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Does anybody have a solution to the bigger underlying question of de-platforming and censorship on online platforms? As far as I can tell, there are two genera

Does anybody have a solution to the bigger underlying question of de-platforming and censorship on online platforms? As far as I can tell, there are two general viewpoints: a) Censorship is bad, free speech is good. You should counter bad arguments with better arguments. b) There are types of speech, which are proven to lead to violence in the long-run. Also, some things can be proven as untrue. Lies are bad. I have to say, I agree with both of those points. I think group A is missing the point, that there are echo chambers and people radicalizing within their filter-bubbles up to the point of literal terrorism, while group B is missing that the power to censor can be misused by bad actors in the future and that silenced people will not just change their mind. Is there a proper answer for someone like me? Where should I stand on this? I am leaning towards group A, while acknowledging that radicalization does happen and dearly worrying about perversion of words like "truth" or "fact" ("your/my truth", "alternate facts").

mrlala 6y ago
>Does anybody have a solution to the bigger underlying question of de-platforming and censorship on online platforms? Well as far as politics is concerned.. the US Government (and other governments) should make their own twitter like platforms which every active representative has an account, and ANYTHING (barring pure illegal) can be posted. It doesn't even need to have an actual user base, it can just be somewhere to go to see what your politician is thinking. In terms of the average person? There is no solution for one that is owned by a corporation. An offshoot of the above is the government could make a social media site that is covered under "free speech that the government cannot take away" and anything not blatantly illegal can be posted/said. I would not advocate for this though.. I think we have plenty of options. But the one for politicians only is something that should be seriously considered.
- allendoerfer 6y ago
  That's a bad idea, because you are cementing power. It would be hard for contenders to get into office. The incumbents already have a bigger platform they can leverage. I was also getting at the fact, that Twitter, being a private company or not, basically became infrastructure and was thinking about how it should behave, whether that would be enforced by laws or not.
  - medium_burrito 6y ago
    A highly scaleable free Twitter clone for the entire world run by the US government could be built in a year or two on AWS. If you don't need to build the giant ad network, it's much simpler.
- bryananderson 6y ago
  This exists. The government provides the President, the executive departments, and each Senator and Representative with their own websites. They may issue any kind of communications there, including setting up blogs or microblogs.
- wizzard 6y ago
  > Well as far as politics is concerned.. the US Government (and other governments) should make their own twitter like platforms which every active representative has an account, and ANYTHING (barring pure illegal) can be posted. > It doesn't even need to have an actual user base, it can just be somewhere to go to see what your politician is thinking. That's just called a blog. The value of social media for politicians is the "social" part.
  - mrlala 6y ago
    >That's just called a blog. The value of social media for politicians is the "social" part. Actually no, the "value" in Twitter for politicians is * Short succinct messages - people don't want to read a book from their politician for every issue. If it's important and does need more, then they tweet the image of more text or whatever. But most of the time a simple headline does suffice. Otherwise twitter wouldn't be where it is. * The tweet can be linked from anywhere else on the internet, and everyone "knows" what it should look like and can basically distinguish reality from fake stuff * Like the above, it's uniform and simple. Someone else commented to me that each politician has access to a website or something. Did anyone else know this? I sure didn't, yet I've seen a billion links to twitter for politicians. * It would be really sad to learn that politicans are reading replies to their tweets. I don't know how they could get anything else done. Have you ever scanned through a twitter thread from any one of trump's tweets? There is nothing of value, and it's so invaluable that I bet you everyone in the world would be better off with read-only tweets from politicians!
africanboy 6y ago
maybe deplatforming politicians (all of them, no matter their role) it's not a bad thing. there's an entire industry devoted to collect and spread their words, they certainly don't need twitter to be heard.
- AgentME 6y ago
  Politicians aren't the only ones spreading dangerous misinformation and conspiracy theories. They also aren't uniformly doing it; what prominent left-wing politicians are doing so? This is just a lazy both-sides position but this isn't something that both sides are guilty of.
  - africanboy 6y ago
    aren't we talking about Trump here? I never said right or left though, I've said all of them, even though from an American point of view I would be described as a "communist" (it wouldn't be far from the truth TBF ...) I am as far away from Trump as the Star Wars galaxy is from us. Politicians already have a platform, and the platform is "being a politician"
    - AgentME 6y ago
      It's a big leap to go from <Trump gets banned for inviting violence through deliberate misinformation> to <while we're at it, let's ban all politicians because they're similar>. Most politicians have nothing in common with what Trump is being banned for. Politicians are some of the people most engaged with politics, and I don't think such a large chilling effect fully across the subject of politics would be good for people. There are policies and changes from the status quo that I think are very important to improve society (healthcare for all, addressing climate change) and I don't think removing the most influential voices discussing and pushing these would be good for these kinds of goals, or improve sites like Twitter.
      - africanboy 6y ago
        that's not what I've said at all. Elected officials shouldn't be in social networks not because they are all like Trump, but because they represent the people and don't need to be influencers or to have followers, they serve the people. if they want to be heard, they can speak with their actions and their messagge will spread on social networks through the people that supports them, the press whose job is to report what they do and official press conferences that have a wide coverage on media outlets. politicians shouldn't talk "directly to the people" because it's a lie and a distraction, we spend (waste) more time talking about what they tweet and policing what they tweet about than about what they actually do! they are not common people and shouldn't be treated like they were. they can have a social network account for their party and for their press office to report on their activities and that would be it. you would be surprised to know that Angela Merkel has closed her Facebook account with more than 2.5 million folowers. Also, social network accounts are one of the best way to leak private (or secret) informations. back to Frau Merkel, her Instagram account (which is actually the official account of Die Bundeskanzlerin) has ben targeted by Russian hackers from day 1 and they've also stolen documens from computers in the German Parliament. why risk it? last but not least, social networks are private companies and don't treat users equally, they offer their propaganda platform to some but not to others. for example Hassan Rhouani, Xi Jinping, Bashar Al-Assad, Kim Jong-un, they are all on Facebook, but not their oppositions and people of those countries are severely limited in the access to social networks or internet in general. so why give them a global platform? because they can pay? I say let's ban politicians and solve it. great powers -> great responsibilities
Legion 6y ago
> You should counter bad arguments with better arguments We've witnessed the fallacy of this argument. It assumes a level of rationality that has been proven to be unreasonable to assume. The problem isn't that "better" arguments aren't reaching people. Rather, we have watched people exercise an incredible ability to discard overwhelming evidence and embrace narratives that have literally zero evidence to support them (or, in fact, have been repeatedly disproven and debunked). In that kind of environment, "counter bad arguments with better arguments" is hopelessly naive.
- totony 6y ago
  The alternative, which is to prevent the spread of "bad arguments" is dystopian
  - klank 6y ago
    That's hyperbole. If taken too far, sure. But, if we took our attempt to eliminate murder too far, it'd be equally dystopian. Your statement is not unique to speech.
    - totony 6y ago
      Murder is quite easy to define, whereas bad speech/bad argument seems so much more nuanced. I don't think it's an hyperbole moreso than the logical consequence of such a thought.
      - jackson1442 6y ago
        > Murder is quite easy to define Is it? Would someone refusing to wear a mask, provably resulting in them asymptomatically infecting someone with COVID-19 be charged with negligent manslaughter? This is something that people have been debating. Many actions humans can take could kill another. Only a subset of these are regarded as murder/manslaughter.
        klank 6y ago
wmf 6y ago
We could start by not ignoring recommendation/amplification algorithms, especially when they clearly amplify bad arguments and obscure better arguments.
option 6y ago
most Americans never lived in a totalitarian state. Totalitarian state starts when the freedom of speech is gone. It would be a humongous loss to weaken or lose freedom of speech. As someone who lived in USSR, I am am always on the side of the freedom of speech. Of course I never supported Trump, but I think the consequences of normalizing censorship will be far more damaging then whatever he has to say. Once you’ve lived in a totalitarian state it is obvious. I hope people who didn’t live in such states would look at the world history and learn.
- allendoerfer 6y ago
  In Germany you cannot advertise nazism, which you can in America. This restriction of free speech in Germany is exactly put in place to prevent a totalitarian state.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    I found it interesting that the last time I was in Berlin, about a year ago, I kept finding the same stickers everywhere being used for vandalism, initially with an anti-fascist message and then just as many cleverly scratched over to change the message to anti-Semitic hate speech. Equally interesting was that these things were everywhere and none of the locals I was with had ever seen them before. Out of sight, out of mind.
  - option 6y ago
    I am not convinced that it helps preventing totalitarian state, quite the contrary.
  - valenterry 6y ago
    It's a bad idea to do that. To prevent a totalitarian state, there should be general and abstract rules that prevent advertising things that lead to a totalitarian state. Having specific restrictions for nazism can have the opposite effect: people think everything is fine because there is no nazism, but other groups, using similar dangerous schemes will not be regarded as dangerous.
- dghlsakjg 6y ago
tylermenezes 6y ago
> Does anybody have a solution Yes. Get rid of newsfeed algorithms that optimize recommendations for engagement. It won't solve our current problem, but that's what cause it. They took pg's Fluff Principal and weaponized it.
- dexen 6y ago
  >Get rid of newsfeed algorithms that optimize recommendations for engagement. A reasonable proposition, and it would indeed fix the problem of clickbait/outragebait content. Locally. People who profit from clickbait/outragebait content would migrate to other platforms that do optimize for engagment, and the cycle begins anew. Thus it doesn't fix the problem globally. A hybrid solution might be possible if all (or most) service providers agreed to certain baseline restrictions on algorithmic optimization for engagement. Probably unrealistic, because there would be all incentives to cheat any such agreement in subtle ways. While I don't like various problems associated with it, I support the principle of freedom of speech.
  - polishdude20 6y ago
    I think to fix this sort of thing, it all comes down to a person's principles. I think we've failed to teach young people about what is right and wrong and why. You can have the government applying blanket control over things to prevent bad actors and disinformation in society. You can also teach people from a young age what is right and wrong so that when they grow up and are in positions to make these decisions, they won't need blanket decree by the government saying "no you can't do this". The topic may come up in a boardroom and everyone ideally would say "what the fuck? That's not a good idea. Let's not do that because it's wrong even if it makes us money". This is more of a bottom-up approach which can take a few decades to show results. With that argument, I'd be inclined to look back on the last 20-60 years. What have we been teaching/instilling in our population when they were young? I look at the stuff that's happening as a symptom of a long history where we dropped the ball repeatedly.
- Timothycquinn 6y ago
  Agreed, that is a significant cause. However, that must coincide with a updated monetization model for the platforms to account for the inevitable drop in user engagement. This free platforms model is a hot mess.
klank 6y ago
I'm squarely in group b, however, I don't think it's an actual dichotomy in the way you present it. I think American's fetishize "free speech" which leads to a "hyper group a" that argues since censorship is scary (which it is) we'd rather face any other conceivable consequence rather than wrestle with the hard questions of what is appropriate vs. inappropriate public speech. I believe we're seeing examples of where the pendulum has swung too far, in the US, towards "say what you want" and we need to bump it back a bit. If it swings too far the other way I'll quickly switch my thoughts on the matter. Also, there's another dimension which I think gets immediately thrown on the floor when these discussions come up. Very rarely are people calling for controls on what can be said at any time. Instead, it's controls on what can be said to large amounts of people. Group b folks, such as myself, are not saying that we're concerned about dinner conversations. We're concerned about speech that is being amplified in a way where there's a civic responsibility to ensure that the harmful messages are not being amplified.
- physicles 6y ago
  > If it swings too far the other way I'll quickly switch my thoughts on the matter. I’m also in group b, but the danger is that if it swings too far the other way, we may have already lost the ability to speak out against _that_ and restore balance.
  - newen 6y ago
    Yep, it really feels like people are actively and willingly giving away control and free speech rights to the government and a bunch of corporations. Once the power is in their hands, it will be very difficult if not impossible to get it back.
- core-questions 6y ago
  > We're concerned about speech that is being amplified in a way where there's a civic responsibility to ensure that the harmful messages are not being amplified. Who gets to pick what is harmful, though? Why can we not choose our own gatekeepers, rather than having them foisted upon us by corporate oligarchs? The big problem here is that it is completely unreasonable and unprecedented to assume that this will be done in a transparent, consistent, open way. There will be no clear appeals process, and there's no reason to believe that the censorship won't be ideologically biased in favour of whatever is marketing best at the moment. > it's controls on what can be said to large amounts of people It's controls on what the working class can say to large amounts of people. The elite can still just go buy a newspaper or a broadcast media network, or start their own website, etc. and issue forth opinions on a grand scale. Regular folks will have to go through censors, which will end up being some combination of AI and outsourced farms of moderators in other countries or some other such Kafkaesque nightmare of business process. > there's a civic responsibility to ensure that the harmful messages are not being amplified. "harmful" is a social construct, and what is "harmful" to one group might not be to another. Which groups will be prioritized for this? How will you pick sides fairly without imposing a new dimension on whatever underlying group conflicts already exist? The problem is that what you want to do cannot be done fairly. It can only be done in a draconian way, and the result will be an even wider fracturing of dialogue in a way that doesn't result in what you want, at all.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
struct 6y ago
Free speech always requires qualifications: to foster a tolerant society you can't tolerate intolerance. Where the balance is, is hard to determine. Will Trump's supporters follow him to a new social network? Will more active moderation stem disinformation and restore civil, good-faith discourse? I don't know if platforms taking a more active role in shaping online discourse will be successful, but I know that it's essential to our society that we keep experimenting to find that balance.
drewrv 6y ago
I like to think about these issues as "website moderation policies" because that's all it boils down to. Almost all sites have moderation and for good reason. Besides all the spam and trolls good moderation helps build a community. That's why we're all here, and also why I'm selective about what subreddits I join. If a company is so powerful that their moderation policies are effectively censorship, then there is definitely a serious free speech concern. The solution is to break up the monopoly so that no one company is that powerful.
- thefucnjosh 6y ago
  Break-up doesn't stop collusion
incrudible 6y ago
Regardless of any principles one may hold, how could banning Trump from Twitter achieve anything positive? They're forcing Trump to join some more right-wing friendly site. Those are way more saturated with conspiracy stuff. In effect, Twitter is inadvertently exposing his audience to way more false information, achieving the exact opposite of what is ostensibly the goal here.
- pnw_hazor 6y ago
  Extremists will view it as positive because it reinforces one of their chief rallying cries. It will been welcomed by many as an acceleration towards violent civil unrest.
Keyframe 6y ago
I'm more interested, for now, on the platform issue itself. Barring blatantly illegal stuff, when and why should a platform like this (especially like this) itself enforce its self-made policies and act as a censor? If it's an open vox populi platform, and if something isn't illegal (as in quotable in law), why should a platform have its own police? Leave it to, err, police? Of course, that opens up a question of whose police and laws if the platform is global... However, my point is, if the platform is non-moderated, why censor on your own?
- dghlsakjg 6y ago
  Their argument is that it is borderline illegal since it could be perceived as incitement to violence given past events. The other thing is that we need to recognize that the law allows for immoral, unethical and antisocial action. "Not illegal" is an incredibly low bar, and we shouldn't necessarily strive to have the legal system get involved with community morals.
rootusrootus 6y ago
I put myself in the camp of 'free speech is good, with the singular exception of intolerance.' But it's pretty complicated. Defining intolerance, eliminating bots, etc. Not an easy task.
rmk 6y ago
For (b), why should individual companies and platforms do anything but follow the law? Many countries have laws against inciting hate speech. Others, including established democracies, have laws against sedition and such which would address this. Wouldn't someone bring a legal action based on such laws and thus end such behaviour via the proper channels, such as the Courts?
nelsondev 6y ago
Imagine there exists a perfect AI, that can tag all tweets as “true, somewhat true, somewhat false, false”, I think it would be in the public interest to allow all tweets, but tag them accordingly. We have laws against defamation, slander, incitement of violence; but no laws against lies. And I don’t think we should.
dclowd9901 6y ago
There are not two legitimate viewpoints. There is one, and many very smart people have spent a lot of time and resources figuring it out. Just like practically everything else in existence being something in the middle, it was decided that free speech is good with exceptions (your “b”, as it were). Language influences people, literally and figuratively. The mere act of knowing a different language changes how our brain works. So it’s not a stretch to understand and acknowledge that speech is powerful and can cause bad things to happen just as sure as if you did them yourself.
tomp 6y ago
Either a) (US way) or b) (EU way) are fine, but the problem is when they’re applied unfairly - supporting Antifa riots is treated as a), supporting right-wing riots is treated as b).
- allendoerfer 6y ago
  So you are effectively argueing for a).
sparrc 6y ago
in response to (a). I think too much censorship is bad, but there is some amount of censorship in every country in the world. We do censor speech in the USA. IMO we could go a little further without being at all "Orwellian". Many countries with very high levels of freedom from government intervention and freedom to vote and express themselves (mostly in Europe) have much stricter views on what constitutes speech that should be censored around hate speech and overly nationalistic speech. FWIW, while many of those countries take a stricter stance on hate speech, most of them also have a much _less_ strict stance than the USA on other forms of free expression, like nudity and swear words.
qayxc 6y ago
> Is there a proper answer for someone like me? Honestly, I don't think there is one. The problem with A is that it will lead to violence, anarchy, or brutal dictatorship if left completely unchecked and certain groups start to counter (verbal) arguments with death threats and violence. There is a school of thought that says that a free society has to accept this and basically live with the fact that it's constantly in danger due to this. But even this school of thought has one fatal flaw - its proponents lacked the information that we have now. Social media enabled psychological mechanisms that prior to its inception and widespread use were really hard to trigger. In the 20th century, mobilising the masses was hard work and required a lot of resources (printing was expensive, organising large rallies to reach many people was expensive and dangerous, ...) Today, everybody can - even without owning a smartphone or a computer or having internet access - reach literally billions via social media (e.g. by using an internet café). A single Facebook post or Whatsapp message can lead to riots and mobs that kill people [1]. These are means of communications and psychological effects that are simply unprecedented in human history. We opened Pandora's Box without even realising it. When the US constitution was written, no one had social media in mind when they wrote about free speech. The very concept that a single man could within the blink of an eye spread their message to half of mankind, unchecked, without any immediate consequences, completely anonymously was just unthinkable. The amplifying effect of digital echo chambers that suppress dissenting thought and nip constructive discourse in the bud, was yet unknown. FOMO and social media addiction didn't even enter the scientific community until just five or so years ago. It's a really complex and difficult problem and I would love to see some constructive discussion about what to do with it (especially in the mainstream media) - preferably without reducing it to an unfruitful us-vs-them. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/21/how-misinformation-whatsapp-led-deathly-mob-lynching-india/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/21/how-misin...
undersuit 6y ago
We have no right to Twitter's platform. Maybe if the US made a messaging platform we could complain about government censorship on there.
gip 6y ago
My understanding is that censorship is currently the only known way to tackle untruths leading to violence on a platform that enable viral sharing of information. In any other instance, censorship should be (is?) inconstitutional.
AI_WAIFU 6y ago
I think everyone is ignoring the nitroglycerin that's been poured onto what was originally just embers. Every single one of these social media platforms has had an enormous incentive to broadcast viral mind destroying rage-bait to everyone 24/7 for the past decade. People say that free speech needs to go, but free speech has been working fine for centuries, and allowed formerly incredibly unpopular opinions to take hold, opinions that we now take for granted. There's also plenty of historical precedent for horrible shit promptly happening right after it gets removed. The solution is not to ban wrongthinkers, or get rid of free speech. The solution is to build our civilizations communication systems in such a way that they incentivize actually productive discussion, rather than this.
- HeyImAlex 6y ago
  This seems like a paradox since broadcasting viral mind destroying rage-bait is... free speech. So what you're suggesting seems like it necessarily involves curtailing free speech.
mzs 6y ago
Sure, free market, when someone communicates in manner that does damage to it that company will deal with it.
Rapzid 6y ago
I believe the classical meaning of "free speech" as it pertain to government, democracy, and as has roots in Ancient Greece is great. The government shouldn't be able to restrict the flow of ideas or persecute people for them. I also believe that same meaning of "free speech", that binding of the government, can't also be applied to private citizens and entities. That's a paradox; you inhibit their free speech by trying to force them to be a party to others speech. I believe in very, very narrow exceptions to the above in the vein of what we currently have. I also believe private citizens and entities being able to decide collectively on what is and isn't acceptable and not giving quarter to what they deem as bad actors is.. Both good and a type of free speech. It's not perfect, and we don't always agree with it, but it seems that over time we've been living in more and more liberal, socially, times while government has become EVEN MORE tied on the subject of free speech(Larry Flint? etc). I believe it's also okay, even though I don't necessarily agree, to think we should do nothing within the public to restrict or discount others speech and opinions. But then, I'm also betting on society working that out on its own based on the above :)
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
(c) the policies of private companies that are not subject to public utility-like regulation never amount to censorship in a way that is worth wringing one's hands over.
jopsen 6y ago
News papers have published letters from readers for many years. They've had editorial standards. I don't know if this is much different -- it's faster for sure, but crazy people haven't always had a huge platform. In fact, it's seems reasonable to let people say whatever they want so long as the audience is small. And I wonder isn't that pretty much how it works today? I doubt Twitter would ban my account, if I tried to incite my 5 followers to stage a coup :D
- thefucnjosh 6y ago
  If you seem to serious about it, you should be more worried about the FBI & Secret Service than Twitter
lr4444lr 6y ago
The next step, I think is to ask yourself: if the problem cannot be solved, which world do you want to live in: the one where (a)'s downside comes true or (b)'s? I'd rather (a)'s.
elgfare 6y ago
Group A fails to address the fact that emotionally loaded speech severely dulls the rationality of most listeners. Group B requires someone to take a stand on what the different types of speech are, how we recognize them, and how each should be handled, and also what the threshold of proof for untrue statements should be. I think group A is ideal as long as the speech holds a certain level of rationality, but that limitation sort of moves it into group B since it's now subjective. I think it boils down to: If we are unable to agree on even the simplest rules for our discourse there's no way to prevent the discourse from collapsing.
Nursie 6y ago
> You should counter bad arguments with better arguments. When the people making those arguments, and the people consuming them, are not interested in "better" or even "factual", then this is an exercise in pointlessness. People are motivated to disseminate and believe in things which fit their worldview, and they will continue to do so regardless of little things like counter-arguments or even provable facts that outright contradict their fantasies. They will continue to disseminate things they know to be false as it fits their narrative. The marketplace of ideas is a failure in the age of social media.
jtdev 6y ago
History has shown that censorship leads to violence in the long-run.
- Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
  We will see violence almost immediately.
whiddershins 6y ago
The criminal justice system has very fierce teeth to address B. Inciting violence and conspiracy are both crimes. This is an attempt to intervene on a different level and I’m unsure why exactly we feel the FBI, DOJ, Secret Service, etc. aren’t up to this task.
yibg 6y ago
I think there is too much equating free speech with consequence free speech. What we are seeing recently is (mostly) consequence free speech. The trump camp has been able to make blatantly false claims without any accountability (mostly, there are some threats and actual defamation lawsuits now). The bar needs to be relatively high, but I think there needs to be more consequences, especially for public officials, in spreading blatantly false information. We already have this in some places anyways, like courts. Why can’t we apply this more stringently for government officials?
boringg 6y ago
I will say the real challenge with true free speech is the people who abuse the meaning of it compound that with people who make money on viewership. They have no incentive to tell the truth since they make money on getting the most attention. It really leads down a disheartening future where truth doesn't matter but viewership volume does. I'd like to think most people take the quality of their content (i.e. truth and thought) as important to how they consume. All data currently points to the latter in terms of quality of content. I am concerned for the world my children and my children's children will be raised in if this trajectory keeps going.
MichaelMoser123 6y ago
> Does anybody have a solution to the bigger underlying question of de-platforming and censorship on online platforms? the still sitting president of the USA could open a channel in telegramm (no censorship at all right now), or he could use a russian service like livejournal or vkontakte (they wouldn't have a case to ban him), but I guess that's all he could do right now. Update: he can no longer use parler, that has been removed from both app store and google play. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/parler-removed-from-google-play-store-as-apple-app-store-suspension-reportedly-looms/ar-BB1cB6ny https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/parler-removed-fro... it seems like banning platforms wholesale is the logical next step; so usage of alternative platforms might not be a solution.
- FemmeAndroid 6y ago
  As your link says, it has been removed from the Google Play store but not the App Store.
  - MichaelMoser123 6y ago
    the title "...Apple App Store suspension reportedly looms". Some paranoid souls might be suspecting some level of coordination here.
diveanon 6y ago
Hold platforms accountable for the radicals they create. Imagine how different the world would be if Facebook faced consequences for the genocide it helped facilitate in Myanmar. These companies will only ever respond to a loss of revenue, which is why you are seeing these bans now instead of 5 years ago. Twitter helped create this mess, and now people have died and our country was a few guards and a chair barricade away from an actual coup.
- thefucnjosh 6y ago
  this
username3 6y ago
Here’s the solution, lost in noise. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24263815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24263815
mch82 6y ago
The constitutional scholar perspective: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/28/trump-is-doubly-wrong-about-twitter/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/28/trump-is-...
breatheoften 6y ago
A platform is demonstrably different than speech in real-world terms. It is simply not possible to 'say' something while you are sitting on the toilet to 70 million people within a few seconds. The idea that 'a platform' and 'speech' must be treated the same is ultimately a kind of class warfare -- its a false comparison that serves to benefit the rich (in this case, rich in terms of platform reach) by pretending that any attempts to place restrictions on the use of mega-platforms must necessarily imply new restrictions on the speech of the vast majority of people without such reach.
beefield 6y ago
A is demonstrably and blatantly dangerous approach for society. Thus we must consider option B, and due to all risks associated with that, we must be damn sure that the institutions responsible for managing the discussion are and will stay accountable and transparent towards the public. Are we there? Hell no.
jl2718 6y ago
I think it’s called up/down voting.
tim333 6y ago
Maybe chill out about deplatfoming? Any one can put up a website for about $10 with whatever text on they want and if twitter.com or facebook.com chose not to have the text of your choice go to another site.

mrlala 6y ago

>Does anybody have a solution to the bigger underlying question of de-platforming and censorship on online platforms? Well as far as politics is concerned.. the US Government (and other governments) should make their own twitter like platforms which every active representative has an account, and ANYTHING (barring pure illegal) can be posted. It doesn't even need to have an actual user base, it can just be somewhere to go to see what your politician is thinking. In terms of the average person? There is no solution for one that is owned by a corporation. An offshoot of the above is the government could make a social media site that is covered under "free speech that the government cannot take away" and anything not blatantly illegal can be posted/said. I would not advocate for this though.. I think we have plenty of options. But the one for politicians only is something that should be seriously considered.

allendoerfer 6y ago
That's a bad idea, because you are cementing power. It would be hard for contenders to get into office. The incumbents already have a bigger platform they can leverage. I was also getting at the fact, that Twitter, being a private company or not, basically became infrastructure and was thinking about how it should behave, whether that would be enforced by laws or not.
- medium_burrito 6y ago
  A highly scaleable free Twitter clone for the entire world run by the US government could be built in a year or two on AWS. If you don't need to build the giant ad network, it's much simpler.
bryananderson 6y ago
This exists. The government provides the President, the executive departments, and each Senator and Representative with their own websites. They may issue any kind of communications there, including setting up blogs or microblogs.
wizzard 6y ago
> Well as far as politics is concerned.. the US Government (and other governments) should make their own twitter like platforms which every active representative has an account, and ANYTHING (barring pure illegal) can be posted. > It doesn't even need to have an actual user base, it can just be somewhere to go to see what your politician is thinking. That's just called a blog. The value of social media for politicians is the "social" part.
- mrlala 6y ago
  >That's just called a blog. The value of social media for politicians is the "social" part. Actually no, the "value" in Twitter for politicians is * Short succinct messages - people don't want to read a book from their politician for every issue. If it's important and does need more, then they tweet the image of more text or whatever. But most of the time a simple headline does suffice. Otherwise twitter wouldn't be where it is. * The tweet can be linked from anywhere else on the internet, and everyone "knows" what it should look like and can basically distinguish reality from fake stuff * Like the above, it's uniform and simple. Someone else commented to me that each politician has access to a website or something. Did anyone else know this? I sure didn't, yet I've seen a billion links to twitter for politicians. * It would be really sad to learn that politicans are reading replies to their tweets. I don't know how they could get anything else done. Have you ever scanned through a twitter thread from any one of trump's tweets? There is nothing of value, and it's so invaluable that I bet you everyone in the world would be better off with read-only tweets from politicians!

africanboy 6y ago

maybe deplatforming politicians (all of them, no matter their role) it's not a bad thing. there's an entire industry devoted to collect and spread their words, they certainly don't need twitter to be heard.

AgentME 6y ago
Politicians aren't the only ones spreading dangerous misinformation and conspiracy theories. They also aren't uniformly doing it; what prominent left-wing politicians are doing so? This is just a lazy both-sides position but this isn't something that both sides are guilty of.
- africanboy 6y ago
  aren't we talking about Trump here? I never said right or left though, I've said all of them, even though from an American point of view I would be described as a "communist" (it wouldn't be far from the truth TBF ...) I am as far away from Trump as the Star Wars galaxy is from us. Politicians already have a platform, and the platform is "being a politician"
  - AgentME 6y ago
    It's a big leap to go from <Trump gets banned for inviting violence through deliberate misinformation> to <while we're at it, let's ban all politicians because they're similar>. Most politicians have nothing in common with what Trump is being banned for. Politicians are some of the people most engaged with politics, and I don't think such a large chilling effect fully across the subject of politics would be good for people. There are policies and changes from the status quo that I think are very important to improve society (healthcare for all, addressing climate change) and I don't think removing the most influential voices discussing and pushing these would be good for these kinds of goals, or improve sites like Twitter.
    - africanboy 6y ago
      that's not what I've said at all. Elected officials shouldn't be in social networks not because they are all like Trump, but because they represent the people and don't need to be influencers or to have followers, they serve the people. if they want to be heard, they can speak with their actions and their messagge will spread on social networks through the people that supports them, the press whose job is to report what they do and official press conferences that have a wide coverage on media outlets. politicians shouldn't talk "directly to the people" because it's a lie and a distraction, we spend (waste) more time talking about what they tweet and policing what they tweet about than about what they actually do! they are not common people and shouldn't be treated like they were. they can have a social network account for their party and for their press office to report on their activities and that would be it. you would be surprised to know that Angela Merkel has closed her Facebook account with more than 2.5 million folowers. Also, social network accounts are one of the best way to leak private (or secret) informations. back to Frau Merkel, her Instagram account (which is actually the official account of Die Bundeskanzlerin) has ben targeted by Russian hackers from day 1 and they've also stolen documens from computers in the German Parliament. why risk it? last but not least, social networks are private companies and don't treat users equally, they offer their propaganda platform to some but not to others. for example Hassan Rhouani, Xi Jinping, Bashar Al-Assad, Kim Jong-un, they are all on Facebook, but not their oppositions and people of those countries are severely limited in the access to social networks or internet in general. so why give them a global platform? because they can pay? I say let's ban politicians and solve it. great powers -> great responsibilities

Legion 6y ago

> You should counter bad arguments with better arguments We've witnessed the fallacy of this argument. It assumes a level of rationality that has been proven to be unreasonable to assume. The problem isn't that "better" arguments aren't reaching people. Rather, we have watched people exercise an incredible ability to discard overwhelming evidence and embrace narratives that have literally zero evidence to support them (or, in fact, have been repeatedly disproven and debunked). In that kind of environment, "counter bad arguments with better arguments" is hopelessly naive.

totony 6y ago
The alternative, which is to prevent the spread of "bad arguments" is dystopian
- klank 6y ago
  That's hyperbole. If taken too far, sure. But, if we took our attempt to eliminate murder too far, it'd be equally dystopian. Your statement is not unique to speech.
  - totony 6y ago
    Murder is quite easy to define, whereas bad speech/bad argument seems so much more nuanced. I don't think it's an hyperbole moreso than the logical consequence of such a thought.
    - jackson1442 6y ago
      > Murder is quite easy to define Is it? Would someone refusing to wear a mask, provably resulting in them asymptomatically infecting someone with COVID-19 be charged with negligent manslaughter? This is something that people have been debating. Many actions humans can take could kill another. Only a subset of these are regarded as murder/manslaughter.
      - klank 6y ago

wmf 6y ago

We could start by not ignoring recommendation/amplification algorithms, especially when they clearly amplify bad arguments and obscure better arguments.

option 6y ago

most Americans never lived in a totalitarian state. Totalitarian state starts when the freedom of speech is gone. It would be a humongous loss to weaken or lose freedom of speech. As someone who lived in USSR, I am am always on the side of the freedom of speech. Of course I never supported Trump, but I think the consequences of normalizing censorship will be far more damaging then whatever he has to say. Once you’ve lived in a totalitarian state it is obvious. I hope people who didn’t live in such states would look at the world history and learn.

allendoerfer 6y ago
In Germany you cannot advertise nazism, which you can in America. This restriction of free speech in Germany is exactly put in place to prevent a totalitarian state.
- busterarm 6y ago
  I found it interesting that the last time I was in Berlin, about a year ago, I kept finding the same stickers everywhere being used for vandalism, initially with an anti-fascist message and then just as many cleverly scratched over to change the message to anti-Semitic hate speech. Equally interesting was that these things were everywhere and none of the locals I was with had ever seen them before. Out of sight, out of mind.
- option 6y ago
  I am not convinced that it helps preventing totalitarian state, quite the contrary.
- valenterry 6y ago
  It's a bad idea to do that. To prevent a totalitarian state, there should be general and abstract rules that prevent advertising things that lead to a totalitarian state. Having specific restrictions for nazism can have the opposite effect: people think everything is fine because there is no nazism, but other groups, using similar dangerous schemes will not be regarded as dangerous.
dghlsakjg 6y ago

tylermenezes 6y ago

> Does anybody have a solution Yes. Get rid of newsfeed algorithms that optimize recommendations for engagement. It won't solve our current problem, but that's what cause it. They took pg's Fluff Principal and weaponized it.

dexen 6y ago
>Get rid of newsfeed algorithms that optimize recommendations for engagement. A reasonable proposition, and it would indeed fix the problem of clickbait/outragebait content. Locally. People who profit from clickbait/outragebait content would migrate to other platforms that do optimize for engagment, and the cycle begins anew. Thus it doesn't fix the problem globally. A hybrid solution might be possible if all (or most) service providers agreed to certain baseline restrictions on algorithmic optimization for engagement. Probably unrealistic, because there would be all incentives to cheat any such agreement in subtle ways. While I don't like various problems associated with it, I support the principle of freedom of speech.
- polishdude20 6y ago
  I think to fix this sort of thing, it all comes down to a person's principles. I think we've failed to teach young people about what is right and wrong and why. You can have the government applying blanket control over things to prevent bad actors and disinformation in society. You can also teach people from a young age what is right and wrong so that when they grow up and are in positions to make these decisions, they won't need blanket decree by the government saying "no you can't do this". The topic may come up in a boardroom and everyone ideally would say "what the fuck? That's not a good idea. Let's not do that because it's wrong even if it makes us money". This is more of a bottom-up approach which can take a few decades to show results. With that argument, I'd be inclined to look back on the last 20-60 years. What have we been teaching/instilling in our population when they were young? I look at the stuff that's happening as a symptom of a long history where we dropped the ball repeatedly.
Timothycquinn 6y ago
Agreed, that is a significant cause. However, that must coincide with a updated monetization model for the platforms to account for the inevitable drop in user engagement. This free platforms model is a hot mess.

klank 6y ago

I'm squarely in group b, however, I don't think it's an actual dichotomy in the way you present it. I think American's fetishize "free speech" which leads to a "hyper group a" that argues since censorship is scary (which it is) we'd rather face any other conceivable consequence rather than wrestle with the hard questions of what is appropriate vs. inappropriate public speech. I believe we're seeing examples of where the pendulum has swung too far, in the US, towards "say what you want" and we need to bump it back a bit. If it swings too far the other way I'll quickly switch my thoughts on the matter. Also, there's another dimension which I think gets immediately thrown on the floor when these discussions come up. Very rarely are people calling for controls on what can be said at any time. Instead, it's controls on what can be said to large amounts of people. Group b folks, such as myself, are not saying that we're concerned about dinner conversations. We're concerned about speech that is being amplified in a way where there's a civic responsibility to ensure that the harmful messages are not being amplified.

physicles 6y ago
> If it swings too far the other way I'll quickly switch my thoughts on the matter. I’m also in group b, but the danger is that if it swings too far the other way, we may have already lost the ability to speak out against _that_ and restore balance.
- newen 6y ago
  Yep, it really feels like people are actively and willingly giving away control and free speech rights to the government and a bunch of corporations. Once the power is in their hands, it will be very difficult if not impossible to get it back.
core-questions 6y ago
> We're concerned about speech that is being amplified in a way where there's a civic responsibility to ensure that the harmful messages are not being amplified. Who gets to pick what is harmful, though? Why can we not choose our own gatekeepers, rather than having them foisted upon us by corporate oligarchs? The big problem here is that it is completely unreasonable and unprecedented to assume that this will be done in a transparent, consistent, open way. There will be no clear appeals process, and there's no reason to believe that the censorship won't be ideologically biased in favour of whatever is marketing best at the moment. > it's controls on what can be said to large amounts of people It's controls on what the working class can say to large amounts of people. The elite can still just go buy a newspaper or a broadcast media network, or start their own website, etc. and issue forth opinions on a grand scale. Regular folks will have to go through censors, which will end up being some combination of AI and outsourced farms of moderators in other countries or some other such Kafkaesque nightmare of business process. > there's a civic responsibility to ensure that the harmful messages are not being amplified. "harmful" is a social construct, and what is "harmful" to one group might not be to another. Which groups will be prioritized for this? How will you pick sides fairly without imposing a new dimension on whatever underlying group conflicts already exist? The problem is that what you want to do cannot be done fairly. It can only be done in a draconian way, and the result will be an even wider fracturing of dialogue in a way that doesn't result in what you want, at all.

deleted 6y ago

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struct 6y ago

Free speech always requires qualifications: to foster a tolerant society you can't tolerate intolerance. Where the balance is, is hard to determine. Will Trump's supporters follow him to a new social network? Will more active moderation stem disinformation and restore civil, good-faith discourse? I don't know if platforms taking a more active role in shaping online discourse will be successful, but I know that it's essential to our society that we keep experimenting to find that balance.

drewrv 6y ago

I like to think about these issues as "website moderation policies" because that's all it boils down to. Almost all sites have moderation and for good reason. Besides all the spam and trolls good moderation helps build a community. That's why we're all here, and also why I'm selective about what subreddits I join. If a company is so powerful that their moderation policies are effectively censorship, then there is definitely a serious free speech concern. The solution is to break up the monopoly so that no one company is that powerful.

thefucnjosh 6y ago
Break-up doesn't stop collusion

incrudible 6y ago

Regardless of any principles one may hold, how could banning Trump from Twitter achieve anything positive? They're forcing Trump to join some more right-wing friendly site. Those are way more saturated with conspiracy stuff. In effect, Twitter is inadvertently exposing his audience to way more false information, achieving the exact opposite of what is ostensibly the goal here.

pnw_hazor 6y ago
Extremists will view it as positive because it reinforces one of their chief rallying cries. It will been welcomed by many as an acceleration towards violent civil unrest.

Keyframe 6y ago

I'm more interested, for now, on the platform issue itself. Barring blatantly illegal stuff, when and why should a platform like this (especially like this) itself enforce its self-made policies and act as a censor? If it's an open vox populi platform, and if something isn't illegal (as in quotable in law), why should a platform have its own police? Leave it to, err, police? Of course, that opens up a question of whose police and laws if the platform is global... However, my point is, if the platform is non-moderated, why censor on your own?

dghlsakjg 6y ago
Their argument is that it is borderline illegal since it could be perceived as incitement to violence given past events. The other thing is that we need to recognize that the law allows for immoral, unethical and antisocial action. "Not illegal" is an incredibly low bar, and we shouldn't necessarily strive to have the legal system get involved with community morals.

rootusrootus 6y ago

I put myself in the camp of 'free speech is good, with the singular exception of intolerance.' But it's pretty complicated. Defining intolerance, eliminating bots, etc. Not an easy task.

rmk 6y ago

For (b), why should individual companies and platforms do anything but follow the law? Many countries have laws against inciting hate speech. Others, including established democracies, have laws against sedition and such which would address this. Wouldn't someone bring a legal action based on such laws and thus end such behaviour via the proper channels, such as the Courts?

nelsondev 6y ago

Imagine there exists a perfect AI, that can tag all tweets as “true, somewhat true, somewhat false, false”, I think it would be in the public interest to allow all tweets, but tag them accordingly. We have laws against defamation, slander, incitement of violence; but no laws against lies. And I don’t think we should.

dclowd9901 6y ago

There are not two legitimate viewpoints. There is one, and many very smart people have spent a lot of time and resources figuring it out. Just like practically everything else in existence being something in the middle, it was decided that free speech is good with exceptions (your “b”, as it were). Language influences people, literally and figuratively. The mere act of knowing a different language changes how our brain works. So it’s not a stretch to understand and acknowledge that speech is powerful and can cause bad things to happen just as sure as if you did them yourself.

tomp 6y ago

Either a) (US way) or b) (EU way) are fine, but the problem is when they’re applied unfairly - supporting Antifa riots is treated as a), supporting right-wing riots is treated as b).

allendoerfer 6y ago
So you are effectively argueing for a).

sparrc 6y ago

in response to (a). I think too much censorship is bad, but there is some amount of censorship in every country in the world. We do censor speech in the USA. IMO we could go a little further without being at all "Orwellian". Many countries with very high levels of freedom from government intervention and freedom to vote and express themselves (mostly in Europe) have much stricter views on what constitutes speech that should be censored around hate speech and overly nationalistic speech. FWIW, while many of those countries take a stricter stance on hate speech, most of them also have a much _less_ strict stance than the USA on other forms of free expression, like nudity and swear words.

qayxc 6y ago

> Is there a proper answer for someone like me? Honestly, I don't think there is one. The problem with A is that it will lead to violence, anarchy, or brutal dictatorship if left completely unchecked and certain groups start to counter (verbal) arguments with death threats and violence. There is a school of thought that says that a free society has to accept this and basically live with the fact that it's constantly in danger due to this. But even this school of thought has one fatal flaw - its proponents lacked the information that we have now. Social media enabled psychological mechanisms that prior to its inception and widespread use were really hard to trigger. In the 20th century, mobilising the masses was hard work and required a lot of resources (printing was expensive, organising large rallies to reach many people was expensive and dangerous, ...) Today, everybody can - even without owning a smartphone or a computer or having internet access - reach literally billions via social media (e.g. by using an internet café). A single Facebook post or Whatsapp message can lead to riots and mobs that kill people [1]. These are means of communications and psychological effects that are simply unprecedented in human history. We opened Pandora's Box without even realising it. When the US constitution was written, no one had social media in mind when they wrote about free speech. The very concept that a single man could within the blink of an eye spread their message to half of mankind, unchecked, without any immediate consequences, completely anonymously was just unthinkable. The amplifying effect of digital echo chambers that suppress dissenting thought and nip constructive discourse in the bud, was yet unknown. FOMO and social media addiction didn't even enter the scientific community until just five or so years ago. It's a really complex and difficult problem and I would love to see some constructive discussion about what to do with it (especially in the mainstream media) - preferably without reducing it to an unfruitful us-vs-them. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/21/how-misinformation-whatsapp-led-deathly-mob-lynching-india/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/21/how-misin...

undersuit 6y ago

We have no right to Twitter's platform. Maybe if the US made a messaging platform we could complain about government censorship on there.

gip 6y ago

My understanding is that censorship is currently the only known way to tackle untruths leading to violence on a platform that enable viral sharing of information. In any other instance, censorship should be (is?) inconstitutional.

AI_WAIFU 6y ago

I think everyone is ignoring the nitroglycerin that's been poured onto what was originally just embers. Every single one of these social media platforms has had an enormous incentive to broadcast viral mind destroying rage-bait to everyone 24/7 for the past decade. People say that free speech needs to go, but free speech has been working fine for centuries, and allowed formerly incredibly unpopular opinions to take hold, opinions that we now take for granted. There's also plenty of historical precedent for horrible shit promptly happening right after it gets removed. The solution is not to ban wrongthinkers, or get rid of free speech. The solution is to build our civilizations communication systems in such a way that they incentivize actually productive discussion, rather than this.

HeyImAlex 6y ago
This seems like a paradox since broadcasting viral mind destroying rage-bait is... free speech. So what you're suggesting seems like it necessarily involves curtailing free speech.

mzs 6y ago

Sure, free market, when someone communicates in manner that does damage to it that company will deal with it.

Rapzid 6y ago

I believe the classical meaning of "free speech" as it pertain to government, democracy, and as has roots in Ancient Greece is great. The government shouldn't be able to restrict the flow of ideas or persecute people for them. I also believe that same meaning of "free speech", that binding of the government, can't also be applied to private citizens and entities. That's a paradox; you inhibit their free speech by trying to force them to be a party to others speech. I believe in very, very narrow exceptions to the above in the vein of what we currently have. I also believe private citizens and entities being able to decide collectively on what is and isn't acceptable and not giving quarter to what they deem as bad actors is.. Both good and a type of free speech. It's not perfect, and we don't always agree with it, but it seems that over time we've been living in more and more liberal, socially, times while government has become EVEN MORE tied on the subject of free speech(Larry Flint? etc). I believe it's also okay, even though I don't necessarily agree, to think we should do nothing within the public to restrict or discount others speech and opinions. But then, I'm also betting on society working that out on its own based on the above :)

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

(c) the policies of private companies that are not subject to public utility-like regulation never amount to censorship in a way that is worth wringing one's hands over.

jopsen 6y ago

News papers have published letters from readers for many years. They've had editorial standards. I don't know if this is much different -- it's faster for sure, but crazy people haven't always had a huge platform. In fact, it's seems reasonable to let people say whatever they want so long as the audience is small. And I wonder isn't that pretty much how it works today? I doubt Twitter would ban my account, if I tried to incite my 5 followers to stage a coup :D

thefucnjosh 6y ago
If you seem to serious about it, you should be more worried about the FBI & Secret Service than Twitter

lr4444lr 6y ago

The next step, I think is to ask yourself: if the problem cannot be solved, which world do you want to live in: the one where (a)'s downside comes true or (b)'s? I'd rather (a)'s.

elgfare 6y ago

Group A fails to address the fact that emotionally loaded speech severely dulls the rationality of most listeners. Group B requires someone to take a stand on what the different types of speech are, how we recognize them, and how each should be handled, and also what the threshold of proof for untrue statements should be. I think group A is ideal as long as the speech holds a certain level of rationality, but that limitation sort of moves it into group B since it's now subjective. I think it boils down to: If we are unable to agree on even the simplest rules for our discourse there's no way to prevent the discourse from collapsing.

Nursie 6y ago

> You should counter bad arguments with better arguments. When the people making those arguments, and the people consuming them, are not interested in "better" or even "factual", then this is an exercise in pointlessness. People are motivated to disseminate and believe in things which fit their worldview, and they will continue to do so regardless of little things like counter-arguments or even provable facts that outright contradict their fantasies. They will continue to disseminate things they know to be false as it fits their narrative. The marketplace of ideas is a failure in the age of social media.

jtdev 6y ago

History has shown that censorship leads to violence in the long-run.

Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
We will see violence almost immediately.

whiddershins 6y ago

The criminal justice system has very fierce teeth to address B. Inciting violence and conspiracy are both crimes. This is an attempt to intervene on a different level and I’m unsure why exactly we feel the FBI, DOJ, Secret Service, etc. aren’t up to this task.

yibg 6y ago

I think there is too much equating free speech with consequence free speech. What we are seeing recently is (mostly) consequence free speech. The trump camp has been able to make blatantly false claims without any accountability (mostly, there are some threats and actual defamation lawsuits now). The bar needs to be relatively high, but I think there needs to be more consequences, especially for public officials, in spreading blatantly false information. We already have this in some places anyways, like courts. Why can’t we apply this more stringently for government officials?

boringg 6y ago

I will say the real challenge with true free speech is the people who abuse the meaning of it compound that with people who make money on viewership. They have no incentive to tell the truth since they make money on getting the most attention. It really leads down a disheartening future where truth doesn't matter but viewership volume does. I'd like to think most people take the quality of their content (i.e. truth and thought) as important to how they consume. All data currently points to the latter in terms of quality of content. I am concerned for the world my children and my children's children will be raised in if this trajectory keeps going.

MichaelMoser123 6y ago

> Does anybody have a solution to the bigger underlying question of de-platforming and censorship on online platforms? the still sitting president of the USA could open a channel in telegramm (no censorship at all right now), or he could use a russian service like livejournal or vkontakte (they wouldn't have a case to ban him), but I guess that's all he could do right now. Update: he can no longer use parler, that has been removed from both app store and google play. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/parler-removed-from-google-play-store-as-apple-app-store-suspension-reportedly-looms/ar-BB1cB6ny https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/parler-removed-fro... it seems like banning platforms wholesale is the logical next step; so usage of alternative platforms might not be a solution.

FemmeAndroid 6y ago
As your link says, it has been removed from the Google Play store but not the App Store.
- MichaelMoser123 6y ago
  the title "...Apple App Store suspension reportedly looms". Some paranoid souls might be suspecting some level of coordination here.

diveanon 6y ago

Hold platforms accountable for the radicals they create. Imagine how different the world would be if Facebook faced consequences for the genocide it helped facilitate in Myanmar. These companies will only ever respond to a loss of revenue, which is why you are seeing these bans now instead of 5 years ago. Twitter helped create this mess, and now people have died and our country was a few guards and a chair barricade away from an actual coup.

thefucnjosh 6y ago
this

username3 6y ago

Here’s the solution, lost in noise. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24263815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24263815

mch82 6y ago

The constitutional scholar perspective: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/28/trump-is-doubly-wrong-about-twitter/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/28/trump-is-...

breatheoften 6y ago

A platform is demonstrably different than speech in real-world terms. It is simply not possible to 'say' something while you are sitting on the toilet to 70 million people within a few seconds. The idea that 'a platform' and 'speech' must be treated the same is ultimately a kind of class warfare -- its a false comparison that serves to benefit the rich (in this case, rich in terms of platform reach) by pretending that any attempts to place restrictions on the use of mega-platforms must necessarily imply new restrictions on the speech of the vast majority of people without such reach.

beefield 6y ago

A is demonstrably and blatantly dangerous approach for society. Thus we must consider option B, and due to all risks associated with that, we must be damn sure that the institutions responsible for managing the discussion are and will stay accountable and transparent towards the public. Are we there? Hell no.

jl2718 6y ago

I think it’s called up/down voting.

tim333 6y ago

Maybe chill out about deplatfoming? Any one can put up a website for about $10 with whatever text on they want and if twitter.com or facebook.com chose not to have the text of your choice go to another site.