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I had to type in this box more times than I'm willing to admit to produce something that didn't violate the guidelines. Let's examine why this is problematic:

• TameAntelope 6y ago
  I think it's an interesting consequence of accountability, that the people being held accountable tend to vocally dislike being held accountable, but don't want to say so for some reason. It'd honestly be pretty refreshing for a leader to come out and say, "I don't think my actions should be held against me like your actions should be held against you because I'm special/different." Insane, but refreshingly honest. For what it's worth, I'm increasingly with you re: leaving the US, for what basically amount to the opposite reason. I'm tired of people not being responsible for themselves, their actions, and the outcomes that happen beyond the first order consequences.
  • kodah 6y ago
    I think people generally mention accountability when it suits them, specifically when it suits their group morals. Accountability to me is that the government teaches them a lesson, some company doesn't need to jump in line to punish them for me to feel satiated -- that job is done by the government. Moral communities are just that though, tiny groups that would like to exercise their power and worldliness on others in pursuit of their utopian society free from democracy and government oversight. Having come from a repressive religion, I have no argument against why this paradigm is flawed, but maybe it takes the eyes of someone who has lived that to see it.
    • TameAntelope 6y ago
      So you think companies are acting in a moral interest and not in perceived financial interest?
      • kodah 6y ago
        I think the financial interest is connected to moral interest.
        • TameAntelope 6y ago
          The responsibility starts to fuzz when you try to follow that thread. It's clearly with the company executing the decision to remove someone from their platform, but trying to decipher whether or not what they're doing is a financial or moral decision (despite their claims, that's part of the financial choice) becomes fairly pointless. If you want to rail against a changing society, that seems like a waste of time. If you want to rail against a specific set of companies who have acted in a specific way, I think that's more productive and addressable.
  • refenestrator 6y ago
    Held accountable by whom? We didn't elect twitch. Who decides who needs to be held accountable, and for what? Shouldn't that be the justice system? Twitch mentioned proactively banning people who are arrested, without using the word 'convicted'. Which demographics is that likely to affect?
    • CharlesW 6y ago
      Twitch is a private company (Amazon). Simply don't use it if you don't like it's ToS, or otherwise disagree with how it handles relationships with the creators who've agreed to it.
      • refenestrator 6y ago
        If you're going to go corporate libertarian, that's consistent. But when this line comes from people claiming to speak for the downtrodden against the oppressors, I start wondering which of those is the trillion dollar corporation with a monopoly in the space.
        • floatingatoll 6y ago
          The parent comment you're replying to notes, correctly, that the behaviors you label "corporate libertarian" are the choices available today. It's not valid to infer and label the beliefs of the poster of that comment for describing these choices under the current US situation, even if those choices seems unjust and cruel, as it's entirely possible they don't agree, or they have more nuanced beliefs, or maybe they're just bitter today for reasons wholly unrelated to the topic at hand. You could instead indicate that what they describe is precisely the circumstance you wish to change (you do wish to change that, right?), and maybe you could even go into detail how you'd change it (would you pass new laws? what would they say?), and what approach you think would be effective for making that happen. Anything along those lines would be valuable and relevant.
      • floatingatoll 6y ago
        Describing the options available currently today is not a helpful contribution here, and seems intended to silence discussion of something considered unjust by others. Beyond the facts you've cited — as a private company, Amazon owes no duty of 'guaranteed platform' whatsoever — is there anything else you're able to contribute to this discussion? What are your views? Do you agree or disagree with the "simple" circumstances you cite? Do you consider Twitch's actions likely to promote injustice against minorities?
  • gotoeleven 6y ago
    Yeah I get your point. Like those witches in Salem, they really didn't like being held accountable for performing witchcraft.
    • krapp 6y ago
      The "witches" in Salem weren't actually witches. Racist and violent assholes on social media trying to drape themselves in the false flag of liberty are still racist, violent assholes.
      • filoleg 6y ago
        I think the parent comment is trying to point out that the people who were deciding who was a "witch" in Salem back then could be the same type of people who are deciding what counts as "racist" or "hate speech" these days when it comes to "canceling" others.
        • krapp 6y ago
          Yes, practically everything every social media platform has done over nearly the last decade which anyone has ever disagreed with has been equated to Nazism, Stalinism, Orwellian dystopia or the Salem Witch trials. The slippery slope fallacy is very popular, especially on Hacker News.
      • insert_coin 6y ago
        There is no false flag of liberty, that is an oxymoron. Liberty is having the right to offend people, that’s what it means.
        • krapp 6y ago
          And if you exercise your right to offend people in my establishment, I have the right to toss you onto the pavement. Liberty is a two-edged sword, which is something a lot of people seem to have forgotten.
  • rsj_hn 6y ago
    Since when has BLM or antifa been held accountable for anything? BLM alone murdered over 30 policemen and several civilians. They pulled a dead body out of one of the burned out buildings in Minneapolis after the violent left-wing riots there. Antifa murdered 9 in Dayton and injured over 20 others, they stormed multiple government buildings and attacked government officials and police. Who is held accountable for promoting violence against ICE, disclosing the home addresses of the police and shooting at their facilities?
    • kodah 6y ago
      I'll try to be mature about my response to this too. Blaming BLM for the acts of individuals is tantamount to blaming the right for the acts of people who organized in private groups on a public platform. Both sides will claim that the other has stoked fear, hate, and division to various degrees in a myriad of ways. I tend to agree with both, but I also realize that the people really responsible are likely at the top of a chain that laypeople can't even perceive. If we're to undo the damage that Russia has done to this country I think it starts in that understanding. Then and only then do we have armor to fight a nation hell bent on destroying things like ethos.
  • lmm 6y ago
    "We can ban anyone at will for any reason or none" (which is what this kind of policy amounts to) is corrosive to actual accountability. Twitch are appointing themselves as judge, jury and executioner; there's no evidentiary standard, no right of appeal, no procedural safeguards. It's the same kind of "accountability" as the Star Chamber - a way for the strong to impose their will on the weak.
    • nine_k 6y ago
      Twitch is a private company. You are free to not use their services (which may be a good idea).
      • lmm 6y ago
        Limited-liability companies are an unnatural, artificial privilege; perhaps we should tolerate them when they serve some social purpose, but they should be held accountable like any other government-backed entity (since that is in fact what they are). More to the point, pragmatically the likes of twitch are harder to avoid than many national governments.
• dionian 6y ago
  America has changed a lot, used to be whether you were on the left or the right, you were radically pro-free speech because bad speech needs to be exposed. Somehow it's turned to "we need to censor bad speech" which is a dangerous cultural turn. If you support it because it hurts your political enemies, maybe you will be the political enemy in 5 or 10 years, and you will have no recourse
• malandrew 6y ago
  > or if the perpetrator was not a user when they committed the acts. if this becomes more widespread, this is one of the most chilling aspects. I don't think it takes much imagination at all for anyone to consider a future where something you said today that is totally acceptable by today's standards keeps you from participating in some aspect of society* in 10 to 20 years time. Think about how many public figures have been canceled for things they did that were socially acceptable 10 to 20 years ago. Now imagine tooling being developed that scans your entire social media existence for the past 10 to 20 years and then throws an automated exception saying that you can't register. Then imagine that you have no recourse because there is no due process and practically non-existent Google quality customer service. * any sufficiently pervasive social network is a significant aspect of society
  • logshipper 6y ago
    I was having this exact conversation with a friend the other day. To engage in any form of (even remotely) political discourse on the internet is to step into a landmine once you consider the 20-year horizon. People are now being fired for things they said as teenagers [1], and while I am all for anti-racism and inclusiveness, have we forgotten that people grow and change with time? That we are products of our society and those societies often imbibe us with some blind spots that we later come to recognize? The only way I can see out of this displaced and performative moralism is to not attach your name to anything that could be considered even remotely problematic in the future. To get rid of old tweets, FB posts, anyone reading this might want to try the Jumbo app [2]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/business/media/teen-vogue-editor-alexi-mccammond.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/business/media/teen-vogue... [2] https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/jumbo-privacy-security/id1454039975 https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/jumbo-privacy-security/id14540...
    • malandrew 6y ago
      > those societies often imbibe us with some blind spots that we later come to recognize? It's not just blind spots you recognize and correct. There are societies in history like the USSR, the DDR, North Korea, etc., where those with dissenting views weren't the ones with the blind spots, but that it was society itself that developed blind spots and punished those that did not go along with those blind spots.
• ngokevin 6y ago
  "Terrorist activities, child sexual exploitation, violent extremism, credible threats of mass violence, carrying out or deliberately acting as an accomplice to sexual assault" falls under moralism and cancel culture? We've seen things that fester online that lead to real life tragedies or to the damaging of the fabric of democracy itself. Including insurrection on the US Capitol which took its roots on Twitter. There's a spectrum between "cancel culture is bad" vs. "let domestic terrorists and CP sharers gather". And I don't think there's a slippery slope concern. Twitch already bans people for unexplained reasons anyways.
  • jkhdigital 6y ago
    A rowdy unarmed (not a single firearm) mob is not an “insurrection”. I’m not condoning what happened, but can we please stop using hyperbolic language?
    • rising-sky 6y ago
      Not a single firearm? https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/17/politics/capitol-insurrection-weapons-ron-johnson/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/17/politics/capitol-insurrection... However, I'm not sure where you got the "opinion" that an insurrection must be carried out with a firearm? You can do a quick Google search for the definition of the term. Here's one from the Cambridge dictionary > an organized attempt by a group of people to defeat their government and take control of their country, usually by violence https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/insurrection https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/insurrec...
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
        A protest that was larger than expected and overran the existing security isn't exactly an organized attempt.
        • 6y ago
• g_p 6y ago
  Perhaps this will encourage or lead to more people protecting their privacy and avoiding cross-service linkage? It isn't a given (and certainly would be hugely problematic to assume) that the same human sits behind the same username on each service. Absent strong linkage and enduring proof of that link, this will be weaponised (register same username on Gab and post hate, then report the user to Twitch). That's an obvious attack vector, and I assume they will be wanting to see proper links. The game theory rational response for all users is surely therefore to not link or associate their online social presences together. While I guess this might not work in modern social media culture of trying to gather a following everywhere on multiple platforms, this disclosing those accounts ("follow my Instagram and Twitter, like my YouTube videos, etc."), it perhaps will normalise less linkage (or leakage, depending on your perspective) between platforms? If you depend on twitch, but don't want someone to try get you deplatformed based on something elsewhere, one of the best ways to prevent that would be to not have any linkable off-site activity. Then there's nothing for them to ban you for. Or am I just reminiscing too much for the old internet before social media took off?
• natsup123490 6y ago
  > I can't imagine staying in this country much longer. If you are serious about that statement, I encourage you just as I have encouraged all my family and close friends. I have never regretted leaving America. There are dozens of nicer countries to live in. However, tech platforms exert their dominance worldwide. Americans have made this a global problem. Most of my family and friends still feel like they don't need privacy because they have "nothing to hide" because they "aren't doing anything wrong." It's hard to communicate the idea that the tech lords' ideas about "wrong" are being rapidly redefined and weaponized, driven by a very active and rapidly growing neoreligious woke cult, and it has nothing to do with logic and reason, little to do with morality, and much to do with power. And the more information you feed them the more power you yield to them until one day you'll realize the enormity of what you willingly did, but by then it will be far too late. You will be a slave to their crushing, perverse, and ever smaller version of morality. They know who all your friends are, what your fingerprint looks like, your walking gait, where you hang out, ... everything. And they abandoned the motto "don't be evil".
  • sam1r 6y ago
    So when you left, where did you go first? Curious to hear more about the first jump -- i think we all need more examples of this in first-person.
  • thefz 6y ago
    > However, tech platforms exert their dominance worldwide. Americans have made this a global problem. No. Living in Europe, cancel culture, the woke inquisition and the minority culture wars are seen as a US only phenomenon. I could not be less touched and less interested by it.
  • junon 6y ago
    I moved to Berlin. Quality of life improved from not being in the US in and of itself. Can confirm. Grass definitely is greener.
  • koheripbal 6y ago
    > This new stage of American moralism is pretty tiring This exists in Canada too, in case anyone is wondering. You cannot escape the toxic teenagers of the internet by moving to a different country.
• ggggtez 6y ago
  If you go on Facebook and say "Hey, I'm going to go shoot up a school on twitch tomorrow", then Twitch can ban you. Previously, it was unclear that this was bannable because it didn't occur on site. Phrasing this as an argument against "Cancel Culture" is the ultimate moral hand-wringing. There is nothing even closely resembling what you're talking about in this change. This is no slippery slope. This is just the obvious result of people realizing that the internet is real life.
  • read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    Thank God Twitch is stopping people from livestreaming how they shoot up a school. It's not like we have mechanisms that work to actually prevent those events in the first place. We really need internet mob justice to provide a non-solution to this already-solved problem.
• nine_k 6y ago
  It's plain and simple: nobody is willing to give you a tribune for a risky public speech on their large, multi-tenant, money-generating property. They don't want the bad PR fallout. Not because they are moralistic; they care about their profits. It's the public who is moralistic, and even a small but vocal group can do a lot of damage to a company image, with a silent / tepid support from the bulk of the public. Don't expect commercial entities to fight for your First Amendment rights; they exist to earn money, and have a ton of honest warnings in their ToS. If you want to say something that annoys the public, something pushing the frame of the Overton window, write a blog. Run a mailing list. Run a Mastodon instance. Run a private invite-only telegram chat. And for communicating with your auntie, you don't need a public platform; use an IM. Use Signal if you discuss something that leads to instant deplatforming on Twitter. Leave Twitch to dancing kids, or whatever is all the rage there now. Leave Facebook to vacation photos and discussing technology, arts, or hobbies. Leave Twitter altogether, or at least go read-only.
  • claytongulick 6y ago
    I believe you have just succinctly described what is known as a "chilling effect" on speech. Historically in this country, we've tried hard to prevent that.
    • throwawaygh 6y ago
      > Historically in this country, we've tried hard to prevent that. It's astounding to me that anyone believes this. American puritanism has always had an incredibly censorious streak. Go tell this to any gay/bisexual person not living in a large city, even today. Cancel Culture isn't even close to new. Millions and millions of Americans still live entire lives pretending to have roommates instead of partners. Teachers are still fired for being gay; in the 90s, every gay teacher I knew lived in TREMENDOUS fear. Even in cities. One male elementary teacher I know lived celibate for over two decades because he feared that being outed would definitely leave him destitute and could even eventually land him in jail. He worked in a very liberal big city. Teenagers are still routinely kicked out of home for not being straight. There are still many communities where the key to that raise or promotion is being in the right small group at the right church. Cancel Culture is not new, and historical examples of it have been far more damaging that losing access to a streaming site. What is new is conservatives finding themselves as a permanent numerical and therefore economic minority. And it's infuriating to them because suddenly the "free market" mechanisms that used to protect them as a numerical and especially economic majority are instead turning against them, even as they hold onto political power, because the market doesn't care about gerrymandering. I'm not going to hire homophobes because I don't want to work with people who hate me. Is that cancel culture? I don't care. Fucking sue me. The characterization of Cancel Culture as a "new thing" is beyond infuriating. If you want to roll back Cancel Culture, maybe start by realizing that it's not even close to a new thing.
• sam1r 6y ago
  >> This new stage of American moralism is pretty tiring no matter what group or direction it comes from. I can't imagine staying in this country much longer. Ok but where you would go where it's better? I do empathize as a born + raised american citizen, however, seeing how other countries have handled the pandemic -- I am more tentative versus [ideally] excited.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• lotsofpulp 6y ago
  >Private companies now own most of the highways we use for speech, much less widespread speech. The highway is the one thing they do not own. They own exits on the highway. But no one is stopping anyone from sending emails. Or setting up their own website and messaging service. It is easier and cheaper today to to connect with others and express yourself without the need for private companies than it has ever been in the history of mankind.
  • kodah 6y ago
    > It is easier and cheaper today to to connect with others and express yourself without the need for private companies than it has ever been in the history of mankind. I'm glad you feel secure enough to say that out loud, and maybe from some perspective you are technically correct. But the comparison you gave about email is easily refutable. Most email traffic is controlled by large providers, large providers which can denylist your mail servers for a myriad of vague reasoning which take forever to scrub yourself from. Given that major mail providers now regularly sniff your emails as a feature, your privacy now comes at a premium. In other words, privacy is a feature and a premium one at that. So, while the future is not certain to be what I imagine it can be from this point, it's certainly not open and free as you've asserted.
    • lotsofpulp 6y ago
      >Most email traffic is controlled by large providers, large providers which can denylist your mail servers for a myriad of vague reasoning which take forever to scrub yourself from. Most people choose to use email controlled by large providers. I choose to pay a company for my email needs. Others have that choice too. They can also choose not to use the large providers. It's open and free as in speech (excluding illegal activities of course), but it's not effortless and not free as in beer. I don't see how much more open and free (as in speech) it can get without taking away someone else's ability to do what they want with their computer.
      • remarkEon 6y ago
        >I don't see how much more open and free (as in speech) it can get without taking away someone else's ability to do what they want with their computer. Do you understand why some of us are viewing this problem through an anti-trust or public utility lens now? In other words, "I don't understand how much more open and free (as in electricity) it can get without taking away someone else's ability to do what they want with their power plant." It's really, really unfortunate that this debate was triggered for what are at their base partisan political reasons. Because this is a debate we should have had with cooler heads, about what these services actually represent for human society and how government should interact with this technology. Instead, everyone is drawing a line in the sand based on their politics (not saying you are doing this, but others clearly are). And look, yeah, I get it. "Electricity" is not "speech". But when you need electricity and you need computers to transmit speech in the modern era ... well I guess I just see it as six of one and a half dozen of the other.
• LdSGSgvupDV 6y ago
  It seems like that the companies are trying to avoid the lawsuit. Let say our freedom of speech is X. In tradition, we have X<LAW. Right now, we get X<COMPANY<COMPANY<...<LAW which would definitely narrow down when the company chain increases.