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I hate this trend of shutting down comment sections. Only very establishment public opinions will now be allowed to be shared on mass media. What good is freed

I hate this trend of shutting down comment sections. Only very establishment public opinions will now be allowed to be shared on mass media. What good is freedom of speech if you’re not allowed to publicly assemble because of COVID and social media is cut off from you? Next time there’s a destructive unpopular war or bank bailout or police shooting or event that threatens corporate profits there’s no public ability to call the corporate press out on their BS.

pron 6y ago
First, the comments that cause this are so from "establishment opinions" that you can be well outside them and still not come close to what they're talking about. Second, what good is freedom of speech if a platform is not free to choose which speech to amplify? Seems like some have started to understand freedom of speech as "you're free to publish exactly what I tell you to publish!" Freedom of speech also means that I'm free not to repeat what you say. This understanding of freedom of speech is the one that has been at the very core of media companies and educational institutions for ages; they're free to shape their reputation by choosing which speech they publish.
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  Free speech sounds a lot like free market when you put it like that. I mean, there's "technically" a free market, but advertising works and thus clearly it's possible for poor quality, expensive products to beat out cheap, good quality ones. Same way, there's "technically" free speech. But if corporations can use their billions to trumpet specific politics only, then it's also possible for poor quality, expensive opinions and speech to beat out cheap, good quality ones. Note: I am not saying the comments are good quality ideas, just making an analogy based on parent's comment.
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  > what good is freedom of speech if a platform is not free to choose which speech to amplify What good is freedom of speech when powerful and influential organizations (like Twitter or Facebook) control virtually all speech in society? Above a certain size, these platforms are public utilities and public town squares. For the right to free speech to be at all practical and meaningful, they must be required to platform all legal speech.
  - pron 6y ago
    > For the right to free speech to be at all practical and meaningful, they must be required to platform all legal speech. So newspapers will be required to publish any story, no matter how true? Universities will be required to teach any theory, no matter how crackpot? Twitter will be required to promote porn just as it does other content? > What good is freedom of speech when powerful and influential organizations (like Twitter or Facebook) control virtually all speech in society? But they don't. You have huge, successful websites devoted to porn. A publication like Quillette builds its reputation around pseudoscience and is free to do so. You have entire cable news networks devoted to conspiracy theories. But yes, more mainstream venues try to shape their reputation by not amplifying more fringe speech. Not only has this always been the case, but that's what everyone understood "free speech" means. You have more mainstream publications and fringe ones.
    - throwawaysea 6y ago
      I’m not proposing that newspapers publish any story submitted by the general public as a news article, if that’s what you’re taking away. For newspapers I am proposing that their comment section should be free of censorship. For social media I am proposing the same. That also means their algorithms would need to “promote” things in a content neutral way. I’m also proposing that society is served better when ideas from powerful publishers (like journalists at big newspapers) are easily challenged by the public via features like comments sections. I think we’re getting a bit off topic but since you mentioned it - universities already teach many crackpot theories - the social “science” fields are full of them (https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/ https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...). But they don’t teach the alternative viewpoint to those crackpot theories. As institutions with tremendous power, they influence society greatly but their commitment to a one-sided biased environment serves to only amplify one ideology, and this unbalanced outcome is effectively propagandizing all of society. Giant social media platforms are similarly problematic, because their degree of reach and network effects give them power other new social networks cannot mirror or challenge. Their policies restricting content that they don’t like ends up amplifying one worldview disproportionately while shutting down others, which also is effectively propagandist. In both cases these institutions are as powerful and influential as nations’ governments, and their choices to promote certain speech or censor certain speech are as damaging as the government taking such action. We have outsourced the ability to exercise fundamental rights like free speech and free thought to spaces that are legally non public but really should be held to the public standard. Your claim is that there are “huge, successful sites” or other media that fall outside the control of these institutions I am complaining about. However, that’s not really the whole truth because the scale of those alternatives is simply completely different. Facebook has more users than any country and Twitter is probably close to that as well. Universities have no diversity of thought and there isn’t much of an alternative to the university system at all. It doesn’t matter if some other alternative site could have millions of users carrying speech blocked on Facebook or Twitter, because the amplification of ideas allowed on the biggest platforms will drown out all others. These are really public squares that should be held to public regulation, including upholding the right to free speech. As an aside, your inaccurate and uncharitable characterization of Quillette as building a reputation around “pseudoscience”, when it is actually built around high quality critical thought, makes me think you’re on one side of this ideological war and happy with the status quo because your ideology is currently winning the power struggle by censoring/deplatforming dissenting views. But what you’re labeling as fringe wouldn’t be fringe if it was given a fair chance to be heard and amplified in various institutions or platforms. Because ideologues have tried to suppress and diminish challenging views in aggressive and unfair ways, these ideas are in lesser prominence than they deserve.
rangewookie 6y ago
To be fair - news is not a social media platform. I don't know why every webpage on the internet needs a comments section anyways. News articles can be posted elsewhere for public comment and discussion. Like here or reddit, twitter, etc.
- SilverRed 6y ago
  Exactly, the OP comment is pretty ridiculous. It's equivalent to demanding the local news TV station put your phone call on air so you can share your uneducated and often off topic opinion on what was just displayed.
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  There’s value in a discussion being tied to the community of news readers as its own social environment. Twitter and Reddit have heavy, biased moderation that don’t even allow many legitimate viewpoints. Plus you have to deal with their user bases, who are strongly opinionated and would drown out the voices of dedicated followers of a newspaper. Just like any community subset has some value in its separation and identity, there is value in the news comment sections.
krastanov 6y ago
It feels very strange to me that you are viewing a (privately moderated) comment section as the forum for public speech. These comment sections have existed for little more than a decade and have never been a useful forum, neither have they been the place where civic organizing happens.
itisit 6y ago
No public ability? Not sure if that’s said with a straight face, but there are a multitude of platforms to bind your comments to a particular article/post/entry/etc. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Hacker News come readily to mind. There are many, many, many other ways of getting your opinion out there online. Content producers of any ilk are in no way obliged (and imo expected) to provide and administer a public forum alongside their work.
techrat 6y ago
> freedom of speech You would have a point if 'mass media' wasn't privately owned.
bjt 6y ago
Rewind to before the internet, and you never had the right to get your opinions into the 6 o'clock news or the printed newspaper. There are still plenty of places you can put up your own website. Free speech doesn't mean that others are obligated to subsidize your speech.
- falcrist 6y ago
  Whatever you do on the internet, you're always at the mercy of private companies. You're always subject to your hosting company or domain registrar or ISP or whatever. On some level, private companies have to allow everyone neutral access. Like phone companies and the USPS, the internet should be accessible. On the other hand, comment sections under news articles are really not the way I'd make this argument. Let's talk about net neutrality first.
  - Thorrez 6y ago
    Yep, I think net neutrality should solve the ISP and hosting problems (you can self host out of your basement). Domain registrars are harder; can we get net neutrality to apply to them?
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  > Free speech doesn't mean that others are obligated to subsidize your speech. Actually, it does, that's the liberal ideal of free speech, that it 's a public protected good. Having a free opinion and practically keeping it to yourself because you have no audience is not freedom of speech.
  - Nursie 6y ago
    > Having a free opinion and practically keeping it to yourself because you have no audience is not freedom of speech. It absolutely is. You are still free to propagate your ideas. You have no claim to use other people's tools or access other people's property to do so. You are not entitled to an audience. If that means you're literally screaming into the void because nobody else wants anything to do with you, then that's still free speech.
ogre_codes 6y ago
> Next time there’s a destructive unpopular war or bank bailout or police shooting or event that threatens corporate profits there’s no public ability to call the corporate press out on their BS. They would have to get rid of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, HackerNews, on down the line for this to be true. There are dozens of places where you can call out the media for their nonsense. As recent politics have proved, calling someone out for their bullshit is pointless when you have millions of people willing to buy into their bullshit regardless.
ppf 6y ago
It's a sad state of affairs when online comment sections have become an integral part of the social cohesion (such as it is) of a society. In my opinion, the current state of our response to Covid shows that the social cohesion of society has already been destroyed, mostly by pigeonholing everyone into neat little online boxes. The corporate press doesn't care about being "called out" in an online comments section. Real-life cohesion is incredibly more powerful than anything online.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
d35007 6y ago
Did you read the article? Better yet, did you read the comments at the bottom of The Inquirer's articles? You know things are bad when a media organization realizes that online discussions about sports _in Philadelphia_ are the least toxic ones on their site. This was a good decision. Nothing of value was lost. The 2% of productive commenters can go back to writing letters to the editor. The 98% can go back to the chans.
YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
>> What good is freedom of speech if you’re not allowed to publicly assemble because of COVID and social media is cut off from you? From the article: The First Amendment limits the government’s ability to regulate speech. It does not require news organizations to treat all speech as equal, or to provide an open forum for comments. Rather, the First Amendment ensures The Inquirer’s right to publish what The Inquirer chooses to publish. Freedom of speech is necessary in a democratic society in order for citizens to be able to criticise their government freely. It is not meant to protect any (non-existent) right to verbally attack one's fellow citizens with impunity. Indeed, most modern nations that have legislation that protects freedom of speech also have legislation that protects their citizens from defamatory, or libellous speech, and many also protect individuals from hateful speech that targets personal characteristics like sexuality or religion. tl;dr, freedom of speech sets you free to punch up, not to punch down.

pron 6y ago

First, the comments that cause this are so from "establishment opinions" that you can be well outside them and still not come close to what they're talking about. Second, what good is freedom of speech if a platform is not free to choose which speech to amplify? Seems like some have started to understand freedom of speech as "you're free to publish exactly what I tell you to publish!" Freedom of speech also means that I'm free not to repeat what you say. This understanding of freedom of speech is the one that has been at the very core of media companies and educational institutions for ages; they're free to shape their reputation by choosing which speech they publish.

notsureaboutpg 6y ago
Free speech sounds a lot like free market when you put it like that. I mean, there's "technically" a free market, but advertising works and thus clearly it's possible for poor quality, expensive products to beat out cheap, good quality ones. Same way, there's "technically" free speech. But if corporations can use their billions to trumpet specific politics only, then it's also possible for poor quality, expensive opinions and speech to beat out cheap, good quality ones. Note: I am not saying the comments are good quality ideas, just making an analogy based on parent's comment.
throwawaysea 6y ago
> what good is freedom of speech if a platform is not free to choose which speech to amplify What good is freedom of speech when powerful and influential organizations (like Twitter or Facebook) control virtually all speech in society? Above a certain size, these platforms are public utilities and public town squares. For the right to free speech to be at all practical and meaningful, they must be required to platform all legal speech.
- pron 6y ago
  > For the right to free speech to be at all practical and meaningful, they must be required to platform all legal speech. So newspapers will be required to publish any story, no matter how true? Universities will be required to teach any theory, no matter how crackpot? Twitter will be required to promote porn just as it does other content? > What good is freedom of speech when powerful and influential organizations (like Twitter or Facebook) control virtually all speech in society? But they don't. You have huge, successful websites devoted to porn. A publication like Quillette builds its reputation around pseudoscience and is free to do so. You have entire cable news networks devoted to conspiracy theories. But yes, more mainstream venues try to shape their reputation by not amplifying more fringe speech. Not only has this always been the case, but that's what everyone understood "free speech" means. You have more mainstream publications and fringe ones.
  - throwawaysea 6y ago
    I’m not proposing that newspapers publish any story submitted by the general public as a news article, if that’s what you’re taking away. For newspapers I am proposing that their comment section should be free of censorship. For social media I am proposing the same. That also means their algorithms would need to “promote” things in a content neutral way. I’m also proposing that society is served better when ideas from powerful publishers (like journalists at big newspapers) are easily challenged by the public via features like comments sections. I think we’re getting a bit off topic but since you mentioned it - universities already teach many crackpot theories - the social “science” fields are full of them (https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/ https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...). But they don’t teach the alternative viewpoint to those crackpot theories. As institutions with tremendous power, they influence society greatly but their commitment to a one-sided biased environment serves to only amplify one ideology, and this unbalanced outcome is effectively propagandizing all of society. Giant social media platforms are similarly problematic, because their degree of reach and network effects give them power other new social networks cannot mirror or challenge. Their policies restricting content that they don’t like ends up amplifying one worldview disproportionately while shutting down others, which also is effectively propagandist. In both cases these institutions are as powerful and influential as nations’ governments, and their choices to promote certain speech or censor certain speech are as damaging as the government taking such action. We have outsourced the ability to exercise fundamental rights like free speech and free thought to spaces that are legally non public but really should be held to the public standard. Your claim is that there are “huge, successful sites” or other media that fall outside the control of these institutions I am complaining about. However, that’s not really the whole truth because the scale of those alternatives is simply completely different. Facebook has more users than any country and Twitter is probably close to that as well. Universities have no diversity of thought and there isn’t much of an alternative to the university system at all. It doesn’t matter if some other alternative site could have millions of users carrying speech blocked on Facebook or Twitter, because the amplification of ideas allowed on the biggest platforms will drown out all others. These are really public squares that should be held to public regulation, including upholding the right to free speech. As an aside, your inaccurate and uncharitable characterization of Quillette as building a reputation around “pseudoscience”, when it is actually built around high quality critical thought, makes me think you’re on one side of this ideological war and happy with the status quo because your ideology is currently winning the power struggle by censoring/deplatforming dissenting views. But what you’re labeling as fringe wouldn’t be fringe if it was given a fair chance to be heard and amplified in various institutions or platforms. Because ideologues have tried to suppress and diminish challenging views in aggressive and unfair ways, these ideas are in lesser prominence than they deserve.

rangewookie 6y ago

To be fair - news is not a social media platform. I don't know why every webpage on the internet needs a comments section anyways. News articles can be posted elsewhere for public comment and discussion. Like here or reddit, twitter, etc.

SilverRed 6y ago
Exactly, the OP comment is pretty ridiculous. It's equivalent to demanding the local news TV station put your phone call on air so you can share your uneducated and often off topic opinion on what was just displayed.
throwawaysea 6y ago
There’s value in a discussion being tied to the community of news readers as its own social environment. Twitter and Reddit have heavy, biased moderation that don’t even allow many legitimate viewpoints. Plus you have to deal with their user bases, who are strongly opinionated and would drown out the voices of dedicated followers of a newspaper. Just like any community subset has some value in its separation and identity, there is value in the news comment sections.

krastanov 6y ago

It feels very strange to me that you are viewing a (privately moderated) comment section as the forum for public speech. These comment sections have existed for little more than a decade and have never been a useful forum, neither have they been the place where civic organizing happens.

itisit 6y ago

No public ability? Not sure if that’s said with a straight face, but there are a multitude of platforms to bind your comments to a particular article/post/entry/etc. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Hacker News come readily to mind. There are many, many, many other ways of getting your opinion out there online. Content producers of any ilk are in no way obliged (and imo expected) to provide and administer a public forum alongside their work.

techrat 6y ago

> freedom of speech You would have a point if 'mass media' wasn't privately owned.

bjt 6y ago

Rewind to before the internet, and you never had the right to get your opinions into the 6 o'clock news or the printed newspaper. There are still plenty of places you can put up your own website. Free speech doesn't mean that others are obligated to subsidize your speech.

falcrist 6y ago
Whatever you do on the internet, you're always at the mercy of private companies. You're always subject to your hosting company or domain registrar or ISP or whatever. On some level, private companies have to allow everyone neutral access. Like phone companies and the USPS, the internet should be accessible. On the other hand, comment sections under news articles are really not the way I'd make this argument. Let's talk about net neutrality first.
- Thorrez 6y ago
  Yep, I think net neutrality should solve the ISP and hosting problems (you can self host out of your basement). Domain registrars are harder; can we get net neutrality to apply to them?
cblconfederate 6y ago
> Free speech doesn't mean that others are obligated to subsidize your speech. Actually, it does, that's the liberal ideal of free speech, that it 's a public protected good. Having a free opinion and practically keeping it to yourself because you have no audience is not freedom of speech.
- Nursie 6y ago
  > Having a free opinion and practically keeping it to yourself because you have no audience is not freedom of speech. It absolutely is. You are still free to propagate your ideas. You have no claim to use other people's tools or access other people's property to do so. You are not entitled to an audience. If that means you're literally screaming into the void because nobody else wants anything to do with you, then that's still free speech.

ogre_codes 6y ago

> Next time there’s a destructive unpopular war or bank bailout or police shooting or event that threatens corporate profits there’s no public ability to call the corporate press out on their BS. They would have to get rid of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, HackerNews, on down the line for this to be true. There are dozens of places where you can call out the media for their nonsense. As recent politics have proved, calling someone out for their bullshit is pointless when you have millions of people willing to buy into their bullshit regardless.

ppf 6y ago

It's a sad state of affairs when online comment sections have become an integral part of the social cohesion (such as it is) of a society. In my opinion, the current state of our response to Covid shows that the social cohesion of society has already been destroyed, mostly by pigeonholing everyone into neat little online boxes. The corporate press doesn't care about being "called out" in an online comments section. Real-life cohesion is incredibly more powerful than anything online.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

d35007 6y ago

Did you read the article? Better yet, did you read the comments at the bottom of The Inquirer's articles? You know things are bad when a media organization realizes that online discussions about sports _in Philadelphia_ are the least toxic ones on their site. This was a good decision. Nothing of value was lost. The 2% of productive commenters can go back to writing letters to the editor. The 98% can go back to the chans.

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago

>> What good is freedom of speech if you’re not allowed to publicly assemble because of COVID and social media is cut off from you? From the article: The First Amendment limits the government’s ability to regulate speech. It does not require news organizations to treat all speech as equal, or to provide an open forum for comments. Rather, the First Amendment ensures The Inquirer’s right to publish what The Inquirer chooses to publish. Freedom of speech is necessary in a democratic society in order for citizens to be able to criticise their government freely. It is not meant to protect any (non-existent) right to verbally attack one's fellow citizens with impunity. Indeed, most modern nations that have legislation that protects freedom of speech also have legislation that protects their citizens from defamatory, or libellous speech, and many also protect individuals from hateful speech that targets personal characteristics like sexuality or religion. tl;dr, freedom of speech sets you free to punch up, not to punch down.