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This is not censorship, this is not about the First Amendment. Freedom of Speech !== Entitlement to a Platform And incitement of violence has never been prote
by danhak 6y ago
This is not censorship, this is not about the First Amendment.
Freedom of Speech !== Entitlement to a Platform
And incitement of violence has never been protected speech. This has gone too far.
- lutorm 6y agoExactly. Censorship is done by the government. A private entity can not "censor" anyone, legally. And the idea that the President of the United States is deprived of a platform by this is ludicrous.
- dunce2020 6y agoI also celebrate this return to feudalism.
- whoevercares 6y agoDisagree. I’d rather prefer a practical view —- Big social media tech in internet age have the practical means to perform censorship
- vlovich123 6y agoHow so? Just going from a dictionary definition: > censorship: the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security. Nothing here says it's only censorship if done by the government. Legally in the USA there's a stark distinction between government & non-governmental censorship. Even then sometimes private entities fall under restrictions like in the case of the FCC & public broadcast networks (see Janet Jackson nip slip, the inability to curse during certain TV/radio programs at certain times, etc). Now whether all of this desirable or not is politically debatable & one we should have. That being said under the current legal structure Twitter is probably in the clear. I'm generally more curious how these kinds of actions by tech companies don't violate section 230 though. In the early days of the WWW, that was the reason given for not moderating such speech - "if we start moderating any speech then we're not a safe harbor and we have to moderate all speech". Does this mean that these tech companies that are doing moderation expose themselves legally somehow? Or does it just mean that the previous arguments were done in bad faith? Or were there laws passed to refine section 230 in this regard?
- elliekelly 6y agoYou should read the book “The Twenty-Six Words that Created the Internet” - Section 230 does not at all work the way most people think it does.
- tpoacher 6y agoThe 1st amendment is about government censorship. Censorship is about practical censorship. Mutually exclusive arguments.
- bgorman 6y agoDonald Trump is a remarkable individual. He has broken liberal's minds to the point where they cannot think straight anymore.
- bgorman 6y agoYou are incorrect. Censorship is not a legal concept, it a noun. Oxford English Dictionary definition: https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/censorship https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/censorship Nothing mentioned about the government at all.
- foolfoolz 6y agothis is censorship, which twitter is allowed to do on their site. i think communication platforms should allow all (legal) posts
- GloriousKoji 6y agoIronically I feel as if by censoring Trump, twitter is performing an act of free speech.
- freen 6y agoSedition isn’t legal.
- chrstphrknwtn 6y agoCensorship is the state saying "you cannot say this". Trump is still free to say whatever he likes, and Twitter is still free to moderate its platform.
- chordalkeyboard 6y agoper the dictionary it doesn't require the government in order to be "censorship."
- ta2987 6y agoIt requires the government to be illegal.
- 6y ago
- anonunivgrad 6y agoThe concepts and values of free speech and open discourse are more than the legal requirements of the First Amendment. Coordinated private censorship by oligopolistic platforms that have largely replaced the public square is contrary to the value of freedom of speech.
- ogre_codes 6y agoEven the first amendment doesn't protect incitement. You can't yell "Fire" in a crowded theater.
- anonunivgrad 6y agoPolitical opinions are not incitement.
- ryeights 6y agoActually, you can. Schenck v. US was overturned 52 years ago. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
- lvturner 6y agoI’m staggered by the number of people who don’t get this point. You can write any book you want - but no one is under any obligation to publish it for you.
- dionian 6y agoTwitter is a platform, not a publisher, in theory
- Jtsummers 6y agoWhat’s the difference in your mind between those? Both in general and legally?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- schoen 6y agoThis distinction doesn't exist under the actually existing version of §230. I think it's shocking how Twitter has completely changed course from its "free speech wing of the free speech party" positioning, and I understand why people find it frustrating that you don't have to "choose between being a platform and a publisher". But you don't; that's not the law and it hasn't been the law for over a quarter-century. And that rule has mostly been a very good thing for online speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#Background_and_passage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#Background_and_pas...
- ars 6y ago> but no one is under any obligation to publish it for you. Is the Post Office under an obligation to mail your book to your subscriber list? No one is asking Twitter to put his messages on their front page, but anything who specifically subscribed should be able to see anything he writes.
- lhorie 6y agoNo, Twitter is within its right to remove stuff that goes against its policy. e.g. no one in their right mind would argue to keep a tweet up if it was a picture of child pornography.
- bgorman 6y agoCensorship doesn't need to be done by the government From Oxford dictionary: "the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security." Silicon valley has done a lot of harm over the last few years, and redefining words to mean things that benefit big tech companies is one of the worst things they have done. The first ammendment only applies to the government, however the government is not the only institution capable of censorship.
- rhino369 6y agoIt’s certainly censorship. But its reasonable censorship. Censorship doesn’t only occur by violation of the first amendment.
- whoevercares 6y agoWhat’s reasonable? Is it an ordinal or cardinal measure?
- spoonjim 6y agoReasonable: brushing against someone in a grocery store as you squeeze past them in an aisle Unreasonable: Running into them full force, leaning your shoulder into their jaw and breaking it into three pieces The line: somewhere in between
- dkjaudyeqooe 6y agoReasonable is whatever Twitter decides.
- raldi 6y agoThis is like getting thrown out of a bar at the bartender's discretion.
- maest 6y agoThis only holds if there were only one bar that everyone went to.
- booi 6y agoare you saying Twitter is the only website on the internet?
- maest 6y agoClearly I am not, and strawmanning me won't help the conversation. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you really did miss my point: Twitter controls access to a very large audience, only rivalled maybe by Facebook. If you get banned from Twitter, you can't easily go and use a competitor. If there were tens or hundreds of Twitters in the world, then yeah, the "being thrown out of a bar" analogy would hold.
- edoceo 6y agoTwitter is not bigger than a head of state calling a presser. That audience is on multiple platform and T-dog is in a position to reach out to ANY media and they'll listen - and distribute.
- dkjaudyeqooe 6y agoWow if twitter is that important you should probably stay in their good books and follow their rules, hey?
- johndubchak 6y agoTwitter also has its Terms of Service and we are all expected to follow those. There have been many that have been banned from Twitter for violent and/or hate speech. What makes the President any different? Why should he get held to a different standard?
- dionian 6y agoDid his tweets incite violence? I am trying to find out where he did this, maybe it was in those deleted tweets
- GiorgioG 6y agoYes.
- malkia 6y agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=%22These%20are%20the%20things%20and%20events%20that%20happen%20when%20a%20sacred%20landslide%20election%20victory%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22These%20are%20the%20thing...
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI didn't take a picture, but one of his responses to the takeover of the Capitol was that "this is what happens" and a renewed demand to throw out the election.
- 0x53 6y agohttps://www.thetrumparchive.com/ https://www.thetrumparchive.com/
- nullc 6y agoHis message repeated the same tired stolen election stuff then urged protesters to peacefully go home and respect law and order. I saved and linked the video in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25668883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25668883
- throw_m239339 6y ago> Freedom of Speech !== Entitlement to a Platform While I have zero support for Trump supporters, aren't these websites protected by the government with Section 230? This isn't a right granted to these platforms by the constitution either, the fact that these social media are basically shielded from any civil responsibility when it comes user generated content, in fact that what made them thrive at scale... I'm just saying.
- convery 6y agoThe argument over 230 is that one can't pretend to be a utility/platform for communication while at the same time restricting what information is allowed to be published. Lots of these platforms want to have the cake an eat it too; i.e. blacklisting news stories sitewide, banning certain political leanings 21:1, etc. while claiming to be a neutral platform provider that doesn't have a say in what's published.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago> This is not censorship I'm sure that it is. [0] > The suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security. [0] https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/censorship https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/censorship
- edoceo 6y agoIt's not government censorship, so it's not a free speech violation. It's a corporate censorship of the platform they own.
- dnissley 6y agoIt could very reasonably be seen as a violation of the principle of free speech as well. But it's not a violation of the first amendment. We need both of these concepts so we should be careful.
- edoceo 6y agoAgree. Censorship needs at least one type of modifier (are those adjectives?) so it's clear what is being limited. Some is good and some is bad but just "censorship" alone is too ambiguous.
- jimbob45 6y agoOh cool, so it’s okay if Facebook removes every post about and by BLM? Because they certainly incited a great deal of violence this summer. Enough of the Doublespeak. It’s censorship, albeit by a private entity. When it inevitably happens to the left, I’ll call it censorship then too and I’ll advocate against it.
- mrtesthah 6y agoNope. 93% of Black Lives Matter protests have been peaceful. https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-violence-in-america-new-data-for-summer-2020/ https://acleddata.com/2020/09/03/demonstrations-political-vi...
- PontifexMinimus 6y agoYour statistic of: > 93% of Black Lives Matter protests have been peaceful Does not contradict jimbob45's point that "BLM [...] incited a great deal of violence this summer" Going by the numbers in your URL, 7750 demonstations of which 7% violent = 542 violent demonstrations.
- mrtesthah 6y agoHe said “they certainly incited a great deal of violence this summer.” I qualified that statement, which was worded to imply substantially more violence than what actually occurred. I thought HN discussions were based on facts rather than political biases.
- PontifexMinimus 6y ago> I thought HN discussions were based on facts rather than political biases. I very much hope they are.
- mrtesthah 6y agoDoesn’t look like it. Every time I present clear facts contrary to peoples’ political leanings and biases, they downvote.
- imgabe 6y agoThe semantic arguments are pointless. The question is, do you want a private corporation to dictate whether or not the government of the United States is able to communicate to the citizens? If you do, you are effectively placing the leadership of the country at Twitter's discretion. Do you want to have a democracy where all voices can be heard, or do you want a small cadre of unelected corporate bureaucrats to decide what is allowed and not allowed? We have an established democratic process to censure (not censor) and if necessary, remove from office elected officials. That is the appropriate venue and the appropriate authority to deal with this, not Twitter.
- arrrg 6y agoTwitter is not the be all end all of communicating with the world. That’s absurd and more indicative of a warped Silicon Valley centric worldview that overemphasizes the importance of Twitter and others. Don’t get me wrong, Twitter is important, but not so much because it’s the only way for governments to communicate effectively with citizens. That’s absurd.
- imgabe 6y agoIt doesn't have to be the only way and nobody said it was. It is a way, and an important one that is very effective at reaching a lot of people. Government has long had the power to commandeer broadcast media when it needs to get a message to the people ("We interrupt this broadcast...") Do we want to do away with that? For all its flaws, the government is still something every citizen of the US has a say in, however small. I'm not willing to trade that for rule by Twitter executives, however well-intentioned they might be at the present moment.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Government has long had the power to commandeer broadcast media when it needs to get a message to the people (“We interrupt this broadcast…”) No, it hasn’t (outside of, say, the Emergency Alert System.) Government addresses (“We interrupt this broadcast…”) are a subject of requests for air time, which broadcast networks usually (but not always) grant. A decent enough basic explanation with some historical examples is here: https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/major-networks-carry-presidential-addresses.htm https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/major-networks-carry...
- ars 6y agoTwitter can remove his "platform", while still showing his messages to those who directly followed him. i.e. don't show his messages except to people who specifically followed him. This is like the Post Office deciding not to deliver mail. > And incitement of violence has never been protected speech. I saw an incitement to protest, but I saw nothing encouraging violence. Do you have an links to anything like that?
- dragonwriter 6y ago> This is like the Post Office deciding not to deliver mail. Twitter isn’t a government corporation with a legally-mandatory monopoly, so, no, its more like me choosing not to pass on something I got from a politician a disagree with.
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoYou probably wouldn’t be passing it on to several million people, so that comparison isn’t even close.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> You probably wouldn’t be passing it on to several million people, so that comparison isn’t even close. If freedom of speech and the press is curtailed precisely because the speaker or publisher has a large audience so the curtailment most efficiently gives government control of messaging, that doesn’t make it better.
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoHonest question: Why do you think Twitter is a publisher, in the sense of a newspaper, for example?
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Why do you think Twitter is a publisher, in the sense of a newspaper, for example? Because, like a newspaper, they provide an actively curated compilation of information received from a variety of contracted sources to readers. Sure, much (but not all) of the curation is algorithmic, and the direct sources are mostly not under employment contract and not getting paid money for the content (either providing it for free or paying money for reach), while for most newspapers many of the direct sources would be under employment contract and they and others would be getting paid money for the input they provide into the curated product, but that difference doesn't seem particularly relevant to whether Twitter is a publisher. And, yes, a lot of the algorithmic curation is driven by explicit reader expression of preference, and some of the rest is driven by inferred reader preference from reader behavior. But that the curated product is highly personalized also doesn't seem relevant to how free expression rights apply to curation choices. For purposes of civil liability, Twitter is not a “publisher” solely because of Section 230, but since we are discussing how the Constitution applies to them (which Congress could not change by statute) not how civil liability applies to them, that's not relevant.
- PontifexMinimus 6y ago> Freedom of Speech !== Entitlement to a Platform As it happens I wrote an essay on this yesterday: https://pontifex.substack.com/p/google-censors-talkradio https://pontifex.substack.com/p/google-censors-talkradio , in response to an other act of corporate censorship. My argument was that because of network effects there are only a few dominant platforms (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc) and that when these platforms take down content, they are in practise preventing that person's message from getting out, i.e. censoring people. This gives them a lot of power: power to decide which ideas can be disseminated, power to decide which politicians can get elected. So if you favour democracy, you have to be against the power of big tech platforms to shut down discussions they don't like. (My favoured solution would involve mandate interoperability using ActivityPub and similar protocols, which breaks the dominance of big platforms due to network effects).
- klyrs 6y agoWhat if, by way of uncritically publishing everything that everybody says, Twitter is accessory to treason? Do they have a right to demur? Or must they participate in every crime that their users engage in?
- PontifexMinimus 6y ago> What if, by way of uncritically publishing everything that everybody says, Twitter is accessory to treason? I'm not sure that a communications network passing on their users' communications would amount to treason. But let's run with that for instance, and assume it did, in law. > Do they have a right to demur? Clearly if a course of action is against the law, they have a legal obligation not to do it. True by definition. As to whether they have a moral obligation, that's another question entirely, and a rather complex one, as one would have to define what is moral. I would say that a company that wishes to continue operating in a country is going to have to obey the laws of that country. > Or must they participate in every crime that their users engage in? Well, that all depends on whether transmitting other people's messages constitutes a crime. Realistically, no company is going to do things that would get it shut down (and if they did, they wouldn't do so for long).
- garbagetime 6y agoCan you explain why this not being about the first amendment makes what happened not censorship? Can you explain what it not being censorship has to do with freedom of speech not being the same thing as entitlement to a platform?
- bgorman 6y agoLots of comments are being voted down disagreeing with the literal definition of censorship. Whatever your position on this issue, it is certainly alarming that on hackernews intellectual arguments over the meaning of a word are sent down the memoryhole. Doublespeak is really becoming an issue in our society, and a subset of our population is censoring those that point it out.