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It's not censorship, it's free market. These are private companies.
by roberto 6y ago
It's not censorship, it's free market. These are private companies.
- systemvoltage 6y agoAren't these conservative principles? Like Gov shouldn't have any business in private company's affairs?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Barrin92 6y agoIt was until liberals started to run big businesses, that wasn't supposed to happen, so now companies engaging in freedom of association is actually socialism. Those hippies and nerds weren't supposed to run the show
- osgovernment 6y agoPartially, regulation is one thing but being able to kick someone out of your establishment is also part of the law that has been upheld by the Supreme Court and in the constitution. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of communication platforms on the Internet. If Twitter was the only communication platform, then I would be very upset about this decision. There are some companies that I do not think should be allowed to ban people, like ISPs.. since many times people don't have choices between multiple high-speed ISPs. However, Twitter is not in that same category.
- systemvoltage 6y agoOk, so ISP's shouldn't ban people but they're allowed to be monopolies in the first place!? Internet and critical infrastructure is not considered utilities, let private enterprise take care of the most important connection to the outside world - the internet. What could go wrong!? Note clearly - I am not condoning ISPs banning people. I am highlighting the hypocracy in a lot of contemporary conservative principles. It's not the Lincoln party we know of.
- ebilgenius 6y agoFree market principles, at least. But regardless of the political orientation of the view, it always seems to last only as long as they happen to agree with the political implications of the company's decisions
- mhh__ 6y agoThat depends on what case the C is in. Many self-identifying conservatives do not believe in anything close to a free-market, or freedom in general.
- jkhdigital 6y agoNone of these monstrous corporations would exist in anything resembling their current form without a tremendous amount of regulation that entangles government deeply in the affairs of these private companies. So that ship has sailed, you might say.
- jpxw 6y agoYou realise that it’s possible for entities outside of the government to censor things, right? That word isn’t only applicable to state actions, and nor should it be.
- bargl 6y agoIt's legal for entities outside the government to censor things. IANAL so if I'm wrong let me know. But my understanding is that censorship is perfectly fine for any company.
- jpxw 6y agoThere’s a difference between what is legal and what is morally correct.
- crowbahr 6y agoEncouraging violent insurrection against the legally elected congress isn't moral either.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bargl 6y agoAgreed. And these companies are following what they believe is morally correct. Also, this isn't going to be effective Parler is a website, people can just browse to it in Chrome/Safari... We should be promoting apps that encourage and promote healthy discourse between people not echo chambers, but that's what I think is morally correct.
- xyzzyz 6y agoIt's (typically) perfectly legal, but not necessarily perfectly fine.
- ng12 6y agoPrivate market censorship is legal w.r.t. the first amendment. If it's good for society is a separate question.
- kortilla 6y agoOf course it’s censorship. Censorship has nothing to do with who is doing it. Whether a private company suppresses communication or the government does it, it’s still censorship.
- danijelb 6y agoSo the government should be able to force your business to do something against your will? That doesn't sound like free market of which USA, and particularly conservatives, are so proud of.
- leereeves 6y agoThe government forces businesses to do things against their will all the time. So much so that most big businesses have compliance departments to ensure they're doing everything the government requires them to do. In fact there have been many laws requiring companies to carry messages against their will, including the Fairness Doctrine, the Equal-Time Rule, and Common Carrier laws, as well as the failed, but generally regarded as Constitutional, Net Neutrality proposals.
- djsumdog 6y agoThe FDA forces food standards. Should the government really be able to prevent a farm from cutting your meat with sawdust? Should government really keep pharma companies from selling you pills that are filled with snake oil? Should a government really force you to allow black people to eat at the same tables in your restaurant as white people? It's your business after all and it's private. You should have a choice on which customers you get to serve.
- manfredo 6y agoThe above poster does have an important point: Freedom from speech also includes freedom from compelled speech. The things you listed entail selling materially defective good, and discrimination on the basis of race and gender. These are not examples of compelled speech. Here are some more applicable questions: * Can the government force Hacker News not to flag and hide certain posts? * And the government make a bookseller to stock certain types of books? * Could Trump pass a law or executive order to make Twitter revoke his ban? * Can the government official compel a newspaper to print certain content? The last one was actually addressed in a Supreme Court ruling [1]. Freedom of speech includes freedom from compelled speech. It's also against the law to tell a person or business to print or say something, or not ban certain content. Sure, if a business exclusively bans content based on the race of the poster they they could fall afoul of anti-discrimination laws. But note that it wasn't the content of the speech that matters here, it is the discriminatory nature on the basis of race. These protections don't magically go away when a company grows to a certain size or number of users. Market share is relevant to things like anti-trust and anti-competitive behavior, but the people claiming that Facebook or Twitter have to run content because they're big are incorrect. The exceptions to protection from compelled speech are very narrow, like showing your passport at the border and nutrition labels on food or health warnings on cigarettes. They almost always have a direct and tangible safety or administrative justification. Furthermore, political speech is the most protected form of speech in the US by far. I would be astounded if we ever pass legislation compelling platforms like Facebook or Twitter to host content against their will. I agree that the principles of inclusion and freedom of speech should be upheld by Facebook and Twitter, but I strongly disagree that they should be enforced by the government. I could see wisdom in making ISPs, payment providers, and DNS providers act like utilities and extend services to all lawful customers, but not at the application layer. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Herald_Publishing_Co._v._Tornillo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Herald_Publishing_Co._v....
- dumbfounder 6y agoCensorship - noun the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security. It is censorship. But not all censorship is bad.
- ekianjo 6y ago> But not all censorship is bad. pretty much all dictators agree with you on that.
- dumbfounder 6y agoBut not child porn purveyors.
- newguy1234 6y agoI know if I was a dictator, I would definitely agree with it!
- greatgirl 6y agoPretty much all dictators breath, too.
- bun_at_work 6y agoYeah this is a valid point here. If you think it should be illegal to yell "fire" in a crowded theater, you're a dictator. If you think it should be illegal to create/sell/distribute child porn, you're a dictator. Nice false equivalence. The US is divided right now because of bad faith arguments like this.
- ekianjo 6y agoInteresting how you cherry picked political speech out.
- tatrajim 6y agoThat's what I saw daily under military dictatorship in South Korea in the 1970s and 80s. My Time magazine would arrive with gaping holes where pages had been cut out. These days the scissors in the US are virtual, but the goal is the same: suppression of political speech and news deemed heretical to one's ideological viewpoint. If you approve of censorship. try China, all the public rhetoric is very clean and faultlessly progressive.
- zbrozek 6y agoWhy does one mean it isn't the other? Clearly it's both. It's just not government censorship, for which there's a bit of text in the US bill of rights.
- kome 6y agoprivate companies censor things all the time. it's still called censure.
- roenxi 6y agoYou are literally wrong, unfortunately. Censure is quite different from censorship.
- option 6y agowhat’s would be your argument when utility cuts off water to your house? Or you will go to another company?
- lovecg 6y agoLet me introduce you to centuries of thinking on this subject and the concept of “natural monopoly”.
- shrimp_emoji 6y agoAgreed: Internet, like water, is a market failure and should be a public utility. c: That way, your DDoS protection & hosting is subject to First Amendment protections.
- ng12 6y agoWe spent the last four years waxing philosophical about how social media influenced the 2016 election, I think it's time to admit that these aren't _just_ private companies and there's a very real risk that this wave of censorship has far-ranging consequences.
- adamsea 6y agoMaybe there should be government regulation. That’s my personal opinion. Or laws to create and define new category for social media alongside publishers and news organizations.
- that_guy_iain 6y agoIt's not really a free market that's why these tech companies all have anti trust investigations. This is censorship. It's just censorship lots of us agree with.
- mlindner 6y agoSomething can be censorship and also free market. Don't create false dichotomies.
- bluescrn 6y agoPrivate companies with more power and influence than governments, and little serious competition.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- goldenkey 6y agoPrivate companies in the same sense that Marx described democratic capitalism as the best outcome for corporations because it provides the illusion of separation while being unduly connected through monetary incentives?
- jjordan 6y agoYes, it absolutely is censorship. And a massively coordinated effort at that.
- mhh__ 6y agoGot a source for that?
- sillycon-valley 6y agoI get the flow. "Make your own Twitter" Ok... hard to get the network effect, but... done. "Banned. Make your own Apple" Uhm... we can't, they are a monopoly like you guys say everyday. It's legal, but definitely not right.
- djsumdog 6y agoIt's corporate censorship and not government censorship. Corporate censorship is legal to a point. We see now Corporate and State are highly aligned in every possible way. The party Big Tech supports now has control over the House, the Senate and the Executive Branch. In which fantasy world is the consolidation of power ever good for a democracy?
- neekleer 6y agoThe free market approach requires antitrust. It's disingenuous to defer to free market rules when we have big government and big tech so deeply entrenched and largely unchecked.
- EMRZ 6y agoWait until Google starts blocking URLs in Chrome and Android to protect you from "harmful" content. Maybe Facebook can join and block in WhatsApp too. Hey it's free market, private company product yay!
- proc0 6y agoCensorship opposes the free market of ideas. Maybe it's a private company, but it doesn't make sense to use that principle to justify a behavior that kills free markets, economic or not. At best it's hypocritical, taking advantage of competition at the market level, but then preventing that competition within your company, then praising one and condemning the other. It's not consistent, platforms need to be platforms and let the information flow instead of control it.
- zapita 6y agoCorporate sponsorship under pressure from “woke” customers is in fact a manifestation of free markets. These corporations are making editorial decisions based on what their customers want. Right now their customers want less overt coordination of political violence on their platforms. Therefore the platforms are complying.
- proc0 6y ago> Therefore the platforms are complying. Are you saying companies should comply with whatever market pressures they have regardless of the outcome (given a free market)? Because oil companies have an interesting history of abusing this. Surely there is a line, however blurry, that companies shouldn't be crossing if they want to keep the greater good in mind. Given that many of these tech "platforms" are worldwide, and have slowly dominated the world's userbase BEFORE changing their policies, it's easy to see they might have already crossed that line, we're just not sure exactly how yet (at least imho).
- saithound 6y ago> These are private companies. So are Baidu and Tencent. Large companies are part of an industrial–congressional complex, with lobbying and political contributions on one side, political approval and threats of regulation on the other. Just because something is done by a private company, it doesn't mean that it's not the state or the government wielding its power. In the current political climate, and given how intertwined corporations and state power are in the US, trying to maintain a crisp distinction between private companies and public authority is itself comical.
- zapita 6y agoTrying to maintain a distinction between Twitter and the Trump administration is comical?
- saithound 6y agoThinking that Baidu banning photos of the Tiananmen Square protests is not the Chinese administration exercising its power, because the banning itself is done by a private company? Yeah, that would be comedy stuff. In China as in the U.S., these are not local mom-and-pop stores exercising their rights to free association. These are large tech companies and business ventures that are deeply and inseparably intertwined with the state and the political parties (both of them), based on the granting of reciprocated privileges. They know full well that if they ban the wrong person (or refuse to ban the right person), they face being regulated out of existence the next day: indeed, seeing this threat, they're scrambling to align themselves with the incoming administration. Yes, they had deals with the previous administration too [1]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/business/media/facebook-donald-trump-mark-zuckerberg.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/business/media/facebook-d...
- three_seagrass 6y agoBaidu and Tencent are, in part, state owned.
- pldr1234 6y agoExactly this. If I start a private enterprise, I'll be damned if somebody dictates that they have a private right to do or say some particular thing on services I pay hosting for. Corporations are not beholden to pleasing every single individual.