12 ms·

Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?

166 points by curmudgeon22 5y ago

klyrs 5y ago
Is there a law? Or are the platforms in question voluntarily using guidelines as guidance? Are platforms punished in the courts for failing to follow guidelines or implement moderation? As far as I know, the answers to the above are a resounding "no," and it follows that this isn't state censorship. It's the freedom of association, and freedom of speech, exercised by corporation-persons.
- falcolas 5y ago
  Corporation-persons. Is there a more dystopian concept in existence? Corporations are NOT PEOPLE. They're made up of people, but the entity itself is NOT A PERSON.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - klyrs 5y ago
    While I agree with you, that's how the supreme court has interpreted the constitution. Let's take the strawman out of the picture and accept the fiction that corporations are not people. But, they are still not the state. They do not replace government services in any meaningful way -- choice of what to publish, and what not to publish, is firmly the role of private persons and commerce. Maintaining social media sites is not the role of government. Ergo, this is not state censorship.
  - dang 5y ago
    Please don't repeat ideological boilerplate on HN and please don't use allcaps for empahsis - this is also in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
    - chroem- 5y ago
      Is it boilerplate? It seems very relevant to the discussion, given that it's addressing a specific point in the parent comment.
      - dang 5y ago
        Boilerplate has to do with how often something gets repeated, so it's boilerplate independent of where it's inserted; which is kind of the problem with it.
  - roywiggins 5y ago
    Corporate personhood is older than America. Without legal personhood, how do corporations own anything? They've always been treated like legal persons, because that's sort of what corporations are for. They're legal entities that can own stuff and do some things, like hiring people and buying and selling. That doesn't work without them in some sense being treated like persons in the eyes of the law. What they're not are natural persons. Exactly how many legal rights corporations should have is a very good question, of course. But people get bent out of shape about corporate personhood as if it's new or particularly Orwellian. (Governments have always been legal persons- you can sue the government in court- if it lets you- and the government can sue you. The government owns property, pays salaries, and so on.)
- leereeves 5y ago
  The article suggests that government employees may be consulting with YouTube in these censorship decisions. And that consultation would seem to be prohibited by the first amendment, just as police aren't allowed to consult with PIs to violate people's rights, even if the PIs volunteer to do so. (In other words, it's the gov employees, not YouTube, who would be violating people's rights by doing this.)
  - klyrs 5y ago
    Is YouTube doing that voluntarily, or is that consultation required by law?
    - salawat 5y ago
      It doesn't really matter given the quid pro quo that could be facilitated through such engagement. There are more ways of implementing incentive structures and control mechanisms than you can possibly imagine, which is exactly why people are right to be concerned.
    - akomtu 5y ago
      It's the 3rd option: YT follows off-the-record recommendations to avoid potential problems with authorities. There are written, but unofficial, per-country rules and there's a well defined process to squash dissent: ML models analyze videos and comments to find non-complaint users, numerous contractors look at the automated flags and write their summaries, corp employees, up to VP level, review the reports and cancel the non-complaint users.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- chroem- 5y ago
  Corporations don't have freedom of speech and it is misleading to suggest that they do. In fact, there is an enormous amount of legal precedent for mandated corporate speech. If you don't believe me, look at your nearest "nutrition facts" label.
  - klyrs 5y ago
    That precedent is, in fact, quite pertinent. Contrast with various platforms' labeling of misinformation, a law mandating such labeling would be wholly consistent. But we don't even have that. First, the government would need to establish that the people are harmed by the lack of labeling.
  - srtjstjsj 5y ago
    Nutrition Facts rules apply the same to humans and corporations.
- II2II 5y ago
  If I'm interpreting what the author said correctly, it is an incredibly resounding no. It sounds like these platforms are using the CDC as a credible source for information and the platforms are creating their own guidelines for what can and cannot be said. Being concerned about treating the government as a reliable source of information is one thing, but conflating it with guidance on acceptable speech is quite another.
gerikson 5y ago
Betteridge's Law of Headlines points to "no".
soltero 5y ago
Related: Under India's new IT Rules, govt determines (of-course, arbitrarily) what is anti-national and intermediaries like Twitter and Facebook have to comply with deletion requests for such content. Govt is also asking WhatsApp, Signal and other messaging platforms to store information about the "originator" of message (which defies the concept of encryption).
- bostik 5y ago
  I've said it before, but it deserves to be repeated again: the term "E2EE" has been hijacked to infer things that are decidedly not within the remit of end-to-end encryption. We keep seeing the term to be interpreted to mean "fully anonymous communications". >Govt is also asking [...] to store information about the "originator" of message (which defies the concept of encryption). No, it doesn't. I realise this likely comes off as pedantic, but encryption has only ever implied confidentiality, and more recently, integrity of the communication content. Obscuring and/or hiding the information about the communicating parties is an entirely different - and in fact a lot harder - problem.[ß] Please note: I am not saying that governments requiring to store (rich) communications metadata is somehow right or proper. Hell no. As far as I see that's a massive invasion of privacy. But I will object to the misuse of terminology. It's bad enough that the shorthand form "crypto" has been hijacked by wasteful funny-money peddlers. I will fight tooth and nail to not let the term "encryption" suffer a similar fate. ß: At scale, that is. For example, using a numbers station will make it technically trivial (if expensive) to transmit a message from an unspecified sender to an unknown recipient. But enabling similar level of security AND anonymity to millions and millions of participants is a much, much, much more difficult problem.
zugi 5y ago
It absolutely can be, and it's absolutely something to watch out for, but I'm not sure that it is government censorship in this case. YouTube is choosing who to ask ostensibly due to their expertise, not because of government threats or enforcement. That said, a few years ago one of things that kicked off the change from being relatively hands-off to more active content censorship by all of these platforms was being dragged before Congress and lectured and threatened that, if they didn't start voluntarily censoring content, the government would force them to. Those government threats, though they lacked immediate legal force, really do constitute government censorship. So there's an argument to be made that this whole new world of "voluntary" censorship by platform providers really is at its core government censorship.
- leereeves 5y ago
  > YouTube is choosing who to ask ostensibly due to their expertise, not because of government threats or enforcement. It sounds like you've accepted the article's claim that YouTube is consulting government employees. If that's the case, aren't any gov employees who collaborate with YouTube here engaging in censorship? Imagine an analogous situation: a PI goes to the police and offers to break into a suspect's home and collect evidence, if the police will tell the PI what to look for. Accepting that offer and advising the PI on what to collect would be a violation of the suspect's rights, even if the police are merely consulting on the PIs voluntary actions.
  - drivingmenuts 5y ago
    That comes down to nearly-unprovable hairsplitting. If government employees are demanding action, backed by force of law, then Yes. But if YT is merely free to follow or reject advice as it chooses, then No. I can hear advice all day long from experts, but whether I choose to follow or ignore, the consequence is on me.
    - throwawaysea 5y ago
      That’s not really a fair representation of reality. YT and others aren’t really “free to follow”. There are implications for their choice. For example they may face less anti trust scrutiny from the progressive left if they continue to perform censorship that aligns to that political ideology. They may face less scrutiny when it comes to taxes or privacy laws as well. It is precisely because we can’t prove or disprove these links that there should be no situation where state employees ask for censorship (either hard bans or actions like algorithmic changes), period.
Covzire 5y ago
Facebook's censoring of #Revolution via their claims of moral superiority should frighten the shit out of every free person on earth. While we still have it reasonably good in America, their willingness to suppress speech in good times doesn't bode well for people who will be oppressed during bad times. The first amendment made it clear that not even the government had the authority to use their vast moral authority, as they exercise through the legal system, to prevent people from speaking and organizing. But #BigTech has a nuclear option on the speech on the web's most visible ecosystem, social media, through purely market forces and are doing the bidding of a single political party, exclusively. It's not just horrifying that they amassed so much unchecked power, but since 2016 they're actively using and abusing it to suppress legitimate political speech in every nook and cranny they control.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  Media owners have always used their ownership to push their own version of reality. I guess the difference now is that we have allowed so much concentration of media ownership in so few hands. Antitrust is pretty much dead from what I can tell. Or is this just the current story? Maybe media has always been as concentrated as it is now, we just didn’t notice.
  - ndndksksl 5y ago
    Public social media is really fundamentally different from traditional media because it functions as the public square in a way that traditional media never did. As such, it needs to be evaluated and regulated as the novel thing that it is. It's not a newspaper and it's not a telephone company, and it's time to stop trying to apply old regulatory arguments and mindsets to the new situation. So far, attempts to regulate social media show barely an understanding of the problem at hand, but I hope we can recognize that there needs to be defined a novel regulatory framework to prevent tragedy of the commons or heavy handed ideological censorship on public social media networks In the meantime, the value of privately owned and operated, and invite-only social networks (like setting up your own Mattermost or IRC servers) will continue to go up in relation to public networks, because only in tight knit private communities can anyone actually speak their mind.
plerpin 5y ago
The thing that really bothers me about Weinstein's approach is that, while he and his wife are scientists, they're exceedingly quick to assert their hunches as scientific fact. They wear their scientist labels on their sleeves but their thinking is far more ideological. In a recent podcast about fluoridation in tap water, they were talking about how they avoid iodized salt, because iodine is a reactive chemical and you don't want to OD on it. Ludicrous. You'd sooner die from the sheer quantity of salt you'd have to ingest before the iodine even starts to become a problem.
- api 5y ago
  It’s no different from religious fundamentalists who put their own whims and ideologies into God’s mouth. They’re just replacing God with science, but it’s the same schtick.
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  Isn't iodine deficiency a common thing?
  - roywiggins 5y ago
    it was more of a thing before they started adding it to salt, yeah
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      You need to check, though, because it's not added to all salt. Yes if you buy traditional "table salt" such as sold by Morton, it is iodized. Kosher salt, sea salt, salt crystals for use in a grinder, and other "natural" salts are generally not.
    - Igelau 5y ago
      Goiters. Not cool.
- pjc50 5y ago
  > podcast about fluoridation in tap water This has been a staple of crazies since, what, the 50s? I'm reminded of the speech from the deranged general in Dr Strangelove: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/characters/nm0001330 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/characters/nm0001330 You could fit that right into a modern rightwing podcast without it being out of place.
2Gkashmiri 5y ago
Yes. I have been a victim of this when in 5 August 2019 they snapped all internet and even telephone and almost 8 months long curfew /shutdown to prevent me from voicing my anger. The often used term was "misuse" in "misuse of social media" which meant they were watching every Facebook post and tweet and people were arrested for it.
throwawaysea 5y ago
Another example of state censorship via private monopolies was AOC calling for the Apple and Google app stores to ban Parler following the Jan 6 capitol riot. If a sitting member of the government pressures private organizations to censor others, it should be considered a violation of the first amendment. Leaving aside the technicalities of law, it is unethical and immoral even otherwise and completely in conflict with American and classically liberal values. Glenn Greenwald wrote a great article about this titled “How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler” https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-show-of-monopolistic https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-sho...
akomtu 5y ago
Guidelines here is an euphemism for orders. The pro-censorship faction in the gov isn't strong enough yet to openly censor media, but it's strong enough to coerce Twitter and the like with the passive-aggressive "guidelines".
99_00 5y ago
People shake their heads and wonder how the Catholic church could have been so backwards, dogmatic, and ignorant as to jail Copernicus. Yet, here we are. "At the time, it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins." https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-cures/559050-harvard-scientist-says-trump-hatred-motivated https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c... Censoring commentary on scientific data because it doesn't fit with the a political narrative is anti-science. The rationale that well intentioned speech should be censored because may be used by people to spread misinformation in a way the speaker never intended is a horrible standard to uphold. When scientists openly and freely admit to self censorship for political reasons, it erodes the credibility of scientists.
- api 5y ago
  Who is the modern Copernicus? Alex Jones? The church that advocates drinking bleach? Nazis? Neo-Stalinists? I used to be absolutely on the “free speech at any cost” side. I guess if you pinned me to the wall I sort of still would be, but my heart is just not in the fight. First they came for the Nazis, and I didn’t do anything because I wasn’t a Nazi. Then they came for the medical quacks telling people not to get vaccinated and to treat COVID by drinking bleach… during a global pandemic… Then they came for the people who thought the Earth was flat. Then they came for the misogynists and the advocates of sexual persecution. Then they came for the cult of personality that wanted a reality TV star and the My Pillow guy to stage a fascist coup. Oh no… who are they coming for next?!? If it were just a bunch of liars and fools yelling into the wind I wouldn’t care. The really terrifying thing is how gullible people are. It seems like 1/3 of the population roughly will believe literally anything if it plays to their biases. Anything. There seems to be no bottom of the barrel. I picture a future with hordes of millions of gullible fools who can be commanded like armies by social media demagogues. This is exactly how the Rwandan genocide worked except it was talk radio commanding those machete wielding armies not Facebook. We used to poke fun at places like that for being superstitious and barbaric. After seeing things like flat Earth and Qanon I don’t think anyone can ever point fingers again.
  - 5y ago
kingsuper20 5y ago
The amount of gray posts in censorship threads always cracks me up. Please go on.
- enraged_camel 5y ago
  This is my least favorite thing about HN, because it strongly reinforces groupthink. I'd much rather have the number of upvotes and downvotes visible, like Reddit, and leave the styling of the text unchanged.
  - LinuxBender 5y ago
    If you happen to have NoScript installed, you can add something like this to the My filters ycombinator.com##.c00:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.c5a:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.c73:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.c82:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.c88:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.c9c:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.cae:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.cbe:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.cce:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.cdd:style(color: #000 !important; ) Change the color to match your preference.
    - fighterpilot 5y ago
      It'd be cool to have an option in the user's HN profile/account that they can toggle if they want to hide the greying out
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    Have the admins of HN ever defended their decision to grey out downvoted comments with some good arguments? Because reading a text thread where the color of the text constantly changes is rather annoying.
  - kingsuper20 5y ago
    Personally, I think that voting is ridiculous, but I see the point. It's one of the strongest methodologies for making a discussion board addictive. I think an interesting feature to add would be to have peoples' user areas show how many downvotes they have spewed forth.
comrh 5y ago
But their videos are still online, they just can't make ad money from them?
maverick-iceman 5y ago
Every social group eventually uses the weapon of censorship. It's not just government...even without a proper institutional structure , censorship will emerge as a thing that a social group does endogeneously. Like just scrolling back and looking at my last 10 posts on HN , I had to delete them after a few minutes in order to cut my losses because they were being heavily downvoted and once you are in negative territory nobody can see your posts anymore. People just crave and love being surrounded by people who see things the same way as they do, so after a person has been burned a bunch of times, they'd start stepping outside themselves and acting on what they think will sell well socially among the community. Pretty soon everybody starts doing this and you'll soon have a community full of people who are worthy of an actor studio interview. Hollywood, DC, San Francisco and the Valley are prime examples of this
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Disapproval and shaming are very strong and potentially dangerous tools, but they are not the same as censorship, even though they overlap to some degree. (But what doesn't?) The worst kind of censorship is probably the emotionless, impersonal, mechanical sort done on a large scale either by specialized professionals or by robots.
- akomtu 5y ago
  It's because those who agree rarely bother to upvote, while those who disagree downvote often. It's the same in real world: disagreement in form of protests is loud and visible, while even massive support is quiet. One fix HN could make is to take into account the number of readers before hiding a comment: 4 downvotes is big when there are only 10 readers, but it's nothing when there's a million.
  - maverick-iceman 5y ago
    That's the best idea I read on how to solve this problem, which sadly means it won't be implemented.... :P For the record I did upvote you!
  - FpUser 5y ago
ww2buff 5y ago
A corporation deciding not to run ads on videos of a crank promoting snake oil is not a First Amendment issue. It is barely even a censorship issue in the broadest sense of the term. Very sad to see Taibbi reduced to this kind of totally empty hysteria.
- mnouquet 5y ago
  If promoting a certain snake oil because you'll receive government favours, then it IS censorship, cf. all the Title IX unconstitutional enforcement following threats of pulling federal fundings. In this case, GAFAMs are scared as can be from being "regulated".
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Yeah I was a bit surprised when I read the article and what they're complaining about is being demonetised. Not blocked. I don't think this constitutes censorship. They can still publish what they want. They just don't get paid for it this way. If what they have to say it's that important, does it really matter? If they're indeed scientists, don't they have a day job doing science? I'm all for free speech but getting paid for it is another issue altogether IMO. Still an ethical topic worth debating, but not a free speech issue.
ArcturianDeath 5y ago
Now that the facility of the digital tooling is more granular and refined, and theres no shortage of weak-minded grunts that are powertrippin to do what theyre told, by the telepath aliens in human disguise or transdimensionals with the ability to manipulate all digital processes or the government, as zealous intern lords over the online conversation or jannies of pre-crime trends, this is all now easier to implement when it will matter the most to our future: silencing anti-alien dissent after "arrival." The Roswell trojan horse and social infiltration to pressure the farce of 2020, is paying off. Abductees/contactees with negative experiences of the 40+ species will be flagged as "agents of "disinformation" and limited for "preemption of public criticism." https://reclaimthenet.org/world-economic-forum-makes-censorship/ https://reclaimthenet.org/world-economic-forum-makes-censors... https://fair.org/home/us-censorship-is-increasingly-official/ https://fair.org/home/us-censorship-is-increasingly-official... https://archive.vn/WVDGU https://archive.vn/WVDGU https://taibbi.substack.com/p/a-case-of-intellectual-capture-on https://taibbi.substack.com/p/a-case-of-intellectual-capture...
wonnage 5y ago
It's not state censorship. There is no law driving these takedowns. It's the problem you get when one company has monopolized video. But serving videos for free isn't financially sustainable without advertising and network effects. So you're stuck with YouTube or some regional equivalent whether you like it or not.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Always amuses me when it slowly dawns on people just how much power a government can exert if it wants to. Facebook, and most importantly it's advertisers, simply cannot afford to piss off countries. It is a battle that is not in their financial interest. Corporations will not stand up for your rights. You want to fight the power you'll have to become tank man yourself.
alvah 5y ago
I'm on record railing against the collective power of BigTech, in particular some of their leaders' public statements about using their power to put the thumb on the scale since the 2016 election. However, here I'm not convinced there's a huge issue. As I understand it the videos are still available on YouTube, but the creators are no longer able to generate revenue from them (or other videos on their channel). I'm not convinced YouTube owes anyone the ability to generate revenue from videos hosted (for free) on their platform. I would expect many advertisers would not want to be associated with "fringe" theories; as the money YouTube pays creators is funded by advertising revenue, this makes demonetizing anything that strays too far from socially acceptable norms the sensible thing for YouTube to do IMO.
rebuilder 5y ago
That was an odd summary of the issue at the end. Taibbi finishes by saying this is a problem because it potentially allows corporations to influence state institutions via regulatory capture, which in turn would result in dictating what can be said on sites like YouTube that use, e.g., CDC guidance to decide what is acceptable speech on their platform. That seems tremendously convoluted to me. Regulatory capture is a problem, but it's a separate issue. Government agencies directing private censors would be a big problem. But private companies influencing other private companies' moderation guidelines indirectly like this, hoping the target company doesn't notice - really?
6510 5y ago
Is it illegal for governments to start their own social network? I imagine it could be a lot of fun. Have a section for the block, the city, the region, and one for the country. Create contact lists, market places, business and personal pages for each? Use the same laws we already have for public space? Am I missing something? Are toll roads the future?
_user112 5y ago
Worse. Collusion and election inference.

166 points by curmudgeon22 5y ago

Is there a law? Or are the platforms in question voluntarily using guidelines as guidance? Are platforms punished in the courts for failing to follow guidelines or implement moderation? As far as I know, the answers to the above are a resounding "no," and it follows that this isn't state censorship. It's the freedom of association, and freedom of speech, exercised by corporation-persons.

falcolas 5y ago
Corporation-persons. Is there a more dystopian concept in existence? Corporations are NOT PEOPLE. They're made up of people, but the entity itself is NOT A PERSON.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- klyrs 5y ago
  While I agree with you, that's how the supreme court has interpreted the constitution. Let's take the strawman out of the picture and accept the fiction that corporations are not people. But, they are still not the state. They do not replace government services in any meaningful way -- choice of what to publish, and what not to publish, is firmly the role of private persons and commerce. Maintaining social media sites is not the role of government. Ergo, this is not state censorship.
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't repeat ideological boilerplate on HN and please don't use allcaps for empahsis - this is also in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
  - chroem- 5y ago
    Is it boilerplate? It seems very relevant to the discussion, given that it's addressing a specific point in the parent comment.
    - dang 5y ago
      Boilerplate has to do with how often something gets repeated, so it's boilerplate independent of where it's inserted; which is kind of the problem with it.
- roywiggins 5y ago
  Corporate personhood is older than America. Without legal personhood, how do corporations own anything? They've always been treated like legal persons, because that's sort of what corporations are for. They're legal entities that can own stuff and do some things, like hiring people and buying and selling. That doesn't work without them in some sense being treated like persons in the eyes of the law. What they're not are natural persons. Exactly how many legal rights corporations should have is a very good question, of course. But people get bent out of shape about corporate personhood as if it's new or particularly Orwellian. (Governments have always been legal persons- you can sue the government in court- if it lets you- and the government can sue you. The government owns property, pays salaries, and so on.)
leereeves 5y ago
The article suggests that government employees may be consulting with YouTube in these censorship decisions. And that consultation would seem to be prohibited by the first amendment, just as police aren't allowed to consult with PIs to violate people's rights, even if the PIs volunteer to do so. (In other words, it's the gov employees, not YouTube, who would be violating people's rights by doing this.)
- klyrs 5y ago
  Is YouTube doing that voluntarily, or is that consultation required by law?
  - salawat 5y ago
    It doesn't really matter given the quid pro quo that could be facilitated through such engagement. There are more ways of implementing incentive structures and control mechanisms than you can possibly imagine, which is exactly why people are right to be concerned.
  - akomtu 5y ago
    It's the 3rd option: YT follows off-the-record recommendations to avoid potential problems with authorities. There are written, but unofficial, per-country rules and there's a well defined process to squash dissent: ML models analyze videos and comments to find non-complaint users, numerous contractors look at the automated flags and write their summaries, corp employees, up to VP level, review the reports and cancel the non-complaint users.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
chroem- 5y ago
Corporations don't have freedom of speech and it is misleading to suggest that they do. In fact, there is an enormous amount of legal precedent for mandated corporate speech. If you don't believe me, look at your nearest "nutrition facts" label.
- klyrs 5y ago
  That precedent is, in fact, quite pertinent. Contrast with various platforms' labeling of misinformation, a law mandating such labeling would be wholly consistent. But we don't even have that. First, the government would need to establish that the people are harmed by the lack of labeling.
- srtjstjsj 5y ago
  Nutrition Facts rules apply the same to humans and corporations.
II2II 5y ago
If I'm interpreting what the author said correctly, it is an incredibly resounding no. It sounds like these platforms are using the CDC as a credible source for information and the platforms are creating their own guidelines for what can and cannot be said. Being concerned about treating the government as a reliable source of information is one thing, but conflating it with guidance on acceptable speech is quite another.

gerikson 5y ago

Betteridge's Law of Headlines points to "no".

soltero 5y ago

Related: Under India's new IT Rules, govt determines (of-course, arbitrarily) what is anti-national and intermediaries like Twitter and Facebook have to comply with deletion requests for such content. Govt is also asking WhatsApp, Signal and other messaging platforms to store information about the "originator" of message (which defies the concept of encryption).

bostik 5y ago
I've said it before, but it deserves to be repeated again: the term "E2EE" has been hijacked to infer things that are decidedly not within the remit of end-to-end encryption. We keep seeing the term to be interpreted to mean "fully anonymous communications". >Govt is also asking [...] to store information about the "originator" of message (which defies the concept of encryption). No, it doesn't. I realise this likely comes off as pedantic, but encryption has only ever implied confidentiality, and more recently, integrity of the communication content. Obscuring and/or hiding the information about the communicating parties is an entirely different - and in fact a lot harder - problem.[ß] Please note: I am not saying that governments requiring to store (rich) communications metadata is somehow right or proper. Hell no. As far as I see that's a massive invasion of privacy. But I will object to the misuse of terminology. It's bad enough that the shorthand form "crypto" has been hijacked by wasteful funny-money peddlers. I will fight tooth and nail to not let the term "encryption" suffer a similar fate. ß: At scale, that is. For example, using a numbers station will make it technically trivial (if expensive) to transmit a message from an unspecified sender to an unknown recipient. But enabling similar level of security AND anonymity to millions and millions of participants is a much, much, much more difficult problem.

zugi 5y ago

It absolutely can be, and it's absolutely something to watch out for, but I'm not sure that it is government censorship in this case. YouTube is choosing who to ask ostensibly due to their expertise, not because of government threats or enforcement. That said, a few years ago one of things that kicked off the change from being relatively hands-off to more active content censorship by all of these platforms was being dragged before Congress and lectured and threatened that, if they didn't start voluntarily censoring content, the government would force them to. Those government threats, though they lacked immediate legal force, really do constitute government censorship. So there's an argument to be made that this whole new world of "voluntary" censorship by platform providers really is at its core government censorship.

leereeves 5y ago
> YouTube is choosing who to ask ostensibly due to their expertise, not because of government threats or enforcement. It sounds like you've accepted the article's claim that YouTube is consulting government employees. If that's the case, aren't any gov employees who collaborate with YouTube here engaging in censorship? Imagine an analogous situation: a PI goes to the police and offers to break into a suspect's home and collect evidence, if the police will tell the PI what to look for. Accepting that offer and advising the PI on what to collect would be a violation of the suspect's rights, even if the police are merely consulting on the PIs voluntary actions.
- drivingmenuts 5y ago
  That comes down to nearly-unprovable hairsplitting. If government employees are demanding action, backed by force of law, then Yes. But if YT is merely free to follow or reject advice as it chooses, then No. I can hear advice all day long from experts, but whether I choose to follow or ignore, the consequence is on me.
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    That’s not really a fair representation of reality. YT and others aren’t really “free to follow”. There are implications for their choice. For example they may face less anti trust scrutiny from the progressive left if they continue to perform censorship that aligns to that political ideology. They may face less scrutiny when it comes to taxes or privacy laws as well. It is precisely because we can’t prove or disprove these links that there should be no situation where state employees ask for censorship (either hard bans or actions like algorithmic changes), period.

Covzire 5y ago

Facebook's censoring of #Revolution via their claims of moral superiority should frighten the shit out of every free person on earth. While we still have it reasonably good in America, their willingness to suppress speech in good times doesn't bode well for people who will be oppressed during bad times. The first amendment made it clear that not even the government had the authority to use their vast moral authority, as they exercise through the legal system, to prevent people from speaking and organizing. But #BigTech has a nuclear option on the speech on the web's most visible ecosystem, social media, through purely market forces and are doing the bidding of a single political party, exclusively. It's not just horrifying that they amassed so much unchecked power, but since 2016 they're actively using and abusing it to suppress legitimate political speech in every nook and cranny they control.

amanaplanacanal 5y ago
Media owners have always used their ownership to push their own version of reality. I guess the difference now is that we have allowed so much concentration of media ownership in so few hands. Antitrust is pretty much dead from what I can tell. Or is this just the current story? Maybe media has always been as concentrated as it is now, we just didn’t notice.
- ndndksksl 5y ago
  Public social media is really fundamentally different from traditional media because it functions as the public square in a way that traditional media never did. As such, it needs to be evaluated and regulated as the novel thing that it is. It's not a newspaper and it's not a telephone company, and it's time to stop trying to apply old regulatory arguments and mindsets to the new situation. So far, attempts to regulate social media show barely an understanding of the problem at hand, but I hope we can recognize that there needs to be defined a novel regulatory framework to prevent tragedy of the commons or heavy handed ideological censorship on public social media networks In the meantime, the value of privately owned and operated, and invite-only social networks (like setting up your own Mattermost or IRC servers) will continue to go up in relation to public networks, because only in tight knit private communities can anyone actually speak their mind.

plerpin 5y ago

The thing that really bothers me about Weinstein's approach is that, while he and his wife are scientists, they're exceedingly quick to assert their hunches as scientific fact. They wear their scientist labels on their sleeves but their thinking is far more ideological. In a recent podcast about fluoridation in tap water, they were talking about how they avoid iodized salt, because iodine is a reactive chemical and you don't want to OD on it. Ludicrous. You'd sooner die from the sheer quantity of salt you'd have to ingest before the iodine even starts to become a problem.

api 5y ago
It’s no different from religious fundamentalists who put their own whims and ideologies into God’s mouth. They’re just replacing God with science, but it’s the same schtick.
fighterpilot 5y ago
Isn't iodine deficiency a common thing?
- roywiggins 5y ago
  it was more of a thing before they started adding it to salt, yeah
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    You need to check, though, because it's not added to all salt. Yes if you buy traditional "table salt" such as sold by Morton, it is iodized. Kosher salt, sea salt, salt crystals for use in a grinder, and other "natural" salts are generally not.
  - Igelau 5y ago
    Goiters. Not cool.
pjc50 5y ago
> podcast about fluoridation in tap water This has been a staple of crazies since, what, the 50s? I'm reminded of the speech from the deranged general in Dr Strangelove: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/characters/nm0001330 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/characters/nm0001330 You could fit that right into a modern rightwing podcast without it being out of place.

2Gkashmiri 5y ago

Yes. I have been a victim of this when in 5 August 2019 they snapped all internet and even telephone and almost 8 months long curfew /shutdown to prevent me from voicing my anger. The often used term was "misuse" in "misuse of social media" which meant they were watching every Facebook post and tweet and people were arrested for it.

throwawaysea 5y ago

Another example of state censorship via private monopolies was AOC calling for the Apple and Google app stores to ban Parler following the Jan 6 capitol riot. If a sitting member of the government pressures private organizations to censor others, it should be considered a violation of the first amendment. Leaving aside the technicalities of law, it is unethical and immoral even otherwise and completely in conflict with American and classically liberal values. Glenn Greenwald wrote a great article about this titled “How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler” https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-show-of-monopolistic https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-sho...

akomtu 5y ago

Guidelines here is an euphemism for orders. The pro-censorship faction in the gov isn't strong enough yet to openly censor media, but it's strong enough to coerce Twitter and the like with the passive-aggressive "guidelines".

99_00 5y ago

People shake their heads and wonder how the Catholic church could have been so backwards, dogmatic, and ignorant as to jail Copernicus. Yet, here we are. "At the time, it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins." https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-cures/559050-harvard-scientist-says-trump-hatred-motivated https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c... Censoring commentary on scientific data because it doesn't fit with the a political narrative is anti-science. The rationale that well intentioned speech should be censored because may be used by people to spread misinformation in a way the speaker never intended is a horrible standard to uphold. When scientists openly and freely admit to self censorship for political reasons, it erodes the credibility of scientists.

api 5y ago
Who is the modern Copernicus? Alex Jones? The church that advocates drinking bleach? Nazis? Neo-Stalinists? I used to be absolutely on the “free speech at any cost” side. I guess if you pinned me to the wall I sort of still would be, but my heart is just not in the fight. First they came for the Nazis, and I didn’t do anything because I wasn’t a Nazi. Then they came for the medical quacks telling people not to get vaccinated and to treat COVID by drinking bleach… during a global pandemic… Then they came for the people who thought the Earth was flat. Then they came for the misogynists and the advocates of sexual persecution. Then they came for the cult of personality that wanted a reality TV star and the My Pillow guy to stage a fascist coup. Oh no… who are they coming for next?!? If it were just a bunch of liars and fools yelling into the wind I wouldn’t care. The really terrifying thing is how gullible people are. It seems like 1/3 of the population roughly will believe literally anything if it plays to their biases. Anything. There seems to be no bottom of the barrel. I picture a future with hordes of millions of gullible fools who can be commanded like armies by social media demagogues. This is exactly how the Rwandan genocide worked except it was talk radio commanding those machete wielding armies not Facebook. We used to poke fun at places like that for being superstitious and barbaric. After seeing things like flat Earth and Qanon I don’t think anyone can ever point fingers again.
- 5y ago

kingsuper20 5y ago

The amount of gray posts in censorship threads always cracks me up. Please go on.

enraged_camel 5y ago
This is my least favorite thing about HN, because it strongly reinforces groupthink. I'd much rather have the number of upvotes and downvotes visible, like Reddit, and leave the styling of the text unchanged.
- LinuxBender 5y ago
  If you happen to have NoScript installed, you can add something like this to the My filters ycombinator.com##.c00:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.c5a:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.c73:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.c82:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.c88:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.c9c:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.cae:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.cbe:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.cce:style(color: #000 !important; ) ycombinator.com##.cdd:style(color: #000 !important; ) Change the color to match your preference.
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    It'd be cool to have an option in the user's HN profile/account that they can toggle if they want to hide the greying out
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Have the admins of HN ever defended their decision to grey out downvoted comments with some good arguments? Because reading a text thread where the color of the text constantly changes is rather annoying.
- kingsuper20 5y ago
  Personally, I think that voting is ridiculous, but I see the point. It's one of the strongest methodologies for making a discussion board addictive. I think an interesting feature to add would be to have peoples' user areas show how many downvotes they have spewed forth.

comrh 5y ago

But their videos are still online, they just can't make ad money from them?

maverick-iceman 5y ago

Every social group eventually uses the weapon of censorship. It's not just government...even without a proper institutional structure , censorship will emerge as a thing that a social group does endogeneously. Like just scrolling back and looking at my last 10 posts on HN , I had to delete them after a few minutes in order to cut my losses because they were being heavily downvoted and once you are in negative territory nobody can see your posts anymore. People just crave and love being surrounded by people who see things the same way as they do, so after a person has been burned a bunch of times, they'd start stepping outside themselves and acting on what they think will sell well socially among the community. Pretty soon everybody starts doing this and you'll soon have a community full of people who are worthy of an actor studio interview. Hollywood, DC, San Francisco and the Valley are prime examples of this

inglor_cz 5y ago
Disapproval and shaming are very strong and potentially dangerous tools, but they are not the same as censorship, even though they overlap to some degree. (But what doesn't?) The worst kind of censorship is probably the emotionless, impersonal, mechanical sort done on a large scale either by specialized professionals or by robots.
akomtu 5y ago
It's because those who agree rarely bother to upvote, while those who disagree downvote often. It's the same in real world: disagreement in form of protests is loud and visible, while even massive support is quiet. One fix HN could make is to take into account the number of readers before hiding a comment: 4 downvotes is big when there are only 10 readers, but it's nothing when there's a million.
- maverick-iceman 5y ago
  That's the best idea I read on how to solve this problem, which sadly means it won't be implemented.... :P For the record I did upvote you!
- FpUser 5y ago

ww2buff 5y ago

A corporation deciding not to run ads on videos of a crank promoting snake oil is not a First Amendment issue. It is barely even a censorship issue in the broadest sense of the term. Very sad to see Taibbi reduced to this kind of totally empty hysteria.

mnouquet 5y ago
If promoting a certain snake oil because you'll receive government favours, then it IS censorship, cf. all the Title IX unconstitutional enforcement following threats of pulling federal fundings. In this case, GAFAMs are scared as can be from being "regulated".
GekkePrutser 5y ago
Yeah I was a bit surprised when I read the article and what they're complaining about is being demonetised. Not blocked. I don't think this constitutes censorship. They can still publish what they want. They just don't get paid for it this way. If what they have to say it's that important, does it really matter? If they're indeed scientists, don't they have a day job doing science? I'm all for free speech but getting paid for it is another issue altogether IMO. Still an ethical topic worth debating, but not a free speech issue.

ArcturianDeath 5y ago

Now that the facility of the digital tooling is more granular and refined, and theres no shortage of weak-minded grunts that are powertrippin to do what theyre told, by the telepath aliens in human disguise or transdimensionals with the ability to manipulate all digital processes or the government, as zealous intern lords over the online conversation or jannies of pre-crime trends, this is all now easier to implement when it will matter the most to our future: silencing anti-alien dissent after "arrival." The Roswell trojan horse and social infiltration to pressure the farce of 2020, is paying off. Abductees/contactees with negative experiences of the 40+ species will be flagged as "agents of "disinformation" and limited for "preemption of public criticism." https://reclaimthenet.org/world-economic-forum-makes-censorship/ https://reclaimthenet.org/world-economic-forum-makes-censors... https://fair.org/home/us-censorship-is-increasingly-official/ https://fair.org/home/us-censorship-is-increasingly-official... https://archive.vn/WVDGU https://archive.vn/WVDGU https://taibbi.substack.com/p/a-case-of-intellectual-capture-on https://taibbi.substack.com/p/a-case-of-intellectual-capture...

wonnage 5y ago

It's not state censorship. There is no law driving these takedowns. It's the problem you get when one company has monopolized video. But serving videos for free isn't financially sustainable without advertising and network effects. So you're stuck with YouTube or some regional equivalent whether you like it or not.

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

Always amuses me when it slowly dawns on people just how much power a government can exert if it wants to. Facebook, and most importantly it's advertisers, simply cannot afford to piss off countries. It is a battle that is not in their financial interest. Corporations will not stand up for your rights. You want to fight the power you'll have to become tank man yourself.

alvah 5y ago

I'm on record railing against the collective power of BigTech, in particular some of their leaders' public statements about using their power to put the thumb on the scale since the 2016 election. However, here I'm not convinced there's a huge issue. As I understand it the videos are still available on YouTube, but the creators are no longer able to generate revenue from them (or other videos on their channel). I'm not convinced YouTube owes anyone the ability to generate revenue from videos hosted (for free) on their platform. I would expect many advertisers would not want to be associated with "fringe" theories; as the money YouTube pays creators is funded by advertising revenue, this makes demonetizing anything that strays too far from socially acceptable norms the sensible thing for YouTube to do IMO.

rebuilder 5y ago

That was an odd summary of the issue at the end. Taibbi finishes by saying this is a problem because it potentially allows corporations to influence state institutions via regulatory capture, which in turn would result in dictating what can be said on sites like YouTube that use, e.g., CDC guidance to decide what is acceptable speech on their platform. That seems tremendously convoluted to me. Regulatory capture is a problem, but it's a separate issue. Government agencies directing private censors would be a big problem. But private companies influencing other private companies' moderation guidelines indirectly like this, hoping the target company doesn't notice - really?

6510 5y ago

Is it illegal for governments to start their own social network? I imagine it could be a lot of fun. Have a section for the block, the city, the region, and one for the country. Create contact lists, market places, business and personal pages for each? Use the same laws we already have for public space? Am I missing something? Are toll roads the future?

_user112 5y ago

Worse. Collusion and election inference.