is presented as fact. I guess they (or you) will argue they just pass along false rumours and that isn't their fault. But if they claim to be something that deserves any kind of protection against deplatforming then surely they can't just be a spam mill? People spreading falsehoods deserve limited protection IMHO. [1] https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-there-were-not-95000-biden-only-ballots-in-georgia/ https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-there-were-not-9500...
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    > People spreading falsehoods deserve limited protection IMHO. Nobody deserves special protection from "deplatforming"[0] from the government; giving the government the ability to say "you must carry this speech" is just as tyrannical as giving them the right to say "you must not carry this speech". If one has the freedom to speak and associate, one must also have the freedom to be silent and disassociate. [0] It's amazing how many people who've been "cancelled" or "deplatformed" continue to tell me so on the internet. One can't help but wonder how effective this so-called deplatforming really is.
    - dllthomas 6y ago
      > giving the government the ability to say "you must carry this speech" is just as tyrannical as giving them the right to say "you must not carry this speech" Don't we do exactly that with the phone company and the post office?
      - rbanffy 6y ago
        > Don't we do exactly that with the phone company and the post office? Neither allows you to target millions of gullible targets almost for free.
- dibujante 6y ago
  Their website is full of lies and conspiracy theories. Plandemic? Stop the steal? I hope you're joking.
knaq 6y ago
I miss the days when you could reliably buy service from a corporation without fear that you might be denied for wrongthink. Business culture has gone down a very bad path when we can't just do business with each other.
- xlm1717 6y ago
  They used to want your money, now they want [to dictate] your life.
- jedimastert 6y ago
  There's a difference between a difference in ideology and spreading actual and dangerous misinformation. Whether or not spreading misinformation on the internet is justification for removing someone might be up for debate, but let's not pretend it was just because they disagreed with the "big tech" company that is wordpress.com
  - chrissnell 6y ago
    The Conservative Treehouse is not a misinformation site. They are well-known for their meticulous and extensive research. What they say may be contrarian and unpopular, but it's not propaganda or a misinformation campaign.
    - justinclift 6y ago
      Evidence otherwise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25106430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25106430
  - zug_zug 6y ago
    I'd be curious how uniformly they apply this policy. Is a website that promotes crystals to heal cancer going to be shutdown? Anti-vax? What about Jehovah's witnesses who don't allow blood transfusions? Honestly, as somebody on the left, I do feel like there are certain topics that people get unusually emotional about (e.g. terrorism, airplanes, covid) and tend make choices that aren't proportional to the measured risk, relative to say smoking.
BuzzwordBingo 6y ago
A private business declining to assist you in your political cause is not “deplatforming”. You were just asked by your own beloved capitalism to go take your business elsewhere. Man up and do so.
- dang 6y ago
  We've banned this account because using HN for ideological flamewar like this is against the site guidelines, and it's a bad sign when a new account is already doing it repeatedly. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
  - BuzzwordBingo 6y ago
    Bite me.
  - user982 6y ago
    "Repeatedly"? That was BuzzwordBingo's 7th comment, and their first to even approach ideological commentary. You've banned them and me under that basis, but accounts like s9w and rayiner are given free rein for years.
    - dang 6y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25106534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25106534 counts. Also, don't forget that there is sometimes additional context beyond what shows in the public record. I took a look at your recent comment history and it seems fine, so we'll try unbanning you. Admittedly I didn't look too far back because https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23979330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23979330 won me over.
    - tptacek 6y ago
      Rayiner is one of the best commenters on the site. He routinely takes the time to write paragraphs of background to support his views, which are well-informed --- he's an appellate court litigator with an engineering background --- and interesting enough that they're routinely downvoted. I've never seen him complain about that, or about HN moderation. We need 100 more of him (ideally in a variety of ideological flavors). I have no idea who 's9w is, but I've never seen Rayiner post the three word comment "that's a lie", so I object to the comparison.
fatbird 6y ago
Apparently what got them kicked off was this: There is a COVID-19 virus; however, COVID is not more dangerous than all other flu-like viruses that impact the respiratory system. COVID-19 is very manageable and doesn’t carry a higher fatality rate. Why is COVID-19 being disproportionately hyped.... The answer is… social changes under the guise of COVID-19 mitigation, are the entry point for the goals and aspirations of the political left on a national and global scale. [0] [0] https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/11/13/covid-19-is-the-agenda-biden-is-merely-the-delivery-vehicle/ https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/11/13/covid-19-is-...
- 60secs 6y ago
  Sounds like they got kicked off for piss-poor methodology, not ideology.
  - jedimastert 6y ago
    I feel like at this point you have to be actively ignoring the facts.
  - p1necone 6y ago
    I would posit that piss-poor methodology is part of the ideology of the American right. This is part of the problem, by claiming things that used to be frowned upon by everybody (basically lying and misinformation) as part of their political identity they get to claim you're being biased when they get called out for their bullshit. It's gaslighting on a national scale.
    - mmastrac 6y ago
      There's just no way to argue with a group that wants to lie with impunity and support a leader that lies, breaks every norm and is generally showing signs of a being a dictator (I made the mistake of seeing his mental breakdown and tantrum on Twitter today). They'll call it censorship when you point it out, or call you a snowflake if you show that you're bothered by it. This blog is basically calling for a coup. The "I don't agree with what you say but I'll defend it to the death" crowd are going to be the end of the United States. I'm lucky enough that being a Canadian in Canada gives me enough separation from this that I can check out. My heart goes out to you folks that have to live it.
anonytrary 6y ago
I've been of the opinion that hosting sites should be agnostic of the posted content. The moment you try to fact-check one person, you open a very large can of worms and become responsible for fact-checking everyone. Information is cheap and people post correct and incorrect facts all the time. Censorship does not scale. The world is a dangerous place and it's more scalable to teach future generations that they'll run into good and bad information and that they should make decisions for themselves. Trying to censor all of the "bad" stuff is a huge can of worms and is not something huge platforms should even try to be doing. Let the mirror be black, and teach people how to scrub the dirt off. When in doubt, err on the side of higher user agency.
- kajecounterhack 6y ago
  What do you think of spam filters? Do you think Facebook would be a useful product if predatory posts or rampant advertising were allowed? https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/this-is-bob https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/this-is-bob What do you think of this? Would you still use hacker news if such posts littered the site? > Information is cheap and people post correct and incorrect facts all the time. Censorship does not scale. Censorship on platforms will never be perfect but there's a great deal of space between perfect censorship and a ridiculous free for all. You need moderation/filtering to make the modern web work.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jedimastert 6y ago
    > Do you think Facebook would be a useful product if predatory posts or rampant advertising were allowed? ...do you think it's not allowed?
    - kajecounterhack 6y ago
      Phishing attempts and bot-posting ads are surely disallowed.
  - 6y ago
zug_zug 6y ago
I believe deplatforming is sometimes worth it (e.g. child porn, presidential candidates incorrectly claiming they won an election on election night). I personally wouldn't feel the need to deplatform this site, but I guess it's wordpress's call/right. Fortunately for them, it should be fairly easy to migrate to a self-hosted wordpress intallation.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Until the cloud or datacenter operator makes the same call. Or the ISP. Or the software provider. Or the Chrome team. This trend is bad because it's a declaration of open warfare by leftists on anyone who disagrees with them. The notion of persuading people with better arguments is dead to them; they'd rather win by foul means than fair. And sadly too many people here cheer them on, or shrug and say, well, technically nothing stops them. But it's a stale, pale argument. Technically the Chinese government are well within their rights to put their citizens behind their firewall, suppress all free speech within their territory and do many other bad things. It's just one country amongst many after all. People can leave. Nonetheless it's right and proper to criticise them for doing so because that sort of behaviour is morally wrong.
buzzy_hacker 6y ago
I think WordPress as a private company can refuse service to whomever they like. There’s a big difference between a company not selling you something versus the government censoring you. The complicating issue is that we are ceding more and more control of our public spaces to private companies. So, on one hand, a place like Twitter should be able to ban whomever they want, while on the other hand, at what point does not having access to Twitter represent a de facto censorship of public speech? I don’t think we’re there yet (or really all that close), but we’re headed in that direction.
- chrissnell 6y ago
  I don't think we're far from this at all. The Twitter issue is different from the CTH issue covered here; the issue with Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube is that when you're kicked off those platforms, you lose your only real hope of a revenue stream. This has happened to a number of conservative notables, content creators, etc. I think we are already at a point where these companies are so big and powerful that being shunned by one could put you out of business.
- mrslave 6y ago
  Why not just bake the cake tho bigot? But in seriousness, we've all heard this argument. What's interesting about this idea is that we're hearing leftists shill for corporations at levels previously thought impossible. The real question is not, "Is this allowed?" but "Is this good, right, and proper?"
  - ARandomerDude 6y ago
    > The real question is not, "Is this allowed?" but "Is this good, right, and proper?" If leftists thought that way, they wouldn't be leftists. I'm sure a lot of people will find that offensive, but it really is in the left's political DNA, which is why you see bumper stickers like "Well-behaved women seldom make history."
  - buzzy_hacker 6y ago
    > The real question is not, "Is this allowed?" but "Is this good, right, and proper?” I guess I’d say that the real question is kind of in-between those two. We need to permit somethings to be allowed, which are not good, right, and proper.
dibujante 6y ago
Wordpress are a private company and don't have to respect anyone's freedom of speech. Would you require them to host Der Sturmer? This is no different.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  Question: If Wordpress received a large investment from the Saudis, and in response removed all of its LGBT content, would you feel the same way?
  - dibujante 6y ago
    Is the content untruthful and promoting harmful conspiracy theories?
    - dcolkitt 6y ago
      How would you feel about Wordpress deleting all the blogs of a specific religion, based on the fact that there is no evidence for God? Because we're not talking about fringe conspiracy theories here. At least 30% of Americans holds opinions similar to CTH. You may disagree with them, but Wordpress is unilaterally claiming the ability to silence a huge chunk of the American political spectrum. I don't really see how that's any different than them deciding to unilaterally discriminate against, say all Catholics.
      - dibujante 6y ago
        Yes, I struggle with what the right response is when very large numbers of people believe things that are obviously both false and damaging. You're proposing complete relativism and the inability for anyone to know anything; if anti-semitism were a popular belief among 30% of the population, you'd defend it and being equal to any other belief?
  - cortesoft 6y ago
    No, I would not feel the same way... I would likely boycott the company. I don't think there would be a legal issue, though. I always hate this part of these comment threads; there is always a lot of conflation between legal and moral responsibilities.... I hate that people who think this sort of censorship is ok (and I am actually one of them) try to argue from a legal standpoint.... I am pretty sure almost everyone agrees that Wordpress isn't breaking the law here, so why argue that point? As for the moral argument, I don't think I am being hypocritical to say it is morally ok to censor some things but not others. Not everything is the same. In fact, I think even the most die hard free speech absolutists are ok with anti-fraud laws. No one is arguing that is ok to host a typo-squatting website pretending I am amazon and harvest login credentials. No one would say we can't take down that site because of free speech. So, what we are really arguing about is degree; how fraudulent does something have to be in order for it to be ok to censor? Personally, I think the decision should be made on a combination of the certainty that the content is false, along with the harm the content can cause. Fake amazon site is clearly false and clearly harmful; automatic censoring. Flat earth society? Clearly false, but depending on what the site is advocating, it might be mostly harmless. Part of the harm determination is also going to be based on evidence; how many people have we seen be tricked by the false information? Basically, I don't think this is one of those issues that you can have a clear rule for, which is probably why programmers have such a hard time with the concept and default to saying we shouldn't even try.
ashtonkem 6y ago
I genuinely don't think there's anything more to discuss on this subject that hasn't been discussed here 100x. I'm beginning to suspect that most of this stuff has more to do with attention seeking behavior more than anything else, and we should probably stop dignifying it with our attention.
- Thorrez 6y ago
  Has WordPress.com done this before? If not, that is one new thing. But yeah, overall there's not much new to say. Adding another company to the list is nothing novel.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
Look, I’m a very staunch supporter of free speech on the Internet, but this particular site appears to be primarily focused on advocating for a coup. I checked their first 3 pages, and nearly every post is about throwing out the results of the most recent US election. I find it really hard to judge a hosting service for deciding that’s a step too far.
- souprock 6y ago
  They, and much of the nation, would say that it is to stop a coup. The facts are quite disputed.
crocodiletears 6y ago
Story damn near old as time at this point. There's nothing new to be said on the abstract of this event. Some say it's a private company, others say we're outsourcing the stewardship of too many of our public fora to private companies, others will insist that it's wrong in principal, others will say they're just being good custodians of the public dialogue. Nobody's mind will change. Methodologically, I absolutely respect Wordpress's decision to give them advanced warning. If this were to become standard practice, I believe it would constitute a massive deescalation in the culture war/fight against possible misinformation. Rather than attempting to wipe them from the internet with little notice, WordPress tersely informed them that they were no longer welcome, and gave them an eviction date. Call me jaded, but at this point I find this to be a refreshingly civil attempt at a divorce.
vmception 6y ago
Is Wordpress really that hard to run? Couldn’t they have just moved servers in the time it took to write that Conservative victim complex post? I feel like tech companies should just kick luddites off the internet for being inept. Conservatives keep running these 1990s geocities websites wondering why their civil rights vigilance blogs aren't taken seriously. Lets update the terms of service to support that, it would be hilarious and affected people might learn some modern skills in the process. Maybe they’ll even become proponents of decentralization and actually do it.
nkingsy 6y ago
This seems like an obvious play for donations. I find it hard to believe the author really doesn’t know that they can host their Wordpress site anywhere, yet they say “I don’t know what treehouse 2.0 will look like”, etc. The comments are full of “I donated” messages, so I guess it worked. Wordpress seems to have helped this enterprise’s wallet rather than deplatforming anyone.
- Thorrez 6y ago
  Weird, I did a ctrl+f for "dona" and there were 0 matches. So none of the front page of comments mentioned donations and the blog post didn't mention donations. There is a "donate" image on the right, but that's on every post. The point of the blog post seems to be much more "we're being persecuted" than "we need money" to me.
  - nkingsy 6y ago
    Just this morning I clicked to page 2 of the comments on my phone and found 2 (pages appear very short)
ycombonator 6y ago
We are precipitating towards the Chinese Communist model of group think and censorship.

62 points by chrissnell 6y ago

CTH is one place which never puts out any info without hard evidence to the documents which prove their case. Somehow that's not acceptable now a days. And despite this, there will still be people who will claim there's no censorship of conservative voices.

jjeaff 6y ago
I don't see any data that backs this statement up: >There is a COVID-19 virus; however, COVID is not more dangerous than all other flu-like viruses that impact the respiratory system. COVID-19 is very manageable and doesn’t carry a higher fatality rate.
- duck 6y ago
  I'm not saying that statement is true, but if we go by "don't see any data that backs this statement up", then that would be 99% of the internet.
  - jedimastert 6y ago
    I think you might be stumbling on to something...
  - dllthomas 6y ago
    The comment you reply to was itself a response to a claim that this site in particular "never puts out any info without hard evidence". The comment you reply to disputes that. The rest of the internet is irrelevant.
- nl 6y ago
  Indeed, the doesn’t carry a higher fatality rate part is factually incorrect. It's sad to see people spreading this kind of thing because it causes problems for their ideology. COVID-19 has a fatality rate between 1 and 10%[1]. The variation is mostly due to testing - the places with the higher rate are under testing. The flu has a death rate around 0.1% in the US - although that overestimate it because most people who get the flu are never tested and don't report it[2]. The flu is also much less contagious than COVID-19. Influenza has a R0 of between 0.9 and 2.8 (for the 1928 Pandemic stream). COVID-19 is between 3 and 6[3]. [1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality [2] https://www.livescience.com/new-coronavirus-compare-with-flu.html https://www.livescience.com/new-coronavirus-compare-with-flu... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
  - m0zg 6y ago
    > COVID-19 has a fatality rate between 1 and 10% There's a whole slew of reasons why even 1% estimate is bullshit. Consider this: median age of COVID death is currently 78 years old. US all-age life expectancy as of 2018 is 78.9 years. That is, approximately half the people who are dying of this would die anyway that same year. Now granted, expectancy is a mean, not a median, but you get my point. 1% CFR means 3.3 million deaths in the US alone if everyone gets it, which everyone eventually will, and which exceeds even the most ridiculous estimates from March of this year by a factor of 1.5, and is quite obviously not going to happen. It's also ridiculously difficult to track down this median age number for the US, by the way. I wonder why that is. That's before we even consider how the US has 760 deaths per million, and the likes of Iran or Russia (which have nowhere near the medicine the US has) report one half and one third that correspondingly. So yes, C19 quite obviously has substantially higher CFR than the flu, but 9 months in nobody has any idea as to how much higher. Anyone who says otherwise is selling you something.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > Consider this: median age of COVID death is currently 78 years old. US life expectancy as of 2018 is 78.9 years. That is, approximately half the people who are dying of this would die anyway that same year. You are confusing life expectancy at birth of 78.9 for life expectancy at age 78 of 0.9, that's not correct. Life expectancy at age 78 is 9.43 years for males, 10.98 years for females.
      - m0zg 6y ago
        Yes, and a lot of those 78.9 year old COVID patients will survive, although of course their probability of death is much higher. The point is not that. The point is it's dumb to pretend that the CFR is going to be uniform, and that just because it's 2.2% in the US at the moment, it can be linearly scaled up to the entire population (which is what would need to happen if we are to compare it to the flu, which easily 60% of people get in any given year), given the underlying demographics of fatalities. Downright dishonest, if you ask me. Again, it is more dangerous than the flu. But nobody knows by how much, and nobody is even trying to find out as far as I can tell. Seems like a crucial question that needs to be answered, no?
nl 6y ago
> CTH is one place which never puts out any info without hard evidence to the documents which prove their case. They have whole posts like https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/11/13/steve-cortes-discusses-the-election-of-statistical-improbabilities-ga-with-95000-biden-only-votes/ https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/11/13/steve-cortes.... Of course, this just isn't a thing![1] But people seem to believe it is because it is presented as fact. I guess they (or you) will argue they just pass along false rumours and that isn't their fault. But if they claim to be something that deserves any kind of protection against deplatforming then surely they can't just be a spam mill? People spreading falsehoods deserve limited protection IMHO. [1] https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-there-were-not-95000-biden-only-ballots-in-georgia/ https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-there-were-not-9500...
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  > People spreading falsehoods deserve limited protection IMHO. Nobody deserves special protection from "deplatforming"[0] from the government; giving the government the ability to say "you must carry this speech" is just as tyrannical as giving them the right to say "you must not carry this speech". If one has the freedom to speak and associate, one must also have the freedom to be silent and disassociate. [0] It's amazing how many people who've been "cancelled" or "deplatformed" continue to tell me so on the internet. One can't help but wonder how effective this so-called deplatforming really is.
  - dllthomas 6y ago
    > giving the government the ability to say "you must carry this speech" is just as tyrannical as giving them the right to say "you must not carry this speech" Don't we do exactly that with the phone company and the post office?
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      > Don't we do exactly that with the phone company and the post office? Neither allows you to target millions of gullible targets almost for free.
dibujante 6y ago
Their website is full of lies and conspiracy theories. Plandemic? Stop the steal? I hope you're joking.

knaq 6y ago

I miss the days when you could reliably buy service from a corporation without fear that you might be denied for wrongthink. Business culture has gone down a very bad path when we can't just do business with each other.

xlm1717 6y ago
They used to want your money, now they want [to dictate] your life.
jedimastert 6y ago
There's a difference between a difference in ideology and spreading actual and dangerous misinformation. Whether or not spreading misinformation on the internet is justification for removing someone might be up for debate, but let's not pretend it was just because they disagreed with the "big tech" company that is wordpress.com
- chrissnell 6y ago
  The Conservative Treehouse is not a misinformation site. They are well-known for their meticulous and extensive research. What they say may be contrarian and unpopular, but it's not propaganda or a misinformation campaign.
  - justinclift 6y ago
    Evidence otherwise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25106430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25106430
- zug_zug 6y ago
  I'd be curious how uniformly they apply this policy. Is a website that promotes crystals to heal cancer going to be shutdown? Anti-vax? What about Jehovah's witnesses who don't allow blood transfusions? Honestly, as somebody on the left, I do feel like there are certain topics that people get unusually emotional about (e.g. terrorism, airplanes, covid) and tend make choices that aren't proportional to the measured risk, relative to say smoking.

BuzzwordBingo 6y ago

A private business declining to assist you in your political cause is not “deplatforming”. You were just asked by your own beloved capitalism to go take your business elsewhere. Man up and do so.

dang 6y ago
We've banned this account because using HN for ideological flamewar like this is against the site guidelines, and it's a bad sign when a new account is already doing it repeatedly. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
- BuzzwordBingo 6y ago
  Bite me.
- user982 6y ago
  "Repeatedly"? That was BuzzwordBingo's 7th comment, and their first to even approach ideological commentary. You've banned them and me under that basis, but accounts like s9w and rayiner are given free rein for years.
  - dang 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25106534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25106534 counts. Also, don't forget that there is sometimes additional context beyond what shows in the public record. I took a look at your recent comment history and it seems fine, so we'll try unbanning you. Admittedly I didn't look too far back because https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23979330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23979330 won me over.
  - tptacek 6y ago
    Rayiner is one of the best commenters on the site. He routinely takes the time to write paragraphs of background to support his views, which are well-informed --- he's an appellate court litigator with an engineering background --- and interesting enough that they're routinely downvoted. I've never seen him complain about that, or about HN moderation. We need 100 more of him (ideally in a variety of ideological flavors). I have no idea who 's9w is, but I've never seen Rayiner post the three word comment "that's a lie", so I object to the comparison.

fatbird 6y ago

Apparently what got them kicked off was this: There is a COVID-19 virus; however, COVID is not more dangerous than all other flu-like viruses that impact the respiratory system. COVID-19 is very manageable and doesn’t carry a higher fatality rate. Why is COVID-19 being disproportionately hyped.... The answer is… social changes under the guise of COVID-19 mitigation, are the entry point for the goals and aspirations of the political left on a national and global scale. [0] [0] https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/11/13/covid-19-is-the-agenda-biden-is-merely-the-delivery-vehicle/ https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/11/13/covid-19-is-...

60secs 6y ago
Sounds like they got kicked off for piss-poor methodology, not ideology.
- jedimastert 6y ago
  I feel like at this point you have to be actively ignoring the facts.
- p1necone 6y ago
  I would posit that piss-poor methodology is part of the ideology of the American right. This is part of the problem, by claiming things that used to be frowned upon by everybody (basically lying and misinformation) as part of their political identity they get to claim you're being biased when they get called out for their bullshit. It's gaslighting on a national scale.
  - mmastrac 6y ago
    There's just no way to argue with a group that wants to lie with impunity and support a leader that lies, breaks every norm and is generally showing signs of a being a dictator (I made the mistake of seeing his mental breakdown and tantrum on Twitter today). They'll call it censorship when you point it out, or call you a snowflake if you show that you're bothered by it. This blog is basically calling for a coup. The "I don't agree with what you say but I'll defend it to the death" crowd are going to be the end of the United States. I'm lucky enough that being a Canadian in Canada gives me enough separation from this that I can check out. My heart goes out to you folks that have to live it.

anonytrary 6y ago

I've been of the opinion that hosting sites should be agnostic of the posted content. The moment you try to fact-check one person, you open a very large can of worms and become responsible for fact-checking everyone. Information is cheap and people post correct and incorrect facts all the time. Censorship does not scale. The world is a dangerous place and it's more scalable to teach future generations that they'll run into good and bad information and that they should make decisions for themselves. Trying to censor all of the "bad" stuff is a huge can of worms and is not something huge platforms should even try to be doing. Let the mirror be black, and teach people how to scrub the dirt off. When in doubt, err on the side of higher user agency.

kajecounterhack 6y ago
What do you think of spam filters? Do you think Facebook would be a useful product if predatory posts or rampant advertising were allowed? https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/this-is-bob https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/this-is-bob What do you think of this? Would you still use hacker news if such posts littered the site? > Information is cheap and people post correct and incorrect facts all the time. Censorship does not scale. Censorship on platforms will never be perfect but there's a great deal of space between perfect censorship and a ridiculous free for all. You need moderation/filtering to make the modern web work.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jedimastert 6y ago
  > Do you think Facebook would be a useful product if predatory posts or rampant advertising were allowed? ...do you think it's not allowed?
  - kajecounterhack 6y ago
    Phishing attempts and bot-posting ads are surely disallowed.
- 6y ago

zug_zug 6y ago

I believe deplatforming is sometimes worth it (e.g. child porn, presidential candidates incorrectly claiming they won an election on election night). I personally wouldn't feel the need to deplatform this site, but I guess it's wordpress's call/right. Fortunately for them, it should be fairly easy to migrate to a self-hosted wordpress intallation.

thu2111 6y ago
Until the cloud or datacenter operator makes the same call. Or the ISP. Or the software provider. Or the Chrome team. This trend is bad because it's a declaration of open warfare by leftists on anyone who disagrees with them. The notion of persuading people with better arguments is dead to them; they'd rather win by foul means than fair. And sadly too many people here cheer them on, or shrug and say, well, technically nothing stops them. But it's a stale, pale argument. Technically the Chinese government are well within their rights to put their citizens behind their firewall, suppress all free speech within their territory and do many other bad things. It's just one country amongst many after all. People can leave. Nonetheless it's right and proper to criticise them for doing so because that sort of behaviour is morally wrong.

buzzy_hacker 6y ago

I think WordPress as a private company can refuse service to whomever they like. There’s a big difference between a company not selling you something versus the government censoring you. The complicating issue is that we are ceding more and more control of our public spaces to private companies. So, on one hand, a place like Twitter should be able to ban whomever they want, while on the other hand, at what point does not having access to Twitter represent a de facto censorship of public speech? I don’t think we’re there yet (or really all that close), but we’re headed in that direction.

chrissnell 6y ago
I don't think we're far from this at all. The Twitter issue is different from the CTH issue covered here; the issue with Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube is that when you're kicked off those platforms, you lose your only real hope of a revenue stream. This has happened to a number of conservative notables, content creators, etc. I think we are already at a point where these companies are so big and powerful that being shunned by one could put you out of business.
mrslave 6y ago
Why not just bake the cake tho bigot? But in seriousness, we've all heard this argument. What's interesting about this idea is that we're hearing leftists shill for corporations at levels previously thought impossible. The real question is not, "Is this allowed?" but "Is this good, right, and proper?"
- ARandomerDude 6y ago
  > The real question is not, "Is this allowed?" but "Is this good, right, and proper?" If leftists thought that way, they wouldn't be leftists. I'm sure a lot of people will find that offensive, but it really is in the left's political DNA, which is why you see bumper stickers like "Well-behaved women seldom make history."
- buzzy_hacker 6y ago
  > The real question is not, "Is this allowed?" but "Is this good, right, and proper?” I guess I’d say that the real question is kind of in-between those two. We need to permit somethings to be allowed, which are not good, right, and proper.

dibujante 6y ago

Wordpress are a private company and don't have to respect anyone's freedom of speech. Would you require them to host Der Sturmer? This is no different.

dcolkitt 6y ago
Question: If Wordpress received a large investment from the Saudis, and in response removed all of its LGBT content, would you feel the same way?
- dibujante 6y ago
  Is the content untruthful and promoting harmful conspiracy theories?
  - dcolkitt 6y ago
    How would you feel about Wordpress deleting all the blogs of a specific religion, based on the fact that there is no evidence for God? Because we're not talking about fringe conspiracy theories here. At least 30% of Americans holds opinions similar to CTH. You may disagree with them, but Wordpress is unilaterally claiming the ability to silence a huge chunk of the American political spectrum. I don't really see how that's any different than them deciding to unilaterally discriminate against, say all Catholics.
    - dibujante 6y ago
      Yes, I struggle with what the right response is when very large numbers of people believe things that are obviously both false and damaging. You're proposing complete relativism and the inability for anyone to know anything; if anti-semitism were a popular belief among 30% of the population, you'd defend it and being equal to any other belief?
- cortesoft 6y ago
  No, I would not feel the same way... I would likely boycott the company. I don't think there would be a legal issue, though. I always hate this part of these comment threads; there is always a lot of conflation between legal and moral responsibilities.... I hate that people who think this sort of censorship is ok (and I am actually one of them) try to argue from a legal standpoint.... I am pretty sure almost everyone agrees that Wordpress isn't breaking the law here, so why argue that point? As for the moral argument, I don't think I am being hypocritical to say it is morally ok to censor some things but not others. Not everything is the same. In fact, I think even the most die hard free speech absolutists are ok with anti-fraud laws. No one is arguing that is ok to host a typo-squatting website pretending I am amazon and harvest login credentials. No one would say we can't take down that site because of free speech. So, what we are really arguing about is degree; how fraudulent does something have to be in order for it to be ok to censor? Personally, I think the decision should be made on a combination of the certainty that the content is false, along with the harm the content can cause. Fake amazon site is clearly false and clearly harmful; automatic censoring. Flat earth society? Clearly false, but depending on what the site is advocating, it might be mostly harmless. Part of the harm determination is also going to be based on evidence; how many people have we seen be tricked by the false information? Basically, I don't think this is one of those issues that you can have a clear rule for, which is probably why programmers have such a hard time with the concept and default to saying we shouldn't even try.

ashtonkem 6y ago

I genuinely don't think there's anything more to discuss on this subject that hasn't been discussed here 100x. I'm beginning to suspect that most of this stuff has more to do with attention seeking behavior more than anything else, and we should probably stop dignifying it with our attention.

Thorrez 6y ago
Has WordPress.com done this before? If not, that is one new thing. But yeah, overall there's not much new to say. Adding another company to the list is nothing novel.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

Look, I’m a very staunch supporter of free speech on the Internet, but this particular site appears to be primarily focused on advocating for a coup. I checked their first 3 pages, and nearly every post is about throwing out the results of the most recent US election. I find it really hard to judge a hosting service for deciding that’s a step too far.

souprock 6y ago
They, and much of the nation, would say that it is to stop a coup. The facts are quite disputed.

crocodiletears 6y ago

Story damn near old as time at this point. There's nothing new to be said on the abstract of this event. Some say it's a private company, others say we're outsourcing the stewardship of too many of our public fora to private companies, others will insist that it's wrong in principal, others will say they're just being good custodians of the public dialogue. Nobody's mind will change. Methodologically, I absolutely respect Wordpress's decision to give them advanced warning. If this were to become standard practice, I believe it would constitute a massive deescalation in the culture war/fight against possible misinformation. Rather than attempting to wipe them from the internet with little notice, WordPress tersely informed them that they were no longer welcome, and gave them an eviction date. Call me jaded, but at this point I find this to be a refreshingly civil attempt at a divorce.

vmception 6y ago

Is Wordpress really that hard to run? Couldn’t they have just moved servers in the time it took to write that Conservative victim complex post? I feel like tech companies should just kick luddites off the internet for being inept. Conservatives keep running these 1990s geocities websites wondering why their civil rights vigilance blogs aren't taken seriously. Lets update the terms of service to support that, it would be hilarious and affected people might learn some modern skills in the process. Maybe they’ll even become proponents of decentralization and actually do it.

nkingsy 6y ago

This seems like an obvious play for donations. I find it hard to believe the author really doesn’t know that they can host their Wordpress site anywhere, yet they say “I don’t know what treehouse 2.0 will look like”, etc. The comments are full of “I donated” messages, so I guess it worked. Wordpress seems to have helped this enterprise’s wallet rather than deplatforming anyone.

Thorrez 6y ago
Weird, I did a ctrl+f for "dona" and there were 0 matches. So none of the front page of comments mentioned donations and the blog post didn't mention donations. There is a "donate" image on the right, but that's on every post. The point of the blog post seems to be much more "we're being persecuted" than "we need money" to me.
- nkingsy 6y ago
  Just this morning I clicked to page 2 of the comments on my phone and found 2 (pages appear very short)

ycombonator 6y ago

We are precipitating towards the Chinese Communist model of group think and censorship.